Dark past of the National Stadium in Chile reemerges with opening ceremony at the Pan American Games

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — The National Stadium, where the opening ceremony of the Pan American Games in Santiago will take place on Friday, is a source of pride for many in Chile.

For others, however, no celebration will erase its dark past.

Historians estimate that between 20,000 and 40,000 people spent some time locked up in fear at the stadium 50 years ago when it was used for torture and extra judicial killings. Some of those still painful wounds will be visible on memorial plaques around the 47,000-seat venue.

The Pan American Games, the largest multi-sport event in the Americas, take place one year before the Olympics. Chile will be hosting the games for the first time as many remember the 50th anniversary of the crimes committed in that very stadium.

The National Stadium and its surroundings were renovated for the Pan American Games. Six new venues were built for 30 sporting events, an investment of $507 million.

Before and after those three horrifying months in 1973, the National Stadium hosted some great moments in sports. Brazil beat Czechoslovakia 3-1 in the 1962 World Cup final at the venue, and the host nation won its first major soccer title in 2015 by beating Argentina in the Copa America final.

But between September and October five decades ago, it was the center of violence in support of what would become the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet until 1990.

The coup d’etat that ousted President Salvador Allende changed the stadium’s — and the country’s — history. There are now seven memorials around it, including a sign on a wall at the entrance of the National Stadium’s compound. That is where many prisoners were tortured and executed.

“A people without memory is a people without future,” the sign reads.

In April, the velodrome was renamed after Sergio Tormen, a cyclist who was arrested by the military and disappeared on July 20, 1974.

Recently, a group of former inmates joined together at the stadium to relive the tense moments in which someone was called to speak to authorities at the velodrome.

“They gave the name on the loudspeakers, you had to walk and then the military men took you,” said 78-year-old Jaime Zorondo, a salesman who came to the stadium on Sept. 18, 1973. “And then you didn’t know where they went. The women went with their fists up high … They suffered much more than us, raping was a daily ordeal.”

Zorondo also said inmates could only eat whatever they found on the floor at the stadium.

“We ate orange peelings, eggs that had been stepped on, anything we could see,” he said.

Sergio Muñoz, who was 25 years old when he was taken to the stadium by the dictatorship, said he felt horror when a hooded person walked among the inmates to identify adversaries of the new regime.

“There was a snitch who wore a black hood and identified others. That person was taken out, interrogated, and did not come back,” said Muñoz, a history teacher.

Chile’s commission of truth, which looked into crimes of the dictatorship, said some pregnant women lost their babies at the National Stadium because of the torture and sexual abuse.

It wasn’t only Chileans who experienced fear at the National Stadium back then. Brazilian politician José Serra said being questioned at the stadium was the toughest moment of his life. The 81-year-old two-time presidential candidate and former Sao Paulo governor was among the 300 foreigners who were taken to the stadium by military agents.

Serra was arrested in October 1973 as he prepared to leave the country after eight years, previously escaping from Brazil’s military dictatorship. A professor at a Santiago university, he was released under the condition he returned the next day, which he never did. Instead, he moved to the Italian embassy for eight months.

“I thought they were going to kill me as I walked away, as if I were a fugitive,” Serra told The Associated Press. “Going back there would be suicide.”

Despite the stadium’s dark past, many Chileans believe the Pan American Games offer a chance for redemption as the public learns more about what happened five decades ago. The sporting competitions about to be seen are expected to lift spirits nationwide in a country where political divisions have caused massive street protests in recent years.

“History is built with these testimonies,” said Zorondo, the former inmate, “so the same never again happens in Chile.”

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