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| 1 Introduction We woke up on September 11, 1973, an early spring day, to the radio broadcasts describing troop movements all over Chile. My parents had been working for several years against the far Right, an elite influence in Chile, and were at that time working with President Allende. My mother cofounded and directed a party based on liberation theology, and my father, who was educated at Harvard, worked in the Department of Agriculture and taught sociology of law. Salvador Allende was the first socialist president elected democratically in Latin America and in the context of the cold war; this was not acceptable to the U.S. government. The United States provided the Right with financial and military power to challenge him. My sisters and I had been living through rather uncertain times as we struggled with the fast pace of life and the confrontations between our family members. While some sided with the privileged classes, others, like my parents, favored the ideals of social justice that were sweeping through Latin America, in different avatars, during those difficult yet hopeful days. That early spring date came to be known as “El Golpe” (coup). My parents took us to our grandparents’ house and said good-bye. Convinced that we would never see them again, we cried as they rushed to their party’s headquarters to burn all the documents containing names, addresses, and anything else that could be used to track down the party’s members. We sat and waited while our aunts and grandparents drank champagne to celebrate. We knew that they did not realize what was happening, but also that we could count on them. The radio told us that people were being rounded up all over the country. Although my sisters and I were terribly afraid, our family did not notice because they, like the country, were so profoundly divided along political ideology that my sisters and I lived in different realities. Having suffered in silence for most of the day, we were greatly relieved when my parents showed up to take us home, just in time to avoid the new curfew roundups. From our apartment windows on the thirteenth floor, which overlooked the Mapocho River, a mountain called San Cristobal, and 2 | Introduction the edges of downtown Santiago, we watched American fighter jets bomb the presidential palace. We saw bodies floating down the river and heard the blasts of gunfire over several nights while military vehicles patrolled the streets. Several days later, we heard loud knocks on the door. Several police officers ran into the apartment and ransacked it. A few stayed in the living room and pushed us against the wall with their machine guns. “So what is this subversive equipment?” one asked, holding our Batman play tent in his arm. At that moment, one of the police officers ran toward the front door to tell his commanding officer, who was questioning our mother, that he had found a bomb. They all became excited and surfaced with a broken clock with protruding springs that my sister had been playing with. “So what do you do?” the commanding officer asked our mother. “I am a secretary,” she replied, wisely avoiding the rest of her title of “executive secretary of the Christian Left Party.” Being the machista he was, the officer uttered with disdain, “Just a secretary.” Our father was taken away, but none of us cried until later because we did not want to give the police the benefit of our sorrow. We thought they had killed him, and we went to the national stadium, which had become a concentration camp, and stood in line all day only to be told by the Red Cross to check the morgue. Later, we received a call from a priest who told us that our father was alive and could be found in the stadium. So we returned to stand in line again and wait with our toothbrushes, soap, and change of clothing. Finally, through the influence of our grandfather, who was a retired general, our father was released, and we were given two months to leave the country. Because our father had attended Harvard, he was acquainted with intellectuals from the Ford Foundation who lived in Chile during this time and who helped him obtain a grant to conduct research at Harvard. In the middle of the Chilean summer, on December 26, 1973, we boarded a Braniff International plane with other refugees. When the captain told us that we...

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