Tina’s story came to me in the course of revising Gringolandia after it had been accepted for publication. I had been reading some of the testimonies in the Informe Rettig (the first of two major human rights investigations of General Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year military dictatorship in Chile) about Rodrigo Rojas, a Chilean-born teenager living in the United States who died after soldiers set him on fire at a demonstration in Santiago in 1986. The investigation revealed the efforts of paramilitary groups—right-wing groups allied with the military but not under its direct leadership—to silence potential witnesses of this and other atrocities through threats, abductions, and beatings. Officials of the regime went to great lengths to cover up their human rights abuses and at times enlisted people who were not formally in the military but associated with it—like Frankie’s uncle—to intimidate or wreak revenge.
Surviving Santiago takes place in June and July of 1989, nine months before the end of the dictatorship. The Pinochet dictatorship came to power following a bloody coup on September 11, 1973, that toppled the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. In the days and years after the coup, more than 3,000 Chileans were killed or “disappeared,” and more than 38,000 were imprisoned and tortured. Like Tina’s family, nearly a tenth of the country’s population emigrated for political or economic reasons between 1973 and 1990.
Economic policies implemented during the 1980s led to the kind of commercial development—including modern high-rise apartment buildings and enclosed shopping malls—that Tía Ileana’s company represented. But while the wealthy and well educated prospered, poor and working-class Chileans endured the brunt of the repression and saw little improvement in their standard of living. By the 1990s, Chile had one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world.
In 1980 Chile’s constitution was revised to give more power to Pinochet and the military. Under its provisions, a plebiscite (an election in which the only options are yes or no) held in October 1988 would determine whether Pinochet would rule for another ten years, or leave office after the election of a new government the following year. Even if he lost, Pinochet would remain a senator for life and the military would retain its funding and privileges. Despite years of repression and press censorship that was only somewhat loosened to allow the electoral campaign to proceed, the Chilean people voted “no” to their dictator’s continued rule. In October 1989, the people voted again, and in a rebuke to the dictatorship, the opposition Concertación soundly defeated the right-wing National Alliance. The Concertación’s parties have continued to win a majority of the Presidential elections ever since.
Although the 1988 plebiscite represented the victory of nonviolence and democracy, the events leading up to it were far from peaceful. On September 7, 1986, urban guerrilla fighters from the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front ambushed the general’s caravan. While Pinochet and his ten-year-old grandson escaped uninjured, five of his guards were killed. Over the next few days, four well-known leftist activists were kidnapped and murdered in retaliation, including an editor of the magazine Análisis, José Carrasco.
The extreme left engaged in revenge killings as well. In April 1991, a little more than a year after the elected government took power, a splinter group of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front assassinated right-wing senator Jaime Guzmán, a former Pinochet speechwriter and co-author of the 1980 constitution.
These kinds of deadly attacks were spectacular and designed to instill fear, but they were also rare in comparison to other countries in Latin American and to Chile itself a decade earlier. By 1989, politically active Chileans normally did not travel with an entourage or take other security measures, such as varying their route to work. However, many former political prisoners who had endured torture like Marcelo continued to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and physical ailments related to their brutal treatment in prison; the danger of suicide far exceeded that of homicide. According to the Informe Valech (the most recent human rights investigation), the life expectancy of former political prisoners is 60 to 65 years; the average life expectancy in Chile nears 80 years.
Pinochet and military officials demanded silence and freedom from prosecution as a condition for handing over power to an elected civilian government. However, the courageous efforts of Catholic Church officials, journalists like Marcelo, and lawyers and judges to reveal the truth and, ultimately, to prosecute the perpetrators and compensate the victims played a major role in reducing violence motivated by revenge. Beginning in the late 1980s, those on both sides who perpetrated acts of violence and terrorism found themselves increasingly on the margins. Chileans across the political spectrum worked together to rebuild strong democratic institutions and a prosperous economy.
I was in Chile at the beginning of 1990 and witnessed personally the transition from dictatorship to democracy. I consider it the most inspiring experience of my life, and I am grateful to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, which funded my trip through a Work-in-Progress grant, and to the many Chileans who showed me their country and told me their stories. Franca Monteverde and her late husband, Nelson Schwenke, opened their home to my husband and me for the three and a half weeks we spent there. Nelson and I took a roll of photos of Valparaíso at night, competing to see who could hold the camera with a steadier hand. Eduardo Peralta gave me a tour of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the Catholic Church’s human rights organization. (I also saw the McDonald’s in the Plaza de Armas, but being a vegetarian, I didn’t eat there.) Marcelo Nilo, Manuela Bunster, and Jaime Barría guided me through their neighborhoods and introduced me to their families and their lives. Dozens of Chileans shared their often painful experiences with me in the hope that I would tell people in the United States what happened to them, and to prevent the same thing from happening again, anywhere in the world.
A note on names: In Spanish-speaking countries, people usually have two surnames (last names). The first of those is the father’s name, and the second comes from the mother. The principal surname is that of the father, which is the one used for alphabetical order and carried through to the next generation. Thus, Tina’s father is Marcelo Aguilar Gaetani, and he is generally referred to as Marcelo Aguilar. His print byline sometimes reads “Marcelo Aguilar G.” Tina’s name, Cristina Aguilar Fuentes, comes from her father’s principal surname, and then her mother’s. (A woman keeps her maiden name but traditionally adds the de after marriage.) In both the United States and Chile, Tina uses the surname Aguilar rather than Fuentes. The strictness of these naming conventions varies from country to country, but in Chile during this era people tended to observe them seriously.
Surviving Santiago is a work of fiction, and, as such, it features invented characters. The radio station Radio Colectiva, La Pizza Pellegrino, and Speedy Couriers are fictional as well, and any resemblance to real enterprises by the same or similar names is purely coincidental.
For further reading:
Ackerman, Peter and DuVall, Jack. A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Agosín, Marjorie. I Lived on Butterfly Hill. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Allende, Isabel. My Invented Country. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Bolaño, Roberto. Distant Star. New York: New Directions, 2005.
Constable, Pamela and Valenzuela, Arturo. A Nation of Enemies: Chile under Pinochet. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
Muñoz, Heraldo. The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
No. New York: Sony Pictures, 2013. (feature film)