Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir

Where to begin?

I have never given a one star review of any book. Cooper's book deserves no star, because it is a distortion of any truth. I don't think the book is at all balanced with what I know about Chile. I know Chile as well as Cooper. My wife is Chilean and happens to be a socialist. I also have visited Chile many times and love the people and the country.

First, Allende won a very narrow mandate in the election of 1970.
He sought to radically change his country but introduced chaos into his country. He alienated many people including most of the middle and upper classes along with the conservative population of the countryside. My wife is from Curico, in the central agricultural region.

Allende also antongonized some powerful patrons such as the United States and ITT (which owned the copper mines in the north of the country). The United States contributed much of the foreign aid Chile received. What did Allende do? Nationalize the copper mines and invite Castro for a month long visit. Smart move--make enemies of those who contributed most to the Chilean economy. When the economy tanked, chaos was the result.

Workers demands became even more aggressive. Nationalization of smaller companies and agricultural estates were the result. Strikes and work stoppages were common. Economic decline was the result. Copper states that this was the finest hour for Chile. WOW--what a distortion. Economic decline and political chaos and he believes that it was Chile's finest hour. If one wants a modern day example of Chile in the seventies, look at Chavez's Venezuela.

Cooper is right in saying the Nixon administration helped in throwing Allende out of office. However Allende was going down a road which would have resulted in his overthrow.

The military sickened by the economic decline and political chaos overthrew the Allende regime. Pinochet was a reluctant leader of the coup. However, once the die was set, he embraced the coup and brutal crackdown. Over 3100 people died in the coup and the seventeen year dictatorship. Chile was not the worst dictatorship as Cooper would have you believe. In fact, Castro's dictatorship has been far more harsh in this hemisphere. Cooper does not want you to know that. That would distort his story.

Most Chileans believe Allende was an inept leader. Both Allende and Pinochet are divisive issues in Chile today. People don't like to argue the issues involving these two people. That is why Pinochet is not on trial in Chile. Perhaps in the future this may happen, but probably after Pinochet's death. But Cooper wants to rip open the scars of the past to try the crimes of the dictatorship.

One thing the dictatorship did do was set Chile as an economic powerhouse of South America. Where most of the other countries are failing presently, Chile has a thriving economy. Cooper does not want to credit the dictatorship with this. This would destroy his distortion. So he lies and lies and lies.

If I had to summarize the essentials of Cooper's book, it is leftist trash talk about Pinochet and Chile. I wish this book was more objective. It is not. Reader beware.


A Perfect Memory   December 31, 2001
Hope Boylston (Bellefonte, Pa USA)
24 out of 33 found this review helpful

I am unusually critical of critical of books written about Chile by Americans, but Marc Cooper's account is perfect. I lived in Chile, before and after the Allende Government and the Coup, and often find I read these books grumbling about how they authors don't really know what they are writing about. Things aren't right. But not this book. This time I found myself reading and, sometimes, crying, but still feeling a kinship with the author and somehow heartened that the tragedies he portrays have not been entirely forgotten.


Great Literary Journalism!   December 18, 2000
16 out of 18 found this review helpful

This is simply the best book I have read on the whole Chile experience, and one of the best books I have read this year. I have had a curiosity about the Allende government for years and could never fully satisfy it until now. Everything I had previously read was a dry, distant accounting. Cooper's involvement as Allende's translator was direct and passionate and he fully transmits that emotion and drama to the reader. He is obviously a highly talented journalist and the material comes so alive in his hands. This is literary journalism at its best-- right up there with Richzard Kapucinski, Marhsall Frady and George Orwell.


Brief yet vivid portrayal of recent Chilean history   March 3, 2001
CG (Washington state, USA)
15 out of 25 found this review helpful

Marc Cooper, contributing editor to that fine periodical The Nation, was twenty years old when he arrived in Chile in 1971 after being kicked out of the California higher education system by govenor Ronald Reagan for his anti-war activities. At the time of the September 11 1973 coup he was a translator for president Allende. This book is made up of notes he made while living in Chile an in visits to it since. It is very well written.

When he arrived in Chile, Nixon had ordered "make the economy scream," CIA money began pouring into opposition media outlets, parlimentarians, far right organizations and military officers, general Rene Schneider had been assasinated and so on. But Allende had the support of the poor majority and his party won handily congressional elections in March 1973. Bands of peasants, impatient that the opposition controlled congress was blocking land reform, took to seizing estates and dividing them amongst themselves. When the military attempted a coup in late June 1973, Allende urged workers to seize control of their workplaces which they did, to the consternation of the communist party, always among the most horrified whenever genuine socialism emerges (as they were during the civil war in Spain). About a week before the coup, a half a million workers took to the streets in support of Allende. But the U.S. backed military had the guns and they acted.

Over the next seventeen years, Chileans experienced massive terror. After ten years of neoliberal economics, the economy was on the verge of collapse in 1983, eliciting severe unrest from virtually all of Chile's classes and terrorism in response, particularly against the poor, from Pinochet. It is true that since 1986, with the exception of workers wages being well below what they were during Allende's time, a massive upward redistribution of wealth and half of the private social security accounts having less that a thousand dollars in them, Chile's economy has shown some nice statistics. But what is most remarkable is the utter alienation that most Chileans feel towards their political system. Relatively few people belong to a union, a church or any organization; everyone is an individualist fighting for themselves. People don't march for a living wage or free milk anymore; a more likely scene is that described by Cooper, of social security workers protesting very modest government attempts to prevent corruption in the way they earn their commissions. People are more likely to be concentrating on putting a toy phone to their ear while in their cars so that their neighbors will think they can afford a cell phone; or putting expensive times in their shopping carts to impress items in fellow shoppers and then discading them quickly before they leave.

But Cooper sees some hope in the arrest of Pinochet and his cronies, the reemergence of the previously almost dead Chilean left wing and the small steps Chile has taken towards a sort of "denazification" process.


Cooper Vs Ignorance   November 12, 2004
Graham Williamson
15 out of 27 found this review helpful

Many of the reviewers below me point out that Pinochet strengthened the economy in Chile to the level where it became one of the more prosperous states on the subcontinent. He sure did. What's more, Mussolini made the trains run on time, Stalin ran a tight security service and Hitler sure did make some good roads.

Please.

Allende was elected by a narrow margin, so he deserved to be overthrown? Fair enough - let's kill old Bushy boy too, since he was elected by a very narrow margin. What Cooper takes aim at primarily in this book is this notion that Pinochet's brand of "fascism" was good fascism - that it's OK to, say, train alsatians to rape prisoners if they were a bit leftist and their candidate had screwed up the economy.

No economy is so important that mass murder is an acceptable way to rectify it. The fact that so many people on the right refuse to accept this simple moral fact makes me worry for the free West, and how much longer it's going to be free for if we can't acknowledge a simple thing like mass murder being morally wrong.

Bravo, Cooper, you've upset the pinheads.