Santiago, Chile—The day before the 50th anniversary of the coup that ousted Salvador Allende, I watched a father and his young daughter sitting quietly at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. They looked solemnly at the massive wall before them, with its hundreds of portraits of people killed or disappeared by the state during Chile’s military dictatorship.

Nearby, tables invited kids to draw—to trace their hands and write messages in the paper palms. In wobbly penmanship, the letters floating at different heights, one drawing read: “Justice! Members of my family were tortured”—something I, too, learned as a child.

I spent the 50th anniversary of the coup crisscrossing Santiago, in protest and in vigil, with my mom and a caravan of other Brazilian former exiles. Like the children, we were here to witness a profound moment in history, but also to trace the lines of our own. I carried a framed photo of my grandmother, Tércia Maria Rodrigues Mendes, in my backpack. It was here, 50 years ago, that she lost her country for the second time.

She was 22 on the day of the coup, September 11, 1973—already a mother, a widow, and a refugee. Earlier that year, after the Brazilian military had tortured and killed her husband—my grandfather, Jarbas Pereira Marques—she fled Brazil’s dictatorship, traveling by bus to Allende’s Chile, the capital of a new political imagination. At the time, an estimated 12,200 refugees from Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina were living in Chile—many of them, like my grandma, leftists escaping repression. It was here that she moved into a wooden home insulated with newspapers; here that she was reunited with my mom, then only 16 months old and from whom she had been separated; here that she joined a new resistance.

By late June, after the Tanquetazo (tank putsch), a failed coup attempt, she was marching with workers demanding that the government provide weapons should the military attack again—a request Allende denied. When the next attempt came, in September, she was living in a población in Peñalolén called Lo Hermida, a settlement then associated with the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), its politics worn proudly in sector names like “Heroic Vietnam.” This time, behind Pinochet, the military succeeded. Armed forces raided Lo Hermida, destroying my grandmother’s house, and she became the survivor of a second coup—her life now at risk for being a foreigner, for being poor, for being an Allendista, and for not having a home to return to at curfew.

Across Santiago, military officials backed by the United States were rounding up thousands of people and detaining, torturing, and killing them in the Estadio Nacional. The Chilean Air Force bombed the governmental palace, La Moneda. President Allende had died by suicide, and his democratically elected socialist government had died with him. People scrambled to the overflowing embassies of Panama, Mexico, and Argentina to request asylum and escape. Many did not make it.

Pinochet’s dictatorship went on to torture tens of thousands of people and kill or forcibly disappear thousands more. It lasted for 17 years, until 1990, and its vestiges still haunt Chile, and the world. Despite a promising redrafting campaign last year, Chile’s Constitution remains the one that Pinochet imposed. In the Atacama desert, families continue to search for their disappeared loved ones’ remains.

If not for a miraculous bit of luck, I might have been a member of one of those families. But days after the coup, the story goes, my grandmother, who was living in a shelter with my mother, stood in the street, searching for an answer—which came, hurriedly, in the form of a black embassy car. Desperate, she threw herself onto it, and a voice inside promised her there would soon be asylum openings at the Swedish embassy. She wrote a request; it was approved. By October, my grandma, my mom, and dozens more refugees were flying to Stockholm.

I don’t remember my grandmother ever telling me this story herself—I think she wanted to protect me from it—but my mother writes about it in her memoir Born Subversive, a book she dedicated to me. Its narrative is gut-wrenchingly personal, but it’s also a record of a defining era of US-backed repression in Latin America—and a letter to a far too broad collective of victims and survivors. “Perhaps,” my mom writes, “you lived [my life] in another time. Perhaps you lived [it] in another country, and in another language…. I fear my story is more common than I once thought.”

Indeed, between 1930 and the 1990s, many Latin American countries (including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, and Uruguay) suffered brutal dictatorships fueled either directly or indirectly by US interventions. Beginning in the 1960s, security forces from across the region formed their own sinister web of repression, later formalized as Operation Condor—a coordinated, transnational attack on civilian and militant opposition to dictatorships. As a child, I traced one scar of this violence: the marks of a wound on my stepgrandpa’s abdomen, from the Uruguayan authorities who had stabbed and imprisoned him when he escaped Brazil.