Episode 3

Mia Soteriou reads Carmen Aguirre's coming-of-age memoir of life as a teenage revolutionary in Latin America.

Born a week after the death of Che Guevara, Carmen Aguirre was always destined to become a revolutionary. After Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973, her family is forced to flee to Canada, but a few years later return to join the underground movement against Pinochet. And so Carmen's double life begins. Posing as a westernised teenager by day, at night she is drilled in surveillance techniques, cryptography and subterfuge. It's a time of high excitement, but also one of fear and paranoia, of not knowing who to trust, or who to fear.

Today: when the situation in Bolivia becomes to dangerous, Carmen finds herself in rural Argentina in the depths of a harsh winter.

Author: Carmen Aguirre.
Reader: Mia Soteriou.
Abridger: Richard Hamilton
Producer: Justine Willett.