Antes de ser libres (Spanish Edition)
What would life be like for a teen living under a dictatorship? Afraid  to go to school or to talk freely? Knowing that, at the least suspicion, the  secret police could invade your house, even search and destroy your private  treasures? Or worse, that your father or uncles or brothers could be suddenly  taken away to be jailed or tortured or killed? Such experiences have been all  too common in the many Latin American dictatorships of the last 50 years. Author  Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia  Girls Lost Their Accents) and her family escaped from the Trujillo  regime in the Dominican Republic when she was 10, but inBefore We Were  Freeshe imagines, through the stories of her cousins and friends, how it  was for those who stayed behind.Twelve-year-old Anita de la Torre is too involved with her own life to be more  than dimly aware of the growing menace all around her, until her last cousins  and uncles and aunts have fled to America and a fleet of black Volkswagens comes  up the drive, bringing the secret police to the family compound to search their  houses. Gradually, through overheard conversations and the explanations of her  older sister, Lucinda, she comes to understand that her father and uncles are  involved in a plot to kill El Jefe, the dictator, and that they are all in  deadly peril. Anita's story is universal in its implications--she even keeps an  Anne Frank-like diary when she and her mother must hide in a friend's house--and  a tribute to those brave souls who feel, like Anita's father, that "life without  freedom is no life at all." (Ages 10 to 14)--Patty Campbell--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.