Learning more about the lives of people remote from our own present is a vital part of communicating to build a more peaceful future. The following story comes from a project carried out under WACC’s communication for peace programme and symbolises the ongoing need for truth, confession, and reconciliation in Chile.

On 31 October 1973, in the Mapuche community of Maiquillahue, near San José de la Mariquina (Chile), soldiers killed José Matías Ñanco, aged 60, fisherman, Protestant preacher, and leftist-sympathiser. Speaking about someone involved in the incident, José Noé, one of the 19 sons of Pastor José Matías, said: “I do not hate the Caniulaf family. They have a soul to save or lose like me. I love all the people around here. I must not hate anyone. But when there is something shady, you have to clear it up so that here on Earth it can be released, so that when we die this knot does not stay done up, but is untied... that is good.”

It was in such evangelical language that Ñanco testified to the way his family is able to reconcile forgiveness with the demand for justice.

The National Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, made public in June 1991, registered the death of his father as follows: “In the locality indicated military troops carried out an operation and detained about 13 people, lining them up. José refused to obey, speaking harshly to the soldiers, and pushed away the gun of one of them, so they shot him and killed him. The same uniformed soldier ordered that the body be picked up, which he refused to allow the other detainees to do, and the soldiers themselves took it to an unknown place.”

In the investigation, it was established that among the troops was Juan Caniulaf, also a member of the Maiquillahue community – at that time an army recruit – who would have given the names of those who made up the community, including that of José Matías. This was not an unusual situation in the first months of the dictatorship, when old quarrels, or the understandable urgency of avoiding possible reprisals, were turned into hasty denunciations whose consequences were not even suspected.

For the Matías family, this precedent marking a break in the life of the community only deepens the pain and the wound, and demands enormous emotional and spiritual commitment of them to confront it, greater even than that demanded by due process for those directly responsible for the crime.

In January 2007 the Supreme Court condemned to five years and one day’s imprisonment, as the instigator of the murder, the retired army official Héctor Rivera Bozzo, who directed the operation, handing down lesser sentences to five other participants in the deed, among them Juan Caniulaf. The Court judgement records that “the victim’s body was thrown into the waters of the Pacific Ocean in the evening of the same day from one of the helicopters” (El Mercurio, 20 January 2007). Because the body José Matías has never been returned to them, his family, while knowing he is dead, considers him as having disappeared.

From forgetting to remembering

In 1990, seventeen years after these events, reaching Maiquillahue still meant a two-hour walk from the nearest point accessible to a vehicle from the city of Valdivia (southern Chile). Apart from the geographical difficulty of access, the community carried two other marks of identity that made it even more invisible: its people were Mapuche (indigenous inhabitants of central and southern Chile) and Protestant. So it is no surprise that their story was completely unknown at the national level. However, the idea of a disappeared Protestant pastor did not square with the still predominant image of a Protestant world that was, in the main, close to the military regime.

Just after the winter of that year, Patricia Farías, at that time editor of the magazine Evangelio y Sociedad published by SEPADE, travelled to Valdivia with the intention of preparing a report on the Chihuio massacre, a case in which 14 of the 18 victims belonged to Protestant churches in the region. On the train, Patricia bumped into her colleague and friend Sandra Rojas and to her surprise learnt that her journey had the same purpose. Quickly they decided to share contacts and undertake the painful trip together.

Already from the very first interviews with local human rights activists, they heard of another case about which little was known, where the victim was a Protestant Mapuche pastor. Once they had gathered all the information they needed about the Chihuio case, they decided to face the difficulties of the road and press on to Maiquillahue. But, since they arrived unannounced, it proved difficult to overcome the inherent distrust and fear. Only Cornelio Tito, another of the sons of José Matías, was prepared to talk with the journalists.

Issue number 7 of Evangelio y Sociedad (October-December 1990) published the report on the Chihuio victims, including a section on the death of Pastor José Matías Ñanco of Maiquillahue. This was a publication with a restricted circulation distributed among Protestant and ecumenical groups. For the family, however, to have a written version of the story became a form of evidence that gave credibility to their testimony and an incentive to seek clarification of the truth and for justice to be done.

Bicentenary Chile needs to hear the testimony of the Matías family

2007. Exactly another 17 years have passed and the journalists get together to recall their shocking experience in the interior of Valdivia. Although the degree of violence and the number of victims at Chihuio made it, without doubt, a more journalistically important case, it is their visit to Maiquillahue that has remained in their memory. There was something metaphorical in that small community, so geographically isolated yet, at the same time, so profoundly riven by the realities and tensions that characterised 20th century Chile.

These included the marginalisation of the Mapuche people that followed the poorly named pacification of the Araucania Region; the incisive presence of the Protestant churches and their encounters and misunderstandings with Mapuche identity; finally, the dictatorship, repression, human rights violations and the consequent search for truth and justice. It did not escape their observation that a more recent conflict, but also one with national impact, had once again marked the lives of the Maiquillahue fisher-folk: the project to construct a pipeline in Caleta Mehuín to dump CELCO waste.¹

How would the Matías of Maiquillahue be living their present and looking at the future? Convinced that this would be an important question not just for them but also for a country that was getting ready to commemorate its bicentenary, Patricia and Sandra approached SEPADE once again with the proposal to explore if there would be interest in following up their 1990 report. In conversation it rapidly emerged that there were two other contextual matters that changed that question into something particularly relevant for Protestants in Chile: Chilean Pentecostalism – the Matías family church is also Pentecostal – was getting ready to celebrate a historical landmark, its own centenary; and 31 October, the day José Matías died, had been declared the “National Day of Evangelical and Protestant Churches”.

There was no doubt, therefore, that Chile and particularly the Protestants of Chile, needed to hear the testimony of the Matías. A documentary seemed to be the appropriate medium and, to make it possible, SEPADE decided to present a project proposal to the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC).

Once the project had been approved, contact was made with a local producer, Valdivia Films, to commit to the project. Fernando Lataste, its director, knew the story and showed immediate interest, but at the same time he warned that it would not be easy to win the trust of the community in order for it to take part in the project. These doubts were dispelled when, on a joint visit to Maiquillahue, the family of the deceased pastor, recognising the journalists, received them with open arms and much gratitude for the help given them by the Evangelio y Servicio report which had advanced the judicial process.

For the family, sharing their story in a documentary was a new opportunity to come to terms with their grief and continue with their lives in peace. Faced with such willingness, Valdivia Films took on the project and, despite a low budget, committed its best people and equipment.

In March 2008 a gathering of the now dispersed Matías family was organised in the paternal home, in which the elderly widow Francisca Nahuelpán still lives – an occasion on which all the filming took place. In the midst of the testimonies and family dialogue. Susana, the grand-daughter who now lives in San Bernardo, emerged as the natural narrator of the film, summarising the accounts of the elders and presenting them with an eye to the future. In the process of editing the documentary, the original music generously contributed by Daniel Campos captured the emotional climate of the encounter with great sensitivity.

The varied and tiny nuances with which each witness told their version of the events – which happily were not concealed in the editing of the documentary – provide a picture of the diversity of ways of looking at Chilean national history... Mapuche/non-Mapuche; Mapuche/Protestant; victims/killers; civilians/armed forces; and countless other distinctions.

But beyond the differences, guilt, pure or mixed identities, there are pains, emotions and future dreams that we all share. As Susana Matías’ elders remind us, in order to plan the future, we have to look to the past and untie what ties us to it.

Based on a report by Juan Sepúlveda González, Planning Director of SEPADE (Chile), translated and edited by Philip Lee (WACC).

Note

1. CELCO’s southernmost plant, in Valdivia, in the region of Los Lagos, is still at the centre of controversy due to the disaster in the Cruces River wetlands, where hundreds of swans were killed as a result of the liquid industrial waste dumped there by the factory. (CELCO has not publicly admitted responsibility for the damages).

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