THE PEARL BUTTON
"we are all streams from one water"
This block of quartz was found
in the Atacama desert, in Chile.
It is 3,000 years old
and contains a drop of water.
The Chilean desert
is the driest place on Earth.
From here,
astronomers discovered water
in almost the entire cosmos.
There's water in the planets.
There's water vapor in some nebula.
There's ice in other celestial bodies.
On earth, and elsewhere,
water is essential for life to exist.
Each night
a new planet is discovered,
that might have water.
As I watched the stars,
I was drawn to the importance of water.
It seems that water came from outer space,
and life was brought to earth by the comets,
that shaped the seas.
Water,
Chile's longest border,
forms an estuary known as Western Patagonia.
Here,
the Cordillera of the Andes sinks into the water
and re-emerges as thousands of islands.
It's a timeless place.
An archipelago of rain.
Some distant relatives of mine lived here.
We had a zinc roof
and the raindrops made a noise
that reassured and protected me.
That sound has followed me all my life.
When water moves,
the cosmos intervenes.
Water receives the force of the planets,
transmits it to the earth,
and to all living creatures.
Water is an intermediary force
between the stars and us.
Before the white man arrived,
the first inhabitants of Patagonia,
lived in communion with the cosmos.
They carved stones to ensure their future.
They traveled by water.
They lived submerged in water.
They ate what the water supplied.
They arrived ten thousand years ago.
They were water nomads.
They lived in clans
that moved about through the fjords.
They traveled from island to island.
Each family kept a fire burning
in the middle of their canoe.
There were five groups:
the Kawésqar,
the Selk'nam,
the Aoniken,
the Hausch,
and the Yamana.
They all traveled by sea.
The sea...
The sea is one of the places that I...
As I grew up close to the sea,
I really love it.
I'd like to be able to travel by boat
as we used to.
But now there are too many restrictions,
we are barely allowed in the sea.
Why?
The Navy demands too much for us to be able to use the sea.
I have a boat I made myself.
Such a small boat scares them.
They're not familiar with boats that travel in this way.
That's why...
They claim they're protecting us,
but I don't think so.
I was told
that you crossed Cape Horn with your dad.
The first time we crossed Cape Horn,
the weather was bad.
The wind was strong.
The sea is very dangerous,
but we got across fine.
How old were you?
Twelve years old.
We went from Puma Arenas
to Cape Horn and back again.
The paddles were short, like this
because we paddled downwards.
That's how you paddled?
The paddle isn't fixed to the boat?
No, we hold it in our hands.
The current doesn't drag the boat away?
No, it doesn't.
In Cape Horn?
The current holds it back a bit,
but it still moves forward.
We still don't know
how they were able to predict the weather.
It is estimated that in the 19th century,
there were 8,000 people with 300 canoes,
traveling around this vast archipelago.
Gabriela, do you feel Chilean?
Not at all.
What do you feel?
Kawésqar.
I didn't tell you...
Once, with my mother,
we were on an island, near...
near Natalee.
I don't know exactly where.
I'd been sent there as we didn't have water.
There was no well, no river, nothing.
We had gone to fetch water.
Opposite, there was a river.
I already knew how to paddle a little.
You need strength to paddle.
It's not easy.
It's not easy when it's windy.
The wind got up
and we couldn't reach our camp on the island.
So we had to know how to paddle,
in case we needed to get out of trouble.
We couldn't say:
"I can't paddle", that wasn't possible.
We had to be able to do it.
I learned how to dive,
I had to learn.
I must have been 7 or 8 years old.
I got a mussel on my first dive.
That's when I was told
that I could catch shellfish to eat.
This was our food.
Back then, we ate only shellfish.
For Gabriela,
water is part of her family.
She accepts both the dangers
and the food that the sea offers her.
But I, as a Chilean,
I don't feel close to the sea.
For the ocean I feel admiration
and at the same time, fear.
This is because of a childhood memory.
One summer,
one of my friends was swept away by the sea.
He was jumping from rock to rock,
amongst the waves,
that rushed in, claw-like, between the reefs.
His body was never recovered.
He was my first disappeared person.
The indigenous people of Patagonia
were Chile's first and only maritime peoples.
We Chileans today
have lost this intimacy with the sea.
I asked Emma Malig,
my painter friend,
to show me something I've never seen.
Since I was a child,
I've never been able to see
a complete picture of my country.
In the schools,
there were no walls big enough,
for such a long country.
Chile had to be divided into three parts:
the north, the center and the south,
as if it were three countries.
I think this country got its mission wrong.
We have 4,200 kilometers of coastline.
Probably the most coastlines in the world.
With a large mountain range that isolates it from the continent.
The desert in the north isolates us
from Western civilization and a frozen continent in the South.
We are an island,
in the geographical sense,
in terms of human geography, etc.
We don't have a maritime tradition,
and we've built up inland.
But our valley is too narrow for agriculture,
so we built our future
on a very slim economic possibility,
which, over time, has shrunk to almost nothing.
This country has not made proper use of its sea,
the vast ocean that lies before it.
Few people have given the ocean due honor,
have turned to the sea to admire it.
Not just to admire it, but to acknowledge it
as part of our identity.
My country denies the Pacific ocean,
the biggest of all the oceans.
It mistrusts its vastness,
equivalent to half the surface of planet Earth.
However, for the indigenous and the astronomers,
the ocean is an idea,
a concept that's inseparable from life.
How long was the journey of the comet
that brought us the first drops of water?
Each drop
is a world apart.
Each drop is a breath.
As an anthropologist,
Claudio learned from the natives,
the language of water.
Native Americans believe all things are alive.
A stone is alive and has a spirit,
water is alive and has a spirit.
So water is a source of music.
All that moves makes a sound.
And the universe is movement,
so there's always sound.
It's the same water here.
If Earth's made up of different parts...
three parts water,
and one part earth,
what we call "earth" is actually water.
Our bodies are made of water, plants are water,
so everything's water,
with bits of something more solid:
earth, stones or bones.
But everything is water.
What we breathe is also water.
So there's nothing strange in the fact that astrophysicists say
that the universe is full of water.
I began to listen to the sound of the river,
and suddenly I began to hear music.
A river sounds
like a thousand sounds at the same time.
We can separate them, listen to one at a time,
and suddenly you hear...
and you hold on to it and then...
you have two separate sounds
and then another...
and when you have 10 sounds...
That's when the jolt happens.
When you hear the noise, that's a song,
a different sound.
An oceanographer taught me
that the act of thinking resembles the ocean.
The law of thought is the same as that of water,
that is always ready
to adapt to everything.
Might this explain
how these groups of men managed to live here
for thousands of years,
in polar temperatures?
They lived in the most distant region,
the least inhabited.
They had no towns,
they didn't erect monuments,
but they knew how to draw.
One of these groups, the Selk'nam,
came up with the idea
of drawing on their own bodies.
After death,
they believed they would become stars.
In their mythology
they evoke the constellation of Orion,
and the Southern Cross.
We still don't know
the meanings of these drawings.
Perhaps a Chilean poet, Rafil Zurita,
might be able to help us.
These people were complex
and rich.
Their drawings show the whole cosmos,
the way they painted their bodies,
how they transformed them.
For these people,
the stars are the spirits of their ancestors.
So what are they searching for,
those mighty telescopes in the north?
They are searching,
essentially,
for their ancestors,
to make the universe
more familiar.
In one way or another,
when the Indians saw the souls and spirits
of their ancestors, their warriors,
they somehow felt closer to the Universe.
They knew their dead were there.
So what do they want?
What are the telescopes looking for,
the space probes?
To bring the universe closer.
It seems all this progress
is the product of a deep nostalgia,
a desire to retrieve something,
something we already knew, in a poetic sense,
something we inherently knew.
In 1883,
the settlers arrived,
the gold hunters,
the military, the police,
the cattle farmers,
and the Catholic missionaries.
After centuries of living alongside
the water and the stars,
the indigenous people saw their world collapse.
The Chilean government,
who supported the colonists,
declared that the Indians were corrupt,
cattle thieves and barbaric.
Many of them took refuge on Dawson island,
where the main Mission was located.
They took away their beliefs,
their language, and their canoes.
They dressed them in old clothes
that were contaminated
with the germs of civilization.
Most of them
got sick and died within less than 50 years.
The others became prey
to those known as "Indian hunters".
The farmers paid one pound
for a man's testicle,
one pound for a woman's breast,
ten shillings for a child's ear.
This story, I believe,
should be told far more often.
The Chilean settlers,
backed by the foreign settlers,
carried on south
to establish large farming companies.
The Chileans benefited,
buying or obtaining lands from the government
to occupy and turn them into cattle farms.
They began to exterminate the southern people,
to wipe them out and kill them,
in the savage way we know about.
None of these massacres
ever resulted in the perpetrators being accused.
The mother is water,
she's the ocean, the canals, the rain, all that.
When we think of the indigenous people
of America,
we tend to think, as historians,
that these people already identified
with their land, their territory, with nature,
with water, in the case of the Southern people.
They were the masters of their country.
The last groups sank into misery
and alcoholism.
In the eyes of the settlers
they became monsters.
In the 16th century,
the Spanish also saw monsters
in Patagonia.
They confirmed the presence of giant savages.
They called them "Patagones",
because of their long feet.
I ask myself a question:
has the same thing happened on other planets?
Have the strongest people
always dominated, everywhere?
One of the planets of the Gliese star,
discovered in Chile,
may have a vast ocean.
Might it be inhabited by living beings?
Might it have trees to make large canoes?
Might this planet have been a refuge
where the Indians could live in peace?
Having these thoughts is unreal.
But I dare to have them,
because I'd love for these water people
not to have disappeared.
There now remain 20 direct descendants.
Through them
their language has survived for hundreds,
perhaps thousands of years.
A seal.
A whale.
Canoe.
Paddle.
Dad.
Mum.
Child.
Sun.
Moon.
Star.
Gabriela, I'd like you to say in Kawésqar:
Beach.
Mussel.
Canoe.
Button.
Button?
Shirt.
Rain.
Window.
Sea.
Water.
Storm.
I got it wrong.
Good man.
Bad man.
God.
No, not God,
we don't have that.
Police.
Police...
We don't need that either.
When she was a child,
Gabriela crossed almost the whole of Patagonia,
paddling, for 1,000 kilometers,
in a canoe.
Is it true that when you were a child
you made a long trip with your family,
from an island, to Port Eden?
To the Gulf of Penas.
I know the way.
I know how to get to the Gulf of Penas,
going through Agropolina,
very near the island of San Javier.
Tell me about it in Kawésqar.
I'm going to start
to tell you from when we were near...
Cape Tomar.
I paddled all around the south.
It was known as the "K'eaelkces' land,
the Kawésqar people of the south.
I don't know what the area was called
in Kawésqar.
When a canoe is damaged by barnacles
another is built with an axe.
If the new canoe gets a leak
another must be made, immediately.
When you travel by canoe
you get to know the islands inside out,
where to camp
and where to sleep.
Sometimes we stay there for several days,
blocked by the wind
and if it rains we sometimes spend 3 months
waiting for the sea to calm.
I became a teenager, then an adult
as I paddled
and here I am.
The first time I saw Gabriela was in a photograph.
It was also the first time
that I saw nearly all of Patagonia's survivors.
Paz Errézuriz,
a talented photographer from Santiago,
was drawn to the faces of these people
long before the history text books.
For many years, for centuries,
the Fuegians were invisible people.
At the same time
as Gabriela made her 1,000 kilometer journey,
and dived in the sea,
I was at school
and lived by the sea.
We school kids knew nothing
of the people from the South.
Gabriela and I
were several centuries apart.
During those years,
I preferred reading Jules Verne novels.
I didn't even know about the only native
who'd left his mark on history.
His name is Jemmy Button.
I found out about his life much later on.
The adventure of Jemmy Button
seemed almost a legend to me,
when I read it for the first time.
But this is a true story.
At the dawn of the 19th century,
an English boat
arrived in Patagonia,
under the command of Captain FitzRoy.
His mission was to draw the lands
and coastlines of this country.
He drew the finest maps,
that were used for the next century.
He was the first person to draw the natives
with a human face.
The captain,
a humanist,
had a surprising idea:
to take four natives
to England to civilize them.
One of the natives went aboard, in exchange for a pearl button,
which is why the English
named him Jemmy Button.
Jemmy Button was dressed in a sailor's costume,
later on, as an Englishman.
For more than one year
Jemmy Button lived on an unknown planet.
He traveled from the Stone age
to the Industrial revolution.
He traveled thousands of years into the future.
And then,
thousands of years back into the past.
After Jemmy Button had become a gentleman,
the captain
took him back to Patagonia.
When he set foot on his homeland
Jemmy Button took off his English clothes.
He continued to speak half in English,
half in his own language.
He let his hair grow long,
but he was never the same man again.
This was the beginning
of the end of the Southern peoples.
FitzRoy's maps
opened the doors to thousands of settlers.
For 150 years,
a group of white men
governed harshly, in a silent country.
Salvador Allende's revolution broke the silence.
A major social movement arose
that spanned half the country.
We heard voices we'd never heard before.
Allende began to give back to the natives
the lands that had been seized from them.
The freedom didn't last for long.
It was destroyed by a coup d'Etat,
financed by the United States.
At the same time,
the disintegration of a supernova star
was seen from a Chilean observatory.
It was the first time this had occurred
so close to Earth.
Dictatorship
struck Chile.
It lasted 16 years.
There were 800 secret prisons,
with 3,500 civil servants,
many of whom carried out torture.
In some regions,
the prisoners were butchered alive.
Women were raped
in front of their husbands or children.
Men and women
were hung from the ceiling.
Their skin was burnt with acid and cigarettes.
They were electrocuted all over their bodies.
They were drugged.
Their throats were slit.
They were imprisoned in boxes of 1m³.
Usually, the information wanted, was already known.
They tortured to kill.
For years,
the military and civilians involved
didn't say where the prisoners were.
Dawson island,
where hundreds of indigenous people died
in the Catholic missions,
was turned into a concentration camp
for Salvador Allende's ministers
who were deported from Santiago.
Dawson was also used as a prison
and torture house
for over 700 of Allende's supporters
who lived in Punta Arenas,
capital of Patagonia.
I want you to show me with your hands
where Dawson is.
I would like each of you to tell me how long you were held in prison?
- One and a half years - Four years.
Four years and three months.
- Six months. - Four years.
444 days.
Two years and two months.
Two and a half years.
Two years and ten months.
Five years and one day.
- Six months. - One year and seven months.
They were victims of a violence
that the natives knew only too well.
In Chile,
impunity accumulated over centuries.
Dawson is just one chapter.
During those violent years,
the Humboldt current washed up a body,
in the same region
in which my childhood friend had disappeared.
It wasn't the body of a child,
it was the body of a woman.
Nobody knew who she was.
People began to suspect
that the ocean was a cemetery.
Thirty years later,
several officers of the dictatorship
confessed that perhaps
a few people had been thrown into the sea.
One of them was Marta Ugarte,
the woman from the beach.
The family's lawyer knows the facts.
Her wounds are mainly internal.
She shows other signs of torture.
She has some cuts.
As for her face...
what strikes me most, even today,
is that she's looking at us.
Her eyes are open,
and she's looking at us.
Curiously,
her eyes are intact,
which is unusual,
when a body has remained for a long time,
underwater.
But that's how it was with her,
I find it very strange.
Her face isn't bloated.
And she's looking at us.
It's as though she's awake and looking at us.
I wonder what was the last thing
that she saw?
Did she see other prisoners
nearby?
I have decided to reconstruct
the last moments
of a victim, in order to believe it.
A writer and journalist
will help me.
There are various testimonies that they were given an injection.
Some say that it was cyanide,
but most say that it was pentothal.
It was a way of guaranteeing a prisoner's death.
The rail was placed on the thoracic cage.
Higher up, on the chest.
How much do you think this rail weighs?
This rail
must weigh around 30 kilos, at least.
The rails came from the Puente Alto barracks.
The rail carrier was murdered by the DINA,
for talking too much.
To finish off the packaging,
they put plastic bags,
one over the head, and another from the feet,
meeting in the middle.
The other plastic bag here.
And potato sacks.
Exactly the same process:
from the feet up, and from the head down,
to meet in the middle.
Then they awaited the helicopters or airplanes,
from which they'd be thrown into the sea.
What happened with Marta Ugarte's body?
What happened was that this prisoner,
when she was in the airplane,
began to move.
What they did was to take this off her,
untie the bags, take them off her body.
They opened the packaging,
and realized she was alive.
So they took the wire that was here,
and strangled her.
The package was then badly sealed.
This would explain how her body
came to be washed ashore.
According to judicial reports,
the Chilean Armed Forces tossed
between 1,200 and 1,400 people into the ocean,
dead or alive.
They were assisted by many civilians.
They hoped
that the sea would keep the secret of the crime.
This happened in November '79.
Aboard the helicopter,
the mechanic enters the side door.
I realized that there were two bodies:
one was a woman,
who was obviously young,
and one a man, of more than 90 kilos.
I could see his build, but his face was hidden in a bag.
A rail was attached to the body.
Unfortunately,
that was the most difficult day of my career,
I'd already said
that God would punish us.
What we were doing was a crime.
On my second flight,
that was in June 1980,
There must have been...
judging from the stains,
I think there were 8 or 9 bodies.
I had the impression they'd just been killed,
given the blood stains that were left.
Was there more than one civilian?
There were four civilians.
They pushed the bodies out.
They used the hatchway
that's used to load cargo,
and the side doors.
It was easier to throw them from there,
than to drag them to the side doors.
Those by the side doors were thrown out there,
the others out the middle.
There's no limit to the cruelty.
They didn't even have the grace,
the compassion, to return the dead.
It's written in the most ancient history:
the enemy's dead body is returned,
so its relatives may continue to live.
For them to grieve, the bodies must be returned.
So the dead may finish dying
and the living carry on living.
It's so...
It's so brutal, what happened...
in Chile,
in these countries.
Impunity is a double murder,
it's like killing the dead twice.
Finding the guilty is not the end of the road.
It's just the beginning.
Ever since he was a child,
Rafil Veas has dived near to the rails.
Almost everyone in the town knew about them,
but people were scared.
In 2004,
judge Guzmén ordered inspector Vignolo
to find them.
It was Rafil who dived to the bottom of the sea.
Forty years later,
the rails have become covered with marks.
Water and its creatures
have engraved these messages.
Here are the secrets
that the bodies left on the rails,
before melting into the water
and taking on the shape of the ocean.
Observing each of the rails,
other remains were discovered.
A button was found, stuck to a rail.
This button is the only trace
of someone who had been there.
From Jemmy Button, in exchange for a pearl button,
they took away his land,
his freedom, his life.
When he was returned to his island,
Jemmy Button never retrieved his identity.
He became exiled in his own land.
Both buttons tell the same story,
a story of extermination.
There are probably many other buttons
in the ocean.
In this detail lies everything,
condensed,dense,
like a black hole.
That was my impression,
because one can imagine the rail,
and trace its story:
the workers who made it,
who cut it, who laid it.
One can trace the story of the button:
the button leads us to a person,
a shirt, a situation.
Perhaps to Villa Grimaldi itself,
and all that happened there.
It's a detail that grows and expands,
waves that go in different directions.
It's the history of Chile,
and all events of the dictatorship.
When you watch the sea, the water,
you're watching all of humanity.
These lands, both marvelous and in some ways blood-soaked.
They hold the worst
of ourselves.
At the end of the day, we all...
In a world of victims and killers...
although both exist,
we are each responsible for everything,
for the victims and the killers.
Each human being, no one in particular.
So when such terrible things happen,
as they often have done, throughout history,
without participating, we're also responsible,
as in a family in which a child commits a crime
and the whole family is affected.
So...
this part of History,
associated with water, ice, volcanoes,
is also associated with death, massacres,
abuse, genocide.
It is one part...
If water has memory, it will also remember this.
All things converse with all things,
water, rivers, plants,
reefs, deserts, stones, stars...
It's one long conversation,
a mutual regard.
The Indians of Patagonia,
believed that souls didn't die,
and that they could live again, as stars.
They say that water has memory.
I believe it also has a voice.
If we were to get very close to it,
we'd be able to hear the voices
of each of the Indians and the disappeared.
Not long ago, very far away,
a Quasar was discovered, full of water vapor.
It holds 120 million times more water
than all of our seas.
How many wandering souls might find refuge
in this vast ocean that's drifting in the void?