We lost eyes, we were persecuted, assassinated, tortured… raped. There are still young people imprisoned in dark jails without charges and we continue to demand their freedom. Once again, as so many times before. The underground waters of Chile shudder for this land full of dead and hidden events that power hides. The immense flag shrieks in front of the Mint as a testimony of perverse complicities.

In that October, installed in the middle of the spring of 2019, we jumped over so many turnstiles. We pushed all the boundaries of what was possible and what lay hidden and concealed became a volcano that spat fire and continues to reveal the jealously guarded dirt. The children installed that it was not 30 pesos but 30 years and that it was not depression but capitalism. Suddenly we rediscovered a lost hope that another world was possible. We became people again and the houses, the jobs, the streets were filled with conversations and Chile became the protagonist of our reflections. For a while we received the lemons, the bicarbonate, the water with laurel in the streets, we took each other by hand, and we talked on the buses about what was happening to all of us.

The communes of the country opened up to meetings without flags where we exchanged marraquetas, ideas, sopaipillas, paths to reach the wild territory of dignity. We met neighbours who had never greeted each other and that face you saw at the bus stop had yearnings, wounds, fears and we were throwing out what we didn’t even know we had inside. The people, accompanied by the artists, took over the public space with music, theatre, dance, poetry… as before… as in a past time that seemed forgotten. Suddenly everything made sense again because there was a WE in the making, a WE waiting for us, an indispensable WE in the making with all its possible and impossible dark lights.

We lost eyes, we were persecuted, assassinated, tortured… raped. There are still young people imprisoned in dark jails without charge and we continue to demand their freedom. Once again, as so many times before. The underground waters of Chile shudder for this land full of dead and hidden events that power hides. The immense flag shrieks in front of the Mint as a testimony of perverse complicities. If one passes by at night, just before dawn breaks, from its tricolour folds comes the smell of the bombs that have shattered our lives yesterday and today.

At the end of a convulsive and feverish 2021, we can say with certainty that it will still be October because there is so much to heal, for so long, from the beginning and the genesis of what we are …. Because the spring that October hides has not yet arrived. Because caravels continue to advance towards our territories, different from those that arrived on our shores to take everything we had on 12 October. Today they have new sails, new figureheads, but those that arrive continue to look at us as savage barbarians to be conquered and used, and with whom they are engaged in a war that has left many behind.

For all this, I want to commemorate that October 2019, that October of ours that burst forth like an explosive star that filled our world with southern crosses, with three marias, with big bears and rider’s half man and half horse; that October of Alamedas with a strong wind. Those months opened, once again, all hope that love is possible here, between the mountains and the sea, between the desert and the glaciers. Until dignity becomes custom, until dignity becomes culture. If only one, if only one feels this way, this will be so, and I cling to the raft, shipwrecked in agony with deep nostalgia for a future and for the light from which we come and to which we are going.

*Malucha Pinto is an actress, writer and currently a member of the Chilean Constitutional Convention.