Fifty years ago on September 11, 1973, a Golpe assisted by the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and installed the military dictator General August Pinochet. Two years later, Kathy Osberger was a 22-year-old lay volunteer grade school teacher in Santiago, when she was picked up by Chile's secret police. An around the clock hunt for the leftist anti-government fugitives known as the MIR had been in full swing in the wake of a mid-October shootout with the state's secret police, known as the DINA, in the town of Malloco, southwest of the capital, Santiago. Still on the hunt for the rebels, on November 1, DINA security forces gunned their way into the Columban Centre House in Santiago sometime after 8:30 pm, taking British Dr. Sheila Cassidy hostage and holding her incommunicado, torturing her all night until a lead brought them to the School Sisters of Notre Dame convent, where Kathy was living with the sisters as a lay volunteer.
This is a memoir of her experiences in Chile. During the dawn break-in at the convent on Sunday, November 2, the DINA sought to arrest Sr. Helen Nelson and instead took Kathy. In a second raid, Rev. Gerardo Whelan, CSC was arrested in a neighborhood called La Ponderosa. Only a few more hours elapsed until on the nightly news, General Pinochet and members of the ruling Junta were stoking the airwaves with allegations of a "Communist conspiracy" inside the Catholic Church. And it wasn't just a problem of "leftist foreign religious" quietly rebelling against the well-known savagery of Chile' national security state. The resistance to state-sponsored violence rose to include the highest levels of the Chilean Catholic Church and the Vatican's representative, the Papal Nuncio. The Christian beliefs of the nuns, priests, and Catholic hierarchy called them to put their lives on the line by sheltering dissidents in need and at risk. The situation was made urgent by the utter absence of human rights, due process, and law. In their wake, detention, torture, disappearance, and extra-judicial death reigned.
