Courageous women & insightful essay: Elizabeth Subercaseaux, telling it like it is.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Chilean journalist - Interview

Elizabeth Subercaseaux: Telling It Like It Is

During the seventies and eighties Chilean journalists like Elizabeth Subercaseaux played a major role in mobilizing public opinion against the Pinochet dictatorship. In the following years, Subercaseaux came to be known not only as a tough, courageous reporter, but also as a novelist and short story writer. She began her career writing for a children's magazine called Peque, of which she was the editor, and afterward collaborated on Cosas end Aspi. Now based in the United States (she has lived in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, with her family for the past eight years), she currently writes for the Miami-based Vanidades Continental, Caras (published in Chile), and Cuadernos Cervantes (published in Madrid).

Besides several books of reportage, she has published a short story collection and two novels, El canto de la raiz lejana [Song of the Distant Root] (1988) and El general azul [The Blue General] (1992). Her most successful books have been those in which she takes a humorous, but penetrating look at the problems of modern women, El comenzon de ser mujer [Itching to Be a Woman] (1994), Las diez cosas que una mujer en Chile no debe tracer jamas [Ten Things a Woman in Chile Should Never Do] (1995), and Matrimonio a la chilena [Marriage, Chilean Style]. Her forthcoming Como sobrevivir al machismo [How to Survive Machismo] will be published by Alfaguara in the spring.

For Subercaseaux, practicing journalism during the military dictatorship was one of the most important challenges of her professional life. Recalling those days she says: "Censorship was brutal at that time in Chile. Fear permeated every aspect of your life." Memories of that period continue to torment her: "I remember when a couple of thugs from the dictatorship turned up in my own home, one Sunday evening. When I went to open the door they beat me brutally and then ran away.... I remember ... and it gives me the shivers . . . when we found out that the body of Jose Manuel Parada had been found, his throat slit, in an open field near Pudahuel. I remember that we felt death inside us all the time. I remember that constant shadow of sadness in the eyes of my friend Patricia Verdugo, whose father was found floating in the Mapocho River. I remember the helplessness, the despair, and the sorrow of my friend Odette Magnet every time it was (and is) the anniversary of her sister's disappearance. I remember the livid faces and the eyes filled with...