EIt’s not often that older ladies expose themselves in front of strangers, but in this case, pride dictates it. It’s just a few minutes until the city bus departs from Santiago’s trendy Italia district. Hipsters are just around the corner in bars and cafés that look like they’re in Brooklyn or Berlin. But this is about something else, something more important than latte macchiato, the latest craft beer or the region’s most popular wines.
The woman pushes up the sleeve of her blouse, points to the plaster stuck to her shoulder. She just got back from vaccinations, she says on a summer’s day last year. Hardly any other country in the world had started the fourth corona vaccination as early as Chile, well organized as in previous rounds, as good as almost only in Israel. In between, not everything went well, the overly strict Covid regime with long lockdowns made people weary even in exemplary Chile.
The memory doesn’t die
But now it looks like it’s over. More than a year ago, the country opened up again to foreign tourists as one of the first long-distance travel destinations, albeit with complicated formalities. Only recently, just in time for the summer season in the southern hemisphere, did this hurdle fall. The lust for life has returned and with it the hustle and bustle on the nightlife areas all over the city, whether it’s the hip Lastarría district near the city center or the traditional entertainment area Bellavista across the river, the aforementioned Barrio Italia in the east or the slightly run-down Gründerzeit district in the west, where, in addition to the “French hairdresser” founded in 1868, the restaurant of the same name attracts the hungry.
The city’s top chefs are once again dishing up oysters from the country’s humid south or dried blossoms from the desert in the north. And Rodolfo Guzmán’s “Boragó” can be found on every list of the world’s best restaurants, and at the end of an enjoyable evening the chef tells us how difficult it was during the pandemic without economic aid on a German scale.
Commemorating the victims of the military dictatorship
But it’s a different kind of liberation, not just post-Corona, which is why a trip to Chile can inspire a little optimism, especially now that in Europe an authoritarian ruler is waging war on a democracy. In the west of Santiago, not far behind the “French hairdresser”, there has been a multi-storey concrete building with a stone forecourt for a good decade, as big as the headquarters of a bank or insurance company. But it is a memorial to the victims of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship after the coup of 1973, which marks its 50th anniversary this year.
For this reason, the German Federal Chancellor recently visited this “Museum of Remembrance and Human Rights”, which is larger than almost any contemporary history documentation center in Germany that is so proud of its culture of remembrance. Olaf Scholz spoke of “the oppression that the dictatorship left behind for me and many others in our country”.