ABSTRACT
On September 11 1973, Chile's armed forces bombed Santiago's presidential palace and overthrew the leftist government of President Salvador Allende. At ten minutes to eight that morning, Catarina, 1 who lived in a “población” [Chile's version of the favela, or shantytown] in southern Santiago, turned on the radio and learned that people were being arrested. She then heard that there were soldiers in the wide road that bordered her neighborhood, shooting into her población to prevent people from moving. She had been working in the local clinic for years, and someone came to fetch her so that she might help a woman who had been shot while running after her child who had gone to the street corner to see the convoy of military vehicles. Because soldiers were shooting everything that moved, as she put it, she had to squat down to get there, keeping to the edge of the street. She took out the woman's bullet, and treated a child whose throat had been grazed by another bullet while he was looking out from the second floor of his home. However, there was little she could do for some of the injured, who died. The relatives kept the bodies in their homes for five days, and some dug holes in which to bury them. Helicopters would shoot down on the población from above, and there was a night-time curfew. Before long, Catarina's house was raided. “They would raid our homes,” she told me. “They took all the men out into the street at midnight, to an open space that had not yet been built on. They would even take out adolescents, and boys, even. They’d leave the women in the house, and the police and members of the armed forces and soldiers would come in and examine everything. You'd get very scared & You'd feel invaded in your privacy. It was the first invasion you felt; strangers’ eyes, strangers’ hands touching your things.”
