I

t took me around 35 hours to reach this country. It is almost on the opposite side of the globe in the southern hemisphere. But I was excited to undertake this journey. It was my dream destination for several reasons.

In 1994, I read a book on then-president of Chile, Salvador Allende, titled Jalan Demokratis ke Sosialisme: Pengalaman Chile di Bawah Allende (The Democratic Path to Socialism: Chile’s Experience under Allende), by my favorite sociologist and activist, Arief Budiman. As a student activist, I was inspired and dreamed of seeing la via Chilena, the Chilean way, replacing authoritarianism in Indonesia at the time.

After the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998, the human rights community started talking about the importance of resolving human rights violations as a precondition for building a democratic future for Indonesia; then another la via Chilena appeared again on my horizon.

This time was about the way the post-Pinochet regime, particularly that of Patricio Aylwin, dealt with massive human rights violations committed by his predecessor.

Just six weeks after his inauguration as president in March 1990, Aylwin issued a presidential decree to create a national commission on truth and reconciliation. After working for nine months, the commission of eight members and 60 staffers completed the report of 1,800 pages on 3,400 cases of “disappearances after arrests, executions and torture leading to death committed by government agents”, as cited by the researcher Priscilla B. Hayner.

What is inspiring from this Chilean experience is that Aylwin then made a public statement that on behalf of the state, he begged forgiveness for what had happened to the victims and asked the armed forces to “make gestures of recognition of the pain caused”.

As a follow-up of the report, in 1992 the government issued a law on the creation of a national corporation for reparation and reconciliation to provide reparation for the victims.

We can see a common historical destiny between Chile and Indonesia — unfortunately a bitter one. Both beautiful countries had been the field of experiments of the United States’ economic and political greed. There is abundant evidence of US involvement in Indonesia’s darkest history in 1965 and 1966, when the leftists were eliminated, which led to the fall of left-leaning president Sukarno and the rise of Soeharto’s New Order regime.

Less than a decade later on Sept. 11, 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet staged a coup d’état against democratically elected president Allende. In Santiago, I asked a senior civil society leader about the slogan “Operacion Yakarta” (Operation Jakarta) during the 1973 bloodshed. He said the slogans, sprawled as graffiti in the streets of Santiago, was a form of terror and intimidation by the coup leader against leftists in Chile. “We learned about the horrifying witch hunt of communists in Jakarta in 1965. So the word ‘Jakarta’ created an emotional effect of horror among the leftists.”

Several of my Chilean friends have been working for the desaparecidos (disappeared persons) in Chile. They have been fighting for decades for their disappeared loved ones — husbands, wives, daughters, sons or other relatives.

During my brief visit, I dropped by the office of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, where demonstrations during Pinochet’s era drew global attention to human rights violations.

The most emotional visit was to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, where I trembled and was teary-eyed at the sight of the objects presented and the narratives told.

They brought me to memories of repression under Indonesia’s authoritarian government.

This museum is packed with memorial objects related to repression and despair. But visitors would also come away with a sense of hope, for the Museum aimed both at informing the public on the widespread and intense oppression under the Pinochet junta (1973 to 1990) and also how to prevent the dark past from ever happening again, as expressed in their iconic words nunca más (never again).

Like Chile, with our similar past, I still harbor hope that the Indonesian government will be daring and determined to take steps to resolve past human rights violation, as President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has reiterated.

It is never too late. And because of the magnitude of the challenges, people will understand if the government starts from a small step, for as the proverb says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”