Rodolfo Kebede, who spent decades at the center of Chile’s most notorious police and torture chambers, is among the most celebrated victims of the country’s bloody dictatorship.

He served a 25-year sentence for murder, but was later pardoned by the same dictator he fled for freedom.

But the fact that Kebede’s crimes were carried out against hundreds – and perhaps thousands – of political prisoners is largely forgotten, despite the fact that his story remains relevant now because of the growing trend in Chile towards “solar justice” – the recognition that the crimes not only occurred outside the country, but also in the shadows under which they were committed.

Kebede’s case inspired Chilean philosopher and author Daniel Zamora and two colleagues to write a memoir of their experiences as a part of the ‘Rainbow Movement,’ a network of civil society workers that campaigned against the Chilean government’s repression throughout the ’90s and early ’00s.

The authors say that the book is a collaboration between their two groups, the authors and some former prisoners.

“The authors did not want to simply write about their time as political prisoners without an account of what they experienced,” according to Zamora, who says that they were working in a legal structure they considered illegitimate because the “prisoners were not allowed the possibility to challenge the legality of the Chilean state.”

The book provides a “glimpse of what political prisoners in these three countries endured in the 1990s and ’00s,” says Zamora.

The authors describe their experiences – not only witnessing, but feeling and learning. Many of them, which covered an array of crimes from torture and extrajudicial executions to kidnap, were held incommunicado for several days at prison and subsequently interrogated more than 700 times by military intelligence officers, who interrogated with respect, but without providing any relief.

Their experience is similar to his own, though he only found out about his detention in 2002. He was detained in an overcrowded military prison before being sentenced to 33 years’ imprisonment for his role in the murder of an American journalist.

As an alternative to making a name for himself as a writer or activist, Kebede wrote ‘My Prison, My Prison?’ and then made a documentary film about his years at Auschwitz, in which he describes his experiences in prison.

After the publication of the book, Zamora – who was also named one of the