The earthshaking news of October 1998 that General Pinochet had been arrested in Britain presaged two years of international interest in the case and its ramifications for traveling tyrants the world over. Now the General has returned home, but the media has continued to ignore the important story of how his detention lifted a stranglehold that had suffocated Chile’s moral sensibility for a generation.

Award-winning journalist Marc Cooper was a translator to President Allende until the coup of 1973. In this memoir he reconstructs the tense atmosphere of the final days of the Allende government, including his hiding and subsequent evacuation under armed UN protection. Twenty-five years later he returns and describes, in vivid street-level reporting, a country that is a democracy in name only and a society that has been transfigured by one of the most radical, armed capitalist revolutions of our time. Yet, he argues, spasms of protest that seemed like the last rattle of the snake may still presage the crumbling of Chile’s status quo as Allende’s heirs in the Socialist Party, albeit “renewed,” sweep into the Presidency.

“Cooper's judicious prose issues forth from the lime-sprinkled sinkhole of Chile's collective amnesia, attempting to construct a beseiged and busted-out past. The author sets a defiant language against the obliterating shadow cast by Pinochet's regime; he strugggles to breathe remembrance into a decades-long nightmare of civilian death, imprisonment, and exile.” — Village Voice

“It is the underlying sadness of crushed hopes and demolished dreams, conveyed in the crisp prose of a skilled observer, that makes this tale so compelling.” — Publishers Weekly

“Tragic, suspenseful and filled with the tiny personal details that bring history to live ... ” — LA Weekly

Marc Cooper’s journalism has appeared in publications that include The New Yorker, Harper’s and Rolling Stone. He is currently a contributing editor of The Nation magazine as well as host of the nationally syndicated Radio Nation. He is the author of Roll Over Che Guevara: Travels of a Radical Reporter, also from Verso.

“In writing from Chile Marc Cooper vividly and masterfully evokes some of the darkest chapters of US Cold War policy. This book brings to life the compelling human history buried under three decades of official stories and distortions.” — Warren Beatty

Also by Marc Cooper:

Roll Over Che Guevara: Travels of a Radical Reporter