Being in Santiago, Chile, I couldn’t help but gravitate to their Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos to brush up on everything I should have been paying closer attention to in the 1970’s and 1980’s down here. The museum was excellent, very modern, and well designed, full of all kinds of documentation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet reign. It was chilling to see how the coup unfolded and how students my own age in the early 1980’s were tortured and killed for protesting the dictatorship. After admiring many of the old government buildings around town, you could see in video footage how they played a roll in the coup – with a central government palace being bombed, which I walked right past on my way to see the museum. The entire city was full of secret graves of those who were killed for their beliefs. Really not that long ago and they still seem to be discovering other graveyards around the country.
Getting there was interesting. I was using maps from my Lonely Planet guide only to find they were wrong. Without knowing too many Spanish words, I managed to find a tourist office to try and help me locate where the museum was supposed to be. This was more of a corporate office, but they managed to find someone who knew a little bit of English and they took me back to their office to help me find the place on Google maps and plot a route to get there – which included the subway. Numerous people in the office got involved and they were all very nice in trying to help me out even though none of us could speak each others language very well.
Santiago does have a nice subway network, although it’s not quite as new and flashy as Singapore’s, Bangkok’s, or Seoul’s.
