What I would really love to talk to you about is Loss. Loss and Losing. Grief, failure, brokeness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of feeling, the death of dreaming,. The absolute, relentless, endles habitual unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to indivdual" What does it mean to other cultures, whole peoples who have learned to live with it as a constant companion.

Since it is September 11 that we are talking about, perhaps it's in the fitness of things that we remember what that date means, not only to those who lost their loved ones in American that day, but to those in other parts of the world to whom the date has long held signifacance. This historical dredding is not offered as an accusation or provocation. But just to share the brief of history. To thin the mist a little. To say to the citizens of America, in the gentlest , most human way? Welcome to the world.

Thirty-four years ago, in Chile, on September 11,  1973 General Pinochet overthrew the democratically electd government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed doup "I don't see why we neeed to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people, "Said Henry Kissinger, Nober Peace Laureate, then President Nixon's national security advisor.

After the coup President Allende was found dead inside the presidential place. Whether he was killed or whether he killed himself, we will never know. In the regime of terror that ensued, thousands of people were killed. Many more simply disappeard," Firing squads conducted public executions. concentration camps and torture chmbers wer opened across the country. The dead were buried in safts and unmarked graves. For more than sixteen years the people of Chile lived in dread of the midnight knock of routine disapperances, a sudden arrest and touture.

In 2000, following the 1998 arrest of General Pinochet in Britain, thousands of secret documents were declassified by the US government. They contain uneqiuvocal evidence of the CIA's involvement in the coup, as will as the fact that the US governemt had detailed information about the situation in Chile during General Pinochet's reign. Yet Kissinger assured the general of his support. "In the United States, as you know, we are sypathetic with what you are trying to do," he said"We wsih you governemnt well"

Those of us who have only ever know life in a democracy, however flawed, would find it hard  to imagine what living in a dictatorship and enduring the absolute loss of freedom really means. It isn't just those who Pinchet murdered, but the live he has stolen from the living that must be accounted for.

Sadly, Chile was not the only country in south America to be singled out for US government attentions. Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico , Somial, Korea, Indonesi, Laos, and Cambodia.

They  have all been the playground for covert - and overt - operations by The CIA. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed, tortured, or have simply disappreared under despotic regimes and tin-pot dictators, drug runners, and arms dealers that were propped up in their countries. Many of them leaned their craft in the infamous US government funded School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, which has produced 60,000 graduates. If this were not not humiliation enough, the people of South America have had to bear the cross of being branded as people who are incapable of democracy - as if coups and massacres are somehow encrypted in their genes.