"I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile’s Dictatorship, 1975," a conversation with Kathleen Osberger

Barbara Frey, former director of the Human Rights Program, will interview author Kathleen Osberger, about her book I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile’s Dictatorship, 1975. 

 

On September 11, 1973, a CIA-assisted coup overthrew the democratically-elected president Salvador Allende and installed the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.  Fifty years later, Osberger provides a first person account of her experience as a 22-year old living among Catholic social activists who resisted the repression of the military regime, and her own arrest by the Secret Police and exile. 

 

After leaving Chile, Osberger worked for 17 years as a volunteer with the Maryknoll Lay Missioners. In 1993, she joined the University of Chicago Hospitals Department of Psychiatry where she worked as a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist, focusing on issues of trauma and torture.

 

Barbara Frey, whose formational human rights work was with the Vicaria of Solidarity in Chile in 1982, helped to found the Advocates for Human Rights in 1983 and served as its Executive Director until 1997.  Frey directed the Human Rights Program from 2001-22.