Cuando se muere la carne, El alma busca su sitio… -Violeta Parra

Belgium is a small country, little more than a footnote to France in the great scheme of historical geography. I suspect that, in the Congo, they had a different opinion. King Leopold decided he should own the Congo. Kings tend do that. Own everything. Their divine right, or sovereign duty, or something. Then, they die, comrade, just like everybody else. 

Belgium took over the Congo, killed a lot of people and Leopold got rich. There was palm oil, rubber, uranium and copper. Belgium didn’t have colonies before. I guess they felt left out. Like the baby brother in a rich family, throwing a tantrum to get noticed.

Belgium was strangely significant for Chile. Not only because of Belgian-born Holy Cross Father Nieuwland’s eureka moment that brought highly addictive neoprene glue into all the Chilean hardware stores, but also because of Jesuit Father Gustav Le Paige and his feudal governance of the Atacama Desert for upwards of two decades. Le Paige was Belgian, too.

He started out as a missionary in the Congo. When he got thrown out of the Congo under mysterious circumstances, the Jesuits sent him to Chile. He arrived at Chuquicamata in 1952, the same year that Jesuit Father Alberto Hurtado, his classmate in theology at Louvain, died of cancer. Hurtado’s legendary magnetism was the reason Le Paige went to Chile. Hurtado became San Alberto. Le Paige became the patriarch of Chilean archeology. 

To this day, Chileans believe that Le Paige was an archeologist. He was not. His training was in Latin, Greek and theology. At Notre Dame, people believe Father Nieuwland was a chemist. He was, in fact, a botanist. It’s that aristocratic gene. It made learned nineteenth century Europeans believe they had an inalienable right to dabble in hobbies and be considered experts.

Mary Shelley had something to say about that. The monster was a product of the enlightened scientific dalliance of a decaying aristocracy. Le Paige brought that dalliance to the Chilean desert. The truth was that Padre Le Paige first got interested in buried skeletons and pottery shards when he arrived in Atacama. He was already 55 years old. He read a few books and started digging. From Chuqui, he went to Lasana.  From Lasana, he went to San Pedro.

Le Paige was a country priest with an incredible capacity for discovering archeological sites. So, they said. And, dig them up, all by himself. Well, with the help of the youth group from the parish. A day in the country with shovels, buckets and hoes, to see what was there and keep whatever looked pretty. That’s how he found all the treasures currently on exhibit at the museum that bears his aristocratic Belgian name. Museo Arqueológico Padre Gustav Le Paige, financed by none other than BHP Billiton, the other Belgians who are digging up the desert to take home whatever they find, if they think it’s pretty. Or wildly, unimaginably profitable.

Real archeologists are not fond of shovels and buckets. In the heady world of science, they called that pot hunting, and it was not unusual in Europe during the 19th century. Scientific tourism for wealthy readers of dusty books was responsible for destroying a countless number of sites that had lain untouched for centuries. Le Paige brought pot-hunting to Chile, comrade, and because of him, San Pedro de Atacama became an unforgettable tourist destination.

Local people were deferential, by nature. They let Le Paige do whatever he wanted. He was not respectful of local traditions. He considered the Atacameños primitive. Every crazy idea that ever occurred to him was progress.

So, where did that uncanny skill for finding archeological sites come from?

Was it the will of God, revealed to him in mystical Jesuit rapture?

Was it scientific hypothesis coupled with careful trial and error?

No, comrade. He asked the local Indians where there might be bones and pots. They told him, and he gave them money. Lots of Belgian money.

They were sacred sites. All Atacameños knew where they were. And, most of them wouldn’t say. For centuries, silence had been essential for survival. The Spanish had been up there looking for gold since 1540. A remnant of the original community survived only because they knew how to keep their mouths shut. But Padre Le Paige was the pastor. He was an authority. God was on his side. And, there was the money. Lots and lots of Belgian money.

Incredible, isn’t it, comrade? It’s also incredible that there were so many serious universities in Chile and not one had ever thought of asking the Indians where the historic ruins of past civilizations might be buried. All those free-thinking Masons with spectacles and pipes and a fraudulent air of wisdom, and not one of them ever got around to looking under the surface of the millennial sands that surrounded them. Just Indians, they said. Backward people.

For the learned elite, the archeological heritage of the continent was a bunch of useless junk buried in the desert. If some old Belgian priest wanted to dig it up, that was his folly. There was some historic antagonism between Jesuits and Masons. Like scorpions and tarantulas; schoolboys put them together in shoeboxes because they couldn’t not kill each other. As flies to wanton boys. It was fun to watch.

Mining companies, like the one that funded Gustav’s pot-hunting, didn’t tend to value indigenous heritage, comrade. On the contrary. Archeology was an obstacle to the millions they hoped to profit by digging expansive holes into the Chilean altiplano. They didn’t use shovels, buckets and the parish pick-up to destroy sacred burial sites and ancient cities. They had a convoy of oversized front-end loaders. Little bones and ancient ceramics made that business complicated. It was better if there weren’t any.

Enlightened positivism took a similar stand with regard to devotional dancers who took over the streets of Antofagasta, Iquique and Calama a couple of times per year, to thank the Holy Lady for keeping them alive for one more turn of the sun. And the engineers from the mines in their red Nissan Pathfinders would get pissed, because they couldn’t get by without honking and driving on the sidewalk.

The Jesuit-run Catholic University of the North in Antofagasta didn’t have an archeology department. Or an anthropology department, or a history department. There was engineering, geology and business administration. Dancers were not considered cultural wealth inherited from our Pre-Columbian ancestors; they were just noisy Indians, twisting and kicking immodestly in the street. Backward superstition, for all they cared. Actually, Jesuits had founded the university, but it was the Freemasons who controlled it.

It was funny, though. Enlightened Freemasons would happily spend their weekends drinking and whoring, stuffing paper money into strippers' G-strings, and then turn self-righteous and complain that religious dancers were too sexy. Native religion was sexy, comrade. It was European religion that left sex outside the system. Freemasons didn’t believe in that system anyway, but their wives did. If they had wives. Some just had whores. And mothers. Even whoring engineers had mothers, comrade. But the whoring engineers knew which buttons to push to keep the First Nations at bay. That was important, to keep the front-end loaders loading.

BHP Billiton played the same game, but they had learned long ago that public relations were key to their business model. They had a local name, Minera Escondida, that made them sound less foreign. The Minera had a foundation with a budget that seemed huge, but was really insignificant, compared with their bottom line. And they gave money away. They paid for the dancers’ barbecues. They paid for local kindergartens. And they paid for Padre Le Paige’s archeological adventures. To purchase complicity. To keep the loaders loading.

It sounded quaint, anyway. Padre Le Paige with the boys from the parish in his Ford pick-up. Centuries of history would fit right into the cargo bed. When they found ancient mummies and ceramics, they had to wrap them in blankets. His acolytes would hug the mummies tightly for the ride home, so that they wouldn’t break into a million pieces on the bumpy roads. Those were the good old days.

At the Museo Arqueológico Padre Gustav Le Paige in San Pedro, there was a celebrated mummy that belonged to the Atacameño people. The ancestors didn’t mummify all of their dead, but they did mummify some. No one knows exactly why. Perhaps because of nobility, or because that person had been sacrificed to the gods. The climate made it easy. Some of the living looked like mummies already. The desert air dried them out.

This particular mummy, the most famous of all the Atacama mummies, was the desert princess that occupied the place of honor at Gustav’s Museo. You paid your fee, you passed the turnstile, there she was, looking at you. She became known as Miss Chile. She was 2,500 years old, and a little stiff, but still pretty hot.  

Cecilia Bolocco became Miss Chile in 1987 when she was only 22 and still flexible enough to take ballet, which she did. Cecilia Bolocco, commonly referred to as La Chechi, was very hot. Miss Bolocco went on to become Miss Universe, and Chile was paralyzed with ecstasy for a week. Foreign countries had to notice Chile for something other than cruel soldiers, rampant cholera and flagrant human rights violations. At least for a few days.

Le Paige died in 1980, seven years into the dictatorship. After democracy returned, the Indians began to get organized. Pinochet had stolen their land and, more importantly, their water rights. There wasn’t much water to begin with, but it was enough for a few chickens, the llamas and alpacas, and some specialized cultivation on terraces, an ancient cultural heritage. Pinochet gave the water rights to the mining companies.

Progress, comrade. The freest of free markets. Presidentially appointed local governors would send someone to get the cacique drunk, tell him it was time to move to the city where everything was modern and pretty. And then offer him what looked like a lot of cash for signing on the dotted line. If he could sign. If not, a simple “x” would do. After the cacique signed, others would sign, too. Only later would their children’s children discover that they had signed away their homes, their inheritance and their way of life.

After 1990, some Indians began to reclaim their historic rights. Some even spoke up about the faux archeology, things they had never dared to say to Padre Le Paige, the great white missionary who had persuaded so many to give up traditional agriculture and become gainfully employed Chilean citizens, cleaning hotel rooms for tourists with money, and driving transport vans for sightseers seeking exotic panoramas. Their complaint was a symbolic gesture, comrade, but they did say that it bothered them to see their ancestor on exhibit for the whole world to look at. Miss Chile, comrade. It made her sound like a vedette at Los Buenos Muchachos. (The food is really good there, incidentally.)

The Chilean courts responded that the artifact in question was now considered a historical monument, that thanks to Padre Le Paige, it belonged to humanity. The Atacameños made a counter-offer. You can keep our princess if you give us the cadaver of Padre Le Paige. For their proposed museum of the European invasion.

Fair was fair. You paid your fee, and you could have your picture taken with the decaying bones of the greatest Belgian Jesuit of the 20th century. The courts deliberated for a few days and, then, they gave the mummy back. She has returned to her traditional burial place, where she is, once again, venerated by her people. But then, there was another problem. The Indians wanted their ceramic pots back. And their land and their language and their water. That was the real reason the courts didn’t want to give back the princess.

Underneath the thin patina of eco-consciousness and cultural respect, comrade, the transnationals are ripping down the Chilean mountains. They will take all the copper, gold, lithium and molybdenum to wealthy countries that will collapse without them.

Now, they say Chile is a developed country, because there are some modern cars, cell phones and internet. There is even a Metro, in Santiago. But it’s an illusion, comrade, a mirage caused by the sun on the sand and the altitude. By the bone-chilling cold at night, and the thin air. Chile has become a whore, comrade. The worst kind of whore.

Mining in Chile began with guano.  Well, that’s not true either.  It really began with silver in Potosí, but technically, that was Perú, then. Chile was Perú, then, too. But Chile wasn’t involved in the silver, except that Chileans had to grow the wheat and raise the cattle to feed the miners to grind up the mountain to send it away to China and Spain.

Chile first got directly involved mining guano. Bird shit. Centuries of bird shit had accumulated on a few islands off the coast up north where it never rained.  Sea birds had roosted there for thousands of years. There were tons and tons of bird shit.  Local Indians had taught Juan López that it made the crops grow. He sent boatloads of bird shit to Europe. He made lots of money and tired European farmland turned bright green. 

Guano really smelled bad, though, and workers would get red eyes and parched lungs from the ammonia vapor. And guano had other surprises, too. It carried potato blight to Ireland in the 1840’s. All the potatoes died, and millions of Irish people starved.

Then, comrade, they found nitrate. White gold. The raw material for gun powder, and hugely in demand for waging wars. The Chilean desert was everyone’s supplier. After the Germans developed a synthetic alternative, the white crystals became just more fertilizer. It didn’t smell nearly as bad as the bird shit.

Now, it’s copper, gold, cobalt, molybdenum and lithium. Enormously profitable. All of those are located beneath the most delicate eco-systems on the planet, and often found in conjunction with toxic compounds, like arsenic and boron, the reason that the incidence of exotic diseases is unusually high in Antofagasta, Tocopilla and Iquique, comrade.

Maybe, Chile isn’t a whore, comrade. Maybe she is a victim of rape. History will be the judge. The transnationals have learned to soften the blow with money. Money that they give away to build schools and free clinics, things that local government should have provided long ago, things that make the local people happy to give their mineral wealth away to the big men with red trucks and hard hats that know how to dig it up. It will all run out, though, someday.

Experts say, not to worry, it won’t be for another fifty years. That’s not long, comrade, not if you have children, and your children have children. When it does run out, maybe the engineers will go clean hotel rooms and drive taxis for the tourists who come from Belgium. To see the ruins where a beautiful South American civilization used to be.