Luis Sepúlveda was a Chilean writer, director, journalist, and political activist.
He studied theater production at the National University. In 1969, Sepúlveda was awarded a five-year scholarship to continue his dramatic studies at Moscow University, but it was withdrawn after five months due to 'misconduct' (he attended a party with the wife of a Politburo official, which was considered high cost).
Luis Sepúlveda was politically active initially as a leader of the student movement and in Salvador Allende's Department of Cultural Affairs where he was responsible for a series of cheap editions of classics for the general public. He also acted as an intermediary between the government and Chilean companies.
After the 1973 Chilean coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, he was imprisoned for two and a half years and then granted conditional release through the efforts of the German branch of Amnesty International and remained under house arrest.
He managed to escape and went underground for about a year. With the help of a friend who was the head of the French Alliance in Valparaíso, he created a drama group that became the premier cultural hub of the resistance. He was arrested again and sentenced to life imprisonment (later reduced to twenty-eight years) for treason and sabotage.
Amnesty International's German department intervened again and his prison sentence was commuted to eight years of exile, and in 1977 he left Chile for Sweden where he was supposed to study Spanish literature. At the first stop in Buenos Aires, he escaped and was able to enter Uruguay. Since the political situations in both Argentina and Uruguay were similar to those in his homeland, Sepulveda went to São Paulo in Brazil and then to Paraguay. He had to leave again due to the local system and finally settled in Quito, Ecuador, as a guest of his friend Jorge Enrique Adom. He directed the Alliance Française theatre, founded a theater company and participated in a UNESCO mission to assess the impact of colonization on the Shuar Indians.
During the expedition, he shared the life of the Shuar for seven months and came to understand Latin America as a multicultural and multilingual continent where the Marxism-Leninism he was studying was not applicable to the rural people who were dependent on the natural environment around it. . He worked in close contact with Indian organizations and drafted the first literacy educational plan for the Imbapura Peasants' Union in the Andes.
In 1979 he joined the International Simon Bolivar Brigade who was fighting in Nicaragua and after the victory of the revolution he started working as a journalist and after one year he left for Europe.
He went to Hamburg in Germany because of his admiration for German literature (he learned the language in prison) and especially romantics like Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin and worked there as a journalist who travels extensively in Latin America and Africa.
In 1982, he contacted Greenpeace and until 1987 worked as a crew member on one of their ships. Later he worked as a coordinator between the various branches of the organization.