‘The Twilight Zone’ by Nona Fernández (2016) – 219 pages   Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

If this novel were an actual Twilight Zone episode it would be the torture episode. Unfortunately what happened in Chile under General Pinochet is all too real. The systematic human rights violations that were committed by the military dictatorship of Chile, under General Augusto Pinochet, included gruesome acts of physical and sexual abuse, as well as psychological damage. From 1973 to 1990, Chilean armed forces, the police and all those aligned with the military junta were involved in institutionalizing fear and terror in Chile as part of Operation Condor.

Operation Condor was a United States backed and conceived campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents in South America. The governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and later Brazil signed the agreement. The United States government provided planning, coordinating, and training on torture, provided technical support, and supplied military aid to the juntas.

After the legitimate President of Chile, Salvador Allende, was ousted and killed in a United States CIA-backed coup, Pinochet persecuted leftists, socialists, and political critics. There never has been a full accounting of all the people who were murdered by the government of Chile, but the Valech Report of 2005 contains the testimony of more than 35,000 Chileans who were detained and subjected to torture.

Somehow with a national ‘No’ vote against Augusto Pinochet, he got removed from being dictator of Chile in 1990, but instead of executing or imprisoning him, the country allowed him to live out his years first as leader of the Chile military then as a Senator.

At the center of the novel ‘The Twilight Zone’ is “the man who tortured people”. Apparently in 1985 a popular Chilean magazine called Cauce published an article with the headline ‘I Tortured People’ . It was a first-person account by someone who worked at one of these military torture centers. This brought the subject of torture in Chile out in the open. In this novel, Nona Fernández imagines what may have happened to this guy after the article was published.

Toward the end of ‘The Twilight Zone’, a short history of the Augusto Pinochet Torture and Terror Regime appears to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. It begins as follows.

“Coup in Chile,

President Allende died in La Moneda,

Mass arrests,

Secret executions,

war tribunals,

The Caravan of Death travels South and North.

Victor Jara is tortured

and killed at the National Stadium.”

Later, we get these lines:

“Pinochet cedes command of the army

and becomes a Senator for life in the National Assembly.

The world laughs at Chilean democracy.”

Now the United States has had its own attempted Far Right coup. What goes around, comes around.

Grade:      A