By Night in Chile

In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected Socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende, in a violent coup. The coup was the culmination of a covert, three-year campaign by the CIA and the executive branch of the United States government to destabilize Allende. The campaign was driven by Cold War fears of Chile becoming a communist country and a desire to protect American business interests in Chile (Allende had nationalized a number of industries). While no evidence has shown that either the executive branch, then headed by President Richard Nixon, or the CIA played a direct role in the coup itself, the CIA played a documented role in helping Pinochet to consolidate power after his coup. Pinochet reigned as dictator of Chile until 1990, even though, starting in 1983, political pressure forced Pinochet to concede some democratic freedoms.

Pinochet’s rule was defined by human rights abuses, including the documented murder of more than 3,000 dissidents and the torture and imprisonment of more than 40,000 (“Augusto Pinochet’s Chile: Facts and Figures,” Amnesty International, 10 Sept 2023). The Chilean secret police (DINA) perpetrated many of these abuses. Two notorious members of DINA were the American Michael Townley and his Chilean wife, Mariana Callejas—the historical referents for Bolaño’s characters James Thompson and Maria Canales. Like their fictional counterparts, Townley and Callejas lived in a mansion on the outskirts of Santiago. There, Callejas (like Canales) held literary workshops, and Townley and other DINA agents developed chemical weapons, performed telephone surveillance, forged passports to cover up their murder of 119 Chileans, and tortured dissidents. Their preferred torture method—la parrilla (the grill), in which the victim was strapped to a metal bed and electrocuted, often on their genitals or open wounds—appears in the novella when a party guest finds a man strapped naked to a bed in Canales’s basement. As mentioned in the novella, Thompson/Townley carried out a number of assassinations, including one of Allende’s former ministers and his wife, in Argentina.

Pinochet’s regime was also defined by censorship. Pinochet’s junta forcibly exiled left-wing intellectuals and artists and confiscated art considered “leftist” in widespread seizures and book burnings. DINA arrested, tortured, and murdered some artists. Most notoriously, they were suspected of poisoning the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, a communist and supporter of Allende, in the immediate aftermath of the coup. While the official cause of death was prostate cancer—which Urrutia and Farewell conspicuously repeat in a phone conversation in the novella—suspicions of foul play were sufficient to launch an investigation into Neruda’s death in 2013. Coroners determined that Neruda didn’t die of cancer, but were unable to establish poisoning as the cause of death. The police investigated Townley himself for Neruda’s murder, but Townley was never charged. In 2015, the Chilean government concluded it was likely that a third party played a role in Neruda’s death.

The persecution of artists and intellectuals who didn’t support Pinochet led to a period in Chile known as el apagón cultural—the cultural blackout. The title of By Night in Chile is in part a reference to this blackout (Myerston, Jacobo. “The Classicist in the Cave: Bolaño’s Theory of Reading in By Night in Chile.” Classical Receptions Journal, vol. 0, no. 0, 2016, pp. 1-20). Urrutia alludes to this blackout when he mentions the void left by these exiled artists and intellectuals—whom he insists left for personal, not political, reasons—and the attempt by the remaining artists to create a “New Chilean Scene” (101).