Chile vs Uruguay Smackdown!

Well, let’s try this: Focusing the Uruguay vs Chile comparison, through my last day in Chile, during which Don took me through Santiago, to see some of the highlights of Chile’s massive capital.

Our first stop, I think, was la Moneda, the Presidential palace, which was bombarded by warplanes in the 1973 coup that toppled Salvador Allende, he of the pinewood bust in the last installment, and installed Agusto Pinochet in power. The Palace itself is a somewhat lowish (maybe three stories) building, not especially impressive – perhaps in large part because it has had to be rebuilt post-1973, and you just can’t re-created something that was made in another century with modern construction methods. It looks very much the concrete replica of a presidential palace. 

The plaza that it sits in, too, is a real contrast – all the buildings around it are much larger and more modern, which contributes even more to its museum piece-like status there. And the plaza is adorned with statues of every one of Chile’s past presidents. Apparently, as soon as they die, the statue is commissioned and built. What I don’t know, is when Allende’s statue went up.

Up it did go, in the end – and it’s the most modern-looking, with Allende striding out of what seems to be bronze ether. And I find it fascinating that the quote they’ve chosen comes from Sept. 11, 1973, from his last radio address, which he gave from within the presidential palace as the armed forces closed in on him and shot his supporters through the windows. So, I’m thinking, it must have gone in post-1989, which was the end of the Dictatorship. Because it’s hard to imagine Pinochet OK-ing that quote.

Here we do some Uruguay-Chile breakdown: Uruguay’s dictatorship was much smaller-scale in its repression and its bloodshed. I don’t think they killed the sitting president, and the numbes of people they tortured or made disappear of course don’t compare – just as Chile’s numbers don’t compare to Argentina’s, a far larger country. But the memory of that time is just as raw in the minds of those who lived through it in Uruguay as in Chile. And in Uruguay, I got the sense that it is utterly, completely over – that those who perpetrated it are in jail, that the most popular politicians and parties in the country are now the very ones who were persecuted back in the 70’s. Chile, on the other hand, still feels like it’s on the brink of something. Maybe I was projecting, there in Santiago; maybe it wasn’t this way in truth, and I was just seeing things. But there were a loooooot of carabineros, Chile’s national police, walking the beat in the Capital, a lot of them on horseback. Their uniforms are smart and intimidating, and they carry bayonets on their belts. It just felt not quite over.

From there, Don and I moved along to the plaza de armas, Santiago’s main plaza, where the cathedral is (we didn’t go in), and where university students were staging some sort of protest / demonstration to raise awareness: several were dressed in brides’ dresses, and were soliciting help from the crowd. I didn’t stick around to see just what the point was; such things make me nervous. But it was actually here that we saw the carabineros on horseback.

To compare them again: Santiago just feels bigger. Which, of course, it is. But you can tell that over the centuries, more money has gone through there, more heavy-duty movers and shakes have made their mark on the place than in Montevideo. Is this better? No – I don’t think so. If you’re looking for sheer grandeur, the smaller city is never going to outdo the bigger one. And what Montevideo lacks in firepower, it makes up for in intimacy. The presidential offices are also on one of its main squares, and apparently it’s common to see José Mujica, the former rebel leader and current President, strolling out for lunch, with annoyed security guards trying to keep up with him. He hates having them around, and really, in Ururuay, they’re almost doubtlessly not necessary.

In Chile, oh yeah.

We walked the old city, walked to the top of the cerro Santa Lucía, and took in the sights. But it was hard to see them: The city was enveloped in smog, or fog, or whichever. It wasn’t unpleasant to smell, but I did find myself coughing a lot. Santiago is sprawling, and Don says that every time he comes through, he’s take aback by how far out it’s growing. Not in a slum kind of way at all – just more low cinderblock buildings, housing light industry or storage or something Santiago’s churning economy now needs.

Montevideo doesn’t sprawl like that, or doesn’t seem to. And its roads are less perfect, the people and businesses lining them seem a bit more shabby than the portions I saw of Santiago. But again: I didn’t see all of Santiago. And I saw a very large portion of Montevideo.

Don and I then went to the Museo de la Memoria, dedicated to the dictatorship: its beginning, its fall, and its legacy – the main  reason I thought to make this entry largely about comparing Uruguay and Chile. Because I talked a few spots back about visiting Uruguay’s museum of the same name, and how it held artifacts from the struggles  including Mujica’s prison uniform, which I physically touched – there was no barrier, no sign asking me not to. It’s almost as if Uruguay is a big family, and they expect everyone to feel that connected to their common bonds of history. The place was small – a converted elegant country estate – and the rooms were on the scale of one or two people looking at them at a time – in fact, Natalia and I were, I think, the only ones there during our visit. A very close encounter with the past.

Santiago’s museum tries to do the same sort of thing: put the visitor in close touch with victims, with torture methods and memories, with the scale of it all. Just as Uruguay’s had preserved the steel door of the communist party headquarters, Chile’s had preserved a steel door from a prison where political prisoners were kept, and a watch tower from the surrounding walls. The architecture of the place astonished me – I have rarely been as impressed, as moved, by the form of a building. You go deep underneath the apparent structure to gain entry, and as you go down, you pass all 30 articles of the UN’s international declaration of human rights, going from your right to your left as you descend (probably not a coincidence), leading you into the beginning, as if you’d gone back in time in an archaeological dig – doubly meaningful, given the number of exhibitions inside about exhuming people from mass graves. It’s a brand-new, multi-million-dollar stab at reconciliation / redemption, and it’s hard to say they didn’t hit the mark in a lot of ways.

That was our day in Santiago. We walked a good, long walk from there to the bus station where we’d stowed our (my) bags, then another quick walk to where the airport shuttle takes off. And then a half-hour ride to the airport, where Don and I said goodbye, and I boarded a flight at the appointed time, made a connection, took two trains, and now sit on the third, stopped in a suburb of NYC, waiting to get going again for Albany.

And I’m back to thinking about the comparisons. One that’s been on my mind a lot:

The treatment of animals: Chileans love their dogs – but they love them differently than the Uruguayans. In Uruguay, there are very, very few street dogs that truly live there. The vast majority are behind the walls and the gates of the houses they guard, and for the most part they stay there. Some are gallavanters, but you don’t see many. Chile, on the other hand, while it has no marauding packs of clearly wild dogs, does have a fair number in the street in any large-ish town, including Santiago.

But they are fat! Some, like the big German Shepard-like dog at the bus station in Los Andes, appear to have a regular beat and a lot of people who toss them food here and there, because they’re fat, and because they appear to be utterly at their ease lying stretched out on the sidewalk, asleep, as dozens and dozens of people clomp past them on their way to important daily business. But what’s so amazing to me is that no onei bothers the dogs. It’s almost as if it’s a sacred trust – the dog has shown its faith in our better nature, so we respond, while not with what I might call kindness, at least a complete lack of cruelty. Nobody, it seems, would get a kick out of waking those dogs up, scaring them. Because nobody appears ever to do it.

Four, total, is the number of dogs I ever saw in Chile being walked on a leash. And they were all dogs of a particular breed – not well-loved mutts, like was often the case in Uruguay. (Although, in contrast to the "breed-dogs-are-treated-differently" narrative, on my last day there I saw a 100% purebred Shar Pei – trotting down the sidewalk with its friends, no collar, having a grand old time. And as Don put it, "Sometimes you'll be way out in the middle of the campo and randomly see a dog trot by wearing a sweater.") So on that level, Uruguayans love their dogs more like Americans love them. But they’re less free. And it’s not like Chileans don’t love them. It’s a different, somewhat more remote relationship.

And speaking of remote relationships – In Chile, people absolutely teem together. They seem to really dislike being alone. It’s maybe a little skewed, given that I was there and Don and Bridget were showing me around to their various friends, so of course I went to lots of dinners in lots of houses where there was conversation and card-playing and jocularity. And just about everything I saw in Chile was in the countryside, too – mostly, in Uruguay, I was in Montevideo, where folks tend to lead more urban lives, as they probably do in Santiago. But there just seemed to be a need to be together among Chileans, that I didn’t’ sense neary as strongly among the Uruguayans. Lots of people talk about how Uruguay and Argentina seem more Europe-oriented, and maybe this is what they mean: that their sense of space and intimacy seems more at place in Germany or Holland than in Mexico. But honestly, I think there’s something deeper in there that lurks behind those observations. I think this communal nature of the Chilean’s being has come down through the generations along with their black, black hair, their square torsos, and their darker skin. I think it’s from the Indian side of the family, which in Uruguay is far, far less prominent.

I noticed it in the hand gestures, for example. It’s difficult to describe in words, but when a Chilean is talking about something that isn’t significant, but which one would expect to be so, he or she will often hold up one hand – usually the right – about chest-high, close in to the body, with the fingers curled back toward the chest, and tending to rotate slowly up toward the chin. And then suddenly they’ll flick their hand outward and upward, as if swatting away a fly with their fingertips, leaving the hand, at the end of the gesture, palm-out and flexed backward toward the face, held now a little higher, maybe neck-high. It struck me as such an Ecuadorian gesture – and something I do not think I saw once in Uruguay. 

Uruguayans, meanwhile, will pinch the tips of their index finger and their thumb together and raise them slowly while making a precise point, up to eye level, and when the very most crucial syllable is uttered, bounce that little imaginary needle downward to make emphasis on the precision and exactitude of the location of their most important sound, while popping the index and thumb apart from each other as the downward stab happens. I never saw a Chilean do this. The first seems very, very Indian to me, and the second, very Italian.

In Chile, a strong point is made by holding the right index finger high in the air, about ear level, off to the side of the head, and holding it there, still, for just a moment. No wagging, no waving. It's just there, stolidly alone. And then it simply falls. Evo Morales does this; Ecuadorians do this. I never saw a Uruguayan do this.

I’ll never be able to prove it. But the Chileans have an appreciation for dour, sad Andean music; houses where the quality of the construction is just about last on the priority list - where wood is still used to make the bread because a house doesn’t smell like a home unless it’s smoky. And Uruguayans like to pile into long, narrow cafes and eat slice after slice of pizza as it’s brought out to them. They are not alike, these folks, in many ways. And I think it’s reflected in which side of the mestizo family, Mom’s (the Indigenous) or Dad’s (the European), holds sway, both in their blood, and in their cultural heritage, which have come down to them in roughly equal doses.

I make no judgment as to which is better, please keep in mind. Both Chile and Uruguay are fascinating, and filled with warm, wonderful people whom I hope to know for years to come, and I would be happy to bring my family to either for an extended stay. Which one we would pick, would depend on what we wanted to get out of the experience. If I wanted to live in a city, I'd choose Montevideo, for its safety, predictability, and clean air. Countryside? It would be very hard to say no to being within striking range of Flaco's house, Nacho's house, Gladys' house, and of course Lucy and Wenceslao's house. 

"But you didn't spend time in a Chilean city! How can you choose Montevideo?"

"And you didn't spend time in the Uruguayan campo! We're just as great out here!"

Well, then. I'll have to get back and compare them more closely, won't I?

I will leave off there for now. It’s 2:37 PM, and I’m scheduled to see my little ‘uns (all three of them) at the train station in Albany in under an hour. I’m off to freshen up – and see one more time if I can’t locate that damned camera, which I think, I shudder to admit, I left on a plane today. It’s a terrible way to end the trip, but at least I do it on time, and at home.