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A Note on Children of Fate

Juan Radrigán is a phenomenon. Born the son of an itinerant mechanic and a teacher, as a child he would travel with his family from settlement to settlement in search of work. As soon as his father had serviced all the farm machines in one place, they moved onto the next. Juan never went to school. Everything he learned as a child, he taught himself or he learned it from his mother. Now he is a professor of Drama at Santiago University.

His early plays reflect his background. Many of them are about people born into, or fallen into, grinding poverty. Or they are about those forced live on the margins in other ways or for other reasons.

Children of Fate (Hechos Consumados) is one his earliest plays; it was first performed in 1981. It has come to be seen as his greatest play. Perhaps this is because its themes of poverty, struggle to survive against the odds and love are both timeless and also deeply relevant to the period in which the play emerged.

Poverty, lack of education and lack of opportunity existed in Chile long before the brutal military coup that brought General Pinochet to power in 1973. Pinochet found new ways to make them worse.

Pinochet was a soldier, not a politician. He knew he hated Salvador Allende, the world’s first, and so far only, democratically elected Marxist leader. But he also knew that he didn’t have detailed policies of his own.

It so happened that many young Chileans had studied Economics at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman. Friedman’s theories came to greater prominence nearly a decade later when they were espoused by Ronald Reagan in the US, rebranded as Reaganomics, and by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and called Thatcherism.

Friedman’s Chilean acolytes became known in Chile – still are known – as the Chicago Boys. After Pinochet’s coup, Chile’s economic management was handed over to the Chicago Boys. Friedman was ecstatic; at last his theories could be put into practice! For him, the best part was that Chile was a dictatorship. His theories could be imposed without protest or challenge and without any regard for the hardship and suffering they caused to millions of ordinary Chileans.

As in the UK in the early 1980s, so in Chile following the coup. Unemployment rocketed, businesses went bust, old certainties and decencies were destroyed in the cause of worshipping money. The characters in Children of Fate, the inescapable poverty and deprivation they suffer, the circumstances they describe, are in good measure the direct result of the society and values imposed on Chile by Pinochet and later taken up by Thatcher and imposed on our country as well.

Emilio, Marta, Aurelio and Miguel are Children of Fate, but they are also children of Pinochet and, like all of us today in the UK, they are in a very real sense children of Thatcher.