Jeanne-Marie Osterman, Who Killed Marta Ugarte?: Poems in memory of the victims of Augusto Pinochet, Broadstone Books, 2023 Frankfort, Kentucky 53 pages, ISBN 978-1-956782-47-9
Who Killed Marta Ugarte?: Poems in memory of the victims of Augusto Pinochet by Jeanne-Marie Osterman is a tour de force of poetry form and expression. The subject matter is not at this point, if ever, a main preoccupation of Americans, but Ms. Osterman makes it so by her art. Vladimir Putin, Hamas, and Netanyahu get most of our attention in 2024 as perpetrators of violence and inhuman acts, but the behavior is not new to history. Chile’s suffering dates back to 1973, which isn’t that long ago. Colonel Pinochet and cronies, aided by the United States, overthrew the leftist regime of Salvador Allende at the height of the Cold War. Allende was legally elected by the Chilean people. Pinochet usurped his rule and converted Chile into a fascist state that arrested opponents, tortured and killed them. This book of poems explores this barbarity. It remembers and honors the victims of the Pinochet regime.
The Prologue is a lyric poem that begins the revelations. Here is the First stanza:
How long and lonely the rocky shore
How blue the sea,
An open eye,
Where helicopters hovered and dropped the bodies
How each was tied to a length of rail
How one corpse came loose and drifted to shore
How years later divers discovered the rusted rails
One with a shirt button still attached
The book continues on to describe how each tortured body was attached to a train rail, put in a bag, and dropped into the ocean to eliminate all traces of the monstrous captivity of dissents. There are various photos of people and places and things related to this horrible practice. One photo is of pieces of railroad track found by divers off the coast of Chile. There is a photo of Marta Ugarte who was a teacher who was kidnapped, raped, murdered, and dropped into the Pacific Ocean. The picture is a portrait of her writing a letter at a desk. Also, there is a picture of children paying tribute to the disappeared at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile.
There is a two-page poem titled “Open Letter to Margo Ugarte.” It seems that she was the prisoner who was not killed immediately but half-conscious, moved in her entrapping bag attached to the rail. Apparently, it was her body that washed ashore on a Chilean beach and gave testimony to the fate of the political prisoners.
I wasn’t a believer in afterlives,
Miracles, till I read
About you, desapareicida,
Appearing to a fisherman
At Ballena Beach.
Apologies—I’m late in saying this,
I know: songs, poems, plays written,
Quilts, murals made
In your memory, and you’d probably
Just like to rest in peace.
But I can’t help myself—
Want you to know we remember
That September day, when Pincetti
Injected you with pentothal
And took you for dead—
There is a kind of lyricism coupled with a very clear narrative to the poems. There are poems of the captors who later testified as witnesses to the atrocities. There is a poem titled “Which Santiago Chile Did I Love Most?”, which is a two-page litany that begins with the words “City of….” in each stanza. There are fourteen stanzas. As an illustration here are a few of them:
City of man playing Miles in Bustamonte Park, gingerly and off-key
City of backstreet cafes where bootlegged tapes outlawed by dictatorship were
Played anyway, 1974-1990
City of La Chascona, Neruda’s house, now a museum, where thousands
Gathered days after he died, to pay their respects, violating curfew,
Risking death
It was not only the ocean which was a depository for bodies but the Atacama desert. Here is the beginning stanza of “Mothers of The Atacama.”
A woman finds
Her brother’s foot,
Still in its shoe,
A few teeth,
Piece of forehead—
Takes shoe home
In a bag, sits with it
Through the night.
In many ways, this is a sad book of unbelievable grief. In some ways, it is a horror story. It is also a labor of love by the poet for humanity, to atone for the unforgivable suffering Chile’s political prisoners underwent. It is also a call to beware and to remember the possibilities of human beings. Chile has returned to democracy. Let it always be so now. As Americans, we should remember these lines from a poem entitled “What I Remember About El Museo De La Memoria”:
And I remember thinking that in a country accused of forgetting, it was all
Here to remember, and how these memories allow us to live in the
Present because without memories we don’t live anywhere
If the reader genuinely gets into this book, they will be changed and aware of future possibilities for humanity. Let us remember the sufferings of the past to prevent it from happening again in the future—and no one is immune to evil. There is no exceptionalism in the New World. Henry Kissinger was American. He was partially responsible for Chile’s suffering.
© Jeanne-Marie Osterman and Dan Cuddy
Jeanne-Marie Osterman is the author of three books of poetry. A native of the Pacific Northwest, she lives in New York City.
Dan Cuddy is currently an editor of the Loch Raven Review. In the past he was a contributing editor of the Maryland Poetry Review and an editor for Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. He has had a book of poetry published “Handprint on the Window” in 2003. Most recently he has had poems published in the Pangolin Review, Madness Muse Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, the Rat’s Ass Review, Roanoke Review, the Amethyst Review, Synchronized Chaos, Fixator Press, Beatnik Cowboy, Gargoyle, and The Chamber Magazine.
The Loch Raven Review 