[page 3]
Try to imagine Ibrox, Parkhead or Hampden Park Stadiums turned into concentration camps. Imagine yourself picked up at 5.00 on a nice spring merning when everything the working class has ever fought for has collapsed around you.
The first thing you see is bodies tied with wire; bodies so badly beaten that their faces were no longer recognisable as human. You never see them again.
Later you are told that they were workers. picked up for giving support to the last elements of resistance; you will never know for certain. Later you will also be told by one of your closest friends that her husband, a psychiatrist, died in the Stadium; and, even worse, that a former political comrade and friend turned up there as a torturer working for the other side.
The first thing that happens to you is you are put blindfold in front of a firing squad. The soldiers fire and someone next to you falls. You think you are dying. Then the soldiers break out laughing. The rifles were loaded with blanks, People had collapsed from shock.
After that come two months of terror, insults, abuse and waiting. Waiting in case one of the masked civilians brought in every so often should identify you. Waiting to be taken out and disappear forever like some of the others who shared flour space with you in a crowded dressing room turned into a cell. Waiting for the interrogation you know is coming; wondering whether you will survive the systematic application of beatings and electric shocks: never sure if you will emerge alive.
If you recover from your first interogation it may land does) happen again .....and again.
This was the National Stadium, Chile, September to November 1973.
If the Scottish soccer team goes to Chile in June, it will be playing in the same stadium on a pitch covered with the blood of the Chilean working class, And it will be giving a veneer of respectability to the junta. STOP THE SFA CHILE MATCH.
R.N. (Chilean refugee, previously imprisoned in the stadium).