Anti-Communism

Anti-Communism in the novel operates as both official doctrine and a daily language of suspicion: it casts political opposition as a threat to the state, while the Dictator extends the same logic to queer people, treating difference itself as dangerous. The result is a world in which public claims of order coexist with military force, arrests, searches, and a precarious struggle to speak or simply remain safe.

Official Doctrine and the Making of Enemies

The Dictator’s anti-communism is expressed through commands and contempt rather than considered argument. After a Spanish newspaper publishes a photograph that makes him look like a criminal suspect, he accuses his opponents of treachery and regrets that he did not crush them all in 1973. His anger turns immediately toward the possibility of renewed opposition: he insists that the army should impose a curfew and says he would order the execution of any communist who challenged him. Anti-communism here is inseparable from the threat of state violence; political dissent is not treated as legitimate disagreement but as an enemy to be eliminated.

That vocabulary also licenses casual cruelty. On the road, the Dictator and his bodyguards laugh at a limping dog and he authorizes them to kill it by calling it a Marxist. The episode makes his political language deliberately grotesque: the label does not describe the animal but reveals how readily he uses anti-communist naming to turn a target into an object of ridicule and potential violence. The command sits beside the larger threats against human opponents, exposing the ease with which the regime’s rhetoric collapses political identity into a reason for harm.

Queerness Cast as Political Contagion

The Dictator’s hostility to communism overlaps with his persecution of queer people. After seeing a cadet walking with a bodyguard, he asks where the “effeminate pansy” came from and declares that people like him bring bad luck. He then equates queer people with communists, describing both as a plague that spreads through the army. His response is not limited to private disgust: he orders the cadet removed and discharged, and directs his secretary to provide a false account of the reason so that the colonel who recommended him will not ask questions. The scene shows anti-communism functioning as part of a broader authoritarian classification system, one that presents political and sexual difference alike as contamination.

The cadet’s later appearance at a formal award ceremony sharpens the contrast. The Dictator mechanically embraces honored guests, including uniformed soldiers, as if acting out paternal authority. When the cadet addresses him, he recognizes the same person he had ordered expelled. The episode brings the earlier prejudice into public view and shows how the regime’s polished ceremony cannot fully conceal the arbitrary exclusion beneath it.

Everyday Debate and Counter-Speech

Away from official settings, anti-communist politics circulates through neighborhood talk. In the lower-class Santiago neighborhood where the Queen of the Corner becomes a familiar presence, a grocery store serves as a meeting point for commentary on demonstrations, opposition statements, and the Dictator’s threats. Residents voice the hope that 1986 will be the year he falls and call people into the streets. This political conversation emerges amid unemployment and reliance on shop credit, anchoring opposition not in abstract slogans alone but in the material conditions of neighborhood life.

The Queen’s own political speech develops from what she has witnessed. While embroidering sheets for wealthy clients, she listens to women searching for detained or missing loved ones and asking for news at closed metal doors. Their grief moves her. Later, when a woman dismisses protesters as people who only riot and strike, the Queen finally answers that someone has to speak about what is happening and points to soldiers, explosions, and shootings as evidence that the government’s account of normality is false. She is frightened even as she speaks. Her intervention reveals the personal risk involved in challenging the anti-communist common sense that presents dissent as disorder.

Broadcasts, Arrests, and the Reach of Repression

Radio and official announcements compete to define events. A government communiqué claims that a subversive plan for September has been uncovered and says measures have been taken to prevent violence. The Queen distrusts the warning and turns to Radio Cooperativa, which reports that people have been handed over to military authorities. The juxtaposition makes the political struggle a contest over information: official language promises prevention and order, while the broadcast reports arrests and the Queen listens for news of people whose safety she cannot confirm.

Her concern is personal as well as political. She fears that Carlos may be in jail or have been arrested with other revolutionary students. When she sees him crossing the street, she hides behind a tablecloth hanging to dry and watches him, relieved that he is alive and present. Ordinary objects and gestures—work for a client, a radio dial, laundry on a balcony—become part of a life organized around surveillance, uncertainty, and the hope of contact.

Siege, Fear, and the Limits of the Dictator’s Certainty

The regime’s anti-communist language accompanies the military response to the events of September 1986. The Dictator expects revolutionary activity and says that the army will take charge; the narrative then describes a city under lockdown, with roads blocked, house-to-house searches, and residents forced to spend the night in football fields. In Santiago, the Queen stays awake with a kettle ready in case Carlos or his friends arrive and the radio turned low for updates. The contrast between the Dictator’s confidence in force and the Queen’s anxious listening makes the same political crisis legible from opposite social positions.

The Dictator’s private fears complicate, but do not excuse, his public power. He has a nightmare in which birds attack him, and he wakes to reassurance from those around him that it was only a dream. Later, after the events of September, ministers and relatives gather at the house in the Cajón del Maipo while he drinks tea prepared with a tranquilizer prescribed by his doctors. His wife says that Gonzalo’s tarot reading warned her against travel, and that she canceled a planned trip to Miami. These scenes give the ruler a vulnerable domestic setting, but the novel keeps that vulnerability beside the machinery of repression rather than treating personal insecurity as a substitute explanation for it.

The Queen’s own ending registers the cost of living under that machinery. At dawn, she burns papers bearing phone numbers and addresses, cleans the house to remove traces, and packs her most cherished possessions into two bags. She looks across the gray horizon from the roof as someone dispossessed, wishing she could see Carlos once more. In this trajectory, anti-communism is not confined to the Dictator’s speeches: it shapes the conditions that drive a politically awakened neighbor toward flight, and it makes private attachment, public speech, and physical safety increasingly difficult to separate.