This chapter focuses on Bolaño’s writings that confront the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973–1990) and the complicity of intellectuals with Pinochet’s dictatorial state. Prior to Bolaño, few if any Chilean writers had reflected on complicity at such length or with such scathing intentionality. His works illuminate the moral gray zones to which the dictatorship gave rise and the myriad ways civilians and intellectuals became implicated in the regime’s reign of terror. Focusing especially on Bolaño’s 1996 novel Estrella distante (Distant Star, 2004) and his 2000 novel Nocturno de Chile (By Night in Chile, 2003), the chapter evokes several scenes from Bolaño’s two “dictatorship” novels to illustrate a wide spectrum of characters that range from fully complicit subjects to “implicated subjects” (Michael Rothberg). If the poet-killer Carlos Wieder, also known as Alberto Ruíz-Tagle, is clearly an accomplice to the Pinochet regime in Distant Star, figures such as the Opus Dei priest Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix or the belle of the literary salons María Canales in By Night in Chile, might be more aptly characterized as implicated subjects whose example brings into relief the ways a “civilized” culture inhabited by barbarism becomes part and parcel of dictatorial rule.

The coincidence between the events on 9/11 in Santiago in 1973 and New York in 2001, earlier observed by Ariel Dorfman, lends itself to an analysis of the spiral of Bolaño’s oeuvre from the trauma of the 1970s Chilean dictatorship to the neo-globalizing moment that overlapped with the world dissemination of Bolaño’s work. Bolaño is nostalgic for the Allende era in Chile when meaningful social change seemed possible. Yet he is conscious that it was the authoritarian force and neoliberal economics of the Pinochet regime that was truly prophetic of the future. The nostalgic and the counterfactual, the elegiac and recursive, intertwine as Bolaño looks back on his generation’s odyssey and sees analogies for its trauma in the femicides of 2666. A nodal point of this intertwining is the tenth anniversary of the coup on September 11, 1983, where a group of “masochistic Chileans” meet in Paris in The Savage Detectives, poised between a past they never knew and a future they can scarcely envision. Bolaño knows he has to face the necropolitics of the then-present and not the nostalgia of the deferred past; yet the dream of the Allende era is never entirely renounced in his oeuvre.

Bolaño’s work in the nineties shows him conscious of the harm that has been done to an entire generation and to the psyche of Chile. His preoccupation with the Chilean situation connects with his interest in writing fiction that recounts that loss, along with the establishment of the central pieces of the new economic world order. For him, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) unleashes energies associated with a new world map in which the American continent is key to the necropolitics of the end of the century. Bolaño will become the main Latin American author of this period marked by multilateralism, though he is certainly not alone (a central characteristic of Latin American literature of the end of the century is a desire to become global.) Much of what he wrote in the second half of the nineties is an inquiry into Chile’s Pinochet which shows the pervasiveness of evil and the bitter conclusion the neoliberal trend has consolidated. Bolaño’s fame explodes with the publication of The Savage Detectives, which can be read as an instruction manual for contending with the market without making concessions.