Round up: Chilean soldier stands guard over political prisoners held in Santiago's National Stadium after the coup Image:© Bettman/CORBIS

In the time of the Spanish colonials, La Moneda ("The Coin"), as it is commonly called, served as the treasury. That it has come to house the offices of the executive branch is, perhaps now more than ever, symbolic of the national character. Present-day Chile is a hypercapitalist state, welcoming foreign investment and encouraging corporate enterprise to an extent unmatched by other capitalist states in Latin America. During the 1990s, its economy grew faster than any other on the continent, helping to halve poverty and contributing to the country's image abroad as a model of steady growth, an island of economic calm among neighbors--Argentina, Boliva, and Peru--chronically mired in debt and social unrest.

Today, Santiago, Chile's capital, is by many measures South America's most modern city. Its subway is safe and clean. Its skyscrapers crowd the horizon. Progress is, literally, in the air: The exhaust of imported cars and churning factories is so thick that the Andes surrounding the city can seldom be seen from within it. Such are the fruits of free-market reforms, which Chile's president, Ricardo Lagos A.M. '63, Ph.D. '66, Hon. '05 has worked to deepen, further opening the economy to global trade. During his six years in office, he has signed free-trade agreements with Europe, Canada, South Korea, and, most recently, the United States.

But, says Dorfman, modernization has come at a price. Like other survivors of the dictatorship, he deplored the government's long silence on the crimes of the dictatorship following the restoration of democracy, and warned leaders of the perils of a "collective forgetting." In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, the Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzman, who was detained for weeks after the coup in the national stadium, echoed that sentiment. Discussing his commitment to telling stories--among them, his epic film, The Battle of Chile--that many in his audience prefer not to hear, he said, "What shocks me is the lack of space for memory in Latin America. There is no great literature on repression. Movie directors turn away from the topic. Most artists feel it is a tired theme. They want to move on.... In Chile, great writers have not spoken out." He added, "With the exception of Ariel Dorfman."

Now, standing inside La Moneda, Dorfman is speaking out again. On either side of him are paintings based on photographs taken before and after the coup. One depicts a newly elected Allende giving his inauguration speech from the palace balcony in 1970. The other shows what remained of that balcony after the coup: The stone exterior is pockmarked with bullet holes; the iron gate is charred and twisted. And at the center of the picture, framed by a bombed-out doorway, is a black emptiness--"the black hole of memory," Dorfman calls it.

"It's what was opened on that day," he says. "It's the darkness that reigned. It's everything that happened inside that darkness--in the cellars, in the attics, in the torture chambers--that you can't see. And the idea is that when you have democracy back, then that hole disappears. But that's not entirely true. It remains part of the memories and fears of people. It's not an aberration. It's not just a parenthesis. You can't make believe it hasn't happened."

Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman's childhood was framed by flight from political persecution. He was born in 1942 in Buenos Aires, where his parents, Eastern European Jews, had gone after fleeing the Germans. The following year, his father, Adolfo, a history professor at the Universidad de la Plata, was threatened with a trial and deportation after sending a letter protesting the new military regime's takeover of the university. Adolfo reacted quickly, moving his wife and young son to New York, where he accepted a post as an economist at the United Nations. But a decade later, the U.N. would buckle under McCarthyism, firing suspected Communists. Though Adolfo had left the party many years before, he was forced out.

In 1954, Adolfo Dorfman took a post in Santiago, and the family was off again. But by then Ariel was every bit the American kid, obsessed with hot dogs and candy bars, Joe Dimaggio and Donald Duck. He'd even changed his name, replacing "Vlady"--his father had named him after Vladimir Lenin--with the more American-sounding Edward, which he'd picked up in Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, one of his favorite stories. Uprooted, torn from his friends and his baseball and, worst of all, his language, Dorfman found himself adrift in Santiago. His only refuge was a diary, a gift from his father, in which he'd begun to discover the power of literature, his "ultimate defense," he once called it, "the inner kingdom I could control."

"Ariel was always writing stories. He dreamed of being a writer," recalls Queno Ahumada, Dorfman's oldest friend in Chile, a former classmate, and now a press analyst in the Ministry of the Interior. "My first impression was of an over-energized kid who had an opinion on everything," he says. "He was so outspoken and commanding, I felt at first he was difficult to get along with. But at the same time, he was very human, very sensitive, very affectionate with everybody. I admired that."

By the time he finished high school, that quality of humanism had come to characterize Dorfman's political views as well--those of an ardent Allendista. It wasn't just that Dorfman believed in Salvador Allende's socialist program, which called for nationalization of the copper, nitrate, carbon, and iron mines; expropriation of the main industries and banks; and division of the large haciendas among the peasants who worked them. Dorfman was ready, so he thought, to devote his life to it. Even to die for it.

Soon, Edward became "Ariel." The middle name he'd always considered a bit too effeminate for a young man now suited his new identity. Ariel, he discovered, had been the title of an essay by the Uruguayan writer and philosopher JosÈ Enrique RodÛ in 1900. Arguably one of the most influential pieces of literature in the continent's history and certainly the most discussed treatise on hemispheric relations, RodÛ's essay--an allegory pitting Ariel, the lover of truth and beauty, against Caliban, the evil spirit of materialism--was the first to offer an explanation of how, only a short time after the wars of independence against Spanish colonial rule, Latin America had become so completely dependent upon, and dominated by, the United States.

That theme would continue to shape Dorfman's thinking and, later, his prose. As an undergraduate at the University of Chile, he'd become so involved with local politics that he was elected president of the Independent Allendista Students. He grew a revolutionary's beard. He marched in protest, inhaled his share of tear gas, and took a few nightsticks to the ribs. On one occasion, while protesting the murder by police of two high-school students, he was shot. The wound was minor--a light peppering of buckshot to the shins. But it was one more piece of evidence to Dorfman's compaÒeros that he did, in fact, belong, that, despite his Argentinian roots and his American upbringing, at the core of this bilingual hybrid was a genuine Chileno.

Chile's National Stadium is a mustard-yellow cylinder with pea-green bleachers and a magnificent view, on a clear day, of the Andean Cordillera. We're here with Manuel Joffre, a friend and former colleague of Dorfman at the university.

Back in 1973 when trouble seemed imminent, Joffre and Dorfman had agreed to meet, in the case of an emergency, at the university. Dorfman headed there only after deciding against going to the palace. "You were supposed to come to the place that you worked and defend that place," Dorfman says. But when they arrived, the secretary-general of the faculty told them to go. "He said, 'If we stay here, they'll massacre us. So all of you should leave. Right away.' So we decided to go to Manuel's house. It was secure. Nobody knew he was a leftwing militant. And he didn't have any children."

On the way there, Dorfman says, they stopped by the stadium, which the military would soon convert into a holding cell and torture chamber. "That was the last time we saw it in its innocence," Dorfman says. "Manuel had run here, and I had thrown the bal·."

"And we had come here to see [Pablo] Neruda, remember?" says Joffre.