Blood Pour Outside Midtown Kissinger Home Honors Chilean Coup Victims

MIDTOWN, NY— The son of a Chilean prisoner tortured and killed by the Pinochet regime brought a jar of blood and a crew of performers to stand outside the Midtown home of the man he blames: Henry Kissenger.

Artist Máximo Corvolán-Pincheira memorialized his father's death — and those of 3,000 people tortured and killed during the military coup and Augusto Pinochet's rule — outside the former diplomat and Nixon cabinet member's home on Sutton Place Sunday.

Eleven performers, many of them artists from Latin America, stood in line, holding long, white gutters, from which they transferred the blood from one to another, until it reached the end of the block.

"It speaks of the solidarity between peoples," Pincheira said, "that allows blood to be transferred without spilling."

Pincheira is the son of Ricardo Pincheira Núñez, a presidential advisor to the overthrown, democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende.

His father was tortured and shot, then his body exploded, only to be exhumed by Pinochet's army years later and dumped in the ocean in an attempt to hide the regime's grizzly crimes, according to his son and websites devoted to the victims of Pinochet.

Pincheira, also turning 50 this year, was still in utero when his father, who remained in the presidential palace with Allende until the end, was tortured and murdered shortly after the coup.

His remaining family fled Chile, living in exile in Colombia, Berlin, Havana and Mexico City until 1990, when Pinochet left power and democracy returned to the beleaguered state.

Pincheira's performance is part of an exhibition opening Wednesday at the P122 Gallery in the East Village. The show is called Hawapi 2023 – Fuera de Contexto / Out of Context, a retrospective of an independent Peruvian arts organization.

The performance took place outside the home of the man who helped overthrow Allende's government and gave full diplomatic and financial support to the brutal Pinochet rule.

It began with Pincheira unpacking a jar of a blood-like liquid from a soft-sided cooler at the end of East 52nd Street to perform a work he calls Arteria, or Artery.

Through a translation service, Pincheira said that while standing outside the lauded diplomat's home for the first time in his life, he thought about "the power dynamic that allows a character like this to go unpunished after all the damage he has caused."

The work, according to an announcement, sought to highlight the former diplomat's role in "the instigation and installation of the dictatorship in Chile and its consequence: thousands of tortured, exiled, murders and disappeared."

The direct role of U.S. officials in the actions of the coup on Sept. 11, 1973 remains unclear, but declassified documents from the Nixon White House and the C.I.A. show that for years, officials "sought to instigate a military coup to block Allende," even before he had taken power, and had even assassinated a Chilean general, who they believed would be an obstacle to their plot, in 1970.

Other declassified documents reveal that Kissinger was the main advocate of a military coup after Allende's election, and had even refused to listen to U.S. military officials who expressed concerns about supporting and aiding the brutality of Pinochet's regime.

Curious neighbors and doormen began to gather and watch the silent exercise.

One neighbor who lived across from Kissinger's building said she had just learned about the horrors of the Chilean coup very recently.

The neighbor, who declined to share her name, said that it left her distraught for days the more she learned about not just the actions of the twisted Pinochet regime, but the deep and uncritical support he received from Nixon and Kissinger.

She pointed across the street. "And you know he lives right there?"