"No Freedom In Our Own Home”

“Fear, anger, and powerlessness is what I remember feeling when they came to my home,” my grandmother said when she remembered the furious soldiers coming into her house and throwing the things all over. They were yelling incomprehensible words looking for some students that had escaped from the strike against the dictator regimen at that time. Those were the feelings and struggles that most people and my family felt often during the time of 1971 to 1978 when Bolivia was ruled by the dictator President Hugo Banzer. He was an enemy of dissent and freedom of speech. He tried to perpetuate himself in power and proceeded to rule henceforth solely with military support. During this time human rights didn’t exist at all, thousand of Bolivians sought asylum in foreign countries , political opponents were arrested, a lot of people were killed, tortured and many others simply disappeared. In the seventies Bolivia went through a difficult dictatorship which profoundly affected my family in major ways.

One of the three major impacts to my family in this time of dictatorship was the constant fear living in a country with plenty of repression and savage violence. Death, kidnapping of innocent people, and intimidation were something very common. My grandmother said about the violence at the time that “it was as the daily bread for us.” We couldn’t freely go anywhere because of the dangerous and unsafe streets and because the government threatened everybody and enforced with a curfew. Even doing harmless things, like talking with your friends, would have made them suspicious against the government. One time my uncle was outside of the house with his friends and suddenly the police came and they were arrested because just there were more than two people, which was forbidden. My family had to face all these horrible things, but they managed to keep each other safe.
Another effect on my family because of the dictator regimen at that time was the economic crisis that rapidly came to make the situation worse that it was before. Everyday they could see in the news that inflation was spreading all around the country like an epidemic and there wasn’t any hope for something better. The prices of food and other things were incredibly high. We would go to at four in the morning two days during the week and stand in long lines for food. My mother and her brothers lost their jobs because the company where they were working for left the country looking for a safe place to continue their business. Simultaneously to those problems as you could see little by little the money and food were scarce and desperation was invading the family. And without any other way to make money, they started to sell their belongings in order to survive which was the saddest thing for my family and especially for my grandmother who refused at the beginning to do that.
The last consequence and the biggest one in my family by the dictatorship in the seventy’s was that part of my family had to immigrate to other countries. After a long resistance by my family in the country, they had to make a hard decision to leave the country, in other words, they were forced to immigrate to Argentina and Paraguay looking for to have a better life and survive the rigid situation in our country. It meant to leave behind everything such us family, friends, a beautiful culture and seek in a strange country a place to build a new hope. It was according to my family the worse thing that they passed through. However all the time they remember the sad night when the family was separated, when my uncles and their families had to escaped clandestinely to Argentina because there were no other way to do it. Fortunately some friends that had already gone to Argentina were waiting for them at the border where they arrived luckily in excellent conditions.
In conclusion, during the seventy’s my family was deeply affected in major ways by a hard period of dictatorship in my country. After almost thirty years of this event my family is still very close. Even though they live far away and they feel very lucky that they could find hope and built a new life in other country while their native country was collapsing. I Think living under a dictatorship is inexpressible and difficult to forget. After knowing what really happened to my family I really appreciate them. I hope that this awful situation will not happen once again in my country because people don’t deserve live in fear but in a truly democratic system which guarantees peace and freedom for everybody.