In the Footsteps of September 11, 1973 Flash Player required, Broadband connection recommended.

Toppled government: La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, in flames, after bombings and tank fire on September 11, 1973 © Bettman/CORBIS Ariel Dorfman, above Photo: Luis Navarro

In August of 1973, Santiago, Chile, was a city on edge. The national economy was in a shambles, the result of a U.S.-engineered blockade that froze aid to the country, led to rampant inflation, and created shortages of essential goods. Despite the covert nature of it all, there had been open speculation in Santiago, in the editorial pages of the major newspapers and on TV news programs, of American involvement in what would soon amount to a coup d'etat: the toppling of Chile's socialist government.

In 1970, Salvador Allende, a physician turned politician, had become the first democratically elected Marxist head-of-state in the world. In the eyes of the U.S. government, he represented not only the encroachment of Soviet influence in the western hemisphere, but also a potent threat to the more than $500 million that U.S. corporations had invested in the country. Through his Via Pacifica al Socialismo ("Peaceful Road to Socialism"), he aimed for a more equitable distribution of the country's resources mainly by nationalizing major industries.

For President Richard Nixon J.D. '37, this was a troubling prospect, and one that, by Cold War logic, mandated interference. The White House had long been contributing to the campaigns of Allende's opposing candidates. (Allende ran three times before being elected.) But after Allende's victory, Nixon stepped up the effort. According to internal CIA documents declassified in the late 1990s, he ordered CIA director Richard Helms to "make the economy scream."

While Nixon was plotting, Ariel Dorfman, a young professor of literature at the University of Chile, was making a name for himself in Santiago as a rising leftwing intellectual. He'd recently published his first book, a best seller, called How To Read Donald Duck, which examined U.S. cultural imperialism as perpetrated through Disney cartoons. But it was accepting the post of media adviser to Allende's chief of staff in July 1973 that would make him, in the event of a coup, a marked man. As an early precaution, Dorfman moved with his wife, Angelica, and their six-year-old son, Rodrigo, out of their apartment near the city center and into his parents' house in Santiago's suburbs.

It was there, at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11, that Dorfman woke to the thunder of low-flying jets. Chilean Hawker Hunters were buzzing the city. In twenty minutes, they would begin bombing the presidential palace. At 10:00, Allende would declare over the radio his refusal to surrender to the military invasion; by 2:00 p.m, he would be dead. And by 6:00 that evening, General Augusto Pinochet, commander-in-chief of the army and leader of the military junta responsible for the coup, would, for the first time, address the country as dictator.

Assessing A Presidency

Pinochet ruled Chile until 1990. Under his reign, according to Amnesty International, thousands of civilians, mostly political activists and supporters of Allende, were kidnapped, tortured, and killed. Many thousands more were exiled by the state or chose to leave the country out of fear for their lives. Dorfman, now Distinguished Professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke, was among the latter.

In the first hours of the coup, however, Dorfman wasn't looking to save himself. At the sound of the planes, he leapt out of bed. Frantically, he began to dress. He told Angelica he was going to the palace, and she, realizing he couldn't be stopped, offered to drive. They sped down the Alameda, the main avenue that bisects Santiago. But they made it only as far as Plaza Italia, a large roundabout almost a mile from the palace.

Dorfman recalls these moments as we walk down that same stretch of pavement on a crisp spring day in November. It has been thirty-two years since the coup, and now, at age sixty-two, he is indulging in an act of remembrance, a physical retracing of his steps. He believes it will sharpen the memory, he says, and so far he seems to be right. "We were going around here, and then we saw a police barrier right ... there," he says, pointing to the far side of the circle. "There were three or four guards. And I said, 'Angelica, I have to go on foot.'

"Farther down the Alameda you could hear shooting, and you could see people crouching in the shadows. We didn't know whether we had lost at that point--only that there'd been a coup. And at that moment, I had to make a real decision. Because, basically, I think I could have managed to get there. Some of the side streets hadn't been blocked off. I could have been crazy enough to do that. But I looked back at the car and at Angelica," he says. "And then I looked down there. And I decided to live."

Since surviving that day, Dorfman has made a career, and a rather successful one, out of telling Chile's story. His oeuvre--novels, plays, poems, essays, and numerous journalistic accounts--is the picture of a man affected, permanently and profoundly, by the trauma of his past. It is also, for that matter, a very big picture, and it has made his name practically synonymous with Chile's troubled past. He is far and away the country's most illustrious advocate, its loudest, most visible spokesman.

Like Jean-Paul Sartre, his longtime literary hero, Dorfman has personified the belief, to use his own words, that political struggle cannot be separated from art, and indeed, he has mastered the synthesis. Death and the Maiden, the political play that earned him a Sir Laurence Olivier Award for best play in England in 1992, confronted audiences with the unsettling realities of political oppression and forced them to examine their own complicity. "I'm not giving them an easy time," he told one reviewer. "It's not fun. If they want fun, there are many other places they can seek it."

What Dorfman was giving audiences, as well as himself, was a bridge to a time that, in his view, had begun to fade from collective memory. The military's crimes, as heinous and as roundly deplored as they had been, were sliding, irretrievably, into the dustbin of history. And the challenge, as Dorfman saw it, was in resurrecting them on the page, in "getting the dead to speak." Through entangled, surrealist stories--whether set in a Greek village in 1942 (Widows) or on a phone line on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland (Konfidenz)--he evoked the repressive police-state his homeland had become: a country ruled by fear and wracked by violence, and yet always with a glimmer of hope.

No work of fiction, however, could salvage the memory of Chile's September 11 like the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon exactly twenty-eight years later. In the months to follow, that mysterious coincidence would occasion an outpouring of reflection, including a book, Other Septembers, Many Americas, in which Dorfman likened the missing men and women--"their relatives wandering the streets of New York, clutching the photos of their sons, fathers, wives, lovers, daughters, begging for information, asking if they are alive or dead"--to the desaparecidos (the "disappeared") of Chile's coup.

While he acknowledged the superficial similarities--both on a Tuesday, both on September 11--Dorfman probed deeper, recognizing, as he watched the events unfold on his television in Durham, a "parallel suffering," a "commensurate disorientation," that same sensation of "extreme unreality" echoing through time: "I have been through this before."

On a street corner a block from the presidential palace, a man sells ice cream, a woman in a business suit walks her son to school, a construction crew drills into the pavement, and a line of policemen, their caps tilted low, stand stiffly in front of a building. The police would not ordinarily be out in such numbers, but it is no ordinary week in Santiago. In two days, Chile is to play host, for the first time, to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, an annual meeting of the leaders of Pacific Rim countries aimed at encouraging growth and trade among member nations. The government has trumpeted the decision to hold the meeting in Santiago as proof of Chile's elite status. But thousands are expected to march in protest--of APEC and of President George W. Bush's attendance--and in response, the government has bolstered security. It is heaviest around the palace.