¿Donde estan?-- Where are they?

“Don Benito told us stories of Diego de Almagro’s disastrous journey. He said that the adelantado had allowed his men to commit atrocities [while crossing the desert] that were not worthy of a Christian. They took thousands and thousands of Indians from Cuzco with chains and ropes around their necks to keep them from escaping. When one of them died, they simply cut off his head to save themselves the work of undoing the string of captives or holding up the endless line dragging across the sierra.”

Inés of My Soul by Isabel Allende, page 110.

[http://www.thenakedscientists.com/]

This desert located in northern Chile is the driest place on earth, and has probably held this title for thousands of years. While the average rainfall is 4 millimeters per year there are some places that have no recorded rainfall.  It spans 600 miles and covers over 40,000 square miles. The scarce vegetation found clinging to life in the Atacama is kept alive by the moisture of the garúa fog that creeps inland from the sea in some areas. Barely inhabitable by even lichens, algae, and cacti, the Atacama is no place for humans or animals.  This desert with its relentless heat, bone-chilling nights, its dearth of water and the life which it brings has murdered many who have dared venture into its territory.

As I was mulling over what stood out to me from the first 150 pages of Inés of my Soul, my attention was fixed on the Atacama desert and the abuses of the Indians by the Spaniards and I was reminded of the movie Nostalgia for the Light. It is a powerful and thought provoking documentary released in 2010 which artfully draws connections between the astronomers who peer through their telescopes located in the Atacama desert (which happens to be an ideal place for stargazing due to its rainless nature) searching for clues about the history of earth and the universe, and the women who search under the baking sun for the remains of their “disappeared” loved ones.

Chileans holding pictures of loved ones who disappeared during  Pinochet's Regime.
"Donde estan?" - "Where are they?" They say.
[http://blogs.heraldo.es/gervasiosanchez/?p=276]

While the hellish conditions of the desert alone is enough to kill most forms of life, most of the bones that litter the salted and mineral rich landscape are there due to humans and their devilish tendencies. In this desert setting many Indians were killed by Spaniards during the Conquest and Colonization, both by their hand and by their inhumane treatment. The Spaniards refused to believe that the Indians were human and deserving of respect. They were treated like animals—at times, less than animals— and disposed of like the contents of their chamber pots. The bodies of Indians littered the path ambitious Spaniards dared take through the Atacama.

Crimes against human life in the Atacama Desert were to be repeated centuries later during the regime of Augusto Pinochet. Abandoned mining towns in the desert were turned into prisons for those arrested for “political crimes,” and holes were dug into the parched earth where the bodies of executed “enemies of state” were dumped. Their bodies joining the bones of others who were oppressed and murdered hundreds of years earlier by those who also thought themselves superior and above reproach.