IR #3 (Prompt 14, Chapter 3)

This chapter really depicted Littin's first encounter with the heart of Chile since his exile. He talks with his best friend from school, but his friend does not recognize him at all. His friend, Ely, explains how bad Chileans are and how lucky Miguel is to be Uruguayan. This really hits home two points to Miguel, first, his disguise is fault proof, and secondly, the exiles were suffering just as much as the citizens. The last sentence of the chapter reads

"It wasn't until that moment that I realized how long and devastating the years of exile have been. Not just for those of us who left--as I has thought until then--but also for the ones who had stayed" (Marquez 33).

This quotation was basically why Miguel Littin entered Chile despite the exile list. His goal was to reveal the true Chile behind closed doors. He wanted to expose the corrupt government and carabinero (Chilean police). After Ely was unable to recognize him, he had the revelation that he really was a new person. After this revelation, he began to question Ely and he soon realized how horrible it was to be in Chile after the coup d’état in 1973. Littin believed that Chileans would be the same as before the exile, but he discovered that they were far from it, and interestingly enough, this intrigued him and he switched gears on his movie and began to shoot along the lines of the people and the "unexiled". After this quotation, Miguel shapes the rest of his stay in Chile around these new factors. This point in the book was very influential to the rest of the book because it drove Miguel to his findings about the new Chilean life and how much his people struggled. The whole situation reminded me of Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries because Ernesto set out to medically treat patients, who could not get treatment, but he soon discovered how corrupt the government was and also how poverty-stricken his country was.