Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup against Salvador Allende in Chile that saw both the beginning of the Pinochet dictatorship and Operation Condor, the US-sponsored covert campaign that sought to brutally suppress the left in South America by any means necessary. From the start, Condor was a transnational project that brought the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, among others, under the auspices of the CIA to facilitate the cross-border persecution of left-wing dissidents. It is a chapter of US and global history that remains strikingly and shamefully overlooked, especially considering the continued relevance of both Allende’s unique brand of steadfastly democratic socialism and the rise of a global far-right that views Pinochet’s Chile as an example.
Lily Meyer’s Short War tells the story of Operation Condor through the eyes of Gabriel Lazris and his daughter Nina, each grappling with the individual and collective complicity and guilt that comes from being North Americans in a region that is still reeling from the carnage the United States set into motion with Condor. Gabriel is an idealistic teenager living in Santiago who learns his father could be working as a CIA asset to undermine Allende’s government; decades later, Nina finds herself in Buenos Aires, where she discovers information that could shed light on her father’s past and what all he may have left behind in Chile. Innovative and unique in its portrayal of recent history and its contemporary resonance, Short War is a novel that examines the uses and misuses of First World privilege and the price paid by those who were never afforded it.
Bronwyn Scott-McCharen: I was immediately drawn to Short War due to the extensive amount of time I’ve spent in both Chile and Argentina, where two of the novel’s three parts take place. Like Gabriel, I, too, often struggled to reconcile my status as a North American with the world of leftist activism I wanted to be a part of, as well as the lingering effects of the Cold War-era US intervention in the region, which was most overt in the case of Chile. How did your experience of being a North American in the Southern Cone impact the creation of Short War? Were there any previous versions of this story? How did you determine that what has now become Short War was the story you wanted to tell?
Lily Meyer: I did a high-school exchange in Quillota, Chile when I was sixteen – that’s where the book comes from, or where it started. I showed up in Chile with no real concept of the US’s role in getting and keeping Pinochet in power. When I started to learn about it from my host family and classmates, I was mortified. Furious, too, that I hadn’t been taught anything about my country’s complicity in supporting such a repressive and brutal regime. (I had just finished taking AP US History, and we’d studied the Cold War, but Chile never even came up. Still upsets me!) I got a little obsessed with teaching myself about the CIA in Chile, which turned into teaching myself about Operation Condor, the covert CIA-backed network through which the Cold War dictatorships and juntas in Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru, Paraguay, and Brazil repressed their people.
Short War was always going to be a book about US complicity in Operation Condor. I tried ways to broaden its reach – to include CIA support for state terror in countries other than Chile – but it made the story too big and messy. From a narrative point of view, it worked much better to keep myself focused on one family dealing with the moral aftermath of one instance of American interventionism. But I hope that readers go on from Short War to learn about Operation Condor in countries other than Chile!
BSM: We’re definitely on the same page regarding the shameful lack of knowledge about this period of history, and in cases like these, where we cannot assume a more or less universal knowledge of the basic historical facts, it seems authors often feel the need to use their fiction as an educational tool to raise awareness of such overlooked atrocities. How did you navigate the tension between a real or perceived need to teach American readers about the history and politics of 1970s Chile and Operation Condor and the artistic demands of fiction?
LM: I decided that that tension is a myth – one of those workshop rules you can ignore, like that it’s bad to use adjectives. It took me a while to get there, and working as a book critic really helped. I kept – this happened by chance – writing reviews of good novels that I thought set out to teach readers something, or reading and choosing not to review novels that didn’t have any agenda I could identify, which often is boring to me. At some point, I realized what now seems totally self-evident to me: there’s no reason fiction can’t set out to teach history or politics, just like there’s no reason fiction can’t try to make a historical or political point. It doesn’t matter what your goal is; it just matters that you pull it off (or fail in an interesting and ambitious way! I’d sometimes rather read a book that fails big than a book that tries small, if you know what I mean).
BSM: Finally, what would you say are the similarities and differences between how Gabriel and his daughter Nina come to terms with their country’s central role in Operation Condor? And how do these character’s feelings and journeys compare with your own?
LM: Without giving too much away, I would say that Gabriel, who’s in Chile during the coup against Allende, never comes to terms with his country or family’s role in it. Nina, who’s a generation removed, is able to see her father’s guilt as both a moral necessity and a bit of a privileged self-indulgence. One of my professors, Leah Stewart, said when she read a draft of Short War that its characters’ central question is, “Who paid for my privilege?” which is completely accurate, but truest of all in the Nina section.
I’d say my own feelings are more straightforward. For me, part of being an American citizen is recognizing our country’s power and influence – and paying attention when we use it in bad ways, as we very often do. By “paying attention,” I mean protesting in any way possible, even when that protest is writing a novel fifty years after the fact.
BSM: Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Short War for me was the way it tackles the intersection of technology and historical memory. Without spoiling anything, it became apparent that, as I read, technology and the internet come to play an important role in the novel’s more or less contemporary setting (2015 and beyond). A real-life example similar to what you’ve written about in Short War is an Instagram account that uses AI to generate composite images of what Argentina’s stolen grandchildren might look like today based on images of their disappeared/murdered parents, which has proven controversial given it’s an unofficial effort and AI can and often does fail. What made you decide to incorporate technology and the Internet into a narrative that is so often consigned to the realm of the purely historical (or at the very least, the Internet-less 1990s, which many may or may not consider historical)?
LM: I wouldn’t say incorporating technology was a decision as much as a necessity. A lot of Short War is about two characters searching for their family members, and it just wouldn’t make sense for that search not to rely heavily on social media and the internet. What was a decision was writing Short War as both a historical and a contemporary narrative. I agree with that Faulkner line about the past not being past, which is just a way of saying that the past affects us–morally, materially, emotionally–in the present. I wanted to tell a story about Americans paying in the present for the US’s crimes in the past.
BSM: While the Internet has done wonders for promoting historical memory of the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina and for commemorating its victims, it has also been a fertile breeding ground for denialist discourses, something which you also touch on with the Reddit threads debating the veracity of the claims made in Guerra Eterna—the mysterious book that I feel is at the heart of Short War—as well as the identity of its pseudonymous author. We’ve seen how powerful these discourses can be with the recent election of Javier Milei and his infamously denialist running mate Victoria Villarruel in Argentina and the rise of similar figures in Chile such as José Antonio Kast. Did these denialist discourses impact your work on the novel? And how do you think Short War can be read in light of them?
LM: I was of course aware of those conversations, but I wouldn’t say I wrote Short War in that context. We haven’t gotten as far as denialism in the US where Operation Condor is concerned. It hasn’t been forgotten entirely, but it certainly hasn’t been integrated into the dominant narratives of American history. It’s absent from a lot of textbooks and conversations and stories. I was writing into that absence, not into denial.
BSM: That makes perfect sense–you can’t have denialism without first having awareness, which is sorely lacking. I do still think of many on the political right in the United States who lionize Pinochet and his regime specifically, both for economic reasons and, particularly on the growing fringes of this right-wing, for the brutality it exercised against its political enemies. So I suppose that there also exists another kind of American denialism that, instead of ignoring or downplaying Operation Condor, acknowledges it for all the wrong reasons. Short War does touch a bit on the pre- and post-Trump eras of American politics, how the lingering hope of the Obama presidency degraded into the sort of dark cynicism we continue to see today. What and how do you think Short War can contribute to the conversation concerning the rise of the illiberal right in the United States that views dictators like Pinochet as sources of inspiration?
LM: I’m not sure I have a good answer here – I don’t have much to say to a view that’s so opposed to mine! If somebody were to come to me and say, “Give me a book that will persuade me it’s wrong to like Pinochet,” I wouldn’t hand them my book. I’d probably send them to something like Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum, which is a beautiful reflection on the hope Salvador Allende created and embodied. I guess I would hope that Short War reminds readers who are opposed to authoritarianism to take any threat or inkling of it seriously – to not look away or think their country (any country) is exempt.
BSM: The genre of testimony is, for me, indelibly linked to the topic of the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina. Everything we know about the inner workings of the repressive apparatus in each place can be sourced to documents such as the CONADEP’s Nunca Más report (Argentina) and the Rettig and Valech Reports (Chile), as well as countless other books and documentary films. With so many compelling true stories of this time, what can fiction add to the conversation beyond serving to simulate or (worse, in my opinion) make this terrible reality somehow “more palatable”? What role can fiction play in the context of a history that has been so meticulously documented via testimony and preserved via former secret detention centers turned sites of memory? How can we create fiction that is as compelling as testimony without attempting to imitate it; that is to say, fiction with something unique to say about this history, fiction that seeks to do something beyond simply recounting what we already know through the testimonies of survivors, family members, et cetera?
LM: Fiction, history, and testimony do three totally different things. Testimony tells stories directly; history analyzes and contextualizes. For me, the role of fiction is to take a more oblique approach, one that asks readers to figure out for themselves how both they and the book relate to the story in question. That’s my broad response. My narrower one is that I chose not to take my novel into detention centers, or the perspectives of characters who were detained. I also chose not to write the day of the coup against Salvador Allende. What I wanted to explore was how Americans–the ones in my book, but I hope also the ones reading my book–deal with knowing that their tax dollars, and potentially their family members, helped cause those things. Sadly, that question is extremely relevant at the moment, and it’s one that each of us has to look at individually. Fiction is good for that, I think!
BSM: I found the narrative absences you mentioned—the lack of focus on the detention centers and the events of the coup—to be a wonderful subversion of the sort of expectations some readers might have coming into Short War. Historical fiction, especially lately, tends to be a vehicle for the graphic rendering of highly traumatic moments, and I really appreciated that Short War refrained from all of that. How would you respond to these expectations, however unspoken, for historical fiction?
LM: I just read a great book called Immediacy, by Anna Kornbluh – she’s an academic, and she argues that our dominant style right now is an “immediacy style” that tries to recreate the real rather than contextualize or criticize it. A lot of immediacy art, in her view, goes for viscerality: basically, graphic scenes feel real because they upset us, but they don’t necessarily say much about violence. Also, graphic scenes of historical trauma often feel exploitative of the victims to me. I wasn’t interested in any of that – which is maybe just to say I wasn’t interested in writing violence.
What did interest me was the question of how to tell a story that’s so full of holes. Short War has characters who get disappeared. Absence is fundamental to the book. In that context, I thought that having conspicuous narrative absences – especially the absence of the coup – was right.
BSM: I really enjoyed the wordplay of Short War versus Guerra Eterna (“Short War” vs. “Eternal War”). Did the idea of Guerra Eterna (or rather, naming your fictional book-within-a-book Guerra Eterna) arise from the decision to incorporate the phrase “Short War” (which you draw from your own family’s traditions)? How do you think these two are linked in the novel, both narratively and conceptually?
LM: Yes, Short War–which is what my family says instead of “Cheers” –came before Guerra Eterna. I wanted to play with the question of how long war or terror or violence last: in reality, in the perpetrators and victims’ minds, in cultural or historical imagination. And it’s very intentional that only the American characters are the ones toasting to, or hoping for, a short war.
Short War is out next week with A Strange Object/Deep Vellum. You can order a copy here.
Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. She is a contributing writer at the Atlantic, and her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Bronwyn Scott-McCharen is a freelance writer and editor. Her work has appeared in The Millions and Review 31. She currently lives in Tirana, Albania. Twitter: @BronwynScottMcC
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