Can Bodies be Made to Disappear? DIALOGUE (mmj)

"Blowbank" is a word sometimes used by the CIA to describe unintended or unforeseen bad consequences which result from interventions by the firm. It may have been first used in the 1970’s when referring to the Iranian revolution "blowback" from the CIA organised coup in 1953 against Muhammad Mossadeagh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, or again during the days and weeks after September 11 2011.

But by all accounts*, the CIA supported (but ‘no smoking gun’) coup in 1973 lead by General Pinochet against Salvador Allende the democratically elected president of Chile was judged an unqualified success ‘telescoping’ history.

*Peter Kornbluh. The Pinochet File (2003) / Chris Marker. L’Ambassade (1973)

"Be more Brazilian," She  had shouted with others at the Chilean military in the months and years after Allende’s election in 1970, "Stiffen yourself up!"

Strange juxtapositions: while I am lost along with the rest of this misty isle in Limpo-Limpo land these two weeks and oblivious to all other world events unfolding round about, looking at the television picture of a rather smart looking man on a horse with a long Brazilian name reminded me that the next Olympics in 2016 will take place in Rio de Janeiro, a city which I last visited and was staying in on THE 11 September 1973.

The 1973 date burns deeper in my heart than the more recent one, the "Blowback" of 2001 in New York, because the date of Allende’s violent death coincided so closely with the violent death of my own elder brother. That late summer both Allende and my brother disappeared from view, and it did not feel safe to shed tears in Brazil. I do however remember how hot it was in Rio, and also I now recall buying a Rio or national daily newspaper in Rio, I expect it was the 12th or 13th of September, which had a front page filled with a dark grainy photograph of swirling clouds of smoke billowing from the burning presidential palace, in which it was reported that Allende had shot himself rather than surrender to the armed forces of the coup.

Brought back to mind reading the LRB - (Vol 34) 14. 19th July 2012 - review of Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War by Tanya Harmer (2011) North Carolina; Harmer writes that "Chilean military leaders were not Brazilian enough, either in terms of their readiness for repressing the left or in their ideological sense of mission." (The mission was to create authoritarian rule in the image of Brazil, whose president in 1973 was (General) Emilio Garrastazu Medici.)

All this was further brought home to me under the next president of Brazil (General) Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979), to whom I was presented personally in 1976. It was during that hot summer as I recall that the president of Brazil paid a state visit to the United Kingdom, both attending state banquets in his honour, and visiting the Lord Mayor of London at the Guildhall where I formed part of a Guard of Honour. We were a rather sloppy and unmilitary troop of reservists from the City of London’s 'Regiment of Guards’, the Honourable Artillery Company, and our commanding officer was no better, marching us into a wall in front of the waiting Brazilian president before we presented arms for his inspection. I recall a dark-suited late middle-aged man with jowls and glasses passing up and down our ranks, and thinking him not unlike the photographs of Salvador Allende even as my stiff unmoving glance lost sight of him, his presence reminding me once again how it was still not safe to show ones feelings nor to grieve over the loss any brother in the bipolar ideological world of Kissinger and Friedman, against which the electoral success of Allende’s Popular Unity party in 1970 on a programme of non-revolutionary social democracy that respected the role of legislature, the courts and the media, was such an affront, and required the repeated applications of Brazilian "shock treatment", and repetition of the new Commandment:

"Do Not Kill; except when there is no other way to pursue your happiness".