Ángela Jeria occupation archaeologist
Military dictatorship: widowhood and exile
Her husband was secretary of the National Direction of Supply and Commercialisation (DINAC) in the government of Salvador Allende. In 1973, he opposed the military coup d'état. He was detained and tortured by some of his own Air Force comrades. Alberto Bachelet died of a heart attack in 1974, during his imprisonment in the Public Prison of Santiago. Jeria did not have the opportunity to finish her studies in archaeology because she was detained, with her daughter Michelle, and transferred to the centres of the DINA Villa Grimaldi and Cuatro Alamos, where she suffered torture.After being freed and expelled from the country, Jeria lived in exile in Australia, where she began activist work against the military dictatorship of Pinochet, traveling to Mexico, Cuba and the Soviet Union. She also lived in the German Democratic Republic to stay with her daughter Michelle, who was studying medicine at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. There she worked as an assistant at a center of prehistory and archaeology.
In 1977, Jeria traveled to Washington, D.C. to testify on human rights violations in Chile, following the murder of Orlando Letelier.
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