Tijuana, March 13. Of the 577 seats in the French National Assembly, 11 are designated to represent the country's citizens scattered around the world. If the vote favors him, the 84,000 people living in Latin America will be represented by Christian Rodríguez.
Rodríguez is a Franco-Chilean who, after being imprisoned and tortured by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, went into exile in France, where he fights for leftist ideals like those of the alliance of political parties that currently nominate him and are the main opposition to Emmanuel Macron's government.
His personal story is what now leads him to campaign in Tijuana and other major cities in Latin America. He says, "The struggle in the Chilean resistance made a generation commit to that, to fighting against Pinochet, and that's where my story comes from. My story is the story of young libertarians, who fought to end Pinochet, and we are the ones who remain alive; many were left behind."
Back to Chile and La France Insoumise
Unlike other exiles from 20th-century Latin American military dictatorships, Rodríguez returned to his country when the military regime fell. “I came back, worked for six years in Chile, and reopened the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Concepción, which had been closed (…) but I had lived abroad since I was 17. I returned at 27 and realized that I had spent my entire adolescence and youth in France. So I returned there because I felt it was possible to fight there.”
