Miguel Angel & La Virgen is a song that "honors" the mass media campaign performed by the fucking genocide Augusto Pinochet, supported by some people and priests from the Chilean Catholic Church, in order to divert the attention about all the crimes that were performed those days by the police and soldiers (something similar to what's going today in Chile on Sebastian Piñera's government).

If you are not Chilean, please read the story. It's got everything. An abused and abandoned poor clairvoyant teenager who "speaks to Virgin Mary", a fucking genocide, dictatorship, Catholic Church, Intelligence services, Virgin Mary performing gender corrective surgery...I don't know, freak? SURE!

The song was recorded by me and my friend Fran Vilches (Voices, while performing as Miguel Angel in my place) the day after a tv show remembering this freak episode in Chilean history.

Here is a summary:

God’s ways are unfathomable. That’s what the Catholic Church’s Sunday school taught us and that’s where our mothers sent us, with hopes that we would “not set foot on the path of the wicked”; in order avoid ending up like many other kids in the neighborhood, to hang around on street corners, with our feet dragging behind.

But for Miguel Ángel, things took a turn for the worse. His mother and father handed him over to an institution run by the church, where he was subjected to abuse and inhumane treatment. He wandered around, was moved between various orphanages and ran away several times. He appeared doomed to lead a tragic life, alone and forsaken, when in 1983 in the twilight of dictatorship he came into the focus of public interest by way of a very unusual, quite extraordinary event. At the age of 13, Miguel Ángel made direct contact with the mother of Jesus, the Holy Virgin Mary.

It was just a regular day when Miguel Ángel and his friends habitually walked to the top of a hill on the outskirts of Peñablanca to hang out and sniff glue. The air was crisp, the skies were overcast. Suddenly, The Virgin Mary emerged in the sky. She stretched out her arms and spoke to Miguel Ángel. The Virgin Mary desired to speak through the boy to the people of Chile.

Miguel Ángel went to that hill frequently to encounter Virgin Mary. He was filled by her presence, he threw fits, and went into trance. People encircled the boy upon the hill listening to The Virgin’s missives through the skinny boy’s voice. It was rumored that the sick and disabled could be cured of their ills.

The news was a sensation. Initially, people were skeptical, the whole thing seemed absurd. The Catholic Church officially declared that they didn’t put any credibility to the revelations of the exhibitionist Virgin made to the poor boy, but folk belief follows its own logic. Those visiting Peñablanca to witness Miguel Angel’s encounters with The Virgin Mary told of a mysterious, religious experience. They said that there upon the hill under the sky they achieved a direct connection to God. People traveled there from all over Latin America and the United States. They brought sick family members with hopes that the ”blessed child” would call on the Virgin Mary. Tourist packages announced that miracles were guaranteed.

Many were totally blinded in their belief in the mad, skinny, dark boy. For a period of time, Miguel Ángel was able to muster up to one hundred thousand spectators for his performances.

”Virgin Mary Is Sad That The People Protest”

The Catholic Church was the most prominent organization in Chile to oppose Pinochet. From the very first day of dictatorship, Cardinal Raúl Silva Enríquez took sides with the oppressed. He organized Vicaría de la Solidaridad, a refuge where the opposition could obtain legal assistance and where crimes and human rights violations were investigated and reported. Raúl Silva Enriquez ended up being the dictator’s worst enemy. The Catholic Church in Chile opened its gates to the opposition, and so the church became, bit by bit, part of the organization of the resistance.

Pinochet realized that he needed to punish the church and Miguel Ángel, the boy who spoke to Virgin Mary, was a perfect accessory. The dictatorship initiated an intelligence operation and convinced half of Chile that visions occurred in Peñablanca. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just Miguel Ángel who was observing things in the heavens! People said that all this was achieved by aircraft manipulating the clouds, spraying the skies with chemicals and hallucinogenic substances so that it could produce apparitions and images. But the induced phenomenon was collective hypnosis.Miguel Ángel elucidated announcements from ”The White Lady”. Virgin Mary’s message to the Chilean people turned out to be an attack on the Church’s hierarchy, as well as support for the Pinochet regime: ”The Virgin Mary is sad that the people protest”, ”The White Lady articulates her support for our President Pinochet”.

A few years later, when a group of left-wing extremists attacked Pinochet, killing five of his bodyguards while the dictator survived, Pinochet argued that in the car’s shattered windshield one could clearly identify the image of Virgin Mary, who thus protected the life of the mass murderer himself.


For his part, Miguel Ángel continued to perform brilliant theatrical performances while in trance, contacting the Blessed Virgin. ”The White Lady says to stop wearing shoes”, ”The Virgin asks people to eat dirt” and thousands of fools let themselves be manipulated into hysterical pantomimes.

Miguel Angel’s unpredictable shenanigans began to betray him. He was an artist. An eccentric diva conducting a dialogue with the Virgin Mary dressed in sequins and feathers, just like in a drag show. People gave up on him. Desperately, the wonder child started to bleed, cry, end up in mysterious ecstasy, speak in tongues, to no avail. Step by step Miguel Ángel lost touch with reality. Everyone who had once profited from ”The Blessed Child” turned their backs on him.

People forgot Miguel Ángel. The eighties ended and Chile returned to democracy. People left behind their years of dread and began idolizing a wholly novel faith; consumerism. With the advent of neoliberalism, Chilean economy flourished and continued to do so for twenty years. The country was completely transformed.

One day in 2002, newspapers were informed of Miguel Ángel’s return to Chile. What a surprise! No one had even heard of Miguel Ángel leaving Chile. But some editors sent reporters to Santiago airport to welcome the former miracle child and – another surprise! A woman passed through the security control. Miguel Ángel was now transformed into a girl with long black hair and exaggerated feminine gestures, to the delight of the tabloids.

She clarified that she was no longer Miguel Ángel, her new name was Karol Romanoff. And when they asked her in which country the gender corrective surgery had been performed, she responded with a metallic voice: ”It was The Virgin, The White Lady, who operated on me with a ray of light and gave me the body that I have today.” Mocked, discredited and humiliated, Karol Romanoff fell into alcohol abuse and a deep depression. The same people that once upon a time made pilgrimage to Peñablanca and spoke in favor of the Wonder Child, now, at best, said that he was ”possessed by the Devil”.

Surrounded by a small group of devotees, Karol Romanoff lived inconspicuously until the day she died on September 27:th, 2008, only 42 years old.

Does anybody care what life for a dark-skinned, impoverished boy, who once served the interests of power turns into? His own family did not. But I’ve learned from various sources that people still visit the small town of Peñablanca in search of visions and divine contact. Among others, a group of transvestites with the most destitute background, who dream of gender corrective surgery, travel once a month to Peñablanca to the place of wonders, with hopes that The Virgin Mary will perform a miracle for them and with a ”divine cut” transact an express operation in just the same way as with Miguel Ángel.