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On October 10th, 1973, he was sitting in an organic chemistry class at the university, when a group of civilians entered, shouting his name. "I stood up, I answered, that's me, and I thought to myself, my turn's come,".... he says.
From the book "After the First Death: A Journey Through Chile Time Mind",
by Lake Sagaris, Somerville House, Toronto, 1996.
For ten weeks a team of thirty torturers routinely questioned Fernando and hundreds of others held in local regiments. The first time he was tortured was the worst. He recalls: "It was so brutal because it was so unexpected."
"They took me from my cell around midnight. It was very cold, I was blindfolded, and they took me to Catalina Bay. All the way there, they threatened me with what they were going to do and when we arrive, they make me take off my clothes and start to beat me, without asking any questions. I think there are five, six. They make me run a lot. They throw me on the sand. I'm blindfolded. Naked. They make me run into the water, without my knowing it. They pull me shivering from the water. They throw me beside the fire, which burns. They make me put on wet clothes. They make me take them off. They make me run, while I run, they shoot. They put me in a box and ask about weapons. When I know nothing, they start all over again.
"Once I couldn't walk, they had to pull me out, because I'd been so beaten and was so cold. They started with electrical torture. I realized they were drunk."
Magda Ruiz, who was seventeen at the time of her 1973 arrest, speaks of being tortured on the Los Robles ranch belonging to the Menéndez Behetys, a branch of the family that donated the museum to the town, as does Ricardo Andrade, a student leader at the time of the coup. "We were staked out, that is tied down with some stakes like crosses. Beside me they were raping two companions, whose names I won't mention."
They made Marcos Barticevich sit naked on a broom handle, like "Caupolican" (a Mapuche chief who died slowly as the stake passed all the way through his body). Jorge Arriagada was unconscious for three days and blue from the blows. "We improvised some bottles to feed him milk and keep him alive. They'd broken his jaw, but wouldn't allow him to be taken to hospital."
(...)
Fernando remembers reaching Dawson Island in one of the last "shipments" of prisoners. "I knew my father and brother were prisoners but I hadn't seen them. They had managed to position themselves by the barbed wire and I saw them. It was a very special moment."
Life on the island settled into a routine of sorts, that started with exercise and cleanup in the morning, followed by a light breakfast and hours of hard labour in the freezing cold, without proper clothes or tools. The food made him so sick that he eventually ended up in the hospital.
"I was tortured for singing a song by Victor Jara on Christmas Eve," he says. The island produced "an enormous feeling of isolation, of intense cold, wind, few sunny days. It was a prison, surrounded by water, with absolutely no escape. One of the great things was to be allowed to carve the stones: it relieved the stress and for some brought in some income." Until one day an officer decided that the implements used were dangerous weapons and carving was banned.
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