"Chile remains a prisoner of its own democratic transition," says writer Nona Fernández.

Chile built a "soft democracy," and the denial of the dictatorship that exists in certain parts of the country "has roots there," said Chilean writer Nona Fernández on the occasion of the publication of her latest novel, Marciano , a portrait of former guerrilla Mauricio Hernández Norambuena.

After four years of interviews in the prison where Hernández Norambuena is serving his sentence, Fernández (Santiago, 1971) constructed a narrative that revisits the transition and explores the ethical limits of violence, memory, and confinement.

"The interesting thing was that I didn't encounter the stereotype of the Cuban-trained combatant , but rather all of his humanity," explained the playwright, screenwriter, and actress.

Hernández Norambuena, 67, also known as "Commander Ramiro," is one of the most controversial figures in contemporary Chile : he was one of the leaders of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) and one of the perpetrators of the 1986 attack on General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

He has spent nearly 25 years in prison for crimes in both Chile and Brazil, the most emblematic being the 1991 assassination of Chilean Senator Jaime Guzmán, one of the dictatorship's ideologues.

In 1996, he and other members of the now-defunct FPMR participated in one of the most cinematic prison breaks in history, escaping aboard a helicopter. Years later, he was arrested in Brazil for the kidnapping of a businessman and subsequently extradited to Chile.

" It's a novel, not a biography (...) I've manipulated the material of his life. The voice that speaks isn't Mauricio's: it's his content, but everything is constructed," Fernández said about a book that also includes the voices of deceased or murdered former guerrillas.

" I have no ethical problems with what they (the FPMR guerrillas) did in the face of a fierce dictatorship. The complexity begins when democracy arrives," he added.

Author of successful novels such as Mapocho (2002) and Space Invaders (2013) and who has crossed memory and imagination throughout her career to understand the recent history of Chile, Fernández declared that Marciano is also a work that "speaks of our losses, imprisonments, misunderstandings; of how we lost ourselves and how we sustain ourselves."

"Mauricio can serve as a mirror," added the author, who used as one of the narrative threads the sensory therapies the former guerrilla has undergone to "awaken his brain" after the 17 years he spent in isolation in Brazil.

Long conversations with him also made him wonder "what it means for the Chilean subconscious to have someone like Hernández locked away like a centaur in his tower."

"The book attempts to provide insights into this, without replacing the pending conversation about transition, reparations, and the limits of democracy," he noted.

For Fernández, Chile never had a "serious" conversation about its own transition , which began when Pinochet lost a 1988 referendum on his continued power and left power two years later, although he remained commander-in-chief of the Army until 1998 and a senator for life.

"We built a soft democracy, with porous boundaries, with human rights violators in public office . The current denialism has its roots there," he points out.

Pinochet's dictatorship left at least 3,200 opponents murdered , of whom 1,469 were victims of enforced disappearance.

There have been dozens of trials for human rights violations during the Pinochet regime, but Pinochet died in 2006 at the age of 91 without being convicted for his responsibility for the crimes.

Chile, Fernández concluded, "remains trapped in its own democratic transition" : "Our transition marks a founding moment for those of us who live in this society, but not everything has been discussed. We never called a spade a spade and called a spade a spade."