This Year He Will Fall

“This Year He Will Fall” is a recurring anti-dictatorship slogan in the novel’s 1986 Santiago, voiced in demonstrations and printed on calls to protest. Its significance lies in the way a collective prediction enters the Queen of the Corner’s daily life: first as political noise she fears, then as words connected to her own participation and the risks she faces under repression.

A slogan in the streets

In the spring of 1986, Santiago is marked by demonstrations, tire smoke, blackouts, and repeated news bulletins. The Queen hears neighborhood talk predicting that Pinochet will not last beyond that year, alongside calls to take to the streets and prepare for tear gas. Radio Cooperativa carries protest news and urgent announcements into ordinary homes, but she initially prefers old songs and finds the reports frightening. The slogan therefore belongs to a public political world from which she feels both drawn and estranged.

The phrase becomes especially visible on leaflets scattered along the Alameda and Paseo Ahumada. Among the red-ink calls for a “Year of Liberation” and the end of the party, “This Year He Will Fall” turns the expectation of political change into a portable message. Its recurrence binds street protest to the period’s broader atmosphere of imminent confrontation without showing that the predicted fall has occurred.

From overheard prediction to participation

At first, the Queen encounters the slogan through neighborhood discussion and broadcasts rather than as an activist. Her home is a refuge, and her attention is often absorbed by Carlos and the boxes he asks her to store. Yet political violence increasingly presses into that private world: she worries when reports describe students arrested by special police, and government warnings about an uncovered subversive plan deepen her unease.

During a demonstration, she carries a package for Carlos through tear gas and a police advance. The crowd’s cries include the refrain “Now he will fall!”; she remains still as protestors flee, then passes through the line of police by presenting herself as an ordinary older woman going shopping. The incident makes the slogan more than neighborhood optimism: it accompanies a protest exposed to immediate state force, while the Queen’s passage through danger serves a clandestine errand rather than an announced political role.

Later, after being struck by a police officer while trying to pick up a leaflet, she thinks that Carlos and his companions in the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front will retaliate against the authorities. At the Plaza de Armas, she joins women holding photographs of detained and disappeared relatives, takes up a placard, and adds her voice to their demand for justice. In this setting, the hope expressed by “This Year He Will Fall” sits beside the unresolved absence of those taken away.

Hope under repression

By September, the slogan appears on demonstration leaflets as the city faces house-to-house searches, roadblocks, arrests, and military occupation. The call for liberation is thus set against a tightening security operation, not presented as a victory. The Queen returns home fearful, keeps a kettle ready in case Carlos or his friends arrive, and listens to Radio Cooperativa’s report urging residents to remain indoors and report anything suspicious.

At dawn she erases traces of herself, burns papers bearing addresses and telephone numbers, and packs her possessions into two bags before leaving the house with La Rana. The slogan’s repeated promise of a coming fall contrasts with this immediate displacement: the political future remains uncertain, while the Queen’s refuge and her connection to Carlos have already been put at risk. The phrase functions as a collective expression of resistance, but the narrative leaves its promised outcome unresolved.