My friend Enrique Zapata-Bravo, who has died aged 83, was a psychiatrist in hospitals and secure units across the country, a supporter of refugees with a history of torture and an expert who travelled on World Health Organization missions in Africa.
Having trained in psychiatry in Oxford and Buckinghamshire, Enrique became a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1986. Over the following decades he worked as a consultant psychiatrist in Oxford, Milton Keynes and Northampton; lectured in Canada, Spain, Argentina and Chile; taught postgraduate students; and published original research.
From the 1980s he worked tirelessly for victims of torture as an independent consultant and a medico-legal expert at the Helen Bamber Foundation, helping scores of refugees to remain in the UK. In 2019, he made a landmark contribution in the case of KV, an asylum seeker from Sri Lanka, by convincing the supreme court that the man had indeed been tortured and that his wounds were not self-inflicted, as the Home Office claimed.
Born in Osorno in the south of Chile, Enrique attended the Liceo de Hombres de Osorno, and went to medical school at the University of Chile, Santiago, where has also took a post-graduate course in public health. He met Flor Duran, then a student, later a teacher, in a student summer camp in the southern mountains, working with the impoverished Mapuche communities of Auraucania.
Shortly after they married, in 1964, he set up a pioneering clinic for the widely dispersed and poor population in the far south. Later, as a consultant in chest medicine at the teaching hospital Jose Joaquin Aguirre in Santiago, he worked with miners in the copper belt.
He was at the height of his career, working as director of the Institute of Respiratory Medicine at the University of Chile, when President Salvador Allende was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Three years later, when Pinochet’s military began to target them and their friends, Enrique, Flor and their two sons left the country and arrived in Oxford with nothing.
It was through Flor’s connections with the World University Service that I met the couple and taught them English. Enrique had come to Oxford to undertake medical research at the chest clinic at the Churchill hospital, and gained a master’s from the University of Oxford in 1978. Finding that he needed to retake all his exams – in English this time – in order to practise, he accepted the challenge and and opted for another specialism, psychiatry. He chose to stay in the UK, where his third son was born. After retirement, Enrique continued working as a locum until 2022, but in his later life he played chess and tennis and formed a musical group, performing and explaining tangos and sambas to enthusiastic audiences.
He is survived by Flor, their sons, Felipe, Camilo and Xavier, and grandchildren, Annabella, Lucas, Toni and Kika.