A Literary Ambassador: Ampuero book on political orphans of socalism

A Literary Ambassador

By JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA

The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2012
Mexico City

Roberto Ampuero, an exile from the bloody Chilean coup of 1973, had recently arrived in East Germany, a country he thought represented the utopian future. But a German girlfriend soon disabused him of his illusions. In whispered pillow talk, she told him he was an idiot for having gone east when it was every East German's hope to go west.

At the time, Mr. Ampuero was an earnest young Communist, studying Marxist-Leninism at Karl Marx University in Leipzig. He would shortly marry the daughter of Fidel Castro's attorney general, and spend a decade in East Germany and Cuba.

Today, Mr. Ampuero, 59, is the ambassador to Mexico of Chile's center-right government. He is also a best-selling novelist and the creator of Cayetano Brulé, one of Spanish-language crime fiction's most traveled modern private eyes. Now, Riverhead-Penguin has published an English-language translation of his detective novel "The Neruda Case," and plans to publish more of his books.

Mr. Ampuero's life of exile is representative of the experiences of a now-graying generation of idealists who lived through Latin America's heady decades of revolutions, coups and guerrilla wars, only to be shipwrecked on the shoals of history, living Robinson Crusoe-like lives in the wreckage of socialist island paradises. He draws heavily on his own time spent in East Germany, Cuba and Chile to create the characters that populate his books.

Brulé, the neophyte detective in "The Neruda Case," could be a fun-house mirror image of his creator. The detective is a Cuban-American émigré who falls in love with a revolutionary Chilean student he meets in Miami, and follows her to Chile just in time to experience the bloody 1973 coup against socialist President Salvador Allende.

Just before the coup, Brulé takes on his first case on behalf of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and Communist Party politician. In the book, Neruda is dying of cancer and wants to find a loved one who has been missing for decades.

Brulé will travel from Havana to Berlin to La Paz, Bolivia and back to Chile's capital of Santiago before he finds the answer. During the harrowing last hours of the Allende government, as jets strafe the presidential palace, Brulé dodges army patrols scouring Santiago's streets, in an attempt to bring peace of mind to the dying poet.

Chile's coup ended with Mr. Allende's suicide, and the beginning of a military dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet that lasted until 1990. The coup, and the dark night that followed it, represents for Brulé a "loss of illusion," and a realization of the costs when political dialogue collapses, says Mr. Ampuero. Brulé, he says, "is skeptical of political utopias that produce nightmares."

Mr. Ampuero, who was 20, remembers the coup well. He rushed to his university, where fellow members of the Communist Youth burned their party ID cards. For the next three months, he used his Austin Mini Cooper to ferry militants on the run from safe house to safe house until he himself was spirited out of Chile by an East German agent.

Brulé is a man of the tropics who, lured by romance and revolution, goes to the Andes. His creator, Mr. Ampuero, went in the other direction. Once in East Germany, after he married, he left for Havana, which for many leftists represented a fresh take on their dreams of a revolutionary utopia, unencumbered by Soviet guns and dogma.

But before long, the young Communist became disillusioned, finding Cuba to be a warm-weather version of the same Cold War Stalinism. In Havana, he fell out with fellow Chilean Communist exiles over the persecution of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, a seminal case which led many leading intellectuals around the world to break with the Castro regime. After four years in Cuba, his options limited by scant travel documents, Mr. Ampuero returned to East Germany. All in all, he spent a decade living under Communist regimes before crossing to West Germany in 1983.

His autobiographical novel "Nuestros Años Verde Olivo," or "Our Olive Green Years," a reference to Cuban military fatigues, chronicled Cuba's reality of scarcity and secret-police paranoia, and became a sensation in Latin America.

The novel, published in 1999, is one of a handful of texts by disillusioned Latin American leftists critical of Cuba and communism in general. "Latin Americans who knew real socialism from the inside or saw how it fell apart, mostly opted for silence," says Mr. Ampuero.

The book put Mr. Ampuero on Havana's black list. "Neither Ampuero or anybody who remotely looks like Ampuero will ever be able to travel to Cuba," the Cuban ambassador in Chile said after the book was published, according to the writer.

Mr. Ampuero's latest novel, which translates as "Salvador Allende's Last Tango," has been on Chile's best-seller list since April. He is in the final edit of another Brulé novel.

A version of this article appeared December 21, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Literary Ambassador.