Making Peace With Wine
First published in Glug Magazine Issue No. 43 Curicó
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The intro gets me every time, those first 40 seconds before Robert Smith starts singing. The door creaking shut, the deep breaths, the claps, the synthesiser, and those three notes on the keyboard that repeat over and over again. By the time I hear “I’ve waited hours for this…” the lump in my throat is almost unbearable. It’s a great song, one I’d jam to if it didn’t always take me back to that video.
I must have been seven years old. My dad brought it back from one of his trips to Chile; one of those massive VHS tapes that were common then. A strip of masking tape on the side read: Protestas - Chile 1986. With Close to Me playing in the background, the images were not of The Cure band members stuck in a wardrobe on the edge of a cliff, but of young men and women in Santiago’s busy streets, filmed from the chin down, holding signs and pictures of the disappeared while water cannons and armoured trucks chased them down.
My uncle Andrés had put that video together, one of many he produced and distributed as a member of The Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, a clandestine guerrilla organisation that attempted to overthrow the Pinochet dictatorship. No one in the family knew, except everyone knew, much like his drinking problem. While the former was never mentioned, not even whispered, as survival was the name of the game, the latter was easily hidden under the mask of macho masculinity and was, by and large, socially and culturally sanctioned. After all, Chile was and continues to be one of the world’s largest wine-producing countries, and wine was as common as water. Indeed, one-litre boxes of Concha y Toro and El Gato Negro could always be found on my grandparents’ table, beside the marraqueta bread, the pebre, and the porotos granados. A staple.
Silence is toxic, though, much like the poison that enters the bloodstream and, over time, kills the body. According to a research paper published in 1989, by 1982 there had been a 70% increase in alcoholism in Chile since 1952, peaking in 1980. While the study does not state the causes, one thing is certain: ever since the first vine was planted in 1554, alcohol, in the form of wine and pisco, the distilled grape spirit, had been a way to cope with the harshness of life.
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Often considered a shining example of economic development, Chile does not have a particularly bright past on its road to ‘development’. In 1818, the Andean country succeeded in freeing itself from the grips of Spanish Monarchy. The independence efforts were largely funded by a loan from the English, so to avoid defaulting on its payments, Chile turned to trade and exports, namely wheat and silver. With vast natural resources, rich in metals and minerals, such as saltpetre, nitrate, and more recently copper, by the late 1800s mining had become one of Chile’s principal sources of wealth. This gruesome, backbreaking work was not carried out by the wealthy landowners or powerful oligarchy that had emerged, but by a poor, rural, uneducated and often indigenous population. With the onset of industrialisation, wine and pisco became so readily available that by the 1900s, alcoholism posed a serious problem for the state. The first alcohol-related laws were enacted in 1902.
Things did not get any better at the turn of the century. While the economic boom, driven largely by two main industries, mining and agriculture, resulted in a significant population growth and the development of cities and vital infrastructure, most of the country remained in acute poverty. A defining feature of the Chilean socio-economic landscape at the time was the latifundio, a land ownership system rooted in the colonial era, which resembled a serfdom. This hierarchical system was characterised by deplorable and inhumane living conditions for the peasant-families that lived and worked there, and a coercive relationship, where punishment and violence at the hands of the landowners was permitted. By the 1920s, landowners made up just 14% of farm owners, but controlled 92% of the total agricultural land. A powerful group indeed, they did not pay taxes or salaries, instead paying workers in kind: sacks of beans, wheat, firewood and other foodstuffs.
In the first half of the 20th century, a small, powerful, and conservative elite ruled the country. However, conditions were ripe for an overhaul of the system, with various political factions emerging, vying for power and promising reforms. By the time Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president, came to power in 1970, the country was completely polarised. With the Cold War in the background, tensions between left and right ran deep, reaching a boiling point in 1973 when General Pinochet seized power in a coup d’etat. It was the start of one of the longest and most violent dictatorships in South America.
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My uncle Andrés was nine years old when the milicos, the military, dragged him out of the house and held him at gunpoint in front of his parents. A boy. My uncle Marcos was 20 when he left Chile for Argentina to avoid being tortured, killed or disappeared by the armed forces. My grandfather, a proud communist who believed in Allende and the potential of the working class, turned to wine when everything fell apart; when violence and death came knocking; when fear, mistrust and hate had poisoned Chileans, such that they were willing to turn on each other to save their own skins. For him, like Andrés years later, and many others, wine, pisco, beer or anything else that could numb the pain, were the friends, confidants, therapists, priests, and the higher power that made living through the dictatorship bearable, possible even.
The heinous crimes committed during the Pinochet dictatorship are now well known and documented. Terrorism by the state created a terrorised population, down to their core. Where pain and trauma are left to linger, they fester. Andrés died in 2020 from his addiction.
According to the World Health Organization, Chile has one of the highest rates of alcohol use per capita in the Americas (9.3 litres of pure alcohol per capita), and alcohol is the largest risk factor of death, accounting for more than 8500 deaths annually. If physician and author Gabor Maté is right, that addiction is a normal response to trauma, that trauma can be multigenerational and collective, then there’s much healing to be done.
As for me, there's still a lot to unpack but I’ve made my peace with wine.
