Introduction
- Calama is a town in the center of the Atacama desert, the driest region
on earth. It is a grueling,
- dusty twenty-four hour bus ride north of Santiago, Chile. For the past
twenty-three years a small,
- determined group of women have been digging in the vast expanse of the
Atacama for the bodies of
- their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons. Their search began shortly
after the military coup of
September 11, 1973 in which President Salvador Allende was overthrown and
General Augusto
- Pinochet took control of the Chilean government. Thousands of Chileans
were tortured, executed
- and "disappeared".
- The women's nightmare began, one month after the coup, when five military
men boarded a
- Puma military helicopter in Santiago and began a journey which came
to be called "The Caravan of
- Death". The military's intent was to intimidate the people in the
isolated north out of any attempts at
- resisting the overthrow of the Marxist government. Under the command
of General Arellano Stark,
- the soldiers traveled to five cities touching down long enough to murder
a total of seventy-two men.
- The last stop was Calama. On October 19th, twenty-six men, imprisoned
because they were
- assumed to be subversive, were removed from their cells. Although the
Pinochet government
- refused to tell the women what happened, it was assumed the men had
been executed by a firing
- squad and their bodies buried, disappeared to a secret grave in the
desert.
- During the first years after the disappearances many of the wives, sisters
and mothers of the
- men met clandestinely. They tried to share their feelings of rage and
anguish but did not speak out
- publicly for fear that they would endanger both their lives and the
lives of their children. They
- searched secretly in the desert but always wondered, since they had
never seen a body, if their men
- were alive.
- In 1985, with the support of human rights organizations in Santiago,
the women of Calama
- bravely formalized their group Agrupacion de Familiares de Ejecutados
Politicos and became
- public. They began to march through the streets of Calama, to speak
out openly, to demand to know
- the whereabouts of their loved ones. They insisted that Pinochet and
his accomplices be held
- accountable for their crimes. But still no one came forward to speak
the truth, to release the women
- from their suffering. The military was, and still is, protected by an
amnesty law that automatically
- pardons them for all their crimes committed from the years 1973 to 1978.