Chile Archives - Not Even Past

Remembering Violeta Parra

California State University’s Professor of Latin American Studies, Ericka Verba, has published a highly engaging volume entitled, Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra. The Chilean folk musician and graphic artist, Violeta Parra (1917–1967), was indeed as the dust jacket claims, “an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe.” She was also very important to me, personally. Let me explain why .[1]

On a warm Saturday morning in 1985, in the period when massive protests against dictatorial rule had just begun to ramp up in Santiago’s peripheral poblaciones, I had a fortunate, unique, and transformative experience. I had taken the bus, guitar in hand, from the población where I lived in La Florida on the southeast edge of the city for the two-hour journey to Pudahuel, on the northwest edge of town. That was where el Mingo lived. He was my partner in a musical duo. Saturday was our rehearsal day.

Our act had become mildly popular on the semi-clandestine protest circuit. Church communities, embattled labor unions, and university students put on shows to raise money for soup kitchens and families of persecuted resistance operatives. We performed for mulled wine, sopaipillas, and bus fare, if we were lucky. Mingo’s crowded home was at the end of the line. Mingo’s family had moved to the capital after the death of his father. Mother and father had been cantores—country musicians—the kind who played and sang for three days at a time for weddings, baptisms, and funerals, before electricity, phonographs, and cassettes. Mingo’s mother didn’t perform anymore. Back in the day, she had played until her fingers bled, while her husband had died of alcoholism—an occupational hazard for los cantores. She had had enough, but her children inherited her the musical talent. Mingo was the youngest, and the most gifted of the all.

Statue of Violeta Parra in Plaza de Armas in San Carlos, Chile — *Violeta Parra Sculpture.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

That day, on the last leg of my bus ride, I heard music coming from a bike shop on Calle Serrano, the last paved street on the edge of town. It sounded familiar, so I got off before my stop to check it out. There was Mingo, playing and singing with the bike shop owner, whose five wiry sons—under their father’s supervision—repaired the bicycles and cargo tricycles on which working men depended for their livelihoods. Their clever mechanical solutions helped maintain an essential material component of survival.

The bike shop’s owner was Don Lautaro Parra, one of the many surviving siblings of the late Violeta Parra. People remembered Violeta as a renowned folklorist, and arguably one of the most influential women that Chile had ever known. Her recordings of Chile’s folk music, as well as her many original compositions in the traditional style, had guided my understanding of how our resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship fit within a much longer struggle for the dignity of working men and women. Since the early days of the republic, they had been oppressed by the predatory inclinations of an unbridled oligarchy. In this context, song was a survival mechanism for the soul.

Don Lautaro was a tall man, expert in bike repair, and honored as working class nobility. Like his famous sister, Don Lautaro played instruments and sang in the authentic, traditional style. He had invited Mingo to join him at the Cementerio General on the anniversary of Violeta’s death, along with friends and family, for an informal a sidewalk singalong—he called it an esquinazo—to honor the godmother of the Chilean soul. He called her, la Chicoca, the little one, a term of endearment, and also, a reference to her short stature in a family of tall brothers. They rehearsed Parabienes al revés, a wedding song about a poor country bride who arrives at the church riding in an oxcart all covered in flowers.[2] Don Lautaro invited me to join, assigning me some very intricate harmonies. He encouraged us to “let our ears grow” until we had mastered the complex possibilities that lurked just beneath the surface of the simple but clever tune.

Foto of Población León XIII — *Población León XIII.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

I missed the homage at the cemetery. I can’t remember why. Communication was not easy. There were no cell phones, and poor people didn’t have ground lines, either, so we might have just missed a signal. But it had been my privilege to sing with a man that Chileans considered royalty, because of his lovely sister, that day.

Violeta Parra was a figure of mythical dimensions for us. Under the dictatorship, people tended to hide or discard her recordings, lest they spark rumors of subversive inclinations. As such, a whispered oral tradition had condensed the memory of Violeta Parra into a few bare essentials. Only a one-dimensional version of the woman who meant so much to us had survived. Ericka Verba’s biography recovers the lost details, the subtle nuances, and the dizzying evolutionary process of the gifted and impassioned artist who created and recreated herself, giving shape, verse, and melody to the common people of Chile.

Verba leaves no stone unturned, using interviews, recordings, and images from Santiago to Paris and Helsinki, to piece together a monumental human endeavor. Violeta’s unique style brought a dying cultural tradition back to life. She thought of herself not as a star, but as the silenced everywoman without whom Chile made no sense. However, not everything Verba has to say is flattering, including a discussion of Parra’s theatrical arrogance, her unbridled temper, and her sense of self-importance. Because of that sincerity, the overall picture stands out as far more reliable than the frequent lionizations that tend to circulate in artistic and political circles. This biography combines rigorous historiographical methods with fine aesthetic and musical sensitivities to formulate an authentic version, with all its symphonic dimensions and awkward dissonances.

*Yo no tomo la guitarra por conseguir un aplauso : yo canto la diferencia de lo cierto lo falso …* Source: Library of Congress

Verba frames her lively narrative as the artist’s quest for authenticity. The world of folk music in Chile and abroad had a growing tendency, in the increasingly mass-produced world of music for profit, to lean into an overly polished and often stylized version of itself. The commercial folksingers, like Los Huasos Chicheros, reminisced about an idyllic hacienda experience that affirmed the oligarchic status quo.[3] On two long sojourns in Paris, Violeta even encountered a naive fascination with staged exoticism. She recalls sharing a venue with a duo of upper class women from Buenos Aires, who dressed up as indigenous women from the Argentine pampa, to perform Andean music from a completely different region, for a Parisian audience that couldn’t tell the difference.[4]

As a young woman, Violeta had done her share of barroom singing to survive, With her sister Hilda, they performed whatever the people wanted to hear. But in her early 30s, Violeta experienced an awakening. With the help of her brother, the poet and physicist, Nicanor Parra, she discovered the profound artistic value in the authentic traditions of her own people.[5] She became a collector of the people’s poet-songs, and then a composer, in a style that she knew by instinct from her childhood. Verba points out the paradox of “becoming authentic,” but she shows that the artist herself lived that paradox. Performance, by nature, involves artifice, but Violeta’s brand of artifice found its beauty in truth.

A pivotal paragraph at the end of Chapter 3 captures her struggle for authenticity:

“In her newfound vocation as folklorista, Parra assumed the role of intermediary between the pueblo or folk and her cosmopolitan audience…. A number of factors—some unintentional, others deliberate—contributed to the blurring of lines between folklorista and folk informant: Parra’s claim to authenticity as a birthright… her lack of formal training in music or folkloric studies, her untrained singing voice, unassuming stage presence, and a repertoire of ancient poet-songs that allowed her public to experience her not as a performer but as the “real thing”; her offstage appearance as everywoman… and finally, encompassing all the other factors, her steadfast identification with the pueblo. Within this context, Parra’s turn to folklore in the early 1950s may be considered the first step in a process of authentication that would span the rest of her life.”[6]

Violeta Parra's signature. — *Violeta Parra’s Signature*. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Her careful biographer signals the cultural and technological tipping points that situated Violeta Parra strategically so that she could voice Chile’s broader quest for authenticity. The possibility of recording provided a way to preserve folk traditions from extinction, but they also threatened those traditions with an overwhelming and market-friendly foreign supply. Modernity pushed musical culture—including folk traditions—toward a global standard of success, but that could drown out the front porch style of not for profit musical production. Violeta depended on rooted people, who had lived for generations in the same place, but she herself became a wanderer. Her many years abroad helped her to identify, define, and embrace her local roots.

Violeta Parra found herself in a borderland between the erudite world of artists and intellectuals—her father’s world—and the uneducated country of her mother’s upbringing. Verba points to Violeta’s longing for market success. She thought it was not only her right, but the rightful place of her brand of artistry. In fact, her work, though always critically acclaimed, remained niche. Even in my time, the poor Chileans who appreciated Violeta’s work, and honored her as their champion, could not afford to but it. By then, cassette tapes had made it easy to pirate her recordings—and even easier to hide them from prying authorities.[7]

One recurrent flaw of Verba’s book might not undermine the overall argument of this biography, but it could affect her credibility with Chilean readers. The author tends to make erroneous assumptions about details of local culture. Verba narrates how the Parra children, in a period of extreme poverty, would sometimes steal and drink the chicha they found in people’s sheds. Verba explains that chicha is a fermented drink made from maize. True, Quechua women in the Peruvian altiplano have made it from maize for centuries, and they still do. But that chicha is not particularly sweet or attractive for mischievous children. Moreover, the common chicha found in Chile’s central valley is a cider made from grapes. The “chicha de uva” has been, and still is, the traditional drink for Chilean Independence Day celebrations on every 18^th of September, and no Chilean would assume that the mischievous Parra children snuck off with anything other than that.[8]

Additionally, Verba describes how some of Parra’s earliest recordings of the cueca came with the traditional animación, improvised shouts of encouragement that musicians and bystanders tend to provide as part of the usual ritual. The point is that Violeta wanted to demonstrate folk music in its most authentic form, with all of its improvisations and rough edges. But Verba assumes that the encouragement is directed to the singers. It is not. The cueca is dance music: animators encourage dancers to put extra energy into their steps.[9]

Verba references a special interest that Leonard Berstein showed in Violeta’s performance at an afterparty of the New York Philharmonic’s performance in Santiago. But she doesn’t mention the fact that Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre, was Chilean. This might partly explain why the world-renowned conductor paid attention to Violeta at all.[10] These details in no way affect the validity of Verba’s research or her arguments, but they merit correction, particularly if an eventual, and probably long-awaited, Spanish version is forthcoming.[11]

More importantly, Verba argues that Violeta Parra pushed the boundaries of gender roles in Chile. She longed to be a star, and she had the right stuff, but the patriarchal system held her back. I suspect that represents a reading of Violeta Parra’s experience from the perspective of first world women, trying to make a name for themselves in a toxic masculine world that thwarts their efforts and achievements. And, that might be a valid reading, if we were talking about the beautiful, protected, and submissive women of the Chilean upper crust, some of whom have broken the mold in courageous ways.

But I would argue that Violeta Parra comes from a tradition of impoverished women who have survived and raised their children over the centuries because of their tenacity, their audacity, and their implacable fighting spirit. Thus, she was not an outlier. Instead, she was a spokesperson for her class. She struggled, not to create a modern space of gender equality, but to preserve a traditional space of feminine prerogative that modernity had begun to eradicate.[12] Perhaps, Violeta is the most prominent, and the most expressive, of this brave and fearless sisterhood, but we need look no further than the Chilean “Families of the Disappeared” – the courageous mothers, wives, daughters, and girlfriends of the men that the Pinochet dictatorship erased from history – to find the same pattern of fearlessness exemplified in the life and work of Violeta Parra.

In spite of these minor defects in the details, I would recommend Verba’s Thanks to Life not only as a gripping read that puts chronology back into the narrative of a cultural icon on the verge of becoming just a one-dimensional symbol. The humanity of Violeta Parra as a Chilean woman and a world class artist shines through. Moreover, Violeta’s world might serve as the ideal prologue for a syllabus focused on Chile’s impending revolution.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

[1] Erika Verba, Thanks to Life: A biography of Violeta Parra, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2025).

[2] See Verba, Gracias, 224. This one of the songs that Violeta depicted visually in a painting that would be included in her one-woman show at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the Louvre, in Paris, in 1963.

[3] Verba, Gracias, 149.

[4] Verba, Gracias, 103.

[5] Verba, Gracias, 68-71.

[6] Verba, Gracias, 91-92. Pueblo, here, means the common people.

[7] Verba frequently notes that Parra was “good at being poor,” but she was not unique in that regard. Her most faithful followers were good at it, too.

[8] Verba, Gracias, 19.

[9] Verba, Gracias, 56.

[10] Verba, Gracias, 161.

[11] This kind of thing is not uncommon. The very prestigious historian, Karin Rosemblatt, in her monograph, Gendered Compromises: political cultures & the state in Chile, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), situates the action of Nicómedes Guzmán’s novel, La Sangre y la Esperanza, in the neighborhood of the Estación Central, because it mentions a train station. In fact, it is in the neighborhood—in which I lived for a year—of the old streetcar station, which is no longer there.

[12] Chilean anthropologist José Bengoa argues that the sphere of powerful feminine prerogative dates back to precolonial Mapuche communities. See José Bengoa, “El Estado desnudo. Acerca de la formación de lo masculino en Chile,” in Sonia Montecino and María Elena Acuña, eds., Diálogos sobre el género masculino en Chile, (Santiago: Programa Interdisciplinario de Género, Universidad de Chile, 1996), 63-81.

Review of Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra, by Ericka Verba (2025)

Ericka Verba’s book Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra is the riveting culmination of a lifetime of dedicated and passionate research about the world-renowned Chilean artist Violeta Parra. Verba immerses readers into the rowdy Chilean peñas, elite Communist gatherings, smoke-filled Parisian nightclubs, and desolate circus tents to narrate decades of Chilean musical history through Parra’s life. Thanks to Life, a long-anticipatedbook for historians of Chilean music, reveals the tumultuous realities of Chilean women musicians through Violeta’s work and life.

Violeta Parra is considered the “mother of Chilean protest music,” who Verba positions as a multidimensional “everything-ist” skilled in songwriting, poetry, ceramics, and a range of visual arts. All but disregarded in Chile during her lifetime, Verba attributes Parra’s obscurity to gendered, racist and classist reasons. Verba frames such social characteristics around authenticity: Parra continually reinvented herself as “the representative of pure and unchanging traditions in the face of [modernity]” (p. 301). While authenticity is a concept that has been discussed almost ad nauseum in Folklore studies and Ethnomusicology, Verba masterfully revives the notion to demonstrate how Violeta manipulated this authenticity for her professional benefit. Parra deployed authenticity interchangeably as the Indigenous, the popular (of the people), the intuitive, or the ordinary, even as audiences and stakeholders stereotyped and at times denigrated her for the same reasons. Verba underscores the intersecting gendered and classist facets of such claims: Parra’s creative abilities, dress, and even her smell, both constructed her as authentic and marginalized her amongst urban audiences.

What I find most exhilarating about Thanks to Life is that Verba displays the complexity of Violeta for who she was, without attempts to either glorify or demonize her. Parra was notorious for her violent outbursts and brash personality; Verba reminds readers that had Violeta lived today, she would have likely been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Rather than attempting to explain Parra’s choices—her bawdy humor, toxic relationship with Gilbert Favre, or penchant for bashing guitars over others’ heads—she instead interrogates the gendered reactions to such behaviors. Readers come away with a vision of Violeta as determined, scrappy, and utterly nonconformist. [1] [2]

Methodologically, Verba pulls together primary sources from across the Americas and Europe by following the places where Parra travelled throughout her life. Through bringing in resources from unexpected places such as the American Folklife Center and the World Festival of Youth and Students Collection, she positions Parra’s story within broader currents of twentieth century folk movements and the cultural Cold War. While I have to admit that I hoped for oral histories rather than a heavy reliance on secondary sources, Verba selected poignant interpersonal and anecdotal details from the autobiographies of individuals such as Favre and Violeta’s brother, Nicanor, to bring Violeta’s story to life. Verba further incorporates song and poetry lyrics into each chapter to explain Parra’s political positions and supplement biographical information. The translations for such verses are particularly impressive as the poetry is riddled with colloquial phrases and Chilean-specific terminology. Collaborators Nancy Morris and Patricia Vilches did a stunning job translating while retaining meaning.

Thanks to Life is chronologically organized into ten chapters, with patterning reminiscent of the ten-line poet-songs that Parra composed. Chapter 1, “Materials,” explores Violeta’s childhood and adolescence in southern Chile, framed as the years that gave her the “‘materials that ma[d]e up [her] song’” (p. 11). Chapter 2, “Anti-Materials,” and Chapter 3, “Folklorista,” offer significant contributions to Chilean music history scholarship. In “Anti-Materials,” Verba reveals two decades of Parra’s life that current narratives, and Violeta herself, glossed over: her years making ends meet as a young working-class musician in Santiago. Years of gigging in nighttime dives disrupt Parra’s neat narrative of authenticity as a countryside child growing up to play folk music; yet, they explain how Parra gained the resiliency to maneuver within the male-dominated music industry in future years. “Folklorista” demonstrates the impact of her family, and particularly her siblings, on her initial success as a folklorista and her subsequent rise as a forerunner of the folk music revival. Her brother Nicanor was particularly influential in both introducing her to the intellectual and artistic circles of Santiago and inspiring her to begin composing the traditionally masculine poet-songs. Conversely, the breakup of the commercially oriented sister duo Las Hermanas Parra forced Violeta to strike out on her own career, leading her to the folk songs that would initially bring her individual fame.

Chapters 4, 7, and 8 document Parra’s two stints in Europe, first in the 1950s, and a decade later in the 1960s. Once again, Verba weaves Violeta’s personal life, and complex family dynamics, into the broader musical scenes and political landscapes. Of particular importance is the author’s exploration of how Parra rose from performing in working-class dives to exhibiting her artwork at the Louvre: Violeta revised her own narrative to exaggerate her poverty and Indigenous heritage, thereby elevating her authenticity as a folk “everything-ist.” Chapters 5 and 6, sandwiched between Parra’s Europe years, chronicle precisely these years spent back in Chile. Framed around Nicanor calling his sister “volcanic” (p. 121), Verba details the explosion of Violeta’s creative activities as she transitioned from folklorista to a multi-faceted songwriter and artist. The last two chapters, “New Songs” and “Last Songs,” hone in on key components of the final years of Parra’s life: her performances in her childrens’ folk club the Peña de los Parra; the composition of the songs that made her famous, including “Run Run se fue pa’l norte,” “Volver a los diecisiete,” and “Rin del angelito;” the ultimately unsuccessful Carpa de la Reina; and the singer’s deteriorating mental health.

As Verba remarks at the beginning of the book, Thanks to Life is not meant to be read alone, but rather to be accompanied with Parra’s music and images of her artwork. I personally recommend her tapestries (they brought me to tears the first time I saw them); Verba conveniently created a playlist for readers to listen to Parra’s music on her website.

Book cover of Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra, by Ericka Verba (2025)

I could not put the book down, even though I knew it would predictably end with Parra’s suicide. Over the pages, I became deeply invested not only in Violeta, but in her children Ángel and Isabel, her husbands and lovers, and the fate of Parra’s Carpa. While I have been a “Violetamaniac”for almost a decade, I learned new information on every page, especially as Verba connected Parra’s compositions to the context in which they were written. I laughed aloud when Verba highlighted Violeta’s humor through the story of a telegraph sent to God; I shared her anger when her first husband refused to support her artistic career. In short, through this book, I feel that I know Violeta Parra more deeply than I thought imaginable.

Hannah is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside and Visiting Instructor of Music at Occidental College. She holds an MA in ethnomusicology from UC Riverside and a BA in Music and Spanish from Messiah University. Sponsored by the Fulbright Hays and Fulbright IIE, Hannah’s current research examines the life and work of Chilean folklorist Margot Loyola and her impact on traditional music performance and education.

The bold political style of Luciano Cruz: The Chilean student protests of 1967

The following narrative is adapted from my recent dissertation on revolutions in Latin America. When I shared it with upper division history students for a class discussion, the story surprised them. Most of them had only ever experienced student government as something to put on your resumé for grad school applications. They had never imagined that student activism could be so decisive for crucial issues of public policy. The Chilean experience seemed to awaken their interest in a rich local legacy of passionate student activism and of unconditional commitment to causes that transcend personal gain. Here I share the story of the bold political style of Luciano Cruz.

As Chile’s first Christian Democratic government attempted to bring social justice through reform during the mid-1960s, medical students in the nation’s second city proposed a more radical change. In a political system designed to concede real power only to the already powerful, they argued, a mere change of government leadership would never suffice. Along with a few disaffected union organizers, the students at the University of Concepción, located in Chile’s second city, formed the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, (MIR), proposing a new constitutional order that, they hoped, would uplift Chile’s perennially poor and underprivileged.

The undisputed leader among the students was the fiery and brilliant Miguel Enríquez, who in 1961, had written on his medical school application essay, “everything has been given to me…, the time has come to give back.” Like Che Guevara before him, the call to heal the sick blended seamlessly with the call to make revolution for the poor. His classmate and best friend, Luciano Cruz, brought a uniquely impulsive energy and irresistible charm to that struggle. The political style of Luciano Cruz allowed him to knew how to rouse, entertain, and impassion any crowd at a moment’s notice.

Picture of Miguel Enríquez — *Miguel Enríquez. Source: Resumen*

Picture of Luciano Cruz — *Luciano Cruz. Source: Resumen*

Whereas Enríquez made measured, brilliant speeches—many of which have survived as written documents—his energetic deputy could improvise behind a microphone, holding the multitude spellbound for hours. Historian Marian Schlotterbeck points to Cruz’s debut as a student leader during a 1965 protest of the recent fare increase in public transportation. Chile’s largest labor federation, CUT, (Central Única de Trabajadores), had called for the protest, and they had invited Cruz as one who “embodied the contentious, combative style of the Concepción student movement.” Schlotterbeck points out that there was more at stake than just bus money. “Amidst wild applause,” she writes, “Cruz proclaimed that the demonstrations were no longer about fare hikes but ‘a demonstration by Chile’s poor against the rich.’”^[1]

By 1967, Luciano Cruz had set his sights on the presidency of the student federation. The university had reached a crossroads. The Christian Democratic government of Eduardo Frei was promoting university reform on a national scale. Frei’s men had lifted up the University of Concepción as a model. They wanted to restructure higher learning as a driving force for modernization. But members of the newly configured MIR, known as Miristas, understood the plan as an attempt to co-opt and “Americanize” their university. Cruz would become MIR’s candidate to spearhead the resistance.

While technically private, the University of Concepción depended on funding from UNESCO and the Ford Foundation, making it vulnerable to foreign interference in crucial policy decisions.^[2] With MIR’s support, the student federation (FEC) demanded the democratization of the power structure so that students and junior professors could have a voice in the decision-making process. But MIR had to win the presidency of the student federation to legitimize its proposal. Focusing his campaign on ideology, class interests, and the social role of the university, Miguel Enríquez had failed in his bid for that office two years earlier. This time, Miguel recognized his classmate’s dynamic advantage. Luciano’s landslide victory in Concepción marked MIR’s arrival as a national political force.

Schlotterbeck highlights a “new brand of audacious student activism” that would predominate in the student federation, transforming university students into political actors on a national scale.^[3] Undergrads—and some even younger protestors—made headlines with strikes, street protests, and the occupation of campus buildings. Riot police confronted them with tear gas, truncheons, and water cannons. Jailed students went on hunger strikes, and their objectives began to escalate. Miguel Enríquez called for more than just a university reform. The time had come for a true university revolution. His statement to that effect appeared in the preeminent national magazine of the non-aligned intellectual left, Punto Final, with a photo of Luciano Cruz in a scuffle with five police officers that would become iconic.

Luciano Cruz in close contact with policemen. — *Luciano Cruz defies Carabineros, Punto Final, 38, (septiembre 1967), 30*

Trojan horse depiction, CIA inside the wooden structure. Drawing — *CIA agents use the Peace Corps as their Trojan Horse. Punto Final, 47, (enero 1968), 47*

Miguel directed MIR’s leadership to confront the “legal dictatorship” of the current system with relentless combat. They should denounce every detail, he said, so that the forces of repression were compelled not only to cease and desist, but to give ground.^[4] On that note, MIR demanded the immediate expulsion of four Peace Corps volunteers from the University of Concepción. Perceived as the youth branch of the dubiously regarded Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps presence symbolized the imperialist assumptions behind Frei’s model of reform.^[5] Students argued that Peace Corps volunteers took up much needed space at the university residence. They also voiced their suspicions (likely credible) that Peace Corps volunteers had provided a stream of inside information to U.S. intelligence services.^[6]

While Enríquez focused on the national politics of the reform, Cruz emerged as MIR’s chief tactician and spokesperson. Under his command, at one of their daily demonstrations, students in Concepción abducted a police officer. After holding him hostage in the university for several days, they offered his release in exchange for the same for all the students who had been arrested during recent protests.^[7] The symbolic value of that gesture weighed heavily. With it, students reconfigured their recent detentions by Carabineros as similarly random and arbitrary abductions.

Carabineros fought back. They arrested Cruz, and the movement seemed to fall apart until Cruz dramatically escaped from jail and waltzed back into the meeting where student leaders discussed their next move.^[8] Although the details of Cruz’ escape remain unclear, his stealth and proficiency in the martial arts seem to have played a part. His return to the front line provided a huge boost for morale, dramatically enhancing his personal mystique and his reputation for dauntless courage and invincibility. It also established MIR’s place in the leadership of the student federation at the Universidad de Concepción (FEC) for the foreseeable future.

Picture of student protest in Concepción — *Student protest in Concepción. Source: https://www.diarioconcepcion.cl/politica/2019/05/22/reforma-en-la-udec-buscando-mas-participacion.html*

But MIR’s ambitions did not stop with the student federation in Concepción. Members of the movement’s inner circle did not want Chileans to think of them as merely the radical fringe of the nation’s restless youth. Aligning themselves with the youthful and dynamic Cuban revolution, Miristas defied the perennial lethargy of Chile’s traditional left to project a hugely inflated image of the new movement’s political significance. Their claim had no real basis in the number of militants, access to material resources, or concrete influence in social organizations, but Mirista leadership bet on the oppressed masses’ perception of their growing visibility as a foreshadowing of an imminent and viable armed revolt. In his incisive analysis of the MIR phenomenon, literary scholar Hernán Vidal observes that MIR’s Comité Central manipulated the obvious contrast between an appearance of mythical power and a reality of tactical impotence, calling it a strategy of “establishing presence.”^[9] They didn’t have to really be everywhere; they only had to seem to be everywhere. Luciano Cruz figured as the master of MIR’s expanding illusion of ubiquity.

Until 1969, MIR had mostly operated out in the open. Their practical jokes and disruptions only remained covert until they had succeeded. Then, they generated positive PR. But a pivotal student prank in Concepción would initiate a period of tension between the gregarious publicity that had shaped MIR’s style and method, and a new strategy of strict secrecy. As fate would have it, Luciano Cruz’ impulsive abduction of a local journalist in June of that year provoked the ire of the Frei government, driving the entire movement underground for the first time. Miristas had to learn to hide their militant activities and to use code names. The demands of clandestine living made MIR a more dangerous commitment for new recruits, but it also provided an undeniable aura of romance.

Kidnappings, though frequent, lucrative, and lethal among revolutionary movements in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, did not figure in MIR’s habitual playbook. Leaders observed that, in terms of promoting public sympathy for the cause, they usually backfired. But acting independently, Luciano’s regional task force in Concepción crossed the line with a targeted prank in the austral winter of 1969. The Christian Democratic journalist, Hernán Osses Santa María, had lost his job at the University of Concepción because of the reform. He got his revenge by disparaging young Miristas in his editorials. He never criticized their politics. He derided their personal lives, and he made fun of their girlfriends. That seemed to violate an unspoken code of honor. The clever Luciano Cruz decided to teach him a lesson in respect.

Photograph of members of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) during a press conference. From left to right are Roberto Moreno, Luciano Cruz, Nelson Gutiérrez, Miguel Enríquez, Bautista Van Schouwen and Andrés Pascal. — *Fotografía Conferencia de prensa MIR. Source: Arc hivo Digital Londres 38*

Luciano’s team of tricksters abducted Osses Santa María with the archaic idea of tarring and feathering him. Finding no tar, they released him naked in the courtyard of the university during an annual event. There was no real harm done, except to Christian Democratic pride. The Frei government took advantage of the public outcry to invoke a national security statute declaring MIR illegal, and to order the arrest of the Secretary General, along with his wily second in command.^[10] That meant that most of MIR’s operatives had to go underground, something Miguel Enríquez had in mind anyway. Cruz had not cleared his plan with the more prudent Enríquez, but his audacity triggered MIR’s rather sudden transition from the gentler politics of campus protests and community organizing to a more decisive program of direct action; most of it, illicit; and some of it, armed. Cleverly-staged bank robberies, framed as Robin Hood style gestures of taking from the rich to benefit the poor, became the order of the day. Ever sensitive to the importance of good publicity, however, the students took precautions to make sure that no one ever got hurt.

After the election of Chile’s first Socialist President, Dr. Salvador Allende, in September of 1970, MIR continued to agitate for faster and more radical reform, but without the emphasis on spectacular disruptions of daily routines. Luciano Cruz took a flat in Santiago, where he conducted a covert program of surveillance, keeping watch over potential coup-plotting generals and their supporters. To this end, he recruited a sizeable contingent of young militants who learned to quietly follow and watch. In that role, Cruz’ team pieced together all the elements of the right-wing attempt to prevent Salvador Allende’s inauguration to the presidency, one that culminated in the assassination of General René Schneider, a trusted army commander.[11] Chilean police investigators, more attuned to internal bureaucracy and protocol than really solving crimes, had failed to break the case, but Cruz’ investigation uncovered embarrassing complicity that reached to the highest levels. Though published in Punto Final, the justice system failed to follow up on his findings.

Picture of funeral procession of Luciano Cruz — *Funeral de Luciano Cruz. Source: Archivo Digital Londres 38*

Luciano Cruz died of accidental gas inhalation in his one-room basement flat in downtown Santiago on August 14, 1971. After he missed an arranged meeting, Miguel Enríquez discovered his friend’s lifeless body. He frantically attempted to revive him, but it was too late. A CIA report surmised that Enríquez might have had Cruz murdered to resolve an internal power struggle.[12] But gas heaters in those days had no safety valves, and Luciano had been complaining of morning headaches for a week. All the witnesses mentioned the smell of gas in the flat. So it was likely careless rather than malicious.

Tens of thousands followed the funeral procession in support of the charismatic Luciano Cruz and the incisive student protest movement he represented.[13] MIR would never be the same without him. But, to this day, Chilean students put their whole heart and soul into their protests.

Nathan Stone, Professor of Instruction at the University of Texas and a recent Ph.D. recipient from the Department of History (2023) of the same institution. His specialization is Modern Latin American revolutionary movements. Previously, he lived and taught in Chile for thirty years, Uruguay for two, and IN Brazil for five. H is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, and he has published his writing, both academic and non-fiction, in both languages.

Banner image source: http://archivodigital.londres38.cl/index.php/afiche-del-comite-de-solidaridad-luciano-cruz

[1] Marian E. Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile (Oakland, University of California Press, 2018), 23.

[2] Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard, (2018), 26; Punto Final, 12, (septiembre 1966), 16-18.

[3] Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard, (2018), 26.

[4] Punto Final, 40, (oct 1967), 37.

[5] Punto Final, 12, (sept 1966), 18; Punto Final, 37, (sept 1967), 39, and Punto Final, 40, (oct 1967), 36.

[6] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. (UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 35; and Punto Final, 32, (julio 1967), suplemento, 1-10.

[7] Schlotterbeck, Beyond the Vanguard, (2018), 26.

[8] “La rebelión de la juventud,” in Punto Final, 38, septiembre 1967, 28-30.

[9] Hernán Vidal, Presencia del MIR: 14 Claves Existenciales (Chile, Mosquito Comunicaciones, 1999), 28.

[10] Punto Final, 138, 31 agosto 1971, suplemento, 5.

[11] “El MIR denuncia a los verdaderos culpables del asesinato del General Schneider,” in Punto Final, 117, 10 noviembre 1970, suplemento, 1-10.

[12] CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, 1141-1.37, Confidential, 1 October 1971, declassified September (1999), https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000365918.pdf.

[13] Jorge Müller Silva, “Funerales de Luciano Cruz Aguayo, 16 de agosto de 1971.” First released 1972; remastered by Chilefilms, Santiago, (2014).

Review of The Age of Dissent: Revolution and the Power of Communication in Chile (2023), by Martín Bowen

Martín Bowen’s most recent book, The Age of Dissent: Revolution and the Power of Communication in Chile, explores the turbulent period between 1780 and 1833 in which the inhabitants of the Captaincy General of Chile, a sparsely populated Spanish colony on South America’s Pacific Coast, witnessed an unprecedented scale of political experimentation and mobilization. Beginning in 1780, a series of plots, revolts, and a brutal civil war initiated in 1816 culminated in the collapse of Spanish rule and the emergence of Chile as an independent republic. In this context, women, artisans, indigenous, and free and enslaved peoples of African descent participated in the emergence of a pluralistic political landscape in which radical political dissension became an inescapable part of politics.

Drawing from archival repositories in Chile, Argentina, and Spain, The Age of Dissent skillfully uses newspapers, congressional debates, court cases, travel accounts, and material culture such as badges, flags, portraits, and other insignia to interrogate the ways in which Chileans from different social backgrounds experienced and participated in the desacralization of royal authority and the opening of politics. The book’s central claim is that this process was marked in large part by the emergence of radical political dissent and the appearance of new mediators in the political sphere. Bowen points out that while a diversity of opinions existed before the monarchical crisis, Chileans started to question the sacred foundations of royal power in this period by publicly expressing dissenting ideas about the legitimacy of the king and his agents.

The definition of radical political dissent used in the book is broad and incorporates a series of practices used by different actors to express disagreement either with the foundations of the ancient regime’s political power or with the ideas of republicanism. Thus, the realms of communication and visibility became the prime means to express radical political dissent. Dressing, iconoclasm, and rumor, alongside other written and discursive practices, were used by patriots and royalists alike to achieve their political goals.

The Age of Dissent is divided into two parts and eight thematically organized chapters. The first part explores how visibility became a realm of political action in Chile during the monarchical crisis. According to Bowen, insignia such as badges, clothes, and portraits were meant to manifest the transcendent origin of the political power of the monarch and his agents. However, after 1808 using the same insignia could potentially become a medium to express radical political dissent. For instance, chapter two analyzes the contested meaning of clothing during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods. Clothing, broadly defined to include hats, canes, and capes, represented the “natural” social hierarchies of the ancient regime societies. In Chile, sumptuary clothing was reserved for the elites, and popular was banned from their use. Nonetheless, patriots inverted the meaning of clothing by using hats or ragged clothing as republican symbols. Similarly, chapter four demonstrates how acts of iconoclasm, for instance, the destruction of portraits of King Ferdinand VII, were used to transgress the traditional boundaries of political participation.

*King Ferdinand VII and Queen Maria Christina of Spain and their hats. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

The book’s second part is concerned with what Bowen defines as the “field of propagation”. In these chapters, Bowen reconstructs in great detail how, during the Age of Revolutions, Chileans believed that actions and behaviors, vices and virtues, could easily propagate throughout the social body via imitation and contagion. In this context, the elite’s behavior was thought to influence popular classes. Chapter Five explores how patriots invented new models of heroism during the Revolutionary period to destabilize traditional conceptualizations of heroism and loyalism. Following a similar line, chapter six explores how certain political ideas were thought to be vectors of contagion and how political actors in Chile used different forms of communication to spread dissenting ideas.

Notably, the book develops a rich conceptual frame to understand political action during the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods. Categories of analyses such as “mimesis,” “publicness,” and “contagion” allow Bowen to capture the period’s social and political language, serving as an explanatory framework to understand how actors made sense of their actions. Furthermore, The Age of Dissent skillfully shows the complexity of the political landscape of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Chile, avoiding overly simplistic characterizations of the political actors. For instance, it shows that radical political dissent could be present within the same political factions.

"Chile's First National Congress," oil painting by Nicanor González Méndez, 1903. — “Chile’s First National Congress,” oil painting by Nicanor González Méndez, 1903.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Another important historiographical contribution is that the book places Chile in the wider context of Atlantic revolutionary politics. Often characterized as a backwater of the Spanish empire sheltered from the political agitation of the period, Bowen shows that Chileans were in close contact with revolutionary developments in the Atlantic World via the circulation of people and information. Bowen further stresses this point by analyzing a series of vignettes intertwined within the chapters of the book, such as the official celebration of US independence in Santiago on the fourth of July of 1812 or the arrival of Fernando Condorcanqui, the eldest son of Túpac Amaru II, to the port of Talcahuano in 1784.

The Age of Dissent is a welcomed contribution that adds to recent studies on popular politics, the public sphere, and the crisis of colonial rule in Spanish America. Furthermore, it expands our understanding of how communication and visibility became important tools that Chileans used to shape the transition from colony to republic. Nonetheless, the book lacks a detailed explanation of the origins of political dissent. Why did some political actors choose to side with the royalists or patriots? Did elements such as geography, literacy, or class shape this process of self-identification? Overall, The Age of Dissent’s captivating narrative and creative use of primary sources make it a compelling reading not only for scholars of Chile but also for anyone interested in the Age of Revolutions.

Juan Sebastián Macías earned a BA in History from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and an MA in Latino/a and Latin American Studies from the University of Connecticut. Currently, he is a first-year PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include indigenous history and popular politics in the Northern Andes during the Age of Revolutions.

Review of Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (2020), by Tanya Harmer

At about nine o’clock on the morning of September 11, 1973, Beatriz Allende, the daughter of Socialist President Salvador Allende, arrived with her younger sister Isabel at the Chilean presidential palace in the heart of downtown Santiago.[1] The military coup that would end her father’s presidency, and Chile’s dream of a peaceful revolution, had begun around dawn that day. Though seven months pregnant at the time, Beatriz had come to join forces with the presidential bodyguard to defend, by force of arms if necessary, the legitimate presidency of her father and her country’s democratic transition to socialism.

Beatriz had acted as her father’s right hand on the executive team since he took office. But in recent months, as signs of an imminent overthrow became clear, President Allende had begun to pull his daughter back from the political front lines in order to protect her. That morning, in spite of her resistance, he ordered Beatriz to leave, along with her sister and five other women. In the words of Tanya Harmer, author of Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America, Allende’s effort to shield his daughter from the impending attack “amounted to an act of betrayal from the person Beatriz loved most,” and he did it “because she was a woman” (212). Harmer’s recent monograph provides serious readers of history with a riveting close-up of how Chileans experienced their revolutionary years, focused especially on how leftist longings for a more just and equitable society challenged culturally-determined presuppositions. Like Harmer’s acclaimed masterwork, Allende’s Chile and the Interamerican Cold War (2011), this book prioritizes local agency and conflict over international interference to show how Chileans struggled to define their own history.

The primary subject of this volume, Beatriz Allende, shines in public memory as Allende’s favorite child, the middle daughter who became the son he never had. Educated in revolutionary politics from an early age, Beatriz followed in her father’s footsteps, first into the medical profession and then into Socialist Party militance. Though not outright wealthy, the family belonged to Chile’s comfortable intellectual middle class. They vacationed at the upscale seaside town of Algarrobo and, like any Chileans of means, they had domestic servants who did all their cooking and cleaning. The Allende clan could not be called armchair socialists, by any means, but they did not actually belong to the masses of working poor their political cause championed.

A large crowd marches along a tree-lined street in Santiago in this black-and-white photograph from 1964. Members of the crowd are holding aloft several large banners, all of which indicate support for Salvador Allende. Two banners are easily legible; they read "Telefonicos con 1 Allende" and "Trabajadores municipales con Allende." — Supporters of Salvador Allende’s 1964 presidential campaign parade in the streets of Santiago. Allende lost the election of 1964 but would go on to win the presidency six years later. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

As a medical student at the University of Concepción, Beatriz grew close to the Enríquez brothers, Luciano Cruz, and Bautista Van Schouwen. Together with Beatriz’s first cousin, Andrés Pascal, they would become founding members of Chile’s most radical leftist organization, the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, usually remembered by its acronym, MIR. After some training in Cuba, and in opposition to her father’s lifelong commitment to the peaceful road to socialism, Beatriz embraced MIR’s option for armed insurrection as the only path to a meaningful revolution. She never made the switch to MIR, instead acting as a permanent go-between, informally linking MIR with Salvador Allende’s leftist coalition. In 1967, she did become a part of a very secret armed faction of the Socialist Party, called Organa, that mobilized in support of Bolivia’s ELN—Ejército de Liberación Nacional—as it attempted, in vain, to revive Che Guevara’s ill-fated insurrection there. Committed to actual armed participation, she found that the elenos (as ELN members styled themselves) protected her, partly because she was a woman, but mostly because she was Salvador Allende’s daughter and more valuable to their cause if she managed to stay alive.

Beatriz married a Cuban intelligence agent, Luis Fernández Oña, in 1970. Through him, she had already become a backchannel liaison between Allende’s coalition and the Cuban high command. After the coup in 1973, Beatriz fled to Cuba with her husband. She had her second child in Cuba, and she found herself thrust into a very public role, representing the exiled Chilean left, and the many victims of the military dictatorship back home. As the government of General Augusto Pinochet became an international pariah, Beatriz became an international celebrity, but it was not a role she wanted.

Though fascinated by Cuba, Beatriz found no peace there. Cuban authorities detained Loti, her long-time housekeeper—who had been caught in a lesbian relationship—and sent her off for reeducation. Fidel’s revolution considered homosexuality, and even feminism, to be capitalist vices that would naturally fade away in the socialist utopia of tomorrow. Moreover, classless revolutionary Cuba could offer no replacement for Loti. As a consequence, in her early thirties, with her fine medical training and her unfulfilled revolutionary aspirations, Beatriz Allende found herself isolated in a foreign land, facing the unknown challenge of traditional feminine domesticity for the first time (249). To make matters worse, news of the assassinations of former comrades, including Miguel Enríquez and Orlando Letelier, began to trickle in, making Beatriz feel increasingly helpless. That fatal combination drove her into a severe depression. She died by her own hand in 1977.

While Harmer’s work is rich in personal details and human drama, she did not set out to write a biography. Her study focuses on the catalytic agency of an extraordinary person pivotally situated in the unfolding of many previously untold historical connections. In the process, she reveals many previously unrecounted historical connections. The author’s sensitivity to the particularities of Chilean revolutionary culture is unparalleled. Elegantly written and abundantly sourced in memoirs, letters, and periodical sources—much of them from Cuba—Harmer’s skillful treatment of extensive personal interviews makes this work unique and remarkable. Harmer has created a rigorous, unbiased, but very gendered study, showing how the patriarchal patterns of even the most revolutionary movements consigned Beatriz Allende and others like her to a very particular kind of evolving agency. Ultimately, the author attributes her protagonist’s untimely demise to the internal contradictions and unviability of that gendered but revolutionary role.

Through the lens of this one conflicted revolutionary life, Harmer shines light on the many contingencies that contributed to the Chilean revolutionary phenomenon. Her study examines, for example, the growing influence of Chilean youth in the long decade of the 1960s. Compounded by the disruptions of an enormous earthquake in 1960, which united young people in massive solidarity efforts, sheer numbers, a fact that can be attributed to the post-war baby boom, made Chilean twenty-somethings a new and powerful contingent. Universities became the room where it happened. As Harmer observes, “university student numbers rose from 7,800 in 1940 to just over 20,000 in 1957, and 120,000 by 1970” (10). That university experience, as Beatriz knew it, represented a quantum leap in the political potential of the younger generation.

But even that giant leap would not be enough. In the most hopeful early days of the Popular Unity experiment, Harmer observes that “the opposition was strong and united. Indeed, the Left’s defensive measures . . . paled in comparison with the Right’s organization, resources, and propensity for violence” (196). Right wing women, as historian Margaret Power observed in her foundational study from 1998, formed the ideological bedrock of that opposition.[2] But there were left wing women, too, with unique struggles, decisive agency, and an untold story. Harmer has opened a new window on them.

A black-and-white photograph of Salvador Allende and his Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Mireya Baltra, in the midst of a large crowd of people wearing suits. Both Allende and Baltra are smiling; the President is handing his minister a document. — *President Allende photographed with his Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, Mireya Baltra, a member of the Communist Party of Chile. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Despite its many strengths as a work of multilayered analysis, the book has some flaws. One is a simple editorial failure: a propensity to reproduce grammatical and orthographic errors in the Spanish language. Población, a Chilean settlement of the urban poor, has an accent mark in the singular form. Poblaciones, in the plural, does not, but Harmer’s work consistently maintains that telltale accent mark. This kind of defect does not detract from the overall argument, nor from the English reader’s appreciation. Chilean scholars, on the other hand, ever mindful of their legalistic traditions, especially when it comes to proper Spanish grammar and spelling, may be frustrated by these minor orthographic failings.

A second misunderstanding goes deeper. The author observes that, in her mid-thirties, Beatriz didn’t even know how to fry an egg. This is by no means an overstatement, but the author leaves it at that, as if to say, it would only occur to the unjust patriarchal universe to expect that women should be frying eggs (185, 233). In making such statements, Harmer elides over the fact that an ignorance of domestic skills in Chile often revealed more about social class than about gender roles. This was especially true for the revolutionary left. What good was a revolutionary who could shoot an AK-47, but then needed to be fed by someone else at the guerrilla hideout?

Among pobladores, Chile’s shantytown dwellers, anyone who could not buy fresh bread, fry an egg and slice a tomato would be esteemed pituco—haughty or snobbish—a fish out of water. In the informal economy of extreme poverty, where women could earn cash frying the eggs uptown, their unemployed menfolk often took care of housekeeping by default. Egg frying, a fact of life for the poor, became an asset and a virtue for a true guerrilla fighter.

Harmer recognizes that with regard to gender equality, it would be “unfair to expect the Left to have adopted practices not found anywhere else in society” (14). In fact, it would be anachronistic. And Beatriz Allende never identified as a feminist, but as a revolutionary guerrilla fighter. But cultural presuppositions allotted her only a supporting role. In exile after the coup, travelling between solidarity events, she commented to a friend that she had grown tired of being “Allende’s daughter” (260). She wanted to be Tania, the legendary compañera of Che Guevara, who supposedly died fighting by his side in the Bolivian altiplano (257). Though Beatriz Allende never achieved that dream, her experience made it possible for other women to dream it, too. Her prominence helped to shape a vocabulary that, as Harmer points out, contributed to “a searing call to end gender violence” during the 2019 protests in Chile (274). That call went viral worldwide.

[1] Isabel Allende, the daughter of the President, should not be confused with her second cousin, Isabel Allende, the acclaimed author of the novel The House of the Spirits (1982).

[2] Margaret Power, Right Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle Against Allende, 1964-1973 (New York: Routledge, 1998)

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Review of Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile (2021)

More than fifty years ago, Chile began a democratic path toward socialism with the election of Salvador Allende. President Allende promised that the country’s revolution would taste of “empanadas and red wine.” These quintessentially Chilean staples represented his pledge to ensure social welfare. In Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile, historian Joshua Frens-String explores this relationship between revolutionary politics, food security, and nutrition science in twentieth-century Chile. He concludes that the Allende years signified the culmination of decades-long popular struggles to position food security as a basic right of democratic citizenship.

Over seven chronological chapters, Frens-String weaves together political, social, and economic history to reveal how Chile’s food system reflected larger inequalities within society. The book’s first two chapters chronicle the rise of workers’ organizations in the urban capital of Santiago and the mining camps of northern Chile. Despite distinct economic contexts, both regions grappled with high prices and food shortages. Frens-String uses profiles of individual labor organizers to drive the narrative. He shows that these actors identified hunger as clear evidence of working-class exploitation and demanded popular access to dietary staples. Through decades of campaigns against the rising cost of living, Chilean workers made it clear that food security was central to a functional national economy.

In chapters three and four, Hungry for Revolution shifts the focus from the streets to the halls of government offices. This section traces how state actors responded to the left’s politicization of food. In particular, Frens-String’s attention to gendered ideas is a significant strength of these chapters. Government officials, social scientists, and medical doctors often blamed mothers for poor nutritional outcomes. Thus, educational outreach targeted poor and working-class women. Public health officials in the 1940s offered cooking classes and consumer handbooks to teach new food preparation methods and to encourage new eating habits. In the countryside, the state urged rural women to participate in agrarian reform by embracing sacrifice and frugality. Government officials pushed women to plant small family gardens, preserve their own vegetables, and switch to composting to conserve scarce fertilizers. The state’s focus on female consumers in its efforts to alter Chile’s nutritional habits reflected gendered beliefs about work and domesticity.

Allende supporters walk toward the government palace to hear his speech on International Workers Day, 1973. Source: Biblioteca Nacional

The concluding chapters of Hungry for Revolution demonstrate that state intervention in food production and distribution fueled both a socialist revolution and a far-right counterrevolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Rural landowners, urban merchants, and female consumers rejected the government’s interference in their decisions to produce or consume certain foods. As food demand outpaced supply, the Allende government encouraged consumers to replace traditional staples, such as red meat, with unconventional substitutes, like merluza fish. The state’s failure to ensure consumer abundance led to anxiety and frustration, which the opposition harnessed to demand an end to state intervention. Rising social unrest would pave the way for the military coup that overthrew Allende in 1973, which in turn led to the dismantling of the Chilean welfare state.

Hungry for Revolution is a fascinating account of national development in twentieth-century Chile. Using food politics as a lens into larger debates about what democratic states can and should provide their citizens, Frens-String traces how Chileans came to see food security as a basic right of citizenship. He illustrates that popular mobilization around consumer issues furthers our understanding of social welfare and economic justice. This book will appeal to historians of modern Chile as well as food historians. However, Hungry for Revolution offers insight to scholars broadly interested in national development, democratization, and social welfare in the Americas.

Gabrielle Esparza is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a historian of Latin America with a focus on twentieth-century Argentine history. Her current research interests include democratization, transitional justice, human rights, and civil-military relations. Gabrielle holds a B.A. in History and Spanish from Illinois College and received a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Argentina in 2017. At the University of Texas at Austin, Gabrielle has served as a graduate research assistant at the Texas State Historical Association and contributed to the organization’s Handbook of Texas. She served as co-coordinator of the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality in 2020-2021. Currently, she is the Associate Editor of Not Even Past.

José and His Brothers

Pampa Unión, today, is a ghost town lost in the Atacama Desert, a mile high and halfway between the Chilean mining centers of Antofagasta and Calama. Founded over a century ago as a medical way station, it quickly became a resting place for nitrate miners on their days off, complete with all the supplies and entertainments that working men required. With two main streets and just one tree, the 2,000 stable inhabitants entertained a floating population of up to 15,000. The town was abandoned in 1954. All that is left today are the ruins of adobe walls with broken bits of signage and a cemetery.

Diego was the one with the artistic inspiration. They were humble ideas, at the beginning, but he took them seriously. He could move heaven and earth to make something out of whatever it was he had in his head.

So, he went up to the pampa with fifteen classmates and a couple of movie cameras, the best they could get their hands on. It was quite the production. For Pampa Unión. The idea was a short feature about a young man who goes there to meet his ghosts, the hidden history of his rootless family, buried in the toxic sands of an abandoned mining town.

Pampa Union — Pampa Unión (via Wikimedia Commons)

They even had a visit from Diego’s baby sister. She couldn’t stay, of course, but she went for the day. They dressed her like a doll from the nineteenth century and they filmed her with flowers in her hand wandering around among the tombstones. It was traumatic for her, because some of the graves had been disturbed. For art’s sake. The point was that suffering ran deep in Chilean veins. We were a nation of exiles, slaves, and survivors. Or something like that. It would be disconcerting to be from a ghost town, I guess.

The boys went up there to rough it, but they also went to have a good time. The desert is enchanting. It has a magic that wakes up all your neurons. When you are from the city, the purity of color, light, and shadow connects your soul with the depths of life and death, past and present. I drove up to see them, about the fifth day of their odyssey. They said, whatever else I brought, to please bring water. They were running out.

A mausoleum that exhibits years of decay — Pampa Unión (via Wikimedia Commons.)

There was a scene with a hot-air balloon. The protagonist needed to send a message, an urgent, desperate call for help. Like when someone lost at sea might send a message in a bottle, but airmail. As if everyone just had a hot-air balloon stashed in their billfold for emergencies. As if wind-born balloons ever made it to their intended addressees. The story didn’t have to be realistic, comrade, just visually pleasing.

Hot-air balloons were a thing, right about then, in the artistic community of Santiago. The dictatorship had been over for almost a decade, and even Plaza Ñuñoa had become a center for a new species of night life that posed as politically aware. Starving artists, the kind Neruda called, anarcocapitalistas, would show up with marionettes, walking on stilts or pointlessly lifting off hot-air balloons, in exchange for pocket change from passers-by, and demanding that a Ministry of Culture be created to fund the fog of marijuana smoke in which they floated. Diego got his hands on three hot-air balloons, bright red and white, and he took them up to Pampa Unión.

All three had to look the same, so that his team could film the scene three times from different angles and create the illusion of just one balloon. And they had to film at dawn, because that was the only time of day that the wind wouldn’t abduct their temperamental prop and send it tumbling sideways across the desert. There were about fifteen minutes of quiet just as the sun came up. After that, the wind began to swirl around like the noxious gas on the surface of Jupiter until the sun went down.

Two men stand between two walls. The walls have faded painted advertisements — Photo via the author.

It was the first time that all fifteen of them had ever gotten up that early. Some had hardly slept. To buffer the dopamine, they drank at night. Not a good idea, not in that climate. Alcohol dehydrates you. But it was tradition. Sebastián, nicknamed el Perro, would crawl out of his sleeping bag, muttering, If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. I will never drink again. It was like the folksong from Carnaval in Bolivia, the one that says, they were nice boys, but they just couldn’t stop drinking.

The scene with the hot-air balloons was a success. They spent the rest of the day in the cemetery, where they got to know the whole town: names, nationalities, dates of birth and death. People died young. There were cemetery ghettos of Croatians, English, Mapuche, and even Chinese. I brought their dirty clothes home to wash. Imagine, fifteen twenty-year-olds, no showers, drinking at night and filming in the cemetery during the day. They reeked of sand, sweat, alcohol, and cadaver.

José and his brother, Francisco, went with me. They weren’t from Santiago. They were from Antofagasta. Well, they weren’t from Antofagasta, either, comrade. Their father and grandfather had grown up on the pampa. They were desert people from way back.

Walking around in the ruins, it was easy to figure out which was the street with the hardware stores, and which one had been for cantinas and bordellos. Most of the roofs had fallen in, but there were still signs painted on the walls of the once-thriving businesses. And there was junk on the ground. Kitchen middens of the future, an archeologist’s dream that we were disturbing. There were spoons and saucers, most of them bent or broken. There were wine bottles, shattered with the cork still in. There were tin plates, costume jewels, bits of clothing and other residue of a forgotten humanity from almost a century ago.

Two men stand between two walls — Photo via the author.

Among all the junk, we found some bent pieces of tin, one shaped into a star, another that looked like a ship, and one that was shaped like a child. The boys from Santiago, smart as they were, had no explanation. José picked one up, as if to examine it in the light, the very bright desert light, and he said, this is a toy. My grandfather used to make these. A loaded silence of amazement descended over the boys from Santiago. José had given himself away. He had revealed his roots and the endless desert sand into which they sank, publicly claiming the pampa as his own. For him, this was no short feature film. For him, la pampa was the real thing.

Though the original population in Pampa Unión had been inordinately skewed toward masculinity, there were females. Children were born. Sometimes, they survived the diarrhea and the diphtheria. They got old enough to need something to play with.

Supplies came up from down below. There was wine and aguardiente. There was beef, kept on the hoof, as there was no refrigeration. There were satin dresses for the prostitutes and Victrola Talking Machines to create a romantic ambiance for fantasy love affairs. But it never occurred to anyone to send up a doll, a stuffed bear, or a toy truck.

So, grandparents would take their tin shears—they had those—and try to make something nice to stimulate the imagination of the toddlers who had never known anything other than the infinite horizon, the blinding clarity of midday and the starlit dark of night. In la pampa, grandparents were often no older than about thirty-five. Anyone who lived to be forty got the hell out of there.

In Antofagasta, José’s grandfather kept making toys out of empty tin cans. A long time ago, few toys made it there, either. No toys, no fruit and no conjugated verbs. People with money took trips to Santiago if they wanted something nice. Poor children did without. Raising children was not the objective, there. You had to get the ore out of the ground. You had to get it down the mountain, onto ships, into trains and out of there. That was all. Playful little brats were slag, byproducts of some miner’s love affair on his day off.

Even so, grandfathers found tender spots for toddlers and got busy with their tin shears. Compared to X–boxes, the tin-can toys might have seemed like nothing at all. But, compared to nothing at all, comrade, well, that was another story. They were the first thing that delighted the eye of virgin innocence. For the semi-abandoned babies of the desert, tiny tin toys were shining treasures, an opportunity to imagine the garbage dump where they lived transformed into burgeoning beauty. They were a chance, maybe their only chance, to ever contemplate the world as it might have once been, as it could someday become. Those toys did tend to have sharp edges and pointy places. They were dangerous toys that prepared children for life in the Norte Grande, a life with lots of rough edges.

The guys from Santiago grew quiet. José’s revelation gave them pause. They realized the deficiencies of their own elitist upbringing. José became silent, too. He understood, in that moment, the cultural and geographical abyss that separated him from the sons of wealth, privilege, and power. He had played with those toys. Francisco had, too.

More From Nathan Stone:

Three-year-olds on the world stage

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Miss O’Keeffe

For further reading, see Hernán Rivera Letelier’s novel about Pampa Unión, Fatamorgana de amor con banda de música. (Santiago: Planeta, 1998)

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Preso en su lecho mi rio pasa, pero se acerca su libertad.
Sus aguas dulces ya son saladas; ya no eres rio, eres el mar.

A prisoner within its banks, my river rolls on, soon to find freedom.
Your sweet waters now have grown salty; you’re no river, now, you are the sea.

Charo Cofré

Colegio Andacollo was a K-through-12 parish school in old town Santiago. The Holy Cross Fathers took it as their new mission when the military government kicked them out of Saint George’s, their traditional academy for the elite. Andacollo was another world.

The original Andacollo was a mountain town in the north where Our Lady of Deep Rocky Mines granted solace and safety to her devoted followers. Our Andacollo was on the corner of Mapocho and Cautín, in a barrio of old multifamily dwellings, cheap bordellos, and the local seafood market. The place had a history of union struggle, fiery passion, and a profound commitment to the miracle-working Virgin of Andacollo. It also had a secret tale of tragedy.

Teatro Municipal in Santiago, Chile (via wikimedia)

Old town Santiago sat atop an ancient network of canals. Some were small but others were regular aqueducts, lined with stone and brick. Built for irrigation, they carried quantities of water from Canal San Carlos to the Mapocho River. Before there was pavement. When Matucana and Avenida Matta were still just vegetable gardens and chicken coops. Back when every home had tomatoes, basil, and cilantro growing out back.

The central region of Chile is still crisscrossed with canals that were built by a dozen Jesuit missionaries and several thousand local Indians. The intention was to strengthen the native communities against European invasion. Taking advantage of the melting snowpack in the mountains, they transformed a semi-arid wasteland into the now-famous fertile green valleys.

The effect on the indigenous population was the opposite of what had been intended. In 1550, the conquistadors said that Nueva Extramadura was too poor and not worth the trouble. By 1750, they had changed their conquering minds. Irrigated and green, the Spanish liked it. So, they threw out the Indians and the Jesuits, and they set up their haciendas.

One hundred and fifty-three “nice families” colonized with all the rapacious vigor of their prestigious lineages. They were Spaniards, Basques, and some French. They brought their cattle and their vineyards. They brought their illusions of noble breeding and Chile criollo was born.

Their descendants became the barrio alto, the GCU, as they say, Gente Como Uno, (People Like Us), a code that only legitimate members of their tightly-closed circle were supposed to recognize. It wasn’t about money, comrade, though the GCU did tend to be rich. It wasn’t about land, either, though they controlled most of it. The GCU sustained an Old World fantasy of hereditary aristocracy. They really believed it, and they insisted on marrying their children to each other. A rich man without a pedigree was called, roto con plata, more or less, a bum with lots of cash. If he had not descended from the legendary hundred families (who were, in reality, one hundred and fifty-three), he was and always would be an outsider.

The canals in the central valleys are still functional. They are the reason why there is Chilean wine and fruit at Whole Foods. Building a canal is no joke. It has to always go downhill so that the water flows forward and never backs up. In 1600, that was an engineering masterpiece.

As the population grew in old town Santiago, the canals lost their reason for being. Family gardens became parking lots and chicken coops became bus stops. They are mostly dry today, an underground labyrinth for which there is no known map. Only the rats know their way around.

But, until the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s, the water continued to flow, and there was access at strategic places. Neighbors would draw a bucket or two to water a shade tree, or to dampen the streets and vacant lots in the summer. That kept the dust down as boys upheld an important tradition, the continuous game of pick-up soccer, la pichanga. No shirts, no shoes, no score, house rules. Everyone played until it was too dark to see your hand in front of your face. As the brown water flowed constantly down into the rocky Mapocho.

Flowing water was an urban temptation. Children learned early in life to toss all their trash into the open mouths of Santiago’s filthy underside. The subterranean monster swallowed everything, without complaining. What’s more, most homes still had no indoor plumbing. The canal was where people dumped their chamber pots. Anyone who drew a bucketful had to watch out for floaters from upstream. That was emblematic of the ongoing relationship between the barrio alto and los de abajo, the people down below. It just seemed natural that those in high places would dump their refuse on those who were geographically and socially below them. That was also the reason why typhoid and hepatitis were so common, down there.

La Iglesia de Andacollo (the church of Andacollo) (via wikipedia)

There was an opening in the schoolyard at Andacollo. It was about two feet wide and three feet long, rimmed with discarded railroad ties. The canal water rushed by about a foot below the ground level. Like everywhere else, at Andacollo, the canal water was used to keep the dust down and get rid of the trash. There was a big willow tree in the middle of the schoolyard that provided shade on hot afternoons. The groundskeeper would make a trench around it with his trowel, and fill it with water from the canal, using his big iron bucket.

The school was all boys back then, and la pichanga never stopped. One day, the ball bounced close to the opening. As tradition demanded, the boy closest ran backwards with reckless abandon, to make the save. It’s a passion, comrade. When the ball was in play, nothing else mattered. He fell into the canal and disappeared.

The foul waters dragged him through their labyrinth. No rescue was possible; nothing anyone could do. They found him the next day in the Mapocho River. His clothes had been ripped off. His body was twisted and broken, but he was recognizable. He had been dragged through hell in an unexpected, surprising, and unavoidable way. I don’t know his name.

Back then, it never occurred to anyone to cover a hole in a schoolyard because someone might fall in. They told the boys to be careful. That was part of their education. They had to learn that any one of them could drop into the abyss at any moment.

That awful day, the dead boy’s classmates learned that destiny could betray you; that there were tragic, violent accidents; that the lives of poor boys didn’t really matter; that in five seconds, it could all be over and done with; that they, too, could disappear and be forgotten. That day, the boys learned that you have to be clever to survive in a cruel world.

Nowadays, we cover holes like that. We deceive our children with the illusion that the world is safe and trustworthy. That has never been true, but if you are under thirty, you were probably brought up to believe it and expect it.

The fickle nature of fate is the elephant in our proverbial living room. Everyone pretends it isn’t there. And the willow tree, silent witness to everything, grows tall.

The national anthem says that Chile is the copia feliz del Edén. That means a happy copy of paradise. But it’s just a copy, not the real thing. And Eden was a tricky place, comrade. You do remember what happened there?

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The Battle of Chile

“Where is that terrible beauty we planted so long ago?”

-Santiago del Nuevo Extremo

Rodolfo Müller is almost a hundred years old, now. He still lives in the same house as always, off Simón Bolivar, between Hamburgo and Coventry. That’s in Ñuñoa, a township on the near west side of Santiago. It’s a big house, and very nice but unpretentious. If he had wanted, he could have picked a more prestigious address further north, in Providencia, or up higher, in Las Condes. But he didn’t.

Rodolfo was born in Germany in about 1920. Before World War II, he came to Chile with his parents and his brother. They were just teenagers. I met him when he was almost sixty. He still looked very German after all those years: tall, blond, and blue-eyed. But he was a Jew. That’s what people said, anyway. Maybe, just on his mother’s side. They came to Chile to escape from Hitler. They left in time and made new lives in South America.

Rodolfo was a violinist and a pretty good one, apparently. Until he lost a segment of his little finger in an accident. If it had been his right hand, it wouldn’t have mattered as much, not for the violin. But it was the left. Violinists use that a lot. Rodolfo was a mechanic. It was a work-related accident. Machines are cold-hearted and unforgiving in that way.

He drove a ’64 Volvo. It was old, even then, but it ran like a Swiss watch. He did all the work on it personally. Rodolfo was not the mechanic at the shop on the corner. He was the ace; the mechanical surgeon. A horse-tamer for steel and steam. When big industrial contraptions at local factories broke down, they came and got Rodolfo. He understood machines.

When he gave up the violin, Rodolfo started playing the accordion. You can’t have music from Chiloé without an accordion. Besides, after Beethoven’s quartets, the melodies from Chiloé were simple, comrade. He played in a group was called Aydar. His wife, Irma Silva, was the director.

Jorge Müller shooting for the film The Battle of Chile — Jorge Müller shooting for the film *The Battle of Chile* (via Patricio Guzmán)

Chiloé is an island in the south. Potatoes, sheep, and seafood. Theirs was a picturesque culture and they had a music all their own. Aydar comes from the local vocabulary. It’s a contraction of ayudar, to help. Solidarity is fundamental for survival in a place like that. It was primitive island communism. It’s just how it was.

Irma and Rodolfo were members of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared, (Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos). Aydar was not the official group of the Association. There was one. But this was Irma’s project, where Inelia sang and danced the cueca with Lucho from Lo Hermida. It’s where I met Pepe and Alfredo, Victor and Jaqueline, Sonia and the unforgettable Miguel Marín. I played guitar and sang backup vocals. I could do harmony. People liked that. Everyone there had been hurt by the Pinochet regime in one way or another. It was our protest group. They couldn’t kill the joy.

Irma was a professional folklorist. She even taught folklore at the University, before the coup. After the coup, folklore was considered suspicious. Too many leftists.

Irma and Rodolfo were the parents of Jorge Müller, the filmmaker. He disappeared on November 29, 1974, along with his girlfriend, the actress and producer, Carmen Bueno. Inelia’s boy, Tito, had been gone four months by then. Miguel Angel, Doris Meniconi’s boy, just ten days.

Jorge Müller and Carmen Bueno were clandestine members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, also known as MIR. Before the coup, they had worked for Chile Films. With director Patricio Guzmán, they made the documentary, La batalla de Chile –The Battle of Chile. It was about the historical process in Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. It was meant to be a memoir of the revolution, but it devolved into a denunciation of the coup. Jorge was the cameraman. The whole world can now see the coup unfolding through his eyes.

Jorge Müller and Patricio Guzmán (via Patricio Guzmán)

Now, if MIR wanted a documentary about the Popular Unity government, it wasn’t to come out in support of the idea that the ballot box was the right way to have a revolution, comrade. MIR wasn’t a part of the Popular Unity coalition. They believed in violent overthrow or nothing at all. The theory was that if you tried to take over the means of production nicely, there will be a coup. They were right about that. But Chile Films was more than just MIR, and documentaries are more than just propaganda. In the long run, The Battle of Chile got out of control. Now, it’s a classic.

The unedited footage was smuggled out after the coup. That cost Jorge his life. Irma was inconsolable. She was a high society lady, deep down. She liked things done properly, efficiently and on time. She joined the Association when Jorge disappeared. Later, she created Aydar.

Folklore from Chiloé was raucous, sentimental, and fun. Someone would speak briefly, at the beginning of our presentations, to say who we were and why we were there. Then, it was strictly repertoire from Chiloé. Some of the songs talked about lovers lost at sea, or travelers who never came home, but the listeners had to make the connection themselves. It was a challenge to the regime, but an indirect one. A clever one.

Among the mothers in the Association, Irma was one of the youngest. She died of cancer in ’94. Pinochet was no longer in power, but there was still no news of Jorge. Rodolfo was left alone. A grandson went to live with him. And there are many friends from the old days. He hasn’t been forgotten. His son was an artist. One of the best Chile has ever known. But there can be no poets in Plato’s Republic, comrade. As it turns out, the real battle of Chile was one that we would lose. The whole project of a world that is fair, just, and free has collapsed.

The Battle of Chile movie poster (via Patricio Guzmán)

They started filming in May of ’72. The tale had begun, but no one knew how it would end. Víctor Jara had a song about that, from before. After the coup, Santiago del Nuevo Extremo gave us the verse, where is that terrible beauty we planted, so long ago? Nostalgia, comrade.

The revolution failed, but the film is still a treasure. It has its rightful place today in the shantytowns of poor Chilean youth, the ones who never knew that once there had been a dream.

Irma and Rodolfo had a house on the coast, at El Quisco. That was a beautiful beach and, in its heyday, pretty elegant. Now, it has sort of come down in the world. People with money don’t go there anymore. They prefer Algarrobo, Papudo and Zapallar. Not because the beaches are any better, only because the crowd is more exclusive.

Irma and Rodolfo’s house was up on a cliff, right near the shore. It was a wooden house, red and white, with a huge pine tree in the front. The beach was about five hundred feet away, but to get there, you had to take the stairs. It was about two-hundred feet down. Which was why the view from the back porch was so spectacular. There was a well that never went dry. In a coastal town with a chronic water shortage, Irma and Rodolfo’s house was the oasis.

Deep down, Jorge liked the good life. Given a choice between a political demonstration downtown and a day at the beach with his friends, he preferred the day at the beach. El Quisco was his beach. I bought that house in 1987. Irma and Rodolfo sold it because they needed the money and because they weren’t going very often anymore. It was hard, because it was Jorge’s house, too. It was as if his footsteps could still be heard there. As if his heart were still beating there. Something about the smell. When I went, which was quite often, it was as if I dreamed his dreams and saw his visions. Irma and Rodolfo wanted the house to stay in the family. It was a simple place, but enchanting.

Aydar performed from ’76 until ’88, more or less. Those were glorious years, tragic and triumphant. Irma and Rodolfo had another child, a daughter, but Jorge was their pride and joy. And they were right to be proud. Repressive government doesn’t work out when people can see the truth.

The DINA took Jorge Müller and Carmen Bueno at 9:30 am on the corner of Bilbao and Los Leones. They had been to a party with the cast and crew of another film that had opened the night before at Cine Las Condes. They were on their way to work at Chile Films, but they never made it there. Agents appeared in civilian clothing, driving a grey Chevrolet pick-up. We have seen them before. They tried to rip out the people’s eyes and ears, comrade, but we still have the film. That’s not ever going away.

Perhaps, Jorge and Carmen died believing that victory was imminent. That’s what MIR had taught them. Song, poetry and cinema are more powerful than bombs and bullets. Maybe they are, but sometimes, they are not powerful enough.

For more on Chile’s disappeared ones, see www.memoriaviva.com.

La Batalla de Chile is available on Youtube, linked here is part one of four.

Also by Nathan Stone on Not Even Past:

Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: An Unusual Disappearance

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Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez: An unusual disappearance

They weren’t all the same. We know of at least one soldier who had a conscience. There were several, actually. Most were weighty figures, captains and colonels who refused to follow orders. Some of them quit or went into exile. Others died. But I’m talking about conscripts, the powerless boys who were in military service when the decision was made to interrupt the institutional process of the Chilean state on September 11, 1973. When the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by the US-backed Chilean military. When those boys were commanded to arrest, torture, and kill their own brothers and sisters.

Rodolfo González was one such conscript. He was proud that he had been chosen for the Air Force. He was just eighteen. After the coup, he was commissioned to serve at the DINA, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional. That was General Pinochet’s secret police.

Rodolfo wasn’t an agent, but he did participate. He had guard duty. He delivered messages. He got coffee for the boss when the boss got tired of torturing someone.

He lived with his aunt, María González. I knew her. She was a member of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos) until the day she died. She marched alongside Doris, Inelia, and the mothers of so many others who had disappeared, carrying her placard with the picture of Rodolfo. María González was an anomaly. Rodolfo was unusual company for the other prisoners at Villa Grimaldi, too.

Demonstration by members of the Association of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (Photographer: Kena Lorenzini, via Wikimedia Commons)

María González said that, when her nephew started out at the DINA, he stopped wearing a uniform. They gave him a dark suit and black shoes. They picked him up in a car every day, a black Chevrolet Impala with tinted windows. Once, Rodolfo showed his military ID to his aunt. It identified him as a member of the DINA. That was a violation of protocol. The first one.

During the dictatorship, showing military ID was understood as a threat. It was a way to cut in line and get preferential treatment. But the DINA was different. You weren’t supposed to show that one anywhere, except at the door. They had several doors, actually, all of them, secret.

Rodolfo Valentín didn’t do well at the DINA. His own humanity betrayed him. Some days, he was sent to guard prisoners with bullet wounds, internal injuries, and broken bones at the Military Hospital. He would use his privileged access to tell to the prisoners what their respective situations were. Later, he contacted some family members, letting them know where their loved ones were and in what condition.

Rodolfo Valentín González Pérez (via Memoria Viva)

Maybe he wasn’t so clever. Maybe Rodolfo really thought that was how it was done. That was, after all, the Chilean way. But not in the DINA. One would think he had been thoroughly briefed. My suspicion is that our Rodolfo Valentín was very clever. If so, he was in open rebellion.

I don’t know if he really thought he had a chance of not getting caught. Maybe, like many others, he believed the military government would be over soon. Or, maybe, he was just very brave. Rodolfo was already a witness to the wildness of the DINA. If he wasn’t on board, then he was dangerous. The day would come when he would speak out.

He had an older brother who was a leftist militant. He had been given temporary asylum at the Argentine embassy.

Rodolfo was the third of ten. He had lived with his aunt since he was small. His father had died in ’64, leaving his mother more mouths than she could feed. His aunt had raised him to lighten the load. But someone had taught him very young that there are things one would never do to another human being. Perhaps that was his father.

He fell in step with the DINA at the beginning. Afraid, perhaps, or just following orders, as they say. And, maybe, he missed his father. That would leave any boy vulnerable to the military style. And maybe he was the favorite recruit of someone important. Military hierarchy works that way, believe it or not. And it just might be true that Rodolfo was momentarily tempted by the unlimited power of the DINA. It was naked, corrupt, clandestine, total power.

One thing we know for certain. His parents loved the cinema. That’s how he got the name Rodolfo Valentín. Perhaps, they were romantics, fans of Gardel, the tango singer. The cosmopolitan night life of Santiago in the ‘50’s ended, for them, abruptly. A heart attack, or an accident; I’m not sure. Rodolfo was ten when he went to live with his aunt.

The DINA caught him, of course. Communicating with the incomunicados. The next day, he was one of them. They took him from aunt’s home on the night of July 23, 1974. He could have met Inelia’s boy, Héctor, first as a DINA man, with infinite power over him, and, a few days later, as a comrade in the anonymous darkness at Villa Grimaldi.

During the Popular Unity years, Luz Arce had belonged to the Socialist Party. She was taken in June 1974. Rodolfo was her guard at the Military Hospital. He became too friendly. He even asked for her advice about how to get his brother out of the country.

Then, Luz Arce defected to the enemy. First, she became an informant and, later, a full-blown DINA agent. Stockholm Syndrome, that’s what they called it. When someone who is abducted begins to collaborate with their abductors. It’s what happened to Patty Hearst.

In 1990, when military rule was over, Luz Arce recanted. She told everything she knew to the Rettig Commission. She said she saw Rodolfo at Villa Grimaldi. He had his leg in a cast. Out of desperation, he had thrown himself from the tower. Maybe he thought he could escape, but no one ever escaped from the DINA.

They might have thrown him from the tower. The DINA agents were especially cruel with Rodolfo. For them, he was a traitor. Because of his brother, they figured he was a leftist infiltrator.

That wasn’t true. The other prisoners even said he was different. He had no political background. Leftist parties had training. Militants knew the drill. They knew what to expect when they were tortured. Rodolfo, they said, was “like a virgin.” An inexperienced, innocent boy.

Luz Arce said that the last time she saw Rodolfo alive, he was stripped naked and hanging from a beam at Villa Grimaldi. We don’t know if he was hanging by his hands, by his feet, or in some unimaginably painful stress position, barely breathing and wishing he could stop.

In 1977, two Air Force officials showed up at his aunt’s apartment in Santiago to confiscate Rodolfo’s military insignia. It seems they made a special effort to make sure that he never reappeared. Or maybe they did it just to be cruel. Why they waited so long was a mystery.

If all children had someone to teach them right from wrong; someone who would say that sometimes the authorities are evil; that power and goodness are not the same thing; then there would be no DINA, no CIA black ops, no My Lai massacres. There would be no cruelty, no abduction and no torture. I am surprised that there were so few like Rodolfo. Sometimes, in this world, there seem to be more cowards than heroes, more darkness than light. It doesn’t have to be that way.

There were nearly 2,000 who disappeared in Chile between 1974 and 1976. Most of them were convinced of an ideology. They had chosen to sacrifice their lives for the dream of a better world. But Rodolfo’s option was more primitive. He decided that he could not become a torturer, even if it meant he would be tortured. He chose solidarity, and it cost him everything he had.

For more on Chile’s disappeared ones, see www.memoriaviva.com.

Nathan Stone is a new graduate student in Latin American History. He lived in Chile for many years, starting in 1979.

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