Life under a US-backed tyrant

That must remain speculative, of course, but there is ample evidence that what the US now regards as negative events and processes within the Americas are firmly rooted in the growth of the US empire.

What is unarguable is that the 1973 coup that brought a nonentity such as Augusto Pinochet to power caused left and rightwingers to revise many of their assumptions.
The Dictator's Shadow, written about the coup and the subsequent process to re-establish bourgeois democracy, is therefore an interesting document.

The author is now Chile's ambassador to the UN and is currently the security council president.

During the Popular Unity government, Heraldo Munoz was National Supervisor of the People's Stores under the government of Salvador Allende and his book details his evasion of the drag-net that took and brutally butchered so many Popular Unity supporters.

The final chapter takes us past the death from natural causes of Pinochet and on to some positive assessments of the Pinochet period.

It is at this point that any reader who recalls those dark days may regret laying out £16 and may even have to try to hold down their last meal.

"Chile became the model of an IMF-compliant country," says the author. Does he not know that many now think, with good reason, that IMF stands for infant mortality figures?

And, while we can certainly agree that "most Latin American dictatorships ran disastrous economies," only the most stupid rightwinger could believe that "Pinochet's was the exception."

Like a chameleon, Munoz later quotes The Economist, editorialising that Pinochet's privatisation of the pension system "should not wipe away the memory of the torture, the 'disappeared' and the bodies dumped at sea."

ROGER FLETCHER