chile88

I was invited to do the voiceover for two or three things, very precise spots. And the message was very clear, right? “No hate. No fear. No violence. Vote NO.” And that day I recorded and came home and commented to my wife: “Do you know what happened to me today? I took the boot off of my head, the military boot off my head.” I lost my fear. So, for me the triumph is personal, intimate. So when the NO triumph came, of course I was happy, but I had felt the triumph before.

My dad was military. So I lived in a place where only soldiers lived […]. I experienced the process of the plebiscite in a transition from leaving that place and going to a place that was for civilians. In other words, to leave this neighborhood, from this place where only soldiers lived to a place where ordinary people lived.

I was a close friend of General Pinochet’s youngest son at that time […]. He voted for the YES, but with reluctance, because he thought that the best thing that could happen was for the NO to win, since the country was in a kind of pressure cooker and needed to free itself a bit. And I was a little more to the right, I wanted the YES to win anyway. But I realized, as time passed, that the best thing that could have happened was that the NO won.

He handed my passport to the cabin manager and told her: “You have to keep this passport until the plane has closed the doors and is about to take off” […]. Then people started to come up and everyone looked at me as if I were a deportee, a criminal, or I don’t know what. But I didn’t care too much.

What I can say is that effectively, despite the fear and despite the threat of being exposed as an opposition actor in a context of dictatorship, community relations in small towns, like Pichilemu, had other mediations. It had another meaning. Because, effectively, there was polarization. It was possible to recognize in a small town who was in favor of the YES and who was in favor of the NO, but it is also true that the experience of life in the province somehow attenuated the ideological divisions.

The next day when we went out to celebrate, people hugged the police. And I said, now, here we win. This is the real win. Because the people – who had been repressed and who looked at the carabineros as the closest representatives of this omnipotent power – instead of making fun of them, instead of attacking them, embraced them, that is the true triumph of that campaign.