Responding ‘with life’: A divided Chile marks 50 years since coup
Hands still muddy, Jorge Córdova looks over the young lumilla tree he has just planted here in memory of Gabriel Martínez, a teenager murdered in September 1973 at the outset of Chile’s nearly two-decade-long dictatorship.
Mr. Córdova joined an international collective that plans to plant more than 3,000 native trees across 15 acres of protected land in southern Chile over the coming year. Each tree will commemorate the life of a victim killed or disappeared under the rule of Augusto Pinochet.
“We cannot forget or go through life as if nothing happened,” says Mr. Córdova.
On Sept. 11, 1973, a U.S.-backed coup ousted the democratically elected, socialist President Salvador Allende, ushering in 17 years of brutal violence and the suppression of political dissent.
Half a century later, the South American nation is still reckoning with its complicated past – and how, or even whether, it should be
