Patriots

Dominga looked out of the windows at the city, she could see the people, tiny, walking from one place to another, in a hurry, with bags and coats, cars of different colours moving and stopping, moving and stopping. If she looked up, there were the roofs of the buildings and, in the background, the Arc de Triomphe commemorating the eleventh of September. Work had begun the previous year, it was already finished, but Pinochet had not yet inaugurated it. Sixty metres high and thirty metres deep, I had heard on the radio that it was bigger than the one in Paris, the Chilean flag was flying on it, the same one I had seen after Hernández had been assassinated.

Santiago de Chile, in the mid-1990s. Pinochet has been in power for more than two decades using all the means at his disposal. After the victory of the YES vote in the 1988 plebiscite, the dictatorship has strengthened its grip on power and, with the support of its secret police, the SICH, it maintains control at all costs. The death of a prominent artist unveils a dark plot: a briefcase containing key information that could decide the fate of the country has disappeared. A plot of death and suspicion involves a series of characters whose lives intertwine: Ivana, a young guerrilla woman who belongs to the Popular Justice Command; Alonso, a detective from the Investigative Police; Martin Stein, commander of the SICH; and Alejandra, a woman who gets caught in the crossfire.

Patriots is an entertaining thriller full of action and suspense with references to the Chilean political situation in the background. In a dark society, full of de facto powers, dark mafias and a guerrilla fighting for freedom, a plot full of intrigue and action, love and tragedy emerges.

Key points

• An agile novel, with multiple plots and twists for a cross-cutting audience.
• Narrative structure similar to the scripts of audiovisual series: each chapter reveals something new and leaves  expectation for the next.
• A uchronia that functions as an indirect mirror of our society and our times.