Luke Epplin

>On Chile’s Bicentenary Year

Posted on October 18, 2010. Filed under: Chile, Latin America, Luke Epplin, N+1 Magazine, travels |

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Luke Epplin reflects on disasters and national identity in Chile @ n+1. 

On the sloping peak of a coastal hill rising from the muddy banks of the Maule River, which cuts through the lower Chilean heartland and once marked the southernmost boundary of the Incan empire, a wildfire was vaulting through a dense thicket of pine trees. It was an arresting sight: a shock of red among the moody shades of green and brown that Chilean winters customarily color the south-central landscape. I was seated on the edge of a wood-bottomed inflatable raft alongside four strangers—two wetsuit-clad soldiers in the Chilean army, a member of the Chilean Marine Corp, and a slightly seasick homicide detective—and we all stared uneasily at the flames before turning our attention back to the task at hand. It was a drizzly morning in mid-June, and we were searching for bodies.

I’d arrived in Constitución, a coastal city nestled between the Maule River and Pacific Ocean, three months after an 8.8-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami had decimated the city. With 102 people either dead or missing, Constitución had suffered the country’s highest death rate, largely as a result of the tidal waves that barreled several miles up the Maule forty minutes after the ground had stabilized. By June, many of the nearly 10,000 people who lost their houses had moved from tents to mediaguas—emergency housing units that resemble a one-room child’s playhouse—and enough time had elapsed for residents to become accustomed to the changes in their urban landscape: collapsed buildings, fissured sidewalks, pyramidal piles of crumbled mud brick, and, especially, uniformed soldiers trudging through the streets all hours of the day.

Their presence was disconcerting, conjuring up memories of the 1973 coup and resulting sixteen-year military dictatorship, when armed soldiers marched through the country’s streets in search of political “dissidents,” who were frequently dragged from their homes and tortured. At first, I kept my head down while strolling past the soldiers, but after observing the activities in which they were engaged—clearing away rubble, delivering water to resettlement camps, erecting mediaguas—I decided to stop by the headquarters they’d established in a water-damaged police station along the riverbank. A balding general escorted me to the commanding officer, a British-educated man who greeted me warmly and asked if I’d be interested in coming back at eight the following morning to shadow a search-and-rescue team up the Maule.

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