Between Extremes by Brian Keenan

Author:Brian Keenan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 1999-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

Jorge and Eunie have a great house in a shady street just ten minutes’ drive from our apartment. It is quite a party with their children Martin, Santiago, Domingo and Maria Jesus, and other relations and friends there. As we enjoy the food and wine the conversation wanders between mountains and what they do to us, the mountains we find to climb in ourselves, and past terror and present forgetting.

One of the other guests, Rodrigo Jordan Fuchs, led the Chilean expedition that scaled the Himalayan monster K2 in 1996. Jorge has produced a film of this successful adventure. Rodrigo is delighted that we are going to get a taste of the mountains, albeit the lazy way, on horseback. Forever concerned about gear, I ask his opinion on our lack of botas: would it be a problem? Rodrigo has a very pleasant face with a big grin and, for a hardened mountaineer, a surprisingly light build. He, who has overcome the logistics of mounting a massive expedition into the wilds of Jammu and Kashmir, manages not to laugh at my curious obsession and gravely advises that, in all probability, it is not a great cause for concern.

As often on this trip we are fortunate that so many people speak good English. It gives us a chance to ask some of the many questions that have occurred to us as we have travelled. In captivity, when we so rarely had any sources of information, we often had to live in a land of accepted supposition. Whether this concerned our immediate predicament and Middle East politics or the development of the internal combustion engine, we sometimes just tried a good guess and carried on with our discussion of the topic on that basis. I always liked having access to reference books and now I feel at a loss without them.

Easily available research sources do not, of course, ensure an understanding of the world in which we live. News Review has been covering the current debate over Pinochet’s retiring as commander-in-chief of the army and, as a former President, taking up a position as Senator for Life. Thanks to his own 1980 constitution, the senate already has guaranteed places for leading military figures. It seems astonishing that this old man, after the crimes of his regime have been made public through a national commission, can still have access to such power. Before that, in 1978, after five years of torturing, killing and ‘disappearing’ thousands of people, many innocent of even the mildest political thought, he instigated an amnesty law that absolved him and his henchmen from any charges of human rights abuse. Given that Pinochet is now old and that democracy has apparently returned strongly, it is extraordinary to an outsider that such laws are not overthrown and justice sought to heal the nation’s wounds.

‘You remember what I was saying about the Chaos?’ Jorge asks. ‘Well, many people still believe, as you have found in your travels, that Pinochet saved the country. For many he is a hero.

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