Remembering September 11 1973

   Were the lives of those killed at the World Trade Centre more valuable
   than  the  innocents  murdered  in  Chile's  US-backed coup, asks Tito
   Tricot

   Monday September 16, 2002

   Our  dreams  were  shattered  one  cloudy  morning  when  the military
   overthrew  the  democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.
   Twenty-nine  years  later,  at midday, Chile's's firemen sounded their
   sirens  paying  tribute  to  thousands of men and women who lost their
   lives without really understanding what was happening.

   It  was  a  moment of remembrance, not for the victims of the military
   coup,  but for those killed at the World Trade Centre in New York. Sad
   as  that  might have been, it is even sadder that Chilean firemen have
   never  sounded  their  sirens  to remember our own dead. And there are
   thousands  of  them, including many children, who were murdered by the
   military.

   It is not a matter of comparing sorrow and pain, but for the past year
   the  US  media  has tried to convince us that north American lives are
   worth more than other people's lives. After all, we are from the third
   world,   citizens  of  underdeveloped  countries  who  deserve  to  be
   arrested, tortured and killed. How else are we interpret the fact that
   the military coup in our country was planned in the United States?

   The truth is that no US president ever shed a tear for our dead; no US
   politician  ever  sent  a  flower to our widows. The US government and
   media  use  different  standards to measure suffering. It is precisely
   this   hypocrisy  and  these  double  standards  that  make  us  sick,
   especially  when on such a symbolic day for Chileans, the president of
   Chile, Ricardo Lagos, attended a memorial service at the United States
   embassy  where the ambassador, William Brownfield, stated that "people
   who   hate   the   United  States  must  be  controlled,  arrested  or
   eliminated".

   In  what  kind of a world are we living? Can we stand idly by while in
   the  name  of  the  fight  against  terrorism  countries are bombed or
   invaded  by  the  US  war  machine?  I  think not, especially because,
   irrespective  of  the horror of the World Trade Centre attacks, the US
   has  no moral right to impose its will on our continent. After all, we
   in  Latin  America have ample experience with US terrorist tactics. In
   our  continent  alone  90,000 people disappeared as a direct result of
   the operation of the School of the Americas and US "counterinsurgency"
   policies - 30 times more than the victims of the World Trade Centre.

   One cannot - and should not - attempt to quantify suffering, but we do
   have  the  right  to  denounce  this double standard. We also have the
   right  to  question President Lagos's assertion that "for the youth of
   today  what  happened  in 1973 is part of history, which means we must
   undertake  the  task of looking to the future". Only a few hours after
   the  president's  speech,  thousands  of people - mostly young people-
   took  over parts of Santiago and other Chilean cities to express their
   true  feelings  about  this  fateful  day  in  Chile's  history.  They
   organised   demonstrations,  candle-lit  vigils,  concerts,  meetings,
   seminars and put up barricades to defend themselves from the police.

   It  was a way of saying: Neither the United States nor anybody has the
   right  to steal our memory. No one has the right to steal our day, for
   September the 11 1973 is marked in our hearts with tears.

           Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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