Nov. 28, 1972 – September 11, 1998
Claudia López Benaiges was an anarchist militant and dance student at the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano who was fatally shot by police during protests on the 25th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup.
She was on a barricade in the La Pincoya district, a suburb of Santiago de Chile, with a group of encapuchades (masked protesters) when a carabinero opened fire, hitting her in the back and wounding two of her comrades. She died a few hours later.
The regime press attempted to cover up her death and blame it on protesters, but a preponderance of evidence including bullet casings recovered from the scene proved otherwise.
Claudia became a symbol for the Chilean anarchist movement as well as student and youth movements more generally. Among other things, a long-running anarchist social center was named after her.
Her murder also made clear that, nearly a decade after the supposed “first democratic election in Chile since 1970,” Chile remained under the domination of the same autocrats who had run the dictatorship.
You can read an archived collection of her writings (in Spanish) and, below, see a video of one of her dance performances.