Books about Pinochet from Amazon.com

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Following a military coup in 1973 led by General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean people lived for 17 years under his dictatorial rule. This study describes the gradual struggle for civil rights and freedoms which took place during that time, leading to public presidential elections in 1990..
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The headline-grabbing story of the covert, international "anti-terrorist" network responsible for South America's worst human rights abuses.

Throughout the 1970s, six Latin American governments led by Chile formed a military alliance called Operation Condor to carry out kidnappings, torture, and political assassinations across three continents. It was an early "war on terror" initially encouraged by the CIA which later backfired on the United States.

Hailed by Foreign Affairs as "remarkable" and "a major contribution to the historical record," The Condor Years uncovers the unsettling facts about the secret U.S. relationship with the dictators who created this terrorist organization. Written by award-winning journalist John Dinges and newly updated to include recent developments in the prosecution of Pinochet, the book is a chilling but dispassionately told history of one of Latin America's darkest eras. Dinges, himself interrogated in a Chilean torture camp, interviewed participants on both sides and examined thousands of previously secret documents to take the reader inside this underground world of military operatives and diplomats, right-wing spies and left-wing revolutionaries..
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Updated with newly declassified documents, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2003.

When first published last year on the thirtieth anniversary of the Chilean coup, Peter Kornbluh's The Pinochet File was hailed on the editorial page of the New York Times —no doubt to the aggravation of Henry Kissinger and all those who would deny the U.S. role in undermining Chilean democracy and supporting the advent of General Pinochet's brutal dictatorship. "Thanks to Peter Kornbluh," Marc Cooper wrote, "we have the first complete, almost day-to-day and fully documented record of this sordid chapter in Cold War American history."

Peter Kornbluh led the campaign for the declassification of some 24,000 secret CIA, White House, NSC, and Defense Department records on Chile. The paperback edition includes new information and documents released since the hardcover went to press. This material is incorporated into a powerful retelling of the events that Newsweek magazine calls "a remarkable reconstruction of the secret U.S. foreign policy that transformed Chile into a dictatorship.".
Price: $20.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Chile was the first major Latin American nation to carry out a complete neoliberal transformation Its policies—encouraging foreign investment, privatizing public sector companies and services, lowering trade barriers, reducing the size of the state, and embracing the market as a regulator of both the economy and society—produced an economic boom that some have hailed as a “miracle” to be emulated by other Latin American countries. But how have Chile’s millions of workers, whose hard labor and long hours have made the miracle possible, fared under this program? Through empirically grounded historical case studies, this volume examines the human underside of the Chilean economy over the past three decades, delineating the harsh inequities that persist in spite of growth, low inflation, and some decrease in poverty and unemployment.

Implemented in the 1970s at the point of the bayonet and in the shadow of the torture chamber, the neoliberal policies of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship reversed many of the gains in wages, benefits, and working conditions that Chile’s workers had won during decades of struggle and triggered a severe economic crisis. Later refined and softened, Pinochet’s neoliberal model began, finally, to promote economic growth in the mid-1980s, and it was maintained by the center-left governments that followed the restoration of democracy in 1990. Yet, despite significant increases in worker productivity, real wages stagnated, the expected restoration of labor rights faltered, and gaps in income distribution continued to widen. To shed light on this history and these ongoing problems, the contributors look at industries long part of the Chilean economy—including textiles and copper—and industries that have expanded more recently—including fishing, forestry, and agriculture. They not only show how neoliberalism has affected Chile’s labor force in general but also how it has damaged the environment and imposed special burdens on women. Painting a sobering picture of the two Chiles—one increasingly rich, the other still mired in poverty—these essays suggest that the Chilean miracle may not be as miraculous as it seems.

Contributors.
Paul Drake
Volker Frank
Thomas Klubock
Rachel Schurman
Joel Stillerman
Heidi Tinsman
Peter Winn
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Price: $24.94 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In 1998, General Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London on charges of crimes against humanity. All over the world, but especially in Chile, the shocking arrest thrust the former dictator and the atrocities of his regime back into the public eye. During the two years just before the arrest, the renowned historian Steve J. Stern had been in Chile collecting oral histories of life under Pinochet as part an investigation into the form and meaning of memories of state-sponsored atrocities. In this compelling work, Stern shares the recollections of individual Chileans and draws on their stories to provide a framework for understanding memory struggles in history. At once analytical, poignant, and personal, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile offers a human portrait of Chile’s memory drama on the eve of the London arrest.

From a woman who recalls Pinochet’s overthrow of Salvador Allende as salvation from scarcity and chaos to an activist whose husband was tortured by state agents, and from a colonel who served under Pinochet to a mother who had two sons “disappeared,” these stories reveal how people connected their intimate personal memories with the collective memory of traumatic times. They draw the reader into a passionate quest to shape the remembered meaning of trauma and state atrocity and, ultimately, to control the politics of truth and justice. Remembering Pinochet’s Chile presents not only a rounded portrait of Chile’s specific memory drama but also a method for tracing the historical unfolding of memory struggles in other societies that must reckon with experiences of mass violence and crimes against humanity.

Remembering Pinochet’s Chile is the first volume in The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile: A Trilogy. Subsequent volumes will trace the historical unfolding of Chile’s memory drama from the 1973 coup into the twenty-first century..
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Battling for Hearts and Minds is the story of the dramatic struggle to define collective memory in Chile during the violent, repressive dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, from the 1973 military coup in which he seized power through his defeat in a 1988 plebiscite. Steve J. Stern provides a riveting narration of Chile’s political history during this period. At the same time, he analyzes Chileans’ conflicting interpretations of events as they unfolded. Drawing on testimonios, archives, Truth Commission documents, radio addresses, memoirs, and written and oral histories, Stern identifies four distinct perspectives on life and events under the dictatorship. He describes how some Chileans viewed the regime as salvation from ruin by Leftists (the narrative favored by Pinochet’s junta), some as a wound repeatedly reopened by the state, others as an experience of persecution and awakening, and still others as a closed book, a past to be buried and forgotten.

In the 1970s, Chilean dissidents were lonely “voices in the wilderness” insisting that state terror and its victims be recognized and remembered. By the 1980s, the dissent had spread, catalyzing a mass movement of individuals who revived public dialogue by taking to the streets, creating alternative media, and demanding democracy and human rights. Despite long odds and discouraging defeats, people of conscience—victims of the dictatorship, priests, youth, women, workers, and others—overcame fear and succeeded in creating truthful public memories of state atrocities. Recounting both their efforts and those of the regime’s supporters to win the battle for Chileans’ hearts and minds, Stern shows how profoundly the struggle to create memories, to tell history, matters.

Battling for Hearts and Minds is the second volume in the trilogy The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile. The third book will examine Chileans’ efforts to achieve democracy while reckoning with Pinochet’s legacy..
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This book tells the extraordinary story of the Pinochet regime's economists, known as the Chicago Boys. Following their training as economists at the University of Chicago, they took advantage of the opportunity afforded them by the 1973 military coup to launch the first radical free market strategy implemented in a developing country. The ideological strength of their mission and the military authoritarianism of General Pinochet combined to transform an economy that, following the return to democracy, has stabilized and is now seen as a model for Latin America..
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This is the timely story of the rise and fall General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. Using interviews and intimate sketches, Roger Burbach unravels Pinochet's historty--from the violent military coup that brought him to power to his ouster in 1990 and eventual arrest in 1998. Burbach reveals the sociopathic, paranoid and authoritarian tendencies that led the dictator to murder thousands of people in the country while authorizing acts of international terrorism.
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