Sol Rojas-Lizana and her older brother Ariel didn’t make a sound. The two children held their breath and glanced at the wanted man seated nervously across the room of their unassuming brick home.

Somewhere outside, a truck of Chilean soldiers patrolled the city streets of Santiago at the order of their president and military dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Any member of the socialist resistance who dared to challenge their US-backed junta would be apprehended or killed.

It was 1979 and Sol and her family of seven were acutely aware of the danger they faced. Pinochet and his army had seized control of the nation and overthrown former president Salvador Allende six years earlier.

The Lizanas harboured the wanted man on and off in the decade that followed. 

The man was Hernán Aguiló Martínez, one of the leaders of the rebel political party (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) MIR, or Movement of the Revolutionary Left. 

He and his partner would come and go, using Sol and Ariel’s home as a safe house.

At other times, another of the family’s notorious guests was Andrés Pascal Allende, the leader of MIR and the nephew of the deposed president. Still alive, Pascal Allende is also a relative of Hollywood actor Pedro Pascal, known for his roles as The Mandalorian in the Star Wars universe and Oberyn Martel in Game of Thrones. Together, the group had orchestrated a rebel uprising from the family’s dining room table.

Of the 20 leaders within MIR, Aguiló Martínez and Pascal Allende would be among the few survivors of Pinochet’s reign of terror.

Sol, aged 12, had grown to accept the presence of strangers. In fact, they would become her family.

Their presence heightened her sense of security. She knew that one wrong move meant the group faced execution.

Much is still unknown about the ordeals faced by Chileans from 1970 to 1990, when a referendum was held and a new democratic government was formed.

A ‘period of silence’ followed the end of Pinochet’s tyranny as president, although he remained in office as the military’s commander-in-chief until 1998.

“This is what happened with the Holocaust. After the Holocaust, there was a period of silence in terms of survivors not writing about it.

“It wasn’t until 20 years later that people started to write about their own lives and this is how it was with Chile because the dictatorship didn’t finish until 1990.”

The graphic novel recreates some of the most terrifying moments faced by the siblings while growing up under Pinochet’s rule.

Sol and Ariel illustrated being used by the resistance to carry out dangerous undercover missions their adult leaders couldn’t. As juveniles, their family and the leaders of MIR felt they would be unsuspected weapons in the fight for freedom.

Hidden by the masses in the streets of Santiago, Sol recalled being given money one day to buy each of the nation’s major newspapers. She was given strict orders to purchase each paper from a different newsstand in a different district, so not to raise suspicion or attract unwanted attention from the military’s intense surveillance.

The family also helped to produce its own secret newsletter to spread hope to other parts of the country.

The children were then responsible for disseminating it because their fingerprints could not be traced.

“When you are 16 years old you get your ID card and they take your thumbprint and you are in their system. Because we were so young, we didn’t have our prints in the system. So, we were the ones that handled everything,” Sol said.

“It was forbidden, so our newsletter had to be produced and done in our house.

“We all contributed. My brother would do drawings and then the editor would write it, and my mum would put it on the typeset.”