Southern Gran Canaria, unwittingly, became a corridor for Chilean life from Scandinavia. The brutality of the September 11, 1973 coup in Santiago unleashed an unprecedented Chilean diaspora, forcing more than 200.000 citizens into exile—an exodus that redefined the political landscape of the Southern Cone and European solidarity. Diplomatic asylum became the most crucial institutional lifeline, with the Swedish Embassy playing a prominent role. Sweden hosted nearly 10.000 Chileans until 1988, demonstrating a broad-based humanitarian foreign policy. Many of those exiles, their children and grandchildren, are now tourists in southern Gran Canaria, and some are even businesspeople who later settled there.
The second edition of 'The Poet Who Defied Pinochet' establishes the work of the Canary Islands writer as a vital testament to collective memory, narrating the true story of how her father, Juan Jiménez, saved the lives of two Chileans during the 1973 coup. The Canary Islands writer and cultural journalist, Nadia Jiménez (Las Palmas, 1968), celebrates the excellent reception of her fourth book, 'The Poet Who Defied Pinochet' (Mercurio Editorial, 2024), which has quickly reached its second edition. The work, a "poetic chronicle" of more than 300 pages, transcends the family narrative to become fully inscribed in collective memory, specifically Chilean memory, by addressing the tragic days of the coup d'état of September 11, 1973.
The book focuses on a true story involving his father, the poet and activist Juan Jiménez (winner of the Can de Plata Prize for the Arts in the Canary Islands in 2016). Jiménez, a leftist targeted by Franco's dictatorship due to his ties to the Communist Party and clandestine trade unionism in the Canary Islands, was in Chile living the "dream of Salvador Allende" after his victory in 1970.
The book recounts Juan Jiménez's harrowing experience in the days following Pinochet's coup and his resourceful escape. The most remarkable aspect of the story is his act of solidarity: he managed to get two Chilean siblings, Lucho and Gisela, out of the country alive on an Iberia flight, who otherwise would have been direct victims of Augusto Pinochet's repression. This act of personal resistance, forged by a leftist ideology experienced under Franco's regime, becomes the central focus of the narrative.
As the author herself, Nadia Jiménez, explains, her work is an exercise in linguistic and political alchemy: “My father, in one of his poems, said that one had to live life 'Che Guevara-style'… The poet Juan Jiménez thus turned Che into an adverb as an essential message for life, and I, for my part, have dared to make Allende a verb to tell in my book this episode of my father's real life, and how he managed to return to Spain when the coup d'état caught him there in Chile, living the dream of Salvador Allende (like so many others who went to Chile to build a better world).”
The work, which adds to the literary production of Nadia Jiménez (daughter of the poet Juan Jiménez and the painter María Castro), acts as a vital bridge that connects the political and cultural memory of Chile with that of the Canary Islands, reminding us that art and poetry have been, and continue to be, essential tools for resistance.
