In 1973, the film director Miguel Littín fled Chile after a U.S.-supported military coup toppled the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. The new dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, instituted a reign of terror and turned Chile into a laboratory to test the poisonous prescriptions of the American economist Milton Friedman. In 1985, Littín returned to Chile disguised as a Uruguayan businessman. He was desperate to see the homeland he’d been exiled from for so many years; he also meant to pull off a very tricky stunt: with the help of three film crews from three different countries, each supposedly busy making a movie to promote tourism, he would secretly put together a film that would tell the truth about Pinochet’s benighted Chile—a film that would capture the world’s attention while landing the general and his secret police with a very visible black eye.

Afterwards, the great novelist Gabriel García Márquez sat down with Littín to hear the story of his escapade, with all its scary, comic, and not-a-little surreal ups and downs. Then, applying the same unequaled gifts that had already gained him a Nobel Prize, García Márquez wrote it down. Clandestine in Chile is a true-life adventure story and a classic of modern reportage.

賈西亞．馬奎斯（Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1928~）

出生於南美哥倫比亞的作家，早年擔任報社記者，後專事寫作，著有《樹葉風暴》、《百年孤寂》、《族長之秋》、《預知死亡紀事》、《受在瘟疫蔓延時》、《迷宮裏的將軍》等；報導文學作品則有《一個罹難者的故事》、《安哥拉的古巴兵》、《尼加拉瓜之戰》等，讀者遍及全世界，1982年獲頒諾貝爾文學獎。馬奎斯曾因阿根廷作家路易斯．波赫士稱揚智利軍事獨裁政權為「南美反共堡壘」而大加批判，也因為祕魯作者巴加斯．略薩對皮諾契特政權態度曖昧而與之反目。

密戈爾．立頓（Miguel littin, 1942~）

早年就讀智利戲劇學院，畢業後進入電影界。曾任阿葉德政府時代的國家電影公司總裁，1973年反阿葉德流血政變中，成為軍方撲殺對象，後僅以身免，流亡歐洲，結識馬奎斯。立頓曾以描寫尼加拉瓜革命的電影《阿爾西諾與鷹》（Alsino & the Conder）獲1973年莫斯科影展金牌獎，奧斯卡最佳外語片提名；本書所述立頓這次潛返智利拍片的成果，則是1986年9月在威尼斯影展得獎的《關於智利的全記錄》（Acta General de Chile）。