check in with military commanders and be back for lunch,” he added. Instead, that friend was arrested and spent months in a concentration camp, only to be released into exile.
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When news of human rights violations under General Pinochet spread, my father, a law professor, became the lawyer to many of the victims and their families. As a result I learned things I was not supposed to know about.
Did you explain any of this background to new classmates at Groton when you arrived? How did they react?
Yes I did. We talked about it into the night many times. Of course, the reactions were pretty varied. Some of the kids in my dorm were politically sophisticated and asked informed questions. Others did not even know where Chile was. I remembered being asked, when
lasting impression. It was a truly amazing class. He would give us famous essays minus the last couple of pages, and then ask that we imagine and write the ending ourselves. I remember being given Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell and having to decide for myself: would the English policeman in Burma (Orwell himself ) shoot the elephant that had gone mad, even though the whole town depended on the elephant for transport and plowing the soil? Mr. Gula also taught us the importance of opening lines in setting the mood for a good essay. If my memory serves me right, the elephant
Then I discovered a weird thing about politics: when you rise in the opinion polls, people who spent years criticizing you in the nastiest way suddenly discover they support you, and claim to the press they always did. Before coming to Groton I went to an English school in Santiago (the same school my three kids go to today). The school was less than a mile away from Villa Grimaldi, a detention and torture center where Michelle Bachelet, the president of Chile today, was once held. Because I had heard it from my parents, I knew what went on there. I tried telling some of my schoolmates. They mostly did not believe it. Many people did not want to believe it. Their lives went on, and the news was just too disquieting. I guess that is what Hannah Arendt meant by the banality of evil in Nazi Germany. Not only do torturers come home in the evening to play with their children, people carry on. They fall in love and marry and have kids and worry about holding on to their jobs and paying the bills at the end of the month. That, as much as naked repression, is what gives dictatorships their staying power. But of course, many courageous people did speak up, and risked a great deal in doing so. My father was one of them. I myself was playing soccer at school on a Friday afternoon when a friend turned up breathless to tell me my father had been arrested. For three days we did not know where he was. Until suddenly we received a phone call from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where
I first arrived at Groton, whether we had ice cream in Chile. Others asked whether we had TV. Things went better after we figured out we had all grown up watching the same cartoon shows— Yogi Bear, The Road Runner, The Flintstones, and The Jetsons. Hard to believe, but TV shows can bring people together. How was such a short stay at Groton? Was a year long enough for the school to have an influence on you?
I was there for only a year, but the school and its teachers had a big influence on me. I took great European history and American literature classes. Learned a great deal about expository writing. Made great friends. Participated in some midnight activities in the woods that I cannot recall—at least not in print. And a year at Groton helped me get into Yale, which was no small thing. Did you have a particularly influential teacher, coach, or advisor? Are you still in touch with any Groton friends?
Mr. Tronic, the librarian, was always kind to me and introduced me to what are some of my favorite books to this day. But it was Mr. Gula and his expository writing class that made the most
piece begins: “Only once in my life was I important enough to be hated by large numbers of people. It was during my years as an Imperial Policeman in Burma.” (Or something like that—Orwell surely said it better.) But the point is that a beginning like that makes you want to read the rest. I still see friends from Groton regularly, whether in Boston, New York, or London. With others, we correspond over email. Tony Borden ’79, who lived in the room next door during Sixth Form, lives in London, and we see each other quite regularly. Same with other Grotonians. When Consuelo, my wife, and I got married on the beach in central Chile in 2003, a Groton and Yale contingent of nearly thirty people came down for the party—and stayed much longer than originally planned. You went to college in the U.S. your whole family was able to return to Chile a few years later. Did you face any repercussions being back in Chile after your family’s exile?
After Yale I went to Columbia for a PhD in Economics. When I was beginning to write my dissertation, my parents were allowed back into the country. And at around that time the Chilean opposition agreed to participate in a
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personae
To what degree did you understand the political climate and what drove your parents to exile in the United States?
he had been shipped after arrest and was now in hiding. From there he went to Venezuela, and then the whole family reunited in the U.S.