Museum of Memory and Human Rights

Today we visited the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos. I would say that there are no words to describe my experience, however I’m about to put it into words in this blog post, so I guess I’ll just say that it was an experience that brought upon a mix of emotions. If you Google the museum, you’ll find out that it was “dedicated to commemorate the victims of human rights violations during the civic-military regime led by Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990.” What you won’t find in this search is the emotions brought upon by the realities that are brought to live in this museum. Ashley and I got a little hand-held phone thing that gave us the tour in English. There were different stations set up, each with a number. When we got to a station, we would punch the number in on our phone, and it would tell us all about what we were looking at. It started at the beginning, in 1973, telling about the military coup and the junta dictatorship that took over. One of their first declarations after seizing power was a curfew on the country. This was only the beginning of the troubles the citizens of Chile would face over the next 17 years. I listened to the voice of a British woman tell me all about the people that were kidnapped, jailed, tortured, and killed for no reason. I listened to her tell me about all of the children who suffered. Some of them lost parents and loved ones, many of them saw violence take place, and some were even taken, tortured, and killed. I kept thinking of how similar all of this sounded to the Holocaust. Although the Holocaust happened decades earlier. The world was so much more modern in the 70s and 80s. Everyone was so connected by then. How could everyone else just sit back and let all of these things happen? Ashley reminded me after that the Apartheid in South Africa was still happening in the 90s. The museum continued on to show how Chileans fought back against this dictatorship. Did you know that the US government gave money to the dictatorship government in Chile? Flashback to the question Gustavo asked me on my first night here: What does your church do to support human rights? And me, not having a real answer, because in the US, we don’t have to deal with things like dictatorship, apartheid, and holocaust. But just because we have been blessed as a country, and we have been brought up privileged as citizens, does not mean that we shouldn’t fight for human rights elsewhere. All across the world, human rights are being violated every day. We wait until ten years after it happens so we can learn about it in textbooks. Who is that helping? Just because it doesn’t affect my life doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do something about it. Start praying. Start doing. It’s always a good experience going to museums and memorials such as this one, but they need to start becoming a thing of the past.