Chilean feminist cites new wave of terror

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Nieves Ayress, a prominent figure in the struggle of resistance to the brutal Pinochet dictatorship. Ayress, a longstanding leader of Chile's revolutionary feminist movement, was one of the "disappeared" of the regime. Following the coup in 1973, she spent three years in different concentration camps.

Ayress' courage in resisting her torturers was intolerable for the dictatorship, which later condemned her to death by firing squad. But as a result of an international campaign to demand her release-and thanks to the constant pressure of her family and friendsAyress was included on a list of 18 "most dangerous" prisoners who were released from the torture clinics and immediately deported from Chile in early 1977.

Ayress is on a national tour of the United States sponsored by the National Network of Solidarity with Chile. She will be träveling to Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., during the month of May. The interview was conducted in San Francisco by Alan Benjamin.

Socialist Action: What is the purpose of your tour in the United States?

Nieves Ayress: I've come to this country to help reactivate the work of solidarity with the Chilean people. I plan to speak at solidarity rallies and on campuses to attract attention to the escalation of the repression in Chilerepression that is financed by the U.S. government. I also want to focus on the role women have played in the resistance to the fascist dictatorship.

S.A.: What is the current state of human-rights violations in Chile?

Ayress: Pinochet's war against the Chilean people has escalated since the state of siege was imposed on Nov. 6, 1984. In response to the massive National Days of Protest that began in 1983, Pinochet has arrested thousands, opened new concentration camps, and sanctuary workers The following article was taken from the May 1985 issue of Panorama, a monthly international publication produced in Mexico, which analyzes political developments in Central America and the Caribbean.

Most of Panorama's articles are either written or translated into English. Subscriptions can be obtained by sending a check or international money order for $40 (12 issues per year) made payable to Priscila Pacheco Castillo to: Panorama, Apartado Postal 20-119, 01000, Mexico, D.F.

The U.S. government has arrested or charged some 20 people, most of them associated with various religious institutions, of "helping illegal Central Americans to cross borders by inciting their entrance [to the United States], transporting them, and giving them refuge."

They are also accused of "conspiring" to commit the crime of giving sanctuary to these people.

It has been estimated that one out of 10 Salvadorans has immigrated to the United States. That is, a half million Salvadorans. In addition an important number of Guatemalans live "illegally" in the United States. According to their own testimony, these refugees have had to leave their respective countries, fleeing from repression and from a total lack of democratic freedoms.

The Central American refugees have to face a great number of dangers and difficulties during their journey. Even after they have arrived in "paradise on earth, they run the permanent risk of being deported to the death camps by U.S. immigration police.

On the basis of official statistics of My advisors ...and adopt tell me I shoula a more moderate my flexible Carolk closed down opposition newspapers.

Raids of poor and working-class neighborhoods are conducted daily. Whereas in the past the use of torture was restricted to clandestine concentration camps-such as the one in Lonquen, which no one knew existed until a torturer confessed his crimes to a priest-today the government is using methods similar to those of the rightwing death squads in El Salvador.

Bodies of women who have organized the "ollas comunes" [neighborhood soup kitchens] or the Comites de Defense de la Mujer [Women's Defense Committees] are regularly found beheaded in the town squares to intimidate others from joining the struggle for freedom.

This is true of our companeros in the unions and in the various rank-and-file committees as well. The open and public psychological terror against the Chilcitizens the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), there have been an estimated 50,000 deportations of "illegal" Central Americans in the past five years. Of those who have been deported and whose whereabouts are known, many have been jailed, tortured, disappeared, or assassinated. Those who have been returned are considered suspect by the right-wing governments of El Salvador and Guatemala.

Of the refugees who have tried to use legal procedures to obtain political asylum or refuge, only 3 percent have received that status.

The age-old tradition of sanctuary On March 24, 1982, the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Ariz., announced its decision to give sanctuary to Central American refugees. Others, especially members of Christian comunidades de base [base communities] in Texas and Arizona followed suit.

Washington's initial calm in the face of the growing sanctuary movement did not last long. Its first attack occurred on Feb. 17, 1984, when La Migra [INS] irrested Stacy Merkt and a Catholic They're right, of course. ean people is something new. It reflects the dictatorship's fear of the growing protest against the regime.

S.A.: What is the situation of the political prisoners?

Ayress: Pinochet is now planning to reinstate executions of political prisoners. There are currently 15 political prisoners who face possible death sentences.

The military has announced that five of the prisoners-two of whom are women-will be brought before "war tribunals" that have been instructed to sentence them to death. They are Jorge Palma Donoso, Carlos Araneda Miranda, Hugo Marchant Moya, Susana Capriles Rojas, and Marta Soto Gonzales.

We in Chile know that there is no possibility that they will receive a fair trial at the hands of a government that has tortured, killed, and disappeared monk in San Benito, Texas, as they were transporting three Salvadoran refugees. These two were members of Casa Oscar Romero, a refugee center run by the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, Texas.

A second arrest occurred on March 7, 1984, near Nogales, Ariz., where a border patrol arrested two people who were transporting four refugees. The two were representatives of church congregations in Tucson.

Finally, as part of this first warning from the federal government toward the sanctuary movement, the immigration police arrested Jack Elder, the director of Casa Oscar Romero, on April 13, 1984.

Of these five activists arrested, three were cleared of all charges for lack of evidence.

However, the government's offensive against the sanctuary movement accelerated. The INS sent two undercover agents and-to their shame-two Salvadoran refugees to secretly tape the sanctuary movement's meetings in several churches in order to collect as much evidence as possible.

Last Jan. 10, on the basis of this evidence, the U.S. government accused 16 church members of 71 violations of the law. This time among the accused were John M. Fife, the minister of the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, the first church to be declared a sanctuary, and Jim Corbett, a member of the Quakers, the first denomination to offer its churches as sanctuaries.

A broadening movement Reagan underestimated the movement's capacity to respond. After his latest attack, many other churches and groups outside of the church have been brought into the struggle. The city of Berkeley, Calif., by a nearly unanimous vote of its city council, decided to offer sanctuary.

Despite reputation for conservaInternational solidarity is urgent in the case of the 15 political prisoners. I'd like to urge readers of Socialist Action to send letters demanding their immediate release to Sr. Ricardo Garcia R., Ministro del Interior, Palacio La Moneda, Santiago, Chile.

S.A.: You were detained for over three years. How, assuming this is possible, can you summarize this experience?

Ayress: I went through three years of animal-like torture along with hundreds of other companeras. But our experience-uncountable rapes and sadistic abominations-did not break us. In fact, the double torture we women were subjected to helped strengthen us.

And this is what the military could not tolerate. Gen. Conrado Pacheco, who was in charge of the Tres Alamos camp where 1 was held, particularly despised the women because we would not give in. The more they abused us, the more we resisted.

Like the women outside the prisons who organized committees of relatives of the disappeared or "ollas comunes," we too organized ourselves in the prisons. We held occasional meetings and we produced handicrafts, which were sneaked out and then sold to help sustain our families. For us the prison was another battlefront.

S.A.: How was your release secured?

Ayress: I was condemned to death by a firing squad—just like the 15 political prisoners today. I am alive thanks to a powerful international campaign that was able to obtain my release. International solidarity has saved hundreds of lives in Chile. It has brought the atrocities committed by this hated regime to the attention of world public opinion.

On my tour I want to present the testimony of my experience in Pinochet's concentration camps to highlight the situation in Chile today. If it was possible to obtain my freedom, it will also be possible to free the 15 political prisoners.

tism of Texas and Arizona, the states where Reagan has concentrated his attacks on the movement, the community response has been impressive. Tucson's Central Labor Council, which includes all of the AFL-CIO unions in the area, passed a resolution to "support the sanctuary movement, and to strongly and publicly condemn the actions of infiltration of the Justice Department into that movement."

On Feb. 28, the same day that Jack Elder and Stacy Merkt were found guilty by a federal court in Houston, members of Casa Oscar Romero and more than 200 religious leaders-among them dozens of bishops-publicly denounced what they called "a scandalous policy of the Reagan administration."

They demanded that the government "stop the deportations of Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees and the jailing of church members who help them."

The Reagan administration is mired deep within this predicament. It is on solid ground neither politically nor morally. Whether it decides to retreat or plunge ahead on its present course, the consequences could be costly.

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Are you going to let this machine do your thinking for you? If so... this could be a job for Factwino! Once again, in a hilarious musical play, "Factwino: The Opera, '' the San Francisco Mime Troupe's redoubtable comic-book hero is poised to do battle against the two-headed Armageddonman, the Moral "What can I do?" the Mime Troupe sings, to counter the forces of ignorance and corruption? Factwino's friends give a rousing musical response in the second act, "I do what I can do!" Along the way, the Mime Troupe treats us to a panorama of characters with dazzling quick-change virtuosity.

"Factwino: The Opera" continues at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco through May 12 and will be performed at the Variety Arts Theatre in Los Angeles from May 15 through May 26.-M.S.

Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko. New York, Signet, 1978. 275 pp. $2.25 paper.

One of the distinctive outgrowths of the recent wave of political upheavals that began about 20 years ago has been the increasing recognition of literature by and about oppressed minorities-Blacks, Chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Puerto Ricans—as a vital component of American culture and an arena for innovative artistic developments.

Of all these oppressed groups, the social structure and cultural life of the Native Americans were targeted for the most brutal assault by triumphant American capitalism.

As George Novack cogently argues in "Genocide Against the Indians" (Pathfinder, 1975), a war to the death was fought on the North American continent from 1620 to 1890 between two incompatible forms of social organization. These were mercantile (and later industrial) capitalism imported from Europe and the "primitive tribal communism" of native inhabitants.

Today Native Americans are the most oppressed minority in the United States, with the lowest rate of employment and the highest rate of suicide. Nevertheless, Native American literature, which had carried on an underground existence for decades, emerged as a potent force in the 1960s.

This was especially due to the revival of "Black Elk Speaks, the autobiography of an Ogala Sioux, which was published in 1932 and reissued in 1962, and to the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize to N. Scott Momaday's "House Made of Dawn, a 1966 novel by a literature professor of Cherokee and Kiowa «cool y.

However, the 1978 appearance of "Ceremony" by Leslie Silko, a woman who grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in New Mexico, constitutes a singular advance in the evolution of Native American literature.

Not only does "Ceremony" equal "House Made of Dawn" in its remarkable technical innovations— both are experimental novels integrating EuroAmerican and Native American cultural traditions— but Silko transcends all hitherto-known thematic boundaries in Native American fiction. This is done through the startling perspective she brings to bear on the way in which capitalism objectively unites people of color through its domestic violence and international wars.

Refusal to kill is psychosis?

"Ceremony" is the anatomy of the mental breakdown of Tayo, a World War II veteran from the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Tayo's alleged psychosis is precipitated by a combat incident when he is ordered to execute some Japanese soldiers lined up in front of a cave with their hands over their heads.

Tayo finds himself unable to shoot because he believes that he sees his Uncle Josiah-the most beloved member of the family, the one who kept closest to the Pueblo traditions—in the middle of the Japanese prisoners. After the executions are carried out, Tayo collapses in uncontrollable crying, and his condition is diagnosed as "battle fatigue."

When he returns to the United States, Tayo is treated in a Los Angeles mental hospital, but on the day of his release a second incident occurs. He faints in a train station and awakens to find himself surrounded by a Japanese-American family recently released from a relocation camp.

Staring into the face of the youngest boy, Tayo hallucinates that he sees Rocky, his cousin who was killed in the Pacific. Tayo is then siezed by an attack of nausea and imagines that he is trying to vomit the image of the boy's face out of his mind.

A third traumatic episode occurs when Tayo is back in New Mexico at a bar near the reservation. He is in the company of other Native American veterans who are frustrated because they have lost the temporary sense of equality with whites that they had known in the service. They now pass their time bragging about military and sexual exploits.

But when Emo, the most rabidly anti-Japanese of the group, displays a bag of teeth that he knocked out of the head of a dead Japanese soldier, Tayo stabs him with a broken beer bottle.

Eventually Tayo learns that his sense of sympathy and identification with the Japanese is not the result 14 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1985 Native American novel:

Third World of psychotic hallucinations but the consequence of a higher order of perception. He tells Betonie, an unorthodox medicine man, about his vision of Uncle Josiah among the Japanese prisoners, and Betonie answers: "It isn't surprising you saw him with them ....Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers."

After this reminder that most Native American tribes are descended from Asian clans that crossed the Bering Straits during the Pleistocene ice age, Tayo progresses to a deeper understanding of the ways in which American capitalism devalues the lives of people of color in its inherent drive to expand and dominate.

In a climactic scene, Tayo hides in a uranium mine. In this setting he recalls the fact that Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was exploded, is only 300 miles to the southwest of his reservation, at White Plains.

After a moment of reflection, Tayo comes to the realization that there is a tragic connection between BOOK REVIEW the slaughter of Native Americans for their land and the holocaust at Hiroshima: "The top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the government took from the Cochiti Pueblo."

Tayo concludes that "He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time."

He understands that the victims of Hiroshima and his own people are united by the white man's system in a "circle of death."

Native American literature is sometimes represented as a variant of Romanticism advocating an impossible return to an idealized, pre-technological existence. Although the cultural values underlying Silko's critique of capitalism are complex and perhaps contradictory, one of the most prominent threads of her argument seems to offer a refutation of this characterization.

This thread can be traced by starting with the title of the book, "Ceremony,' which refers to the curative treatment that Tayo experiences under the tuteMajority, Union Carbide, and the Department of Defense. people lage of Betonie. Betonie is intentionally counterposed to a traditional medicine man, Ku'oosh. This is not only because of Betonie's eccentricities (his medicinal paraphernalia includes telephone books collected from all parts of the country), but also because he is an innovator who teaches that new ceremonies must be developed to respond to the contemporary situation.

Betonie believes that the source of evil in the world is neither white people nor their brutal, inhuman machines. He argues that the whites themselves are victims of a value system that transforms a vital, natural world into "objects."

As an antidote, Betonie advocates ceremonies that will restore a sense of collectivity among all people and a harmonious existence in nature. But such ceremonies cannot be acted out by a medicine man alone, because, as Betonie says, "the people must do it."

Throughout "Ceremony" it is the individualism of the whites—especially as expressed in Christian theology with its emphasis on individual suffering and individual salvation-that is the focus of attack. Silko sharply distinguishes between "ritual,, in which the false lessons of history are simply reenacted, and "ceremony,' in which a consciously controlled creative act restores humanity to its correct relation to the world.

"Ceremony" is a first novel and not without certain flaws and limitations. Silko has to some degree sacrificed the psychological realism of her characters to the daring aesthetic achievements of her fresh, dramatic language and her provocative flashbacks, juxtapositions, and transitions.

Some of her characters seem to be contrived to exhibit different modes of assimilation to or resistance against the dominant culture. A few are two dimensional—replete with self-hatred or else mystically sensual and bound to nature.

Nevertheless, Silko is unequalled in the way she has used craft and imagination to provide a historical perspective for the sentiments that came to the fore among rebellious youth of the 1960s and 1970s. She transfers the political themes of anti-imperialism and Third World solidarity from the Vietnam War to World War Il in a wholly convincing manner.

"Ceremony" offers profound testimony to the creative resources of Native American cultural traditions. Furthermore, with acute political insight, Silko recognizes that American imperialism's crimes against people of color are not simply aberrations that can be reformed out of existence but are inherent in the character of the social structure itself.

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OUR REVOLUTIONARY CONTINUITY Thus Lenin argued: "We as a democratic government cannot evade the October 1917: decision of the rank and file of the people, even if we do not agree with it. In the fire of life, by applying it in pracworkers tice, by carrying it out on the spot, the peasants themselves will come to underHence, of the confiscated land, 86 percent went to the peasants and only 3 percent to agricultural collectives. with the aspirations of millions of poor peasants. stand what is right...."

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hardline policies... approach.

«Circle of death" unifies Mime Troupe sets mission for Factwino