At the halfway point of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973-1990), it was common to see the French priest André Jarlan writing in his notebook in different corners of the La Victoria neighborhood, on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. The working-class neighborhood was a focus of the regime because it was one of the most combative in the fight for freedom. The missionary, who had landed in the South American country at the beginning of 1983, collaborated with the French priest Pierre Dubois in the organization of soup kitchens and assistance to protesters who were injured in clashes with the military. Both supported the claim of the residents, but through peaceful protest. On the night of September 4, 1984, while Jarlan, 43 years old, was reading the Bible in the parish house, a bullet from the Carabineros went through the wall and hit him in the neck, causing his death. In the margin of the Holy Scripture he wrote his last reflection: “They are going to kill me, my God.”
Jarlan was gone, but his notebook remained. The military went in search of him, thinking that they could find valuable intelligence information in the writings, but a network of villagers, nuns, priests and diplomats managed to hide the document and send it to France. Forty years after the death of the worker priest, the notebook has recently been published under the title André Jarlan. Diary 1982-1984. From prayer to action (Editorial Cuneta), with a prologue by the journalist Cristián Amaya, the person ultimately responsible for the Frenchman’s thoughts finally seeing the light of day.
The night Jarlan died at the hands of the police, Chile had been in its 10th day of national protests against the dictatorship. While a Carabineros helicopter hovered over La Victoria at low altitude, catechist Rossana Valdivia told the population of the tragedy that had occurred on Ranquil Street: “Murderers! They killed André!” Her cries brought together hundreds of neighbors outside the parish house, who tried to be dispersed by bullets from the police and soldiers. The spontaneous crowd was only a prelude to the priest’s funeral, which, according to the press at the time, brought together some 300,000 people who accompanied the coffin from La Victoria to the Cathedral of Santiago, a pilgrimage flown over by warplanes that covered 10 kilometers and took four hours.
Four years after that historic farewell, the military was still looking for the notebook. The parish priest Pierre Dubois had given it to María Inés Urrutia, of the Little Sisters of Jesus in La Victoria, when he was expelled from the country. Urrutia had hidden it in the attic of his house and one afternoon in 1988 a group of soldiers raided the house of the Little Sisters of Jesus asking for the writing. Although they went up to the attic, they did not find it. Gerardo Ouisse, French parish priest of San Martín de Porres, a church near La Victoria, maintains in the book’s prologue that Pinochet was “obsessed” with the notebook, “he wanted it at all costs.”
“At that time,” says journalist Cristián Amaya, “there was talk that there was a significant contingent of armed terrorist groups in La Victoria. There was even speculation that weapons were stored in the parish sacristy with the permission of Jarlan and Dubois. They were convinced that the priests were Marxists.” In La Victoria, he points out, there were many former communist leaders, but the priests were not involved in any terrorist network, as the dictatorship’s intelligence corps thought. “They thought that in the notebook there could be code names, hiding people, exiles who were taken out of the embassies, etc.,” he adds.
There was nothing of the sort. The diary is a refuge for the priest’s questions about how to create an apostolic community, conversations with neighbors about the miseries that afflicted them and scenes of violence in which they were immersed, among others. On September 11, 1983, for example, Jarlan wrote: “In La Victoria, rumors spread that the police would come at dawn to destroy and burn handles without discrimination… Bonfires of blown cigars. Almost all the surrounding towns and almost all of Santiago: police wake people up with shots in the air shouting (…) Panic, but enough presence of popular organizations to avoid worse things.” A month later, a brief note of a phrase he heard: “We did nothing, the police intervened” (truth of the facts).”
Sometimes, too, he seemed optimistic. “We have overcome fear. We have come together. We have shared. Even the bad guys have participated (…) Christ is where one least expects him.” His last reflection, in July 1984, was: “Each of the tosses is a person.”
The feat of keeping the notebook protected is a story in itself. Nun Urrutia, stalked by the military’s interest, went to the parish priest Ouisse to carry out a plan. They decided to hand it over to the French embassy so that it could be sent back to Father Pierre Dubois, who returned to his country after the regime expelled him. Ouisse left the house of the Little Sisters of Jesus with an elegant briefcase, pretending to be carrying something valuable inside. Minutes later, Urrutia followed him, poorly dressed and carrying a fairground bag, where the notebook was. “The idea was that they would notice me, not her,” the priest recounts. Ambassador François Mouton sent the notebook to Paris by diplomatic bag. Dubois recovered it and kept it in his possession until 1990, when he decided to leave it in the custody of the National Archives Centre of the Church of France. It remained there for 26 years.
In 2016, the French bishops decided that the notebook should return to Chile and entrusted the task to the priest Jean Marc Vigroux, who travelled to Santiago and handed the diary over to a representative of the Archdiocese of Santiago, the auxiliary bishop Pedro Ossandón. Shortly afterwards, the journalist Cristián Amaya, who served as Communications Director of the Archdiocese of Santiago, received an order from Bishop Ossandón: “See what we can do with this.” Jarlan’s reflections began in March 1982 and ended in July 1984. It consisted of 138 pages handwritten in blue and red ink; the first 58 in French, the last 80 in Spanish. Amaya sent the writings to be translated and tried, without success, to publish it as a book. Amaya left the archdiocese in June 2022 without achieving his goal.
A year later, Amaya wanted to burn one last cartridge. He spoke with Sister Donata Cairo, a member of the Little Sisters of Jesus, and with Galo Ghigliotto, from the Cuneta publishing house, to publish the book. The response was positive. Henriette Jarlan, the sister of the worker priest, gave her approval from France, determining that the royalties would go to the parish of Nuestra Señora de La Victoria. “We hope that the publication of this book will bear witness to what the inhabitants experienced under the Pinochet dictatorship,” she told the journalist.
The first book launch, held a few weeks ago, was La Victoria. “People still remember Jarlan 40 years after his death,” says Amaya. “What they remember most is the unemployment, the poverty, the feeling of injustice, the violent raids and how the priest helped organize a Christian community of about 300 people, in a population of 30,000 people, to express their fears, make peaceful protests, and build a collaborative economy that allowed them to overcome hunger,” he says. The original book is still in the hands of the Archbishopric of Santiago, but now its content is no longer a secret to anyone.
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