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Because I'd had to flea my country, it was on a television in a hotel room in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that I watched my countrymen attack the suppression of my book. My brother, who is a lawyer, heard from a friend of his in the government that I was to be arrested and prosecuted under the Law of State Security, which carries penalties of up to five years in prison for defaming or libeling the principal authorities of the country -- the magistrates of the Supreme Court. My brother had urged me to leave the country immediately before a detention order could be issued that would put an end to all my personal plans and my professional career.

My boyfriend, an American computer programmer, had to learn the hard way what it meant to be involved with a Latin American journalist. Hurriedly, we packed our bags, raced to the airport and bought tickets, without even taking the time to say goodbye to friends or relatives.

I waited in Buenos Aires for 10 days, hoping that my absence from Chile would be temporary. After all, wasn't just about everyone protesting the confiscation order, from my colleagues in the press to cabinet ministers of the president? Didn't they all agree that this action was an absurd holdover from the dictatorship years?

Slowly, however, it dawned on me that the widespread condemnation of the actions of the judges wasn't necessarily going to be translated into any kind of real action. So I left for Miami, where prior to the release of my book I'd been working as a correspondent for the newspaper La Tercera.

I realized at that moment that it was going to be a long fight, and that despite the gestures of solidarity made before the TV cameras, my editors at Planeta and I were alone. Freedom of the press is a cheaply bartered good in Chile, not a treasured right. It's something to make the right noises about but it's not a priority of any government agency or political party.

My publishers, Orellana and Ortiz, were thrown in jail for three days until the court realized that under the law it couldn't hold them for the same high crimes of which I was accused. From the safety of the United States, I sued Chile before the Interamerican Human Rights Commission, an entity that's part of the Organization of American States and whose decisions are supposed to have the force of law in the signatory countries -- including Chile.

Journalistic organizations around the world, particularly in the United States, have sent protest letters to the Chilean government. The president of Chile, through his ministers, has declared my prosecution an injustice and the Law of State Security an artifact of the bad old days.

However, nothing has been done to allow me to return to Chile without threat of arrest and imprisonment for five years. The government's proposal to change the state security law would simultaneously establish a new legal mechanism to protect the senior authorities of government from criticism from the likes of me. My books continue to be held prisoner in a police warehouse for the simple reason that a former Supreme Court justice found them offensive.

As for me, I remain glued to my computer and my phone in a kind of virtual reality, receiving and distributing information about this and other cases that illustrate the limit on free expression inside Chile. I'm struggling to maintain the ephemeral interest of the news media in Chile and the equally fickle major U.S. media. The confiscation and banning of a book in a South American country doesn't seem to raise much of a pulse here -- but I have gotten support from Colombia and Mexico, countries where journalists regularly put their lives on the line.

Last fall, Britain's approval of Pinochet's extradition provoked a small renewal of interest in my case. But I've given so many interviews and told so many people about my situation that the words seem to be losing their sense.

Instead of interviewing people myself, I find I've become a protagonist, or even worse -- a flak -- for a cause that I believe is important for journalism, but which is greeted with a mixture of cool indifference or verbal support that's insufficient to change anything. Meanwhile my personal plans change from week to week, subject to the arbitrary rhythms of petitions and speeches and phone calls and bureaucratic red tape that come with a cause.

Once I had received the letter approving my asylum last November, I realized that as long as my book remains banned in Chile I'll have to keep struggling to bring the words of protest to life, so that my case doesn't simply disappear into oblivion like so many others in the weak democracies of Latin America. All my efforts, all the work and tedium and grumpiness, will have been in vain if "The Black Book of Chilean Justice" ends up trapped forever in a police warehouse.

Yet that's what Jordan and others hiding behind him in the shadows are betting on. After all, for them, silence is victory.
salon.com | Jan. 4, 2000

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