They took to the streets to resist military dictatorship (1973-1990) and protest against the pursuit And disappearance children, brothers or colleagues, unaware that they are writing new stage in the history of Chilean feminism, which this Wednesday will once again gain mass in a mass march.

Almost 50 years after the coup led by Augusto Pinochetfour women who raised their voices when politics and activism were reserved for men only reflect on those dark years with EFE.

ALICIA LIRA: “WE WERE INVISIBLE”

Alice Lyrawas born in 1948type in Museum of Memory and Human Rights Santiago dedicated to more than 3200 victims left by the regime as if it were their home. This is one of activists recognized in the country, and there is no one in the museum who does not know him.

Lira has been President since 2009 Association of Relatives of the Politically Executed (ANEP)but her activism began much earlier, when in 1986 the regime took away her partner, whom she still affectionately calls “my black.”

In the hall of the museum, which has an exhibition on feminism during the regime, Lyra assures that it was them. first in going out on the streets because the crimes “were mostly committed against men”.

He believes that the female resistance and also justifies those who in the background “feed orphans” in the common cauldrons of the most vulnerable segments of the population: “They were an example of unity, love and struggle,” he says.

FANNY POLLAROLO: “WE ARE BIGGER!”

At the intersection of the main avenue of Santiago, providence avenueand street Carlos Antunes, hundreds of women who on October 30, 1985 demonstrated under the slogan “No more, because we are more!” They were severely suppressed.

The moment the police van drove in, throwing out poisonous water, Fanny Pollarolo (1935) recalls that those women shouted: “We do not have such weapons as you have, but there are more of us!”.

March, which over the years will become a milestone for Chilean feminism because she managed to attract many unorganized women who had never been on display before, she was called “women for life“An organization created two years earlier and in which all the ideologies that oppose the regime fit in, from the communists to the Christian Democrats.

“It was a cross movement that did not want to reproduce male practices. Initially, Women for Life was born as a critique of men’s politics, their inability to unite against the dictatorship,” she points out.

Former communist militant and today vice president Socialist Party, says they found it hard to identify as feminists at first, but they “took over the term” and absorbed new currents when their comrades who went into exile in Europe returned to Chile. “The left in those years left the issue of women aside,” she laments.

VICKY QUEVEDO: “DEMOCRACY IN THE COUNTRY AND HOME”

On a silver chain around my neck Vicki Quevedo (1955) keeps the silver female symbol very carefully: she inherited it from the sociologist Juliet Kirkwood (1937-1985), referent Chilean feminist movement 80s and forerunner of gender studies in the country.

Caressing the pendant, she remembers the beginning Women’s House La Morada in 1983, “the first publicly identified herself as a feminist” at a time when not all women’s organizations dared to do so, she says.

“We talked about the dictatorship, which also lived in the house, hence the motto “Democracy in the country and at home”: What happened to relationships within the house? Who made the decisions? he asks rhetorically.

Quevedo, who began her militant feminist activism upon her return from exile in Sweden, acknowledges a certain division with activists associated with parties or unions: “For feminists, democracy was not magic that, after the fall of a dictator, would eliminate all discrimination.”

Today she watches with pleasure how young “They realized that it didn’t start with them.“, the women of her generation were also somewhat clear “thanks to Kirkwood and her look”: “There were always others behind.”

BEATRICE BETASIEW: “HEALING TORTURE”

Beatrice Batashevborn in 1954, meticulously sweeps a memorial to women who “resisted and survived” political sexual violence committed during the dictatorship, installed at 3037 Iran Street, in front of a house known as Venda Sexy, for being used as a detention and torture center during the regime.

“This house was special because of the repressive strategies that were used against women and dissidents,” she says.

More 80 male and female prisonersMost of them were members of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), an organization of radical leftists that in those days defended the armed struggle that took place there.

Batashev arrived one night in 1974. On the subway he raped and tortured before sunrise. He feminismwas, in her words, “part of the process of recovery and healing”, a feminism she absorbed from her peers who helped her understand that what happened had “nothing to do with her, but with being a woman”.

Critical of more institutional feminism, she believes that “victimization sells” and that “the importance of women in the fight against dictatorship is never discussed” in the most literal sense: “We put our bodies and lives into it, but this part of history has been erased.”

(EFE)