Testimonials

I felt the community, I felt a vibration in which each one was a hero, an anonymous hero who in some way took risks because of what was happening, but because he really felt that it was one of the most important things he was going to do in his life.

The next day everyone celebrated. Everyone called each other on the phone. In those days there were no cell phones, so the telephones collapsed from calling each other, congratulating each other. At last, at last! Many people cried. I, we all cry. I think, out of emotion: knowing the board was finally going to leave.

I did not participate in any of the celebrations. I went home because I had a feeling of sadness because this was over, which was a unique experience of dedication, of mysticism, of generosity from people, of fellowship, of friendship, of a very great fraternity that […] never again, as I assumed at the time, would ever happen again.

My school was mostly YES, but I do remember very clearly that there was a debate […] and I remember very well that Juan Diego Santa Cruz who was two years above me defended the NO vote […]. And I was very impressed because the way he defended the NO was very powerful. Not only because he denounced the violation of human rights, but because he made a distinction between what a dictatorship was and a democracy, and the value of democracy itself. Because he defended democracy, more than attacking Pinochet […]. And he came to say: There is something much better and more interesting than Pinochet, and that is democracy, and it is freedom, and it is public debate, and it is critical thinking, and it is the diversity of opinions, and it is competition, and it’s the political parties, and it’s the elections, and it’s when the people decide, and the parties compete and the best ideas win.

After the vote, I went to the Diego Portales building to wait for the results announced by the dictatorship. I saw when they delayed and delayed things. And there was great expectation, and talking to the journalists there they said: “Hey, but this thing is strange, maybe they won’t recognize the results. Another coup may come.” I told them: “No, how can you say that? It would be the maximum discredit. They have everyone watching them do this.” And we made jokes: “The Soviet Union or the United States will come invade us, because this cannot be!”

The truth is that there was a lot of joy, of course from the supporters who had won. In my case, I lost, so I didn’t have much joy, but it didn’t seem like the end of the world either. It was simply a change of government.

At the time of Pinochet, foreigners who settled in Chile had to sign a paper specifically stating that they were not going to participate in politics. And that helped me to be able to say “no” to working on the YES campaign, and say “yes” to working on the NO campaign clandestinely, without anyone knowing.

We found that the people, the people, had behaved badly with the military government. We found that they were very ungrateful. We found that they had been influenced by propaganda. In no case did we think that democracy was coming.

I lived in a rural area with very little information […]. My parents went to vote that day with a lot of fear. And that I do remember perfectly, because all the people who went to vote were very afraid, because there was a lot of speculation and a lot of myth among the people (mainly the rural people and those who could vote) that they were asking in the voting locations how people were voting.

Even relatives who were in exile were put on the phone and we put the phone there on television so that they would hear that, on television!, a mass medium, for the first time, an option against the dictatorship was having its voice.

In the case of the Radio Cooperativa, we were reporting on everything that was happening that day, and the television […] hid the information at one point, because when everyone wanted to know the news and how the count was in the different polling stations, they broadcast the Roadrunner cartoon. And that also marked a moment of great fear.

The strip was very nice. I think it marked us all because I saw it, well, we saw it every day and it was always something new. And it gives you hope because it was very joyful, then, wow, joy came. We laughed like that because there was a part where a man came walking and we said: that’s the joy that comes. Here we all told ourselves that happiness would come later because it was a child who was walking out and we laughed at that.

There is a moment that is super exciting. It is a moment in which they cross the field – my father enters with my mother – and they cross the entire field of the Stadium. The whole stadium applauds them. […] And the lovely thing is that there is no police. (During seventeen years, every time Pinochet arrived anywhere, the security operation was there.) There was no one around the president and his wife. There was only the official television camera that was broadcasting this moment, but there was no bodyguard, no escort. It was the return of democracy and the return of freedom.

I had a mental short circuit from which it took me a long time to recover, because I cannot understand to this day (look at the years that have passed), I do not understand to this day how that model that was bringing so much well-being to many people (only economically, right?, not necessarily in other important aspects for human life, but economically, which was what we were going to do there) was not enough to maintain that model.

In those times, love, revolution, desire, were all the same thing. It was very difficult to separate them. The sense of community, cause and belonging made all relationships take on a very strong intensity within this struggle.

That’s when I said it was the best night of my life. And a journalist told me: “But how can that be, if they say that you might be president?” And I told him: “I don’t know if that’s going to be the case or not, I have no idea, but I can assure you that if I become president, that night is not going to be like this.” I became president and that night was not like that.

We were so excited, and our kids didn’t understand why, because they were young. And there we realized that, to protect them, we had never told them what the dictatorship was. So, in that time, before leaving [to celebrate], we told them what had happened in Chile, right there in that moment.

So I said to him: “And aren’t you going to celebrate? Aren’t you happy?” And he told me: “No”. So that’s when I realized he was of another political tendency. But we got along super well. He in his thing, me in mine. But as they say, at the table don’t talk about politics, soccer, or religion.

It was my turn, together with Juan Gabriel Valdés and Patricio Silva […] to be the representatives of the NO option before the National Television Council. Forty-eight hours before the broadcast of the program, we had to take our tape to pass the censorship, and that was a routine of about 30 days. It was normally taken over at 12:30 at night two days in advance. Initially, we were very disciplined […] and then, due to some circumstances, we discovered that if the tape had some kind of technical error, we could give ourselves another 24 hours.

The identity card was sacred. Almost such that, from the moment you registered and the moment of voting, you had to leave it locked up and walk around with a photocopy […]. This identity card had to be protected because it was the only document that allowed you to vote.

I remember a famous journalist very close to the Communist Party who hugged me that night and said: “You were right.” Which was enough to show that those friends of mine who had said that the plebiscite was necessarily going to be a fraud, that we had no chance of winning, were admitting that they had been wrong.

The most important thing was for us, through our volunteers, to carry out activities so that people would lose their fear and learn to vote. The training that we did was very important because, on the one hand, you had to be very didactic, but at the same time people had to be with a spirit of seeking consensus. We were not directly looking for people to vote for one position or another, but the important thing for us was that people dare to vote on October 5. And vote correctly.

I had planned to have a family. But I said, I am not going to have a family while we are under a dictatorship. I wanted my son to be born in freedom, not in a dictatorship because I had suffered a lot […]. I always tell my son: No, you were not going to be born into a dictatorship, that’s why I had you when I was so old!

I always remember that on that day of the plebiscite I had to represent the YES at the voting table. And the NO representative was a close neighbor of my neighborhood, who was a Christian Democrat […]. I was with this gentleman all day. So in the end, we were able to talk a lot. And in the afternoon, we said, let’s be reasonable.

In that minute, when the plebiscite of ’88 comes and the NO vote wins, and when the general outburst occurs, so to speak, we decided […] that it was the moment to have children, to raise children maybe, to dare to transcend in that aspect. There was no longer fear, or rather the fear was removed, the barrier that each of us had at that moment in Chile to expand the family or raise a family was removed, right? There was something that the plebiscite or the result of the plebiscite did, which was to allow everyone to think about their life in a normal way, or in a more normal way, than it had been until then.

What I remember is: giant screens showing the results and simultaneously showing the faces of the generals and the generals’ wives. And how they cried: how they cried and how the makeup of the generals’ wives ran down their faces. And that for me was such a strong symbol of how absolute power is crumbling in front of my very eyes. And seeing the vulnerability of the system that was the absolute oppressor, seeing them crumble with the joy of the people, with the people’s vote, with the will of the people recovering their dignity, was a contrast. It was, as they say, a very moving double screen.

I feel that when they are claiming that joy did not come, they are referring more to happiness than to joy. And happiness, we will pass this generation and all the generations that come looking for it, but we will never find it, but it doesn’t matter. There we go.

It was clear from the beginning that a plebiscite was going to be called […]. What had been agreed upon in the constitution was enforced. And if the plebiscite was unfavorable and the NO won, well, it had to be fulfilled.

My mother was sleeping, and suddenly I woke her to say: “Mom, the NO won.” And her answer was: “That’s good, son, I hope we can be more at peace now.” That was her phrase. And then she went back to sleep.

For me it was better that he had followed the other eight years. Some things needed to be stabilized. So, I said, private universities had been created, but that final regularization was still missing when you put the projects in motion. Like the Isapres themselves. So, there was a series of projects that were coming up, which still had to be regularized a little more. And that was my decision as to why I wanted to continue with the military government.

For me, perhaps the most indescribable moment of happiness was entering the Canal and there was no armed guard. Because for seventeen years, we would go in and the guards were armed, and you would stand in line at the casino for lunch and see that they had guns in their pockets. But we had already gotten used to living like this. It was part of the landscape.

There was no one who came and told us: “Hey, be sure to make a joke about this, about this or the other”. I don’t remember anything being said to me. We improvised within a strategic scheme. And I don’t remember ever being afraid. But not at all. No, we worked as if it were a soap campaign.

There was a sense of empowerment, a sense of openness that we hadn’t experienced before. There was an atmosphere of fear but, at the same time, an atmosphere that something could be done. For the fifteen, sixteen, seventeen year olds it was like a new feeling of freedom.

This program was called Bethlehem. It is a program that I believe that to this day people do not know about. It was kept very confidential so that it would not be eliminated. The government never understood what we were doing. […].Bethlehem was born from a trip made by Joseph and Mary (Mary about to have her son) to the place where they had to register. Coincidentally, the emperor at the time was called Augustus, just like the dictator here. So our big posters copied exactly what is said in Luke 2, 1-4: In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.

We were very interested in dedramatizing this. Show that the act of voting NO was much more ordinary, much more within reach. Just put a line. Because otherwise, if we presented it as something too epic, people were going to think twice and eventually, they wouldn’t go to vote.

Why did you vote YES? Because we had had 17 years of great tranquility after having spent three years in hell. And I didn’t want that again, when it was the option that the country offered me, right? The option was precisely to return to politicking, to return again to political parties, to political ideologies: to return to the ideology of the extreme left, Marxism […]. We were afraid that the situation that we constantly saw in Cuba could repeat itself.

I was invited to do the voiceover for two or three things, very precise spots. And the message was very clear, right? “No hate. No fear. No violence. Vote NO.” And that day I recorded and came home and commented to my wife: “Do you know what happened to me today? I took the boot off of my head, the military boot off my head.” I lost my fear. So, for me the triumph is personal, intimate. So when the NO triumph came, of course I was happy, but I had felt the triumph before.

My dad was military. So I lived in a place where only soldiers lived […]. I experienced the process of the plebiscite in a transition from leaving that place and going to a place that was for civilians. In other words, to leave this neighborhood, from this place where only soldiers lived to a place where ordinary people lived.

I think there was an effort -perhaps too trusting but that’s the way things were- in an absolutely transparent way to give it legitimacy. If the risk had been known, that is, if the risk had been better measured, perhaps the temptation would have been less transparency, but more security in victory.

I was a close friend of General Pinochet’s youngest son at that time […]. He voted for the YES, but with reluctance, because he thought that the best thing that could happen was for the NO to win, since the country was in a kind of pressure cooker and needed to free itself a bit. And I was a little more to the right, I wanted the YES to win anyway. But I realized, as time passed, that the best thing that could have happened was that the NO won.

What I can say is that effectively, despite the fear and despite the threat of being exposed as an opposition actor in a context of dictatorship, community relations in small towns, like Pichilemu, had other mediations. It had another meaning. Because, effectively, there was polarization. It was possible to recognize in a small town who was in favor of the YES and who was in favor of the NO, but it is also true that the experience of life in the province somehow attenuated the ideological divisions.

It is not the music on its own: it’s the music and the social state that interacts. What happens is very dialectic. Nothing occurs on its own, nothing: neither love nor hate. Everything that passes through the senses interacts. People were exhausted by the violence put forth by the terror campaign of the Pinochet dictatorship. They were tired of that violent, dark tone […]. Ultimately, I didn’t create the song. The song was created by the social atmosphere of that moment. Probably that same song would have been ridiculous during the period of the Popular Unity government [of Salvador Allende].

It is a time – the dictatorship – in general of a lot of fear, of a lot of oppression. And I felt it both in my family and in the external world when I inhabited it, when I went out on the street. I was only saved, or saved to a great extent, I would say, by this school where I studied where, for example, they never taught me the history of Chile. I did not know what the history of Chile was, how they were indoctrinating other children here in Chile regarding the heroism, for example, of the military junta.

The next day when we went out to celebrate, people hugged the police. And I said, now, here we win. This is the real win. Because the people – who had been repressed and who looked at the carabineros as the closest representatives of this omnipotent power – instead of making fun of them, instead of attacking them, embraced them, that is the true triumph of that campaign.

From the first day I said: I arrived in Chile. This is my place. But I have a very clear memory of the country I came to. Two things really caught my attention. On the one hand, I arrived from having lived in the Canary Islands in the Spain of “the destape”, from a society that liberalized culturally very quickly after Franco’s death. And to arrive in Chile was to come to a, I am not saying a convent of nuns but, to arrive at a country culturally, not only with the weight of the dictatorship and the censorship and the cultural repression of the dictatorship, but to a country very morally closed, very prudish […]. And the other thing that caught my attention was the material poverty that existed in Chile at that time.