Claudia López Benaiges was murdered on September 11, 1998, after being shot in the back by cops on a barricade in the La Pincoya neighborhood of Santiago, in the context of mobilizations commemorating the Coup d’État in Chile. López was an active feminist, anarchist militant and poet, in addition to studying Spanish pedagogy and dance.
Poem by Claudia López
The celestial litanies
that fill the nights of the worlds,
they incessantly question the anxious daughters of uncertainty.
They explode dazzlingly like bodies that stretch through the walls,
that burst forth through the whispers of light,
that confront the airy and torrid abysses.
The dark bodies of insurrectionary anxiety,
of the subversive desire of the lunar chains,
that poured onto the earth, they seek their names,
those they do not yet have,
that lie buried in the roots of the jungles.