Pedro Matta, who was held and tortured at the Villa Grimaldi detention center in the 1970s, leads a tour through a memorial rose garden at the center site in Santiago, Chile. Photographs by Ed Hayward
With a thick head of graying hair and dressed in a comfortable suede jacket, Pedro Matta resembles a distinguished, if casual, grandfather. But he tells those who want to listen鈥攚ho ask to meet him behind the concrete walls and steel doors that now conceal a somber memorial site on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile鈥攁bout his time as a detainee during the regime of Augusto Pinochet.
鈥淵esterday, 42 years ago to the day, I was half dead,鈥� says Matta, recalling the first day of his detention in 1975 by Chilean intelligence officials during the dictatorship of Pinochet, who seized power in a U.S.-backed coup in 1973 and ruled until 1990.
Leading Boston College faculty on a tour of the restored grounds of Villa Grimaldi, Matta recounts the atrocities committed against him and nearly 4,500 others detained at one of the capital city鈥檚 most notorious clandestine jails, a facility that was part of a country-wide network of sites that supported the system of state violence blamed for more than 3,000 executions and the torture of approximately 40,000 people.
The visit to Villa Grimaldi was part of the Office of International Program鈥檚 Faculty Seminar, which took a group of seven faculty members to Chile and Argentina to focus on the subject of human rights and reconciliation, as well as BC鈥檚 academic partnerships in the southern cone of South America.
鈥淭he Faculty Seminar is part of a larger series of initiatives offered through the Office of International programs designed to help internationalize our campus,鈥� says Office of International Programs Director Nick Gozik. 鈥淲ith this seminar, we started in Santiago, Chile, where we spent four days. We moved on to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and wrapped up the trip. The seminar was designed to help our faculty get to know Latin America.鈥�
As part of its current 10-year strategic plan, the University has committed to engaging with students, faculty, and institutions around the world. The Faculty Seminar offers early- to mid-career faculty participants from a range of disciplines the chance to study historical and contemporary topics in the host countries and meet with faculty at peer institutions to share research and best practices. The inaugural seminar traveled to Turkey in 2015.
The seminars offer an immersive professional development experience, Gozik says, but also an invaluable face-to-face connection with their colleagues in different schools. Participants in the most recent seminar, in summer 2017, came from the departments of English, philosophy, history, sociology, communication and physics.
鈥淏y bringing faculty together with different disciplinary lenses, we are able to discuss these topics with our colleagues on the ground in ways that would be unimaginable if we had tried to do so on Boston College鈥檚 campus,鈥� says Gozik.
WATCH: Participants in the Boston College seminar to Chile and Argentina discuss their experience. (Video by University Communications)
Associate Professor of History and director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program Martin Summers had little direct professional experience with Chile and Argentina prior to the seminar. Still, he found new connections to the subjects he studies.
鈥淥ne of the things that moved me, and that I became particularly emotional about, was hearing all of the various types of torture that detainees had to endure there, conveyed by someone who experienced that torture,鈥� Summers says of Matta鈥檚 presentation. 鈥淲hat really stuck out to me was his explanation of a stress position that detainees were put in. It really sounded a great deal like the kinds of positions that slaveholders would put slaves in when they beat them.鈥�
Matta, a politically active law student when he was detained, was freed after nearly two years of confinement and torture. He fled to the U.S., where he lived for many years before returning to Chile after Pinochet was forced from office.
