"I had only few weapons in my hands, it was just before I left for Czechoslovakia. At that time it was about organizing demonstrations, secret meetings in groups, printing illegal leaflets and distributing them, doing graffiti around the city against the government, organizing protests in our natural environments. Back then it was a school, a university. Those demonstrations escalated into violence, which we also had to apply. Because when the cops came to get us, they went after us with a baton or tear gas... We had rocks, we had molotovs, different things we learned to use. Violence, in terms of guns... That whole time was about molotovs. That was our main weapon at the rallies. Every now and then we could make a grenade. But when you got into making these things, it got tough, because the cops could accept a few molotovs falling on them. They'd shoot us with rubber bullets or shotguns. It hurt like hell when it hit us - and it hit us every time. But it didn't kill us. We survived and moved on. If someone got caught, and unfortunately that's what happened often, they got beaten up by five, six people for five, six minutes. Believe me, it's quite an unpleasant experience because they did it with vigour. One had to learn to run, they had all the means to suppress demonstrations and our weapons were ridiculous. Every now and then I got to the tasks that more mature people did. I was still nineteen, twenty. You could help by hiding some weapons, moving them from place to place. Revolvers, some machine guns, whatever you could sneak into the country. It would be used later. It was great to get involved in some way. But the actual acts were done by people who had experienced training outside of Chile, like in camps in Cuba, where they really learned something and spent a year or two there. But these were people who were thirty, thirty-five years old. That was a different generation. That was a generation of young people who had experienced a coup as 18-year-olds, or they were the children of the disappeared. I was only eight at the time, I got into it later."
"I remember when I first got my hands on the Communist Manifesto. I thought, wow, communism, it must be a beautiful society, everybody has everything. And here's a manifesto. As a young person, you don't know what's behind it, you don't put it in historical context. At that time I had no idea about the Eastern Bloc. As you get more and more involved, it starts to get to you, and you still see it as positive. You want to see it that way. I would say that the Pinochet regime, and every other fascist regime, tries to make people unaware of things. To know as little as possible and just work. On the other hand - all the freedom was only economic. You could do as much business as you wanted. But there were no laws to protect the workers, the population. To sum up some rights. There was no such thing. It was a wild time, and those who had the proper education in that model prospered. That model started in Chile. They got incredibly rich off of it. When you're forbidden to have collective bargaining, unions, public health care, and there is thirty percent unemployment, people can be exploited and they find no support. In a society like that, it's pretty hard not to be against it and not want it to end. Those who don't get involved, even though they know and perceive it, I don't find any moral values there. Fortunately, in my family and at school, those values were established with me. We wanted to change that."
"When you spend time with these people, you become friends. You go out for a beer with them and things like that. They start ribbing you about why you're a communist and why you shouldn't be a communist. They start telling you a lot of information that you're trying to take in. Confronting how you thought it was supposed to be here. And all of a sudden it all looms up in front of you like a giant question mark. Why can't they travel? And why is it necessary to have a visa out and a visa in? And suddenly you start getting it. Suddenly you realize that it is not exactly what you imagine as a democratic society where everybody has a job and everybody has a place to sleep. These are the kind of shortcuts we have to get to an ideology. When an ideology serves you that you will have all your basic needs taken care of, it's very appealing. And when you're also young and living under a fascist dictatorship, it's a great idea. But suddenly you see it and you see reality differently. You think, aha, life is not just about having food to eat, even if it's crappy food, and having a place to sleep, even if it's terrible place. And that the people are grey, that everybody's sad, nobody's smiling. You start to dig and find out more and suddenly you realize that it's a big concentration camp. The whole nation is under control of some bunch of people who control everyone's life."
"I saw the snow for the first time in my life. It was November, a special moment for me. I arrived in the evening, around five or, six o'clock, and there was snow everywhere. I saw a lot of people with those high winter hats. I felt like I was in Russia. For me it was an amazing feeling. It was like getting to paradise for me. As silly as that sounds. I believed I was in a socialist society, where everyone had everything. I thought to myself, 'Now I'm going to see the kind of life that I wanted for Chile.' The first feeling was to see everything positively. I was set to evaluate everything as a plus. Plus, when you come from a third world country, any other world seems better. The very first problem is confusion. You don't really have anything to compare it to objectively. And then there's the exoticism. You don't understand anything. The language is impossible to grasp. I spoke decent French and little English. And Spanish, of course. But it wasn't of much help. I wasn't able to communicate. I perceived everything as being exotic. I was amazed by this white stuff that covered everything. In Chile, there is snow only in the Andes. And the cold winter. There were proper winters back then in Czechoslovakia. Plus, I was very poorly dressed. I come from a city where the lowest temperature in winter is plus 16°C, in Santiago the temperature sometimes dropped to zero. And in Prague it was suddenly minus five, minus eight. Those were the first moments. And then two other things surprised me. It was the lack of maintenance of the city, how the city, which was supposed to be historic, old, was decaying. I didn't understand that. There were scaffoldings everywhere, sometimes wooden ones. I thought, this looked like it'd been there for a hundred years. I didn't understand why it was so dilapidated. And then a certain aesthetic - the signs on the shops, the shop fronts, which seemed very dated, like time had stopped. On the other hand, we got money. For the first time in my life, someone said to me: 'Here's 400 crowns, buy a coat, buy something to wear. Here's more money for the rest of the month. You will be getting it regularly in Poděbrady, you'll have food.' I thought to myself, 'This is amazing, I'm going to study, and I'm going to get money for it!"
"The surveillance, that's a common practice that all repressive bodies do. It's an interesting game. Sometimes they follow you just to let you know you're being followed. That way you know you're being watched and you get scared. It's actually a threat. If you're playing a role in an organization and you're working on something and you're being followed - quite often you know you're being followed, and there's not only the followed person and the follower, but there's another one watching over everything. They know that you know how to identify them. There are different tricks to find out if you're being followed. That's part of the course too: how to walk down the street, where to sit on the bus, how often to stop opposite a shop window to use it as a mirror. To observe exactly who is on the street at that moment. And a whole bunch of other things. There are many different types of the surveillances."
"One of the first things you have to do when underground is to take conspiracy courses. You have to learn how to survive. It's kind of secret schools. In those secret schools, they teach you how to walk around the town, how to know if you're being followed. What you should and shouldn't do if you're being followed. How to disconnect from the other comrades around you so you don't put them in danger. There's a whole bunch of things you have to learn in order to function as an illegal. These groups are outlawed and if they catch you, they can arrest you and search further. You have to learn how to behave. There's a whole set of rules to protect yourself and others. Then there are courses on basic weapon skills. You come to a course that lasts 3-4 hours, you hide in a house, there are 5-6 people and you are locked in for 48 hours. There are some safety precautions to be able to get a course on what a gun looks like, how to load it, how it works. Then you go somewhere in the country. Luckily Chile still has huge unpopulated areas where you can shoot and no one hears it. Of course someone has to set it up, you go there and learn how to aim and shoot. When you compare that to the professional soldiers you're fighting, it's very naive. But you take small trainings like that."
Jorge Zúñiga Pavlov was born on 30 September 1965 in La Serena, Chile. When he was eight years old, a military coup took place in Chile and General Pinochet’s military junta took power. As he grew up, he believed in leftist ideas, which he saw as the antithesis of the military dictatorship and the remedy for the dramatic social injustice that prevailed in Chile at that time. From 1983 he studied in Santiago de Chile, first at the Faculty of Architecture, then a year later at the Faculty of Education. He took part in street protests and from 1985 became involved in communist youth activities. He became an increasingly active opponent of the regime, which eventually led to his expulsion from the faculty. In 1988, the Communist Party of Chile arranged a scholarship for him to study in Prague. From November 1988, he lived in a centre for foreign students in Poděbrady, where he learned Czech, and in the autumn of 1989 he began studying archaeology at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. During the year he spent in totalitarian Czechoslovakia, he gradually gained a different view of communist ideology, understood that Czechoslovakia was also an unfree country under communist rule, and in November 1989 he participated in the student strike (though he was limited by the language barrier). In the months that followed, he then helped Cuban students who did not want to obey their government’s orders to return to Cuba. In the 1990s, he left the study of archaeology, took up literature, and published several books. In Prague, he runs the restaurant La Casa Blů.
