The Chacabuco Project

It’s amazing what can happen when you set your mind to something. The Chacabuco Project. It’s just a camera a few rolls of DV tape and film, and an intention. But the incredible things that unveil themselves before this intention.

Last Friday morning we sat down for about three hours with Rolando Carrasco and Santiago Cavieres, two men in their 70’s who survived the Nazi-like concentration camp in Northern Chile — Chacabuco.

The camera turned on, they talked and talked and talked about what it was like to arrive there, live underneath the stars that you could almost touch, feel intense unity with fellow prisoners — anyone could be killed the next day — “we were one person” said Santiago. He read his poetry to the camera, he talked about what it was like to become a father while being imprisoned.

Rolando’s eyes sparkled with the beginning of tears throughout much of the interview. For him, Chacabuco was the second stop in about 5 different Chilean concentration camps in 2 years. The threat of death was always about him. And there were some things he just couldn’t talk about.

Still, these two men have decided that it’s time to go back to Chacabuco. They will meet us there as Niles films the documentary Chacabuco; The Desert’s Skin.

This is an unbelievable development. We will be joined in the desert two men who were imprisoned there in 1973-74, who haven’t been back since they were transferred out over 3 decades ago. The plan is that they’ll join us on the 25th, and camp out on the cold barracks floor. We laughed with them as it became apparent that they could certainly handle a night there, as they’d already spent plenty.

But as Winter smashes into Chile, the Atacama desert is not spared. Conditions will be rough. They warned us: it gets cold up there.

We would like to be able to fly these men to Chacabuco. Our fundraising drive has been doing extremely well, but we still lack the funds to get these ex-concentration camp prisoners up to Chacabuco, which is a new expense. Fortunately, we’re cutting costs by forgoing the plane tickets ourselves, and instead taking a 30 hour bus ride up north. I think we saved about USD $200-300 right there. Still, if we could reach our goal of $1,368, it would help a lot.