Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988

"Absolutely. This is an extraordinarily moving book. It tells the story of people who, in the most appalling circumstances, tried to defend liberty. Not people who were necessarily very much on the left, but just ordinary decent democrats. And what he does very well is to say that both sides are trying to construct a memory. So you have these two ideologies in conflict and people remember what’s appropriate to their set of ideas rather than having an objective view of what was going on. He focuses on key episodes, like the assassination attempt on Pinochet in 1986 and what that meant. There is a great deal on the church. Although the church in Chile is a very conservative institution now, it had a strong line on human rights. For the first ten years of the dictatorship, before the economic crisis of 1982/3, the only real internal opposition to the abuses of the regime came from the Catholic Church. The church was very important, not just because they protected individuals but also because they stood up and said what Pinochet did could not be justified. Stern writes about the church lawyers who struggled to keep the human rights issues central and became the core of what the opposition stood for in the Pinochet regime."