On October 10, 1973, he was at an organic chemistry class at the University when a group men dressed as civilians entered the room shouting his name. “I stood up and said ‘Here I am,” and I thought to myself, “Now my time has come.”

For ten weeks a group of some 30 torturers constantly interrogated Fernando and another 100 people that had been arrested and held in local Army regiments. The first time he was tortured was the worst. He remembers: “I was so brutal because I wasn’t expecting it.”

“They took me from my cell around midnight. It was very cold and I had blinds on my eyes and was taken to Bahía Catalina. During the ride there they kept threatening me about what they were going to do to me. Once there, they made me take off my clothes and began hitting me without even asking me a question. I think there were five or six of them. The made me run a lot. They threw me to the sand. I am still blindfolded. I am naked. They make me run towards the water without warning me. They take me shivering from the water. They push me towards a fire and I am burned. I am made to put on wet clothes, then ordered to take the clothes off. They make me run and then shoot into the air as I am running. They put me in a cage and ask me about weapons. When I say I don’t understand what they are saying, they start the process all over again.”

“They had to take me out because I was so beat up and so cold I couldn’t walk any more. Then they began the torture with electricity. I realized they were all drunk.”

Magda Ruiz, who was 17 years old when arrested in 1973, tells how she was tortured at the Fundo Los Robles, owned by the Menéndez Behetys, a part of the family that would donate a museum to the town. The same happened to Ricardo Andrade, a student leader at the time of the coup.
“We were all tied up, or better said, tied on to crosses. At one side they were raping two friends, whose names I won’t mention.”

They made Marcos Barticevich sit on a broom handle, like "Caupolicán" (the Mapuche leader who died a slow death when a stake was pushed through his body). Jorge Arriagada was unconscious for three days and all black and blue because of the mistreatment. “We improvised with some bottles, to give him milk and keep him alive. They had broken his
jaw, but wouldn’t let us take him to a hospital.”

(...)

Fernando remembers arriving to Dawson Island in one of the last shipments of prisoners. “I knew my father and brother were among the prisoners, but I hadn’t seen them. They arranged to be standing near a barbed wire fence and I saw them. It was a very special moment.”

With time a certain routine was established on the Island, beginning with exercises and personal hygiene in the morning, followed by a light breakfast and hours forced work in the extremely cold weather; without good clothing and appropriate tools. The food was so bad that he ended up in the hospital.

"I was tortured for singing a Victor Jara song on Christmas Eve,”he says. The Island produced “a tremendous sensation of isloation, of intense cold, wind, and so few days with sunshine. It was a jailed fenced by water, without any possibility of escape. One positive thing is that you were allowed to carve on rocks. It helped lessen tensions" ... Until one day an official decided that the tools we used could be dangerous weapons and ordered that the carving be stopped.