From Santiago to Swansea: life after a coup
On the fiftieth anniversary of 'The Other 9/11', the military coup that brought brutal dictatorship to Chile, Rocio Cifuentes and Jose Cifuentes talked to Cwlwm about remaking their lives in Wales
By Dylan Moore
On the morning of 11 September 1973, Dr Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist president of a Latin American country, stood in the palace of La Moneda in Santiago de Chile and calmly awaited the arrival of his enemies. A military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet was already underway. The navy had captured the port city of Valparaíso, the air force had bombed radio and television stations, and telephone lines and vehicles belonging to army officers loyal to the president had been sabotaged. In what Allende knew to be his final address to the nation, the president refused to resign, saying: ‘I will pay for the loyalty of the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shrivelled forever… Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.’
By the afternoon, Allende was dead and the military junta had suspended all political activities. Violent repression of the country’s left-wing majority who had brought the president to power had begun. Within months, thousands were killed or ‘disappeared’. Within three years 130,000 Chileans had been arrested, tens of thousands imprisoned and tortured. An estimated 200,000 people, two per cent of the country’s population, were forced into exile.
Fifty years later, at a café overlooking the sea at Three Cliffs Bay on the south side of Gower, two members of a family of former political refugees recall the days when Swansea became home to between thirty and forty families of exiles. ‘There were quite a lot of Chilean families in Swansea when I was growing up,’ recalls Rocío Cifuentes. ‘To me they were like my cousins and aunts and uncles – not all of them obviously, but there were a few that we were closer to – and we would go camping together and have barbecues and stay in each others’ houses, like regular cousins do. That was quite important and I think it would have been different if we were the only ones.’ Most of these families had come, like her parents, José and María Cristina, under a programme of the World University Service, allowing Chilean students and academics who had been expelled from university for political reasons, as José had been, to complete their studies elsewhere.
During the period of President Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, José and María Cristina had been student activists working in a shanty town in the city of Talca, helping to improve the lives of poor people. After the coup, José was jailed, beaten, tortured, kept in solitary confinement, and then released without charge. The couple then devoted themselves to working for human rights organisations, documenting the stories of thousands of their compañeros and comapañeras who suffered the barbarism of the dictatorship.
At the ecumenical Committee for Peace, they took witness statements detailing arrests, raids and disappearances carried out by the Chilean armed forces throughout the country. In the absence of lawyers or judicial authorities able to take on cases for fear of their own lives, long queues would form each morning outside the doors of the Committee as families sought humanitarian or legal assistance, or a way of fleeing the country. Eventually, General Pinochet ordered the closure of the Committee, but even the dictator did not account for the intervention of the powerful Catholic Church, under Cardinal Silva Henriquez, who set up an almost identical organisation, Vicaría de la Solidaridad, to continue its work.
José and María Cristina already had their own personal stories of persecution and abuse, but José describes the job of hearing and documenting the ‘aimless and pointless cruelty and brutal vengeance… the atrocities committed by the military dictatorship’ as ‘like walking into a horror film.’ For two years, from Monday to Friday, their job was to listen to an average of ten to fifteen people a day recounting their experiences of state terrorism. José and María Cristina were still in their early twenties.
Rocío del Trigal Cifuentes was born on 5 August 1976. When the baby was just a month old, her parents received a phone call from the mother of a friend who had been abducted by the secret services that morning. ‘Please, please, run away, leave your home immediately!’
Days later they heard that several other friends had been simultaneously detained on the false charge of planning resistance actions. To protect themselves, and now baby Rocío too, the couple – not yet married – set out separately with no idea where the other was going. Staying at a series of ‘safe houses’, they encountered the kindness of strangers – but continued to hear stories of friends and contemporaries being killed and disappeared. The couple wrestled with the idea of fleeing the country, with José remembering the period in his memoir: ‘Once we made the decision to leave, it hurt. It meant having to say goodbye to one’s own life, the dreams we believed in and fought so hard for. It was a horrible feeling, abandoning our struggle and… most especially the most modest and poorest compañeros and compañeras who trusted us, who joined the socialist struggle because they believed in us.’
On 7 September 1977, almost four years after the coup and having lived ‘underground’ with baby Rocío for more than a year, the young family boarded a Lufthansa flight from Santiago to London Heathrow as political refugees.
Rocío Cifuentes remembers the word refugee from a very young age. ‘My parents saying that we were political refugees, and explaining what that meant – and me just overhearing that. But I didn’t feel that it was a label of shame. The political and social context in Britain was very different to today; the word asylum seeker hadn’t been invented – there wasn’t that stigma that unfortunately does exist today.’
Rocío describes a happy childhood in Swansea, where she was soon joined by a brother, Aleri, born at Mount Pleasant Hospital. She says her life in Wales has been free from discrimination, despite that ‘at the age of five, six, seven, I was very used to having conversations about dictatorships, which made me different I suppose.’ She credits her parents for the way they managed the family’s adjustment to life in Wales in the aftermath of the persecution they had faced in Chile. ‘They were able to give me and my brother a sense of normality. It wasn’t some big tragedy that they would cry about; we had as normal a childhood as we could. We didn’t have a sense of victimhood, and my mum played a big part in that – she would pretend that we were rich, and I had no idea that she was pretending!’
One marker of the family’s difference in Swansea was language, and although Rocío admits there were times during her childhood when she wished her parents weren’t speaking Spanish, and that it remains an annoyance that people still struggle to pronounce her name, she is ‘really grateful that my parents always spoke Spanish to me, and made sure that I could speak and understand Spanish. I think any relationship you have is mediated through a language. You do understand culture and heritage much better through language. I’m learning Welsh now, and you get insights and more of a feel for sentiments, jokes – so many things are untranslatable.’ And as a teenager, being bilingual became something to be proud of. ‘There were some pop songs at the time that had Spanish in them and I could translate them, so it was also something that was quite cool in a way – not very cool, but quite cool!’
It was during Rocío’s teenage years that many of the ‘cousins’ she had grown up with began to return to Chile. Following the introduction of a transitory regime on the anniversary of the coup in 1981, and especially following the plebiscite that ended General Pinochet’s time in power in 1990, many Chileans returned home.
The Cifuentes family were particularly close to the family of Luis Flores. ‘Having fellow Chilean refugees in Swansea as friends was extremely important,’ José recalls. ‘The more I think about it now, the more I value it.’ It was Luis Flores, who had arrived in Swansea alongside José and his family, who later cared for his ailing mother back in Chile, and acted on his compañero’s behalf at her funeral. José’s love and gratitude for his friend, as well as the pain of not being able to be there himself, remain close to the surface today. His voice falters and he looks away.
Rocío remembers: ‘When I was 12 or 13, the Flores family moved to London and then back to Chile.’ Her parents too made active plans to return in the early 1980s, but by contrast with many of their compatriots, José Cifuentes found that employment opportunities were better in Wales than in his homeland. ‘In Chile, even now, jobs are still very much based on who you know,’ he explains. But in Wales, he was able to validate his qualifications in social and community work and gained employment, first with a charity for teenagers and then with the National Children’s Home. Later he studied psychology at Swansea University, became a teacher at Gorseinon College, and then an educational psychologist.
The link between what her father calls his ‘vocation’ and Rocío Cifuentes’ own career and calling seems obvious, and the Children’s Commissioner for Wales finds it impossible to disguise her emotion when thinking about this. ‘When I was very young, I always wanted to fix things,’ she says. ‘I suppose I had this really strong sense of the injustice that my parents and other people had gone through, and wanted to change that. That is what’s driven me. That’s still what I want to do.’
In this still relatively new role, Rocío has responsibility to champion the rights of all children in Wales, and to scrutinise the decisions of public bodies, including Welsh Government, in terms of their impact on children. Before becoming Commissioner, she served for seventeen years as Chief Executive of Ethnic Minorities and Youth Support Team Wales (EYST), an organisation established in Swansea in 2005 that now runs a wide range of services across Wales with hubs in Cardiff, Newport and Wrexham, 70 staff and more than 100 volunteers. In 2022, Rocío received an MBE for her services to the community in Wales.
Rocío links her own experiences as a child refugee and the importance of having a sense of community to her work facilitating children from ethnic minorities to have spaces to interact with and get to know peers from similar as well as different backgrounds. ‘At EYST I was always looking for opportunities to bring people together,’ she says, ‘including white Welsh communities. We did projects which were trying to tackle far-right extremism, which has unfortunately increased in the last few decades in Wales. These were very simple: bringing people from different backgrounds into a space to talk to young white, Welsh people who might otherwise have uniformed… racist views.’ Such projects were academically evaluated in an effort ‘to get the Home Office to see the value of these approaches, especially amid the hysteria post-9/11 about so-called Islamic extremism’.
And although her work as Children’s Commissioner is more strategically focused than the grassroots work she led at EYST, Rocío is clear about the need to connect the world of policy to community and individual experiences. ‘A lot of people who look at policy only at the strategic level are a little bit in denial, or just detached, or not really aware of the practical on-the-ground issues. There has to be a join-up.’ The thread in all of her work has always been ‘helping people, making a difference to people’s lives – it’s just a question of how to do that, and which parts of the problem to try to address. Nothing else makes sense to me.’
It is easy to see where Rocío gets her drive, to help people in practical ways and to bring different communities together, to build a better society. ‘My parents are the best example of this that you could ever wish for, in the way that they have forged such strong relationships with people from all walks of life here in Wales.’
The impact of the Cifuentes family since they arrived in Wales is clear, and even in what José describes as ‘the autumn of my life’, his passion for social justice remains undimmed. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the coup, he organised a sell-out event at the Volcano theatre in Swansea titled ‘They Can Kill The Flowers But Not The Spring’, a reference to a line from a poem by Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. It featured an address from former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose relationship with Chilean socialism dates back to 1969 when Salvador Allende’s left-wing alliance Popular Unity was formed; readings from poet Patrick Jones, whose lyrics are sung by James Dean Bradfield on his 2020 solo album Even in Exile – a tribute to Víctor Jara, the popular Chilean singer-songwriter murdered by Pinochet’s soldiers at the national stadium in Santiago on the day following the coup; and a performance by Dafydd Iwan, including his own ‘Cân Víctor Jara’, originally released in 1979.
For José Cifuentes, the event sought ‘to pay tribute to the victims, and especially to the families of the disappeared, to pay respect also to our leader, Dr Salvador Allende, who had that integrity and that love to give his life, to take that consequence – the only such leader to do so in modern times.’ But it is not only about commemoration; the struggle continues – and so José’s message today is ‘also to teach young people to value democracy. We saw military dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay… we never thought it would happen to us. We were betrayed by the armed forces.’
‘And now democracy is now being threatened not only in Latin America, but in France, in Germany, in Spain, in the UK. The right-wing use the tragedies of asylum seekers and refugees to cover their own failures.’ There is media discourse about the rise of the far-right in many European countries – but leaning across the café table in Three Cliffs Bay, and perceptibly raising his voice for the first time all morning, José issues a warning born from bitter experience. ‘If there were to be a success for the extreme right, you will pay with your life.’
‘So yes, the event seeks to commemorate the victims, to say thank you to Wales for receiving us, but also it is to remind people about the importance of democracy. People who have the generosity to fight for these things need to unite themselves to protect what we have because it can’t be taken for granted.’
For Rocío, the event was also ‘an opportunity to challenge the negative stereotypes that are sadly on the rise again around refugees. I hope it’s portrayed as a positive story of Welsh solidarity over fifty years – this is a message of hope that continues to inspire people.’ Her father adds: ‘I hope there’s just one pair of ears that will put it in their own lives: that basic compassion that every human being should have.’ His voice softens: ‘You just know when you can do some good. And the choice is yours. You can do it, you can open your heart... but you will not realise the joy and the power that you have brought knowing you have done the decent thing.’
As José’s words cross the café table in Three Cliffs Bay, they transport us half a century and thousands of miles across the sea, to a fateful morning in a presidential palace with the forces of darkness circling, and another calm voice speaking with an air of certainty: ‘the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shrivelled forever… Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.’
Rocío Cifuentes is Children’s Commissioner for Wales, but spoke to Cwlwm in a personal capacity. Jose Cifuentes continues to campaign for social justice, and will be presenting ‘The Dirty War on the NHS’, a film by John Pilger, at Volcano theatre, Swansea, on February 7.
An incredible story and one that illustrates the resilience of those who seek refuge in Wales and the multi various ways in which we all benefit from their contributions to enriching Welsh life.