Did a poisoned fish open my eyes to a culture of fear? | Sasha Abramsky

A doctor told Sasha Abramsky that, in all likelihood, he had eaten a fish tainted with ciguatoxin. Suddenly, horrors and anxieties lurked everywhere

In early February 2015, two weeks after my family arrived in the atmospheric Chilean port city of Valparaiso to study Spanish for a month, I woke up in the middle of the night convinced I was about to die.

We were high up in the hills above the city center, in a compact neighborhood called Cerro Mariposa, staying in a small second-floor suite of rooms out back of our landlady Marisol's house.