By the time my parents were born in the late 1970s, the fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet had closed its fist around every part of Chile — from the military, to the judicial system, to every level of education. Pinochet had come into power in a violent coup d’etat on Sept. 11, 1973, that overthrew the democratically elected President Salvador Allende and was executed with the explicit approval and support of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon. Within a day, troops had swept through the University of Santiago where they arrested hundreds of students and professors — some of whom were never seen again.
Today, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist from the University of Columbia, is detained in a Louisiana immigration center, where he has been consistently denied due process and moved hundreds of miles away from his heavily pregnant wife, despite not being charged with any crime. He was arrested in front of his wife, which she captured in a chilling video where agents can be heard claiming that they are revoking his student visa, before they were informed that Khalil is a legal permanent resident.
They took him anyway and initially misled his wife and attorneys by telling them that he was being held in a New Jersey immigration facility, when he had already been moved to Louisiana. He has been allowed to speak to his lawyers only through brief calls that the government has repeatedly tried to delay, often for weeks. The brutal legacy of my family’s homeland tells us all that extralegal detentions such as these are only the prelude to much greater forms of violence against anyone who might dare to speak out.
The fact that a legal resident can be arrested, detained, essentially kidnapped from his family and lawyers without so much as a criminal charge terrifies me. It calls to mind the testimonies given by detainees to U.N. representatives in Chilean detainment centers in 1974, in which students, professors, doctors and pregnant women alike describe torture, sexual abuse and psychological terror without ever having been told the reason for their arrest. In fact, the facility where Khalil is allegedly being held — LaSalle Detention Center — has reports of rampant sexual assault, physical abuse and denial of due process.
Due process is simply not in the interest of the dictator, not when there are enemies to stamp out; it is the first thing that goes when fascism has taken hold. Regardless of one’s personal feelings about Khalil’s cause, a broken-down justice system is destroyed for everybody, and zealous persecution of the kind that led to his arrest will not stop with pro-Palestinian activists or non-citizens. My family has learned from experience: once they come for one, it’s only a matter of time before they come for us all.
Many of the first arrested after the coup in Chile were leftist politicians and public figures, but thousands more were teenagers, college students, women and children caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. And though thousands were released in the following months, many were not. Their fate was so unknown, for so many years, that they were known in Latin America as los desaparecidos — the disappeared — as if they had just vanished from the face of the earth.
We know now that over 2,000 of those desaparecidos were murdered — shot, tortured, beaten to death, thrown from helicopters or into mineshafts or sunk into the Pacific Ocean like stones. Once we begin kidnapping people from their homes, denying them legal representation, deliberately hiding their location and providing no evidence of their criminal conduct, where else can these things end?
We’ve been down this road before — in Chile, in Argentina, in Guatemala, in Spain. Now that it has come to us, will we allow it to go the same way?
