Their existence is more challenging both physically and financially until Carmen’s mother decides that it is too dangerous for her teenage daughters and forces them return to Canada.
The family later moves to post-Malvinas Argentina where Bob and her mother clear paths through the Andes into Chile. At the same time, the U.S.-backed Operation Condor had been set up by right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil employing secret service agents to eradicate socialist operatives such as Carmen’s mother and partner. La Paz is where the young Carmen comes of age, listening to pop music and stealing kisses from boys, but always with a watchful eye on the potentially explosive streets of dictatorship-run Bolivia. To her Bolivian classmates, Carmen is a Canadian pre-teen, while at home she lives by socialist values instilled by her underground revolutionary mother. This is where Carmen’s double life begins.
Although Carmen is aware of the activities that are going on in her home, nothing is explained to her or her sister in explicit terms.
Her mother’s partner, Bob Everton, a Canadian internationalist who had been taken prisoner and tortured by the Pinochet regime in 1973, later joined them.Ĭarmen’s mother and Everton begin their undercover work in Lima, Peru, and gradually make their way through the Peruvian highlands to La Paz, Bolivia, where the family sets up a safe house for resistance members. In 1979, when Carmen was 11, her mother took her and her younger sister back to South America to work in the resistance movement helping exiled dissidents return to Chile through its bordering countries. While Carmen’s father chose another life in Canada, her mother was determined to fight on. The Aguirres were forced to flee their native Chile and live in exile in Vancouver. These are some of the personal experiences that Carmen Aguirre describes in Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter.Īguirre’s parents were leftwing activists who were blacklisted after General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973. Or what about doing a little late afternoon grocery shopping only to come face to face with an armed secret service agent and having to run for your life.
How many left-leaning young women would have given up their quiet, comfortable pre-teen and teen years in North America to live as the daughter of a revolutionary? Imagine attending a middle school where you rub elbows with the children of rightwing political leaders, the very people your parents are working against. In my next post, I will be posting an interview with the author. Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
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