In mid-November 1973, two months after the Chilean military coup, I was transferred, along with 300 other prisoners, to Chacabuco, a former abandoned saltpeter town surrounded by electrified barbed wire and minefields in the middle of the Atacama Desert. I was placed in one of the adobe houses in pavilion 23.
My belongings consisted of the clothes I was wearing, three blankets, a cup, a jug, and a spoon. My twenty-square-meter room was shared with five other inmates.
The floor was dirt and there were two wooden bunk beds, three stories each. The window, without glass, was covered by a grille. On the lists, I was listed as prisoner number 32.
