Irish Columban priests recall stories of Chile following the Pinochet coup

The parish priest of Drumcree, Father Sean Larkin, recalls the killing of a young man by Chilean military following the Pinochet coup in 1973.

Father Larkin memorably shook hands with members of the British security forces during open-air Mass at the Garvaghy Road on Sunday, July 6th, 1997.

The people were being prevented by the security forces from attending Mass at their local church, to allow the Orange parade march by.

Father Larkin, a Columban priest, in the current issue of Far East magazine, recalled Ernesto as "a likeable young man who lived with his mother close to my house".

Ernesto's father was dead and he had lost the sight in his left eye, probably due to an accident at the metal workshop where he made railing and gates. He was a member of a youth club the priest had formed but was not politically involved.

After work some evenings he went for a drink and on one such evening did not return. His distraught mother came to Father Larkin, who made inquiries at the local army barracks but to no avail. He got on his motorcycle and went to the Estadio Nacional (the national football stadium then used to intern prisoners).

"I approached an armed guard at what was once a ticket office. I asked if I could get information about a prisoner. `No', was the answer. As I walked away depressed I heard a burst of machinegun fire from within."

A week later Ernesto's mother was told by the authorities to go to the city morgue. She found the body there. "It was handed over without explanation or regret," Father Larkin remembers. It seemed an army patrol had spotted Ernesto after the curfew and shot him dead. Father Larkin recalls it as "my saddest funeral during my five years in Chile".

Father Larkin's story is just one of four recounted in the Far East by Irish Columban priests who were in Chile during the coup. Father Hugh McGonagle, who has been in Chile since 1952, recalled the eerie atmosphere in Santiago the day of the coup and how the military-controlled radio announced that President Salvador Allende had committed suicide with a machinegun given to him as a gift by Fidel Castro and that he was to be buried without ceremony.

Father Joseph Joyce, now in the Philippines, recalled the sense of helplessness that descended on the people at the time and a loud wailing cry from one of his neighbours who he knew to be a fervent Allende supporter. `They've killed him! They've killed him! Murderers! Murderers!,' she cried inconsolably," he recalled.

"Other voices joined in and soon there was a chorus of grief rising from every street. I remained there listening, fearful and immensely sad. People I loved were suffering greatly and there was no way I could go out to be with them."

Another Columban priest, Father Pat Egan, who is now back in Ireland, recalls hiding in his house Jorge Gonzalez, a member of the Communist Party who had been warned his name was on a death list.

While Jorge made a phone call to his wife elsewhere a platoon of soldiers ransacked the priest's house, saying they were searching for a terrorist.

Father Egan never did find out which neighbour informed on him. Jorge was hidden at another house until he was spirited into the Mexican embassy. A few days later he was flown to Poland, where his wife and child joined him later.

With the restoration of democracy in Chile in 1990 Jorge and his family returned from exile. He now works as a counsellor in a drug rehabilitation centre linked to the Catholic Church.