Mariana Callejas: Literature and Horror in Pinochet’s Chile

Abstract

Mariana Callejas (1932–2016) was an award-winning Chilean writer, active during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. At the same time, she and her husband, the American Michael Townley, were agents of the DINA, the Chilean intelligence service dedicated to the repression of opponents to the dictatorship. The couple was involved in several political crimes in Chile and particularly abroad, including the murder of former Unidad Popular Minister Orlando Letelier in 1976 in Washington DC. In 1995, Callejas wrote her memoirs and, after that, several fictional or semi-fictional works were published that had leading characters inspired by her. This article focuses on her autobiographical book and three fictional pieces written by leading Chilean writers (Pedro Lemebel, Roberto Bolaño, and Carlos Iturra) with a dual purpose. On the one hand, it analyses how different authors (including Callejas herself) use characters inspired by Callejas to conceptualise the relationship between literature and horror during the years of Pinochet’s dictatorship. On the other hand, the article studies how these writings thematise the tension existing in Chilean society (particularly among certain intellectual circles) between knowing, not knowing, and not wanting to know what was going on under the Pinochet regime.

Keywords:

• literature and crime
• Chile dictatorship
• Mariana Callejas

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The bibliography on the DINA is too large to even try to summarize it here. A good reference work on the topic is Salazar (2011).

2 Memoria viva. http://web.archive.org/web/20091004094605/http://www.memoriaviva.com/culpables/criminales%20c/callejas_mariana.htm.

3 Among them, there is a theatre play: El Taller, by Nona Rodríguez, and a miniseries released in Chile in 2018: Mary and Mike, based on the activities of Callejas and Townley as agents of DINA.

4 Callejas’s life was reconstructed through various sources, including conversations with one of her sons. For an overview, see De la Cerda (2002).

5 On the Chilean and American Zionist groups that went to Náan and then founded Kissufim, see N/A (1953). Callejas’s name is among the 91 founding members of Kissufim. My appreciation to Ora, the secretary of kibbutz Kissufim, for this and other important pieces of information.

6 “Hay que construir un complot contra el complot, para resistir el complot”.

7 Cited in Stern (2006, 76).

8 Although Bolaño’s novel has been translated into English as By Night in Chile, I preferred to translate all the passages quoted directly from the original Spanish version.

9 Bolaño reproduces part of Lemebel’s chronicle in his piece titled “The Corridor with no Apparent Way Out”, included in the collection of newspapers articles titled Between Parentheses. In this article, Bolaño characterizes Lemebel as “one of the best writers and the best poet of my generation” (Bolaño 2011).

10 Callejas was arrested in 2003 for the first time. In 2008, she was sentenced to serve 20 years in prison for the killing of Gen. Prats. In 2010, her sentence was reduced to 5 years, but she was benefited with house arrest. Iturra visited Callejas while she was in prison.

11 In a personal interview, Iturra told me that he had not read Bolaño’s novel. However, later in the conversation, he admitted that he had read “parts of it”. Carlos Iturra, personal interview. Santiago de Chile, 22 April 2023.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mariano Ben Plotkin

Mariano Ben Plotkin is currently Principal researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET), and professor of history at the National University of Tres de Febrero (both in Argentina). Throughout his academic trajectory, he has written extensively on the history of psychoanalysis, political history, and cultural history. His major books in English include: Mañana es San Perón. A Cultural History of Perón’s Argentina (Scholarly Resources, 2002); Freud in the Pampas (Stanford 2001) (translated into Spanish and French); Beyond Therapeutic Culture (Routledge 2023) (in co‐authorship with Piroska Csúri and Nicolás Viotti) among others.