Revolutionary Dreams: From Chile to Wales by Jose Cifuentes (Hafan Books, £7)

IN THE 1960s and early 1970s a generation of Chileans embarked on a radical attempt to build a fairer and more equal socialist society.

At the time Jose Cifuentes, a middle-class sociology student in the city of Talca and involved in the Catholic students’ movement was, he says, naive, apolitical, Catholic and conservative with a small “c.”

Guided by a French priest, he and some of his friends went to live and work in a shantytown neighbourhood where they discovered the reality of life among Chile’s 600,000 poor families.

Cifuentes concluded that studying was less important than fighting for social change. In that period, support for Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Party was gathering momentum and in September 1970 he was elected president of Chile.

Cifuentes and his partner Maria Cristina realised that if they were going to secure a better future for the poor they had to support Allende’s government. They were becoming politicised.

But the radical changes to improve the lives of the poor, particularly the agrarian reform and nationalisation of the country’s copper mining industry, threatened the economic interests of Chile’s ruling elite and the US.

Even before Allende’s election the Chilean right wing, with the full support of Richard Nixon’s US government and the CIA, were planning to get rid of him. Aided by the latter, the Chilean economy was soon in chaos.

Then, on September 11, 1973, Allende was murdered and the military junta of General Augusto Pinochet, one of the most brutal in the history of Latin America, assumed control and instigated decades of violations of human rights, torture and imprisonment.

The numbers are staggering — 38,000 victims of human rights abuses, 28,000 tortured, 2,269 executed and 1,248 classed as “disappeared.” Around 200,000 fled or were sent into exile.

Cifuentes had to run for his life after the Pinochet coup and his harrowing story recounts with graphic detail his experiences in hiding, prison, torture and working secretly for the Committee for Peace and the Vicarage of Solidarity, the only organisations in Chile to document the human rights abuses.

Thanks to the World University Service and the UN High Commission for Refugees, Cifuentes and his wife and baby daughter arrived in Swansea in September 1977 along with over 30 other families and the book is also an account of their lives there ever since.

It has a fascinating introduction by historian Brian Davies on Swansea’s copper-smelting past — an ironic connection with Chile given what later happened — and there are contributions by ex-Unison Cymru officer Paul Elliott on Swansea’s Chilean community and Rocio del Trigal Cifuentes on growing up in Wales at a time where, unlike today, there was no stigma to being a refugee.

Gwyn Griffiths