Representational Status: Former National Leader of the Young Christian Workers (JOC). At the time of her detention, she was a militant of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR). Date of Detention: July 22, 1976

María Galindo Ramírez, single, secretary, and militant of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), was detained by DINA agents, as stated by her sister, Eliana Galindo, in the kidnapping complaint filed with the 10th Criminal Court of Santiago on July 22, 1976.

This apprehension may have taken place days earlier, as according to the version provided by Eliana's husband—Mr. Roberto Walterio Rojas Alvarez—recorded in the same proceedings, the last day she was seen was July 18 of that year in Estación Central, where the victim and her brother-in-law parted ways after returning from the city of Coronel.

In any case, she must have been detained on the street, as no traces or signs of such an event were found at the victim's home.

The family gained certainty regarding the victim's detention after August 2, when Roberto Rojas Alvarez was at their shared home and four agents—who identified themselves as belonging to the DINA—arrived and carried out an illegal search of the house.

Roberto Rojas describes this visit as follows: "...people arrived on August 2 who, without identification and whom I did not know, asked me for María Galindo Ramírez, 'la gordita' as they called her. This gave me the impression that they knew her beforehand..." "...the people who went to my home to look for María Galindo carried out a very superficial search and inquired about both my political ideas and hers..." "...regarding hers, I told them that, although she had leftist tendencies, I did not know of any political militancy on her part...".

The victim's sister also deduced the illegal apprehension because the agents mentioned that María had the keys to the apartment, and she was the only one who could have provided them with that information.

In addition to these indications, the family received information regarding her confinement in the secret DINA facility of Villa Grimaldi. The witness Mr. Pedro Rolando Jara Alegría, who was detained between August 18 and 25, 1976, and who provided a sworn statement after his release, indicated the names and circumstances in which he saw several people at Villa Grimaldi, leaving the country immediately afterward due to fear of reprisals.

In this sworn statement, dated November 9, 1976, he states in relation to María Galindo: "In the room next to the one where we were (the declarant and two other women: Juana Vicencio Hidalgo and Rosa Leiva) were Marta Ugarte and María Galindo, people whom I saw when we were taken out to eat during those two days, since we had to use the same door.

I was also able to talk to them during that time, as the partition that separated our rooms had a hole that allowed us to do so." He adds, "...María Galindo had been tortured, having suffered all kinds of abuse."

Another witness, also detained at that time and who remained at Villa Grimaldi between August 20 and 26, 1976, after which he left the country, Mr. Isaac Godoy Castillo, also declared having been with María Galindo at Villa Grimaldi, where she was in an adjacent room in the company of Marta Ugarte.

Coinciding with both testimonies is the sworn statement of Ms. Rosa Elsa Leiva Muñoz, who remained deprived of liberty at Villa Grimaldi during the same period.

From all these testimonies, it is deduced without any doubt that María Galindo Ramírez was at Villa Grimaldi as a detainee in August 1976 and that she shared her imprisonment with Marta Ugarte, being cruelly treated, with her whereabouts or fate at the hands of her captors remaining unknown to this day.

It should be noted that in August 1976, the body of Marta Ugarte was found on a beach in the north of the country with clear signs of torture and mutilation.

JUDICIAL AND/OR ADMINISTRATIVE ACTIONS

On December 13, 1976, a sister of María Galindo filed an Amparo (habeas corpus) appeal, which was assigned case number 1073-76. In said appeal, a report was requested from the DINA, but the Court of Appeals limited itself to requesting a report only from the Ministry of the Interior, an agency that responded that it had no information on the matter.

The sworn statement of Pedro Jara Alegría, in which he maintained having seen her at the Villa Grimaldi facility, was attached to this appeal.

The Court of Appeals rejected the appeal on December 27, 1976, a ruling that was appealed to the Supreme Court. This Court resolved that, as a measure to better resolve the case, the Ministry of the Interior should be officially requested again to report, and it again responded negatively regarding the detention of María Galindo.

The Supreme Court insisted on the request, specifically asking the Ministry of the Interior to refer to the intervention of the DINA in these events. This official letter from the Supreme Court requesting an express statement on the possible intervention of the DINA was reiterated three more times without the Ministry of the Interior providing the requested information.

Faced with this, the Supreme Court decided to send an official letter to the President of the Republic to inform him of the refusal of that Ministry of State to comply with judicial resolutions. In view of such insistence, it was not until March 4, 1977, that the Ministry of the Interior responded concretely to the request: "It is my duty to inform Your Illustrious Honor that, having requested the pertinent reports from the DINA, it is concluded definitively that the person under investigation has not been detained by agents of said agency on July 22, 1976, nor has it been known that she was detained by other agencies."

Following these official letters, the Supreme Court confirmed the rejection of the appeal.

On January 17, 1977, Eliana Galindo filed a complaint for kidnapping before the 10th Criminal Court, case number 4201-8, and subsequently, in the same case, filed a lawsuit for the kidnapping. In these proceedings, the victim's sister and her husband, Roberto Rojas Alvarez, a witness to the home search that occurred on August 2, 1976, testified.

The lawsuit requested that the Court constitute itself at Villa Grimaldi and that President Pinochet be officially requested to provide the names of DINA agents, requests to which the Court did not accede. The statement of witness Pedro Rolando Jara Alegría, which supported the presence of María Galindo Ramírez at Villa Grimaldi, was also attached to the case.

On June 3 of that same year, the case was temporarily dismissed for "not appearing fully justified that the crime of kidnapping denounced had been perpetrated," a resolution that was confirmed by the Court of Appeals.

In August 1977, a reopening of the summary proceedings was requested, a request that was granted for the sole purpose of interrogating Pedro Rolando Jara Alegría via a letter rogatory to Sweden.

In August 1980, a new criminal complaint was attempted before the Extraordinary Visiting Minister, Mr. Servando Jordán López, who at that time had been assigned several cases involving forcibly disappeared persons.

In this complaint, other information that had emerged during investigations into other detainees in similar circumstances was presented, such as the identification of a DINA cell that had operated in the detention of leftist individuals, from whom, in addition to being detained, the vehicles in which they were traveling were stolen.

Precisely, through the search for the vehicles, it was possible to locate the group, which turned out to be composed of DINA agents (case number 242-77 of the Military Justice system and case 86.333-5 of the 2nd Criminal Court of Santiago).

One of the seized cars was owned by a forcibly disappeared person from August 1976, Mr. Daniel Palma Robledo, and another of the vehicles found in the possession of this group was owned by another person who was released, Mr. Marcel Duhalde Garat.

Taking into account the information accumulated in these other proceedings, with which it had been certified that this DINA cell operated on the same date as the detention of María Galindo, this legal action requested the appearance of three of the DINA agents, identified as Germán Jorge Barriga Muñoz, who appeared as the head of the group; Heriberto del Carmen Acevedo Acevedo; and Emilio Hernán Troncoso Vivallos, in addition to their affiliation records and photographs.

The intention of this summons was to obtain information about the DINA and its operations. The Minister denied these requests, considering that there were no references linking the DINA agents to the detention of leftist individuals, without prejudice to the fact that these individuals also had military immunity, for which he considered the requests not pertinent and incongruent with the facts he himself was investigating.

This resolution was confirmed by the Santiago Court of Appeals in July 1981 and the case was archived.

Administrative efforts were numerous, including: complaints to the UN, the OAS, and the International Commission of Jurists; letters to the President of the Supreme Court, Mr. José María Eyzaguirre; a letter to the President of the State Defense Council; 2 letters to Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, who responded by stating she had sent the information to the DINA; a letter to Gustavo Leigh that was not answered; a letter to César Mendoza that was not answered; a letter to the International Red Cross that was not answered; a letter to the Minister of Defense that was not answered, and many others.

Among the administrative efforts made on behalf of this detainee, Bishop Carlos González C. sent a letter to President Pinochet providing information on the death of Marta Ugarte and attaching the sworn statement of Pedro Rolando Jara Alegría, in which the presence of María Galindo at Villa Grimaldi was mentioned alongside Marta Ugarte, whose lifeless body had already appeared on a beach in the north.

Mr. Pinochet replied to the letter by discrediting the witness's statement, for which he in turn attached to this response sworn statements from the other witnesses mentioned by Mr. Jara in his document.

In these statements, the witnesses indicated that they had never been detained and had never belonged to any political movement or organization, thus denying their presence at Villa Grimaldi at that time. Subsequently, all these people have declared to human rights organizations and before the courts that they were forced by DINA agents to make these statements.

Source: Corporation report

Date: "I spent the night there with this other lady named Juana Hidalgo (referring to Juana Vicencio Hidalgo) and Rolando Jara, who was brought into the room; they did not turn off the light at any time. Noises could be heard from the place where the women were; apparently, they raped María, the young woman from the MIR who washed the buckets alongside Marta Ugarte."

The Supreme Court ratified the sentence against former DINA leaders and former Army officers Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo and Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, sentencing them to 5 years and one day in prison for the crime of qualified kidnapping of the militant of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) María Galindo Ramírez, who has been a forcibly disappeared person in Santiago since July 18, 1976.

For the disappearance of the woman from the commune of Coronel, two other DINA agents had also been convicted in the first-instance ruling, issued in September 2017 by Judge Mario Carroza, and were to serve the same sentence; they were former Army officer Carlos José Leonardo López Tapia and former non-commissioned officer Basclay Humberto Zapata Reyes, but both criminals died during the course of the judicial proceedings.

The former in November 2018 and the latter in December 2017.

The Second Chamber of the highest court (case number 7.843-2019), composed of judges Haroldo Brito, Leopoldo Llanos, Rodrigo Biel, and lawyers Pía Tavolari and Carolina Coppo, in a split decision, rejected the cassation appeal regarding the conviction filed by one of the convicted parties.

At the same time, it accepted the cassation appeal filed by the victim's relatives in relation to the civil aspect of the lawsuit, for which the Chamber issued a replacement sentence with both resolutions, with the dissenting vote of Judge Biel and lawyer Carolina Coppo.

María Galindo was a native of Villa Mora, in Coronel. She was 26 years old when she was detained by the DINA. She was an administrative secretary and, simultaneously, a militant carrying out tasks of resistance against the dictatorship.

Her social commitment was manifested from a very young age as a member of the JOC of Coronel; later, when she worked at the "Viento Sur" fishing company, she joined the workers' union and became linked to revolutionary militancy.

Subsequently, at the beginning of the 70s, for work reasons, she moved to Santiago, where the military coup caught her, and she had to begin clandestine militancy and anti-dictatorial resistance activities.

She was detained when she was returning to her home in the commune of Renca after a trip to Coronel to visit her family. Since then, she has also been a forcibly disappeared person. An informant from her social circle betrayed her presence and her clandestine activity, handing her over to the DINA criminals.

She was seen among the detainees who remained as hostages of the regime at the Villa Grimaldi prison camp; from there, she was made to disappear.

In the city of Coronel, the social fighter is remembered in different ways and on a permanent basis. In the Villa Mora neighborhood, a monolith preserves her memory as well as that of three other neighbors of the neighborhood who fell during the dictatorship.

In the Juan Valenzuela neighborhood, a street bears the name of María Galindo. Likewise, María's name is also part of the Human Rights Memorial that exists in the city's Plaza in tribute to the fallen who were originally from the commune.

Source: resumen.cl 8/26/2021

Date: 08-26-2021

Tribute act held for María Galindo and the executed and disappeared of Coronel

On July 22, 1976, María Galindo Ramírez, from Coronel, was detained in Santiago. She was a secretary, former union leader of the Viento Sur fishing company in Boca Sur (currently San Pedro de la Paz, and at that time part of the commune of Coronel), former national leader of the Young Christian Workers (JOC), and a militant of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR).

After the military coup, María Galindo moved from union and social work to the clandestine work of the Popular Resistance struggle against the dictatorship, like many MIR militants, after the organization determined "not to seek asylum" and to initiate a struggle of resistance against the military dictatorship.

That political decision was extremely costly for the MIR; in October 1974, its secretary-general, Miguel Enríquez, would fall, and in February 1975, Eulogio Fritz Monsalvez, a MIR leader in Coronel and Lota.

Despite these harsh repressive attacks, nothing made María doubt her commitment to the cause of the poor in the countryside and the city, even to the ultimate consequences. With extraordinary consistency, Galindo Ramírez, like other militants, persisted in the struggle against the coup plotters even though the conditions they faced were more adverse every day.

María is the only woman on the list of the Human Rights Memorial in Coronel; the rest of the 17 people from Coronel murdered by the dictatorship were men. The daughter of a peasant who became a coal miner, both she and her siblings joined the MIR from a very young age in the Pedro Aguirre Cerda neighborhood of Coronel.

Last Saturday, July 22, relatives, neighbors, and comrades arrived at the event in the Plaza de Armas of Coronel to pay tribute to the fighters of the mining port. In an act organized by the Bautista Van Schouwen Mutual, it was through María Galindo that tribute was also paid to the other 17 comrades from Coronel.

Tribute was paid to the first ones murdered in the days following the coup, such as the socialist teachers Oscar Lizama Ortiz and Frank Mardones Garces, the communist workers of ENACAR Luis Gutierrez Rivas and Hernán Quilagaiza Oxa, which also includes the worker of the Coronel hospital Zenón Sáez Fuentes (PS) and the tailor Pedro Merino Molina (PC).

Furthermore, the fallen in the years following 1973 were remembered, such as Romilio Garces Garces (PC), the former leader of the Coronel high school and organizer of the GAP, the Schwagerino Sergio Pérez Molina (MIR), Eulogio Fritz Monsalvez (MIR), the conscript from Yobilo Luis Villegas Mesa, murdered at the Talcahuano Naval Base (October 10, 1975), Heriberto Leal Sanhueza (MIR) detained and disappeared by Operation Condor in Córdoba, Argentina, the former GAP member from the Camilo Olavarría sector, Fernando Amaya Sepúlveda (MIR), the MIR leader of Coronel Luis Pincheira Llanos, the young communist Saturnino Reyes Rebolledo who fell in the protests against the dictatorship in the Laurie neighborhood, Sebastián Acevedo Becerra, who self-immolated in the Concepción Cathedral demanding that the CNI return his kidnapped children, Mario Amigo Carrillo, a MIR militant from Camilo Olavarría blown up by the CNI in Los Ángeles in 1987, and José Elías Aguayo, a young communist who died in a failed action on November 26, 1989.

During the event in the Coronel plaza, Ana Lizama, "sister and comrade" of Luis; Nélida Villegas, sister of the conscript Luis Villegas; Eduardo Pérez Molina, brother of "Chico Pérez"; and Eliana Galindo, sister of María Galindo Ramírez, who was accompanied by her daughter, spoke. The activity featured songs by Patricio Troncoso and a floral offering placed at the foot of the memorial.

In the closing words of the act, the president of the Mutual, Rebeca Ulloa, was critical of the policies of the post-dictatorship governments regarding Human Rights, emphasizing that "the repression aimed to keep the people under a constant sensation of fear, of dread, of terror, and the means to achieve that was arbitrary detention, kidnapping, torture, the disappearance of detainees, murder, and crime.

That dynamic continued throughout the existence of the dictatorship."

She added that "that was a State policy, promoted by the authorities, sustained by the institutions, financed by the State, protected by the legal bodies, and covered up by the press. In that era, corruption and abuse were born as forms of relationship with society. The post-dictatorship governments have not had the decency to correct or attempt to amend those injustices and inequities."

And in relation to the policies of the current authorities, she concluded: "For all these reasons, the commemoration of the 50 years of the coup cannot be a sequence of activities, a billboard, dominated by fear and pain, but rather we must strive to raise with more strength, and with the greatest possible organization, the demands for truth, justice, and recognition regarding the criminal and cowardly acts that devastated our country.

From there, build a culture of respect for Human Rights and an effective 'never again' policy, all the more so given that repressive and criminal practices became a habitual conduct of the uniformed, military, and police forces, as we can verify in various episodes of the last 33 years, especially during and since the Social Outburst."

Source: resumen.cl 7/26/2023

Date: 07-26-2023

The struggle of María Galindo continues

Lucía Sepúlveda Ruiz: healing journalism

40 years after the kidnapping and disappearance of María Galindo Ramírez, on July 22, 1976, her family, friends, and former comrades paid her an emotional tribute at Villa Grimaldi, inaugurating a plaque in her memory.

It was in this place that the trail of this young unionist, leader of the Young Christian Workers and militant of the MIR, who fought for the reorganization of the union movement, was lost.

At the time of her capture by the DINA, the young secretary María Galindo was operating from clandestinity, determined to regroup leaders and rank-and-file workers to contribute to the reanimation of the union struggle. In San Pedro, 8th Region, she had been a leader of the Boca Sur Fishing Union, and she tried to apply that experience to the work she had been entrusted with.

Journalist Lucía Sepúlveda remembers her in those efforts:

"In clandestinity, she was called 'Renata' and sought to reconnect and organize people in the union movement, together with Luis Riquelme, 'El Yeti,' a former leader of the Metal Federation. That year, acts for May 1st and propaganda activities had been carried out.

We made the flyers for these activities with her, in tremendous precariousness because in those years people were still very terrified. She performed these tasks with great consistency and courage," remembers Lucía.

María's consistency is something also highlighted by the leader Manuel Aguilar, president of the A Luchar – Lautaro union, which groups Transantiago workers. Family-linked to María, he attended the tribute in his work uniform.

"Her struggle is more relevant than ever," affirms Manuel. "The reconstruction, from below, of the union world remains pending and as a task of the moment, rescuing organizations that are even in the hands of the employers.

We need class-conscious unions where the rank-and-file, the assemblies, and the most consistent workers take the lead. Let it be the workers themselves who advance with a political and union perspective.

We must rebuild the beautiful historical legacy of consistent struggle of comrades like María, who was willing to give her life in favor of the workers. We must begin to dream again, because if we do not dream and do not believe in something better, we are doomed," concludes the leader.

María Galindo's martyrdom at Villa Grimaldi was atrocious. But memory cannot remain only in the horror; it must rescue the people, with their longings and their struggles. Establishing the link between the past and a present of efforts and demands so similar, so pending as those that motivated María to fight, facing State terrorism.

On Sunday, July 24, thousands of workers took to the streets throughout Chile to protest against the AFP system that condemns retirees to live on starvation pensions. Undoubtedly, some of the dreams and efforts of the courageous María Galindo were in that human torrent.

Source: periodismosanador.blogspot.com 8/2/2016

Date: 08-02-2016

On the path of Maria Galindo R.

THE OBSTINATE MEMORY

"We do not have the right to abandon the capacity to admire the small and the large; just as we do not have the right to hide the depths of memory. Only that which is not forgotten enters eternity." (Civic commitment of culture for Human Rights).

In light of this quote, we want to tell you who María Galindo Ramírez was, a militant of the MIR and a forcibly disappeared person since July 22, 1976. María was born on January 13, 1950, in Coronel, the youngest of six siblings, her father a miner from the Schwager mines and her mother a housewife.

She lived in Villa Mora, Coronel. She was a simple and sensitive young woman raised under the principles of Christianity; as a teenager, she joined the Young Christian Workers (JOC), presided over this movement at her parish headquarters in the town of Coronel, and became a national leader in the historical period of 1973.

She worked as a laborer in the Viento Sur Fishing Industry, in the town of San Pedro, Concepción Province. Her task was to process prawns, and her coworkers elected her to the industrial union board, as she and her companions became aware of the need to organize to defend their labor rights.

Her political development would soon transform her into an active militant of the Revolutionary Workers' Front (FTR). Upon the bloody military coup, she traveled to Santiago and in clandestinity continued her militant work as a member of the MIR; she committed herself fully to anti-dictatorial activity while earning a living as an administrative secretary in a union.

Between September 1973 and July 1976, María awakened great admiration in her comrades in the struggle and the resistance: it was her great sensitivity and solidarity toward others. She never abandoned any comrade who came from the south seeking support or fleeing repression; she always looked for and found a place for them.

It was her Christian commitment that helped her enrich her revolutionary practice and give more strength to her faith in a more solidary and human world. Those who knew her keep in their memory the anatomy of her face and describe her as having a "little moon face," and just as she vibrated with the young workers of the JOC, with the members of the union, and the militants of the resistance, she also enjoyed the San Remo festivals, famous and popular at that time, laughing, singing, and celebrating her favorite songs.

There is a notarial testimony made in Sweden by Pedro Jara, a militant of the Communist Party who was detained in 1976 at Villa Grimaldi; he saw María in that house of torture between August 18 and 25 of that year and states that she was in very bad condition, in the same cell as Marta Ugarte, a communist militant who was found dead on September 12, 1976, on a beach in the Fifth Region.

María was a woman who lived and enjoyed life both in her daily work and in her militant activities. A militant from that time says that living and working alongside her was the best thing that has happened to her in her trajectory of militancy and in her practice as a woman.

The sensitivity and simplicity of María Galindo Ramírez is an example worthy of being taken into account and imitated, especially in these times when the values she practiced are being forgotten. On this March 8, we speak of a woman who gave her life for what she believed in.

We demand justice just as we remember her name, her example to gather strength for the struggles of the present and those to come.

Source: archivochile.com (no date)

Galindo María by Rodrigo Muñoz

November 2000 Magazine, No. 2 Puño y Letra MARIA, A SIMPLE WOMAN. She was from here, from Coronel. She was a miner's daughter. She was a miner's sister. She was the youngest of six siblings from a working-class family in the Pedro Aguirre Cerda neighborhood, where she was born, grew up, and was formed under the moral principles of Catholic Christianity.

She was María Galindo Ramírez. She was born on January 13, 1950, so today she would be 50 years old. A fighting woman, a worthy daughter of this area, full of examples of combat and heroism, who was also a victim of the savage repression unleashed by the military dictatorship that took over our country in September 1973.

From a young age, María Galindo showed a spirit of solidarity and a sense of community, sharing with her schoolmates and friends not only her school supplies but also the treats and toys she could have.

As a girl, she joined the Young Christian Workers (JOC) in the Villa Mora parish, and given her gifts and personal characteristics, she soon came to preside over this organization in her parish and to be a regional leader of the JOC.

At the same time, she began working as a laborer in the "Viento Sur Fishing" industry in Concepción, where she experienced labor exploitation firsthand and became aware of the need to organize to defend her rights, and together with her coworkers, she formed a union and began the common path of occupations, strikes, and demonstrations to achieve basic gains.

It was the 60s; the second half of the 60s, and all over the country, the popular masses were emerging, organizing, demonstrating, uniting, defending themselves, struggling, fighting. It was the Chilean people who had begun to say "Enough!".

It was a time of social boom, of struggles, of uncertainties, of demands, of agitation, of efforts; but above all, it was the time of great hopes, of great changes, of great illusions, of the necessary and possible revolutions.

It was a time when youth was the protagonist of history. That is where María Galindo also emerges. María was a very humanitarian woman, who was not satisfied with only delivering her knowledge of justice and labor rights, but was also an untiring friend and counselor.

Due to her growing social work, her constant work with young workers, and her personal development and commitment, she was moved to Santiago by the JOC in 1970 to be part of its national leadership.

However, her class consciousness, her principles, and her commitment to the struggle of the workers, which was increasingly rising, clashed in part with the limitations imposed by the religious organization, so she channeled her political restlessness in parallel by joining the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR).

This revolutionary militancy was not accepted by the church hierarchy, for which she ended up being expelled from the JOC. This did not affect María's values or principles, since revolutionary activity was compatible with her interests and convictions and enhanced her aptitudes and capabilities.

Thus, the military coup of '73 caught her. María, already fully integrated into political activity, committed herself fully to the anti-dictatorial struggle while working as an administrative secretary for a union.

María did not hesitate to promote the resistance struggle and not only refused to leave the country, as was suggested to her at some point, but did not hesitate to assume increasing responsibilities within the revolutionary organization, in a period in which the MIR was savagely depleted by repressive blows.

It was a time of terror. The homeland was in darkness. The repression was not isolated acts of response to popular actions, as before or as now. The repression was a constant, permanent, systematic activity that was carried out throughout the length and breadth of the country with all the resources that the dictatorship had at its disposal and was unleashed by air, sea, and land, day and night, near and far, through cities and neighborhoods, through neighborhoods and houses, through families and people.

It was a time of detainees, of prisons and concentration camps, of hundreds and thousands of political prisoners. It was a time of death, murders, and executions; of asylum seekers who by the tens of thousands escaped from prison, from death, and from fears by taking refuge in embassies, of fugitives who escaped into clandestinity to continue fighting.

It was a time of restrictions, curfews, massive and selective searches, controls on highways and roads, of lists of wanted and persecuted people. It was a time of clandestinity and resistance, of confrontations, withdrawal plans, safe houses and changing of shelters and hideouts, of bunkers and links.

It was a time of risks and fears, of sacrifices and frights, of efforts and anxieties, of life and death. It was the moment when the conscious showed themselves and the bold were put to the test. And there was also María Galindo Ramírez, from Coronel, resisting alongside the people who suffered the onslaughts of terror.

The implacable claws of repression also reached María. On the morning of Thursday, July 22, 1976, she was detained by the henchmen of the DINA (later called CNI) after a snitch reported that María was an active member of the resistance.

María Galindo Ramírez has remained a forcibly disappeared person since that day, paying with her life the price of consistency at all costs. The rest is the history of ignominy and shame that characterized the justice system of our country, which was always an accomplice and part of the entire repressive scaffolding of the dictatorship.

Her detention was never recognized despite the evidence that was established; an Amparo appeal was never accepted despite the evidence showing that her life was in grave danger; her body was never handed over or appeared (as happened, for example, with our comrade Marta Ugarte, who was locked in the same cell as María at Villa Grimaldi, and whose body appeared thrown on a beach in the north in September of that year, '76), or data on her burial.

It has been 24 years since she was detained and disappeared; her trail is lost in the fearsome DINA/CNI detention and torture center known as Villa Grimaldi in Santiago; today we only hope that one day her body will appear among so many others that, by stirring up the earth, the courts, and consciences, must still appear.

But we also want, above all, to rescue her example and the lesson of life that this simple woman from here, from Coronel, bequeathed to us. Puño y Letra meets its readers again in this spring of 2000. Eleven months into this year, our Library continues to be popular and new every day.

The reader will find more about Coronel, more rage, more hope, more strength. Our magazine is nourished by reality, which is rarely shown, which is hidden, manipulated, or accommodated according to the interests of those who run society, which do not coincide with those of great humanity.

Who could be interested today in the life of Leocadí? Those of us who knew her, those of us who shared her struggles and ideals of justice and rebellion against the abuses. Also many others who evidently do not have the channels of expression to shout their history.

We are in many places, but isolated, often making more noise because of the differences than because of the agreements. How much is a popular poet worth today? For us, so important that we grant him a central space in this magazine; who writes decimas today to express without calculation or fear what they think?

For us, the mere fact of making rhymes with ideas and ideals is a cultural good of extraordinary importance. What space do the simple men and women of our people have today in the written media? What brings us closer to María, a serene, intelligent, and fighting resident who today would be 50 years old?

Undoubtedly, there is enormous wealth in our city; it is the thousands of young students, workers who move Coronel, who animate it, and who are building the new history, that of the end of the twentieth century and the beginning, some time ago, of a new period.

All of them must know who María, Leocadí, and so many others who were left along the way were. It is part of all of them, it is an inheritance that should not be expropriated by the conscious silence of the wavering or opportunists.

That is why Puño y Letra rescues historical memory and will continue to do so because it is a task that will always be unfinished. We already know the other history, the one told from the cushioned armchairs of the political, economic, and intellectual power of this country; we need the other one, the one that emerges day by day and is full of anonymous real heroes, of flesh and blood.

We want to walk through the streets of a Coronel in which the past is seen, the present is lived, and the future is outlined. A past that undoubtedly speaks of exploitation and misery, but also of organization and struggle to improve living conditions, of active unions, of men and women whose decision set an example at the regional and national level.

A present in which empty political propaganda has made its way, without proposals, which is mixed with hopelessness and decadence. Will we be able, together with many others, to provide content, hope, and joy?

We bet on the intelligence and the enormous legacy of dignity and struggle that our people have. We will find the paths in which the people sing, paint, express themselves, think, propose; we will break the barriers of short-sighted pragmatism, with fist and with letter.

Also, Puño y Letra insists, perhaps with vehemence, on the "issues of the past," curiously contingent. It is not possible not to write about what happens and will continue to happen in our country. The foundations of a culture of life require not forgetting; the action of justice is slow but it advances, not as we want, but we will continue to insist; truth and justice will continue to be a banner of struggle for those of us who think that the right to life cannot be relativized.

Finally, we want to invite the social and political organizations that feel called upon to initiate a process that makes possible in our city a tribute to our comrades murdered during the dictatorial period. We are sure that our next issue will inform the people of Coronel about the Memorial of our city.

Source: archivochile.com (no date)