Victoria Saavedra (Vicky):
- Everytime we go out digging we go psychologically prepared to find something.
Once we
- went to look in a cave. I took gloves and plastic bags, whatever I thought
we might need. We found
- rocks that were immense, larger than a house. Of course we could not
even move one. Such a
- feeling of defeat. One more time and nothing happens. But I still think
this could be the right place.
- Maybe in that pile of rocks there is a symbol, a sign. I always try
to look for some sort of a sign - if
- there are rocks with blood stains, a button, a piece of paper, if the
dirt is darker, anything. There is
- always the feeling that one must search for something.
Violeta Berrios Aguila (Violeta):
- We formed a kind of an information chain together. One friend contacted
another friend. Then
- that friend would contact another friend who had been in the military.
We went to that place he told
- us about. He assured us it was where the men were buried. The impression
was that we were finally
- going to a place that was certain. There was fear and anguish - fear
of seeing how they had been
- killed. They told us it wasn't just a firing squad, that it was a massacre.
We went fifty kilometers out
of Calama. There was nothing. Another deception. Another disillusionment.
Vicky:
While returning to Calama from searching one afternoon, we saw a place that
we thought
looked suspicious. The ground seemed to be darker and the earth looked like
it was moved around.
The first day we organized alot of people to go and we dug with shovels.
The next day we arrived at
9:00 in the morning and only a few people arrived. The police came and took
us prisoners. We were
told we had been arrested because we were digging in an archeological site.
A woman judge got us
off.
Violeta:
- After this we actually heard from someone who threw dirt on the graves.
He said the hole they
- had made couldn't hold the twenty-six, so the last three were put on
the top. the very last one was
- Mario. This man took us to the place but it was too far and the land
was too inhospitable for the
- military to have buried bodies there. I don't think that these people
who give us information want to
- lie. But sometimes I wonder, are they so sadistic as to be able to do
that?
Vicky:
- Violeta and I went out in the desert near the town of Chiu-Chiu and
there was a man-made hole
containing bones. Violeta said they were human so we jumped into the hole
and collected skull
- pieces and bones in plastic bags. We took the bags back to Calama. We
were told that, in fact, they
- were human. I began to feel that maybe I had broken my brother, Jose's
bones. There were about
- twenty bodies in the hole but they were pre-Columbian.
