But Even Yet, Chile’s Pain Remains : Only Pinochet can mitigate the sorrow by ordering his soldiers to reveal the whereabouts of the ‘disappeared.’

SANTIAGO â€”  It is a cruel time in Chile.

It is a time when all the deep pain that most people here would rather suppress and forget comes rising inexorably to the surface of our lives. It is a time when we measure how far we are from healing our damaged and fractured land. It is a time when we are forced to remember the dead and how difficult it is to really bury them.

Twenty years ago, the armed forces under Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the constitutional government of Salvador Allende in a bloody coup. President Allende was himself the first of many to die. Thousands more were to be killed, tortured, exiled and persecuted in the years to come, until democracy was finally restored in March of 1990. The price we had to pay for freedom was that the armed forces stayed under the command of the same arrogant, ferocious and vulgar Pinochet who had been Chile’s dictator for almost 17 years, and we have had to live with the impossibility of repealing the shameful amnesty the military gave themselves before relinquishing power.

Since his inauguration in 1990, President Patricio Aylwin has made extraordinary efforts to close the wounds of the past. Constantly reassuring the military with the utmost tact and moderation, Aylwin ordered the worst human-rights abuses of the former regime publicly investigated so nobody could ever deny the truth about what happened. And with tears in his eyes, he asked forgiveness of the victims on behalf of the state of Chile, instituting a series of reparations to help them normalize their shattered existence.

And yet, the pain remains.

It is best symbolized by the desaparecidos, the disappeared, the many hundreds of men and women who were arrested by the military so long ago, never to be heard of again.

Three and a half years after democracy returned to Chile, they are still missing. Their relatives are unable to mourn them, visit their remains, get on with the business of living. There is a woman I know who still slips out of bed in the middle of the night because she thinks the sound of the wind at the door is her husband, kidnaped 16 years ago, finally coming home to her. Her agony is the hidden agony of Chile; something has been irreparably cut out of our existence, a moon of suffering that will never be eclipsed, a black devouring ache in our memory. The country we used to live in before the coup where we did not kill each other has been splintered forever.

If the pain of many of us in Chile cannot ever entirely vanish, it can be mitigated.

All it would take is a gesture.

It would be enough for Pinochet to do what Aylwin and the Catholic Church have repeatedly asked of him: Reveal the whereabouts of the missing and end the uncertainty in which their relatives live. The general cannot bring the desaparecidos back to life, but he is the only person in Chile who can order his soldiers to inform the public where they are buried, how they died.

Such a gesture would not only alleviate the sorrow of thousands of families, but would simultaneously send an implicit message to millions of other Chileans: By returning the remains of his enemies, Pinochet would be acknowledging that he did in fact have them in his power, that he is ultimately responsible for their death. It would be an implicit confession of his own terrifying humanity, his capacity to imagine the loneliness and affliction of the others he has wronged, his acceptance as human of those ghosts that he has kept at bay all these years by demonizing them. It would be a way of saying: I am like you. I have a conscience.

Perhaps it would be the easiest and the best way to say the immense words he has never dared to utter thus far: I understand what I have done. I am sorry and will never do this again.

Unfortunately, I believe that Pinochet has neither the grand courage to stand before his people with these words nor even the much smaller strength he might need to simply return the missing to their families.

We cannot wait for him to vanquish his fears.

Maybe that is his real message to us: We will have to reconstruct our devastated moral landscape by ourselves.