This image is part of the ‘Ojos’ bi-weekly series. Ojos is a photo-letter that honors people, their merits, the environment and connects our human experience to community with the use of a camera—here in the Bay Area.
From left: A portrait of Aldo Cabello, a political refugee who fled Chile after the Sept. 11, 1973 coup d’etat. Cabello made the difficult decision to leave his homeland and move to Oakland with his family, leaving behind his job as an engineering professor. In the second image, Cabello holds an image of his brother, Winston Cabello, a young economist who worked for the overthrown President Salvador Allende, and was arrested on Sept. 12, 1973, in Copiapó, one day after the United States-backed coup. Winston’s remains were found in an unmarked mass grave in 1990, after dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet vacated power. “The forensics evidence showed that he wasn’t shot, he was stabbed to death,” Cabello described, contrary to what the Chilean government claimed. In 1999, the Center for Justice and Accountability filed a civil suit against Fernández Larios on behalf of the Cabello family and in 2003, a Miami jury found Larios liable for torture, crimes against humanity and extrajudicial killing. As Chile nears its 50th anniversary of the coup, Chileans still grapple with the deaths of their loved ones, including those who remain missing. There are about 3,065 Chileans who were disappeared during Pinochet’s dictatorship, and some say there are thousands more that are missing.