Susan Cabello's father, Winston Cabello, an official in Salvador Allende's government, was killed in 1973 by Pinochet's Caravan of Death. Today, she lives in Valparaiso, working as a journalist while preparing her research for publication. We spoke with Susan and her colleague in their home.
Our conversation started with Susan's reflections of her childhood. She remembers very little about her father, as she was very young when he was killed. Soon after the Caravan's crime, Susan's mother took her to the countryside to live with her grandparents. Isolated there from the bulk of Pinochet's abuses, in a bubble from the authoritarian political system, Susan grew up, always straddling the line between normality and tragedy. She remembers a little girl in one of her classes telling her one day, "I know how your father died."
As a university student, Susan researched the impact of Pinochet's dictatorship on third generation Chileans. ("First generation" refers to people like her father, while Susan belongs to the "second generation;" "third generation" Chileans are the grandchildren of those who lived through the golpe.) While Susan explained that we are still in the very early stages of understanding the relationship between third generation Chileans and the Pinochet years, her work has shown that this new generation has a strong humanistic streak, a high moral ethic. They place a high emphasis on family values, even if living in a non-traditional family, which many were forced into by the state-sanctioned violence.
In 2003, her father's murderer, Armando Fernandez Larios, was found liable for torture, crimes against humanity, and extra-judicial killing, and awarded the Cabello family $4 million dollars. Susan and her mother were in attendance for the trial. She said that the process restored her father's good name and gave her back her dignity. As a child and young adult, she had to live with public suggestions that her father was a terrorist; now, she had indisputable proof that the real terrorists in Chile worked for the government.
We asked Susan why she had committed so much of her academic and professional life to revisiting such dark times in her life. She said that she was looking to reclaim memory from the traumatic moments, to find happy memories within the trauma. Repressing bad memories helps the politicians maintain control, as they take advantage of the people and their pain. She wants to process it and heal.
For Chile to move forward, Susan said that the government needs to finish the amnesty law, asserting that there cannot be justice with amnesty. She also said that the new government is not a fully representation system and it frequently fails to meet the needs of the people. Even the leftist politicians, even Allende's former allies, have betrayed their followers. She held up as a symbol of hope for the new generation - a filmaking congressman who is running for president.
Most importantly, Susan said the government must find the bodies of the disappeared, so that their families can have peace and closure.