Last December, between the two rounds of Chile’s presidential election, I had dinner with some friends from the Latin American country, each of them 1970s-era exiles and dissidents.

Violetta, an old friend of my mother’s, a warm, chaotic, and sharp woman, was passing through Paris, visiting Europe to see her daughter who had fallen in love with a political-prisoner-turned-exile now living in Norway. We were joined by Pablo and Victor, two exiles who had settled in France.

All three had been active in or around the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), the revolutionary organization formed in 1965 to prepare for the armed struggle in the case of a coup. After the overthrow of the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and the takeover of the state by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973, its members were systematically hunted down and murdered by the Chilean military.