Roberto Ampuero (born 20 February 1953 in Valparaíso, Chile) is a Chilean author, columnist, and the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Chile, a position he held from March 11, 2018 to June 13, 2019. His first novel ¿Quién mató a Kristián Kustermann? was published in 1993 and in it he introduced his private eye, Cayetano Brulé, winning the Revista del Libro prize of El Mercurio. Since then the detective has appeared in five novels. In addition he has published an autobiographical novel about his years in Cuba titled Nuestros Años Verde Olivo (1999) and the novels Los Amantes de Estocolmo (Book of the Year in Chile, 2003 and the bestseller of the year in Chile)) and Pasiones Griegas (chosen as the Best Spanish Novel in China, 2006). His novels have been published in Latin America and Spain, and have been translated into German, French, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, Croatian, and English. In Chile his works have sold more than 40 editions. Ampuero now resides in Iowa where he is a professor at the University of Iowa in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He was a columnist of La Tercera and the New York Times Syndicate and since March 2009 has been working as a columnist for El Mercurio. Between 2013 and 2014 he was Minister of Culture in the government of Sebastián Piñera.
Early life (1953–1973)
Roberto Ampuero Espinoza was born in Valparaiso in 1953, as the son of Roberto Ampuero Brule and Angelica Espinoza. He grew up in a “porteña middle class family who leaned to the political right,” his maternal grandmother was French and his dad, worked during World War II for the exterior service of information for the United States. In his first years, he carried out his studies in the David Trumbull Presbyterian School, and later in the German school Deutsche Schule of Valparaiso (DSV) because his parents considered it to be an “excellent private school that was near the house” and they like it for its “demanding curriculum, discipline, education, and language programs.” While he was there, he learned to read and write in German. He studied there for 12 years, completing his schooling in 1971 with a GPA of 5.8 (from 1-7). Years later, he says “If it wasn’t for this school, I wouldn’t have lived in Germany and met my wife. DSV taught me to be disciplined and serious with what I do, to not waste time, to take difficult situations in stride, to be frugal and simple, and to experience and live in other cultures.” In addition, he thanks DSV for helping him to become closer to writers such as Goethe, Schiller, Brecht, and Mann, and remembers that the school “marked my decision to travel the world with my nomadic soul.”
After living 17 years in Valparaiso, Ampuero moved in 1972 to the capital of the country, Santiago, to matriculate into the University of Chile. There he studied Social Anthropology in the mornings and Latin American Literature in the afternoons. Around this time, he became a member of the Chilean Communist Youth. He says that “When I was young, I was a part of the Communist Youth because I believed that the socialism was democratic, just, and economically prosperous.” After the coup d'état at the end of September in 1973, he decided to depart for East Germany.
Exile to Cuba (1973–1979)
Thanks to a contact in the Eastern German Embassy, he left Chile in 1973 after receiving a scholarship for journalism in the University of Karl Marx in Leipzig.
In Eastern Germany he met Margarita Flores, daughter of Fernando Flores Ibarra, attorney general of the Cuban Revolution, with whom he left to live together in Cuba. They arrived at the island in 1974 and that same year they got married. However, this marriage only lasted until 1977.
In this period his political thought began to change. In an interview with Michael Moody in 1999 he says “It’s not just that there was a lack of dialogue, but that the government despised the opposition, making them the enemy. I came from a country where it was a tradition to have dialogue, to have liberty. We had tried to restore the socialism, but now there was a dictatorship and what the people most criticized was that the dictator declared everyone against him an enemy of the state, and therefore you have to incarcerate them, shoot them, or expel them out of the country. When I arrived in Cuba I discovered that the government did the same to the opposition and that they didn’t have dialogue either.” In 2008 he remembered that: “When I arrived in Cuba in 1974 and I saw the economic disaster I thought that it was as much a democracy as I am a Martian, I said to myself ‘this is not the country I want! I quit the JJCC (communist youth) in 1976 in La Habana where everything was going on.”