Vicaría de la Solidaridad

Vicaría de la Solidaridad is associated in the novel with public advocacy for the relatives of people detained and disappeared under the dictatorship. A vigil outside its premises in the Plaza de Armas gives the families a visible setting in which to demand justice; when the Queen of the Corner joins them, the institution becomes a point of contact between private fear and collective action.

A Public Site of Advocacy

A report on Radio Cooperativa informs the Queen that the Organization of Families of Detained and Disappeared Persons is holding a vigil in front of Vicaría de la Solidaridad, in the Plaza de Armas. The families are calling for those responsible for human-rights abuses to be brought to justice. The report presents the gathering not as a formal legal proceeding but as a public act of witness and demand, carried by relatives’ presence and by the radio’s circulation of their cause.

The vigil’s location matters because it makes the families’ claim visible in a shared civic space. Elsewhere, the Queen hears that more than twenty students have been injured and at least as many arrested during university rioting, then turned over to military authorities. Against this atmosphere of arrests and state force, the families’ demand names the consequences of detention and disappearance and insists that those affected must not be forgotten.

The Queen Joins the Vigil

After being struck by police while trying to reach the Plaza de Armas, the Queen encounters women gathered on the cathedral steps with photographs of missing relatives. A young woman gestures for her to join them. The Queen takes up a placard bearing the photograph of a disappeared person and adds her voice to the protest. For a moment, she finds acceptance among the women rather than shame about her conspicuously feminine voice: the shared demand gives her a place within a wider expression of dissent.

The moment is brief and dangerous. Police sirens announce an attempt to disperse the gathering, and the Queen runs, falls on the wet paving stones, and reaches shelter in a shopping passage. Still affected by tear gas, she carefully removes the photograph from the placard, folds it, and keeps it in her pocket. The photograph carried away from the vigil becomes a small, concrete remnant of the public testimony she has joined.

Institutional Significance in the Narrative

The novel links Vicaría de la Solidaridad to a form of civic action that persists outside the state’s coercive machinery: families identify the disappeared, speak in public, and demand accountability. The scene does not describe the institution’s internal organization or legal procedures; its significance is conveyed through the vigil reported on the radio and the Queen’s encounter with the demonstrators.

For the Queen, joining the protest marks a change in the scope of her concern. Her attention to the dictatorship and its victims has deepened as she listens to the women’s testimonies; at the vigil, that concern becomes participation. The institution’s public setting therefore connects broadcast information, family testimony, and street-level solidarity, while the rapid police dispersal makes clear how precarious that public claim to justice remains.