January 4--We went to four of five bookstores today looking for Pablo Neruda's memoirs. The junta has banned the book because the last three pages, written in the 13 days between the coup and Neruda's death, show too vividly the bitterness of a dying man. (I later bought the book outside of Chile, Neruda wrote,.... Then tanks entered into action, many tanks, to fight bravely against one man alone, the president of the Republic of Chile, Salvador Allende, who awaited them in his office, without more company than his great heart, enveloped in smoke and flames.")

I wonder what Neruda felt in those last days as he lay dying, listening to the chattering of the machine-guns.

January 7--Through the recollections of Hans and others, I can tentatively reconstruct what happened during the coup. Almost everyone was surprised by the military action, the chaos leading up to it notwithstanding. Allende spoke over the radio at 7:30 a.m., telling the country the Navy had risen and that the workers should occupy the factories. He spoke again two hours later, saying all the military had revolted and that resistance would be futile. The soldiers, following long-standing contingency plans, fanned out rapidly through Santiago and occupied key sites, such as the radio and TV transmission towers atop the hill which overlooks the city.

At mid-day, people were trapped wherever they happened to be, unable to move without encountering swarms of tanks and soldiers. The attack on La Moneda began at mid-afternoon; simultaneously isolated leftist snipers, most of them young people, moved up to the top floors of the dozen-or-so 20-story buildings in the city's center and began shooting at the soldiers below. The snipers held out, in some cases for hours, until the military stormed each building and killed them. Mass arrests, directed by military intelligence, began immediately. Hans lived near the stadium at that time, and he heard the machine-guns at work all night. Everyone I spoke to saw bodies, many bodies, either strewn about in the city center or floating in the Mapocho River.

January 12--One of our new friends, Pablo, seems to have connections with the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), Chile's most extreme socialist group. He was a high-school teacher before the coup, was arrested, taken to the stadium, served over a year in jail and now tries to survive by selling balloons in the parks. He said the prisoners at the stadium were given nothing to eat or drink for eight days.

We took him for lunch today--we end up taking all our friends to eat because they have no money, which visibly disturbs them since it violates their strongly Chilean sense of hospitality--and he describes the days in the Stadium. "They took one of the teachers from my school, a 50-year-old Trotskyist, and put him against the wall and asked him if he knew how to pray. He began to sing the Internationale. The machine-gunned him. I cried all night."

Pablo gave us copies of a MIR poem entitled "We Can Throw Pinochet Out" which he said, is being circulated clandestinely. The mimeographed copies, obviously done hastily, were of such poor quality that the poem could hardly be read.

January 14--Early morning. Automatic-weapons fire chattered last night outside as we tried to sleep, hoping that only stray dogs were being shot. The sadness at times is overwhelming.

January 18--Today we visted one of the soup kitchens set up by the Catholic Church in Santiago's slums to feed the small children. We got there for lunch and our guide, a young French priest, introduced us to the 60 or so kids there by asking them to say hello to "our foreign friends." They looked up from their plates of corn soup and sang out their hellos with big smiles. I thought I was going to cry.

The priest said that the need for the Church kitchen had increased greatly in the past year, and that many undernourished children could not be fed due to a lack of money. He added that doctors had examined the children currently in the program--the ones we saw--and discovered that 60 per cent of them had suffered irreversible brain damage because of malnutrition.

January 19--Today we went with Hans and his sometime girlfriend, Rosa, to an amusement park which was constructed by the Allende government. The swimming pool, which Hans said had been inexpensive before, now charged the equivalent of almost $1 per person admission--this is a country where a worker's daily salary is between $1 and $2.

We sat in the park and talked. Rosa, who is about 45 years old and out of work, is stunningly beautiful except that her teeth are rotting. She gave Enrique and me plastic bead necklaces she had strung together and asked us when we were going to marry Chilean women.

Hans said he heard over the short-wave radio last night--Radio Moscow beams special transmissions to Chile--that Edward Kennedy had again charged the Pinochet government with torture. The Chilean papers obliquely acknowledge the attacks of Kennedy and others in order to villify them--in Kennedy's case, by bringing up Chappaquidick.

The papers today also pridefully showed photographs of the U.S. ambassador at some function with government officials.

January 25--My last night in Santiago. Enrique left for southern Chile a couple of days ago; I will head north for Peru tomorrow morning. Pablo and I went to a pathetic and dirty dance hall this evening where the maids and servants from the wealthy neighborhood of Santiago were enjoying Sunday, their only day off.

Pablo finally came out and said directly that he had been and still was a member of the MIR. He estimated that the organization had approximately 5000 members before the coup; of them, only 50 were still alive and out of prison in Chile. The rest were either in exile, in prison, or dead. The exiles include his wife and his two sons, who are in Costa Rica.

We got drunk and Pablo cut his arm and my arm and symbolically mixed our blood, a bit theatrical but it seemed appropriate at the time. We parted on a darkened street corner just before the curfew and swore we would see each other again.

January 26--On the bus headed north. Hans walked me to the bus station and I gave him some books I had. He would sell them in order to buy his lunch. He encouraged me to tell people in the United States what I had seen in Chile, once again reminding me that it was worse than Germany in the 1930s. He said he was still optimistic. "I was born left and I will die left," he said. "Wherever we of the left go in the world, we have friends," he said. I thought about that, and about other things, as the bus rumbled through the Santiago slums towards the highway heading north.