Witness

“I am Inelia Hermosilla Silva, mother of Héctor ‘Tito’ Garay Hermosilla, who was arrested and disappeared on July 8, 1974.”[1]

Thus begins one of testimonies from one of the arpilleristas, a woman who followed her son down the stairs and outside into the night as he was being taken away, never letting her eyes leave him.

The power of witness, disconcerting to the men who were taking her son, the men who felt the need to lie to her, console her, and finally beat her – desperately trying to get her to stop watching, stop following, stop witnessing the disappearance of her son.

They punched and kicked her, she reports, until she was on the ground immobilized. The pain was not physical, though, but “a tearing in my womb like when my son was born.”

She is present, watching. And at the same time, he, her son, is still present, still alive in memory if not in body. This patch honors Inelia and her son with witnesses surrounding the scene, appreciating the enormity of it all.

And beyond the perimeters, and beyond the perimeters of the perimeters, a fence surrounds the scene of the crime, as it surrounded the scene of the training for the crime last November. SOA[2] protest, Ft. Benning, Georgia. They constructed a fence last year, a fence to keep us out – we decorated it with the crosses and stars we were carrying, with flowers and pictures and balloons and puppets and…

SOA – Presente! Incredible experience. They built a fence to keep us out – we decorated it . We made the most beautiful global village and all the walls memorials – the fence a memorial to all those lost due to the SOA as symbol, the SOA as fact.

split second decision at first – to approach the fence (across the line) or not? I wanted to decorate it, needed to decorate it. Nobody seemed to be getting arrested yet, but no guarantees. No guarantees – like the 4-year-old boy whose memorial cross I was carrying and wanted to take to the fence. No guarantees – like the hundreds and thousands and millions of ONES in Latin America and all over the world… We must hamper the machine until it is unable to operate (function?) at all.[3] I crossed, I decorated. It wasn’t until later that I went back and prayed, though, in my own way. Gave WITNESS.

to cheer on the few who crossed the fence as they were dragged into police cars.

thousands of names, read one at a time, sung, chanted – PRESENTE. like Yad Vashem[4] and the children’s memorial – mirrors & candles and the infinite voice reading infinite names – never repeated.

There is something incredibly moving and hopeful to me about the sharing of pain, and the celebration of life in spite of or even because of the immense pain we must endure on this planet. I interpret the concept of “witness” quite broadly and quite profoundly… I feel like the patch can say the rest.

[1] Sepúlveda, Emma, ed. We, Chile: Personal Testimonies of the Chilean Arpilleristas. Azul Editions. Falls Church, VA. 1996. p. 62.

[2] The School of the Americas, now called the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” or WHISC. Military training school for Latin American soldiers, located in Ft. Benning Georgia and paid for by U.S. tax dollars.

[3] I was thinking here of Mario Savio’s statement in 1964: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” (now taken from http://www.fsm-a.org/stacks/mario/mario_speech.html)

[4] Yad Vashem is Israel’s most famous Holocaust museum.

Patch and writing by Hannah

Witness