Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir

this book is essential reading for us as we reflect upon our own global piracy which now continues under a new illegitimate administration. Marc Cooper is an excellent author and reporter of truth, courageous in speaking truth to power. THis book should be required reading in any social studies and history class. This is our history of terror and domination. The bombing of the Presidential mansion in Chile 9/11/73 and our destruction of a society and the torture and assassination of thousands of innocent people and exile of thousands more through the brutal fascist military dictator Pinochet, and our continuance of such policy, must chill the blood and mind of any American concerned for truth justice and social progress of all people, which is the true American and Christian way. UPDATE 2007: Pinochet is dead and now people go around claiming, well, he only killed a couple of thousand people after all. It was only a couple of thousand on OUR 9/11, too, right? Please get the truth. Get this book by Marc Cooper. We need to study this very readable and informative and TRUE account now, more than ever.

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.

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.

I saw Marc Cooper at a reading in Portland and was very taken by his talk on Chile and human rights, especially his reflections on the recovery of historical memory. I bought Pinochet and Me and wound up reading it one sitting. I was emotionally moved and felt ashamed for what my country did to Chile and its people. This is a very very good book.

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.