The language of euphemism and the inversion of customary meanings is alive and well in Chile, 25 years after Nineteen Eight-Four first appeared there in Spanish.

One evening in 1983, when Chile was under military rule, three young journalists discovered that all their peers had read the same ubiquitous edition of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s anti-Stalinist parable (thanks, probably, to US State Department largess). But none had ever heard of Nineteen Eighty-Four.