In one final act of cowardice, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet requested that his body be cremated upon his death, so that his tomb would not be forever desecrated by those who despised him and everything his brutal regime represented. Anyone who had dreamed of dancing on his grave has been robbed of that hope, just as their hopes of seeing him brought to justice for human rights crimes have been stolen.
Dance in Chilean politics is not an idle metaphor. One of the most potent forms of protest during Pinochet's regime was the cueca sola, danced by women whose loved ones were among the dead or missing. The image of the cueca sola was brought to international attention by singer/songwriter Sting, who saw the protests and immortalized them in a song called "They Dance Alone."
The cueca is a popular Chilean folk dance, performed by a man and a woman, each carrying a kerchief. Norwegian researcher Jan Sverre Knudsen, in an article published in the British Journal of Ethnomusicology, describes it as follows:
As the undisputed national dance of Chile, the cueca belongs to a large group of so-called "handkerchief dances" found in several Latin American countries. A number of different forms of handkerchief dance are found in Bolivia, Argentina, Peru and Mexico. Some of them are known by other names, such as zamacueca, marinera or chilena. In Chile the dance is generally associated with rural culture, and particularly with the culture of the huaso, the Chilean version of the Argentinian gaucho.
[snip]
The cueca, as danced in informal settings in the Chilean community in Oslo, could be described as follows. The music starts with a brief instrumental introduction, to which each couple does a promenade (paseo), back and forth on the dance floor. Then, when the singing begins, the dance partners turn to face one another and perform the first careful dance steps and start waving their handkerchiefs. The man circles the woman without touching her, pursuing her with soft "whiplashes" from his handkerchief. She alternates between moving away from her partner in elegant circular movements and meeting his approaches in different ways: with her eyes, with her movements or with the ever-waving handkerchief. Intensity builds gradually towards the end of the dance, culminating in a short "tap dance" (zapateo) by the man, before he offers his partner his arm and the couple finishes in a gesture of greeting, while the music ends in an instrumental coda.
The cueca is above all a celebratory dance. Although the cumbia and in recent years the salsa have become the dominant party dances in Chile, cuecas are often danced in settings with a ceremonial character, like birthdays, weddings and above all, during such national festivities as Independence Day. The participatory element is striking. A Chilean audience will always join in with rhythmic clapping (palmas)and encouraging shouts.
In 1979, Pinochet declared the cueca to be Chile's "national dance," coopting this symbol of national identity for his own purposes.
But then a strange thing happened. Chileans took the cueca back, and turned into a powerful symbol of opposition to Pinochet's regime. In any dictatorship, a silence descends on the people. They begin to censor themselves, and to keep every thought that might endanger them or their families hidden. I have seen it during the war years in Guatemala, in the simplest examples like suffering any rudeness on the sidewalk or street in silence, because you never know what the consequences might be of speaking out. I once saw an old man, the attendent of a church parking lot, shot in cold blood because he told a chafa (a military official) in an unmarked civilian car that he couldn't park there.
How does one protest in such a society? In Chile, women who were searching desperately for their disappeared relatives began to dance the cueca in public protests, but they danced it alone, with photos of their missing loved ones pinned to their dresses or hung about their necks. It was the simplest possible act of political protest, one that cut to the heart of the Chilean identity.
Anything else that might be said about the emotional impact of the cueca sola is best heard in Sting's song. I first heard it many years ago, performed in Spanish and English by Mercedes Sosa and Holly Near. There are many versions, but this is still my favorite. Fortunately, it's available on the Internet here, via archivochile.com.
It will come as no surprise that yesterday's celebrants in Santiago were dancing the cueca, but now jubilantly and with a partner, which I caught in this screenshot from CNN en español.