< Peacework Back Issues | General Pinochet at the Bookstore : November 2005

Peacework
November 2005



About Peacework

Subscribe Now

Current Contents

November Contents

Back Issues

Index
2001   2000   1999

National AFSC

NERO Office



American Friends Service Committee

Peacework Magazine

Sara Burke,
Sam Diener,
Co-Editors

Pat Farren, Founding Editor

2161 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02140

Telephone number:
(617) 661-6130

Fax number:
(617) 354-2832

e-mail address:
pwork@igc.org



Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised.

Editorial material in Peacework is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-
NonCommercial-
ShareAlike License
unless copyright is otherwise specified.

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

General Pinochet at the Bookstore

Santiago, Chile, July 2004

The general's limo parked at the corner of San Diego Street
and his bodyguards escorted him to the bookstore
called La Oportunidad, so he could browse
for rare works of history.

There were no bloody fingerprints left on the pages.
No books turned to ash at his touch.
He did not track the soil of mass graves on his shoes,
nor did his eyes glow red with a demon's heat.

Worse: His hands were scrubbed, and his eyes were blue,
and the dementia that raged in his head like a demon,
making the general's trial impossible, had disappeared.

Desaparecido: like thousands dead but not dead,
as the crowd reminded the general,
gathered outside the bookstore to jeer
when he scurried away with his bodyguards,
so much smaller in person.

Martín Espada is the author of Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2003). He teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
  Large demonstration
Washington, DC, September 24, 2005. © 2005 Pat Rabby.


Previous Article    Next Article

About   |   Subscribe   |   Current Contents  |   November Contents   |   Back Issues

Peacework Magazine on the web:   http://www.peaceworkmagazine.org