Fear in Chile: Lives Under Pinochet

"Yes, there was a new version published in 2001, but Patricia actually wrote it in 1985 towards the end of Pinochet’s regime. So it’s a courageous book, because to publish books in Chile which might be seen to contain critical material was not an easy decision to make. What she does is look at a whole spectrum of people: from powerful people with money on the right, to the poorest of the poor peasants. Through their stories she reconstructed their lives and beliefs. I found it an extraordinarily moving book. The last chapter deals with the case of José Tohá, one of Allende’s ministers who was starved to death in a military hospital. His widow, because they were friends of the family, goes to Pinochet to try to find out what happened. I was actually moved to tears in this chapter because it is this woman’s attempt to come to terms with the dreadful things that have happened to her husband at the hands of someone they thought of as a friend. Oh brutally – he just more or less said ‘that’s tough, that’s life, that’s how things are.’ That really offended her; that someone they knew quite well could actually behave like that. He was a very cruel man. I don’t think he cared a damn about the kinds of things he did. I think it’s because Chile had a very high international profile. People could identify with the socialist experiment in Chile. And then it was destroyed. They said if it could happen to Chile it could happen to us. At least that was the view of the French Communist Party and the left in many countries in the world. So there was enormous sympathy for Chile. Also, I think what was important in Chile was the role of television. This was one of the first televised coups. There were images of Pinochet in his dark glasses and the bombing of the Presidential Palace, La Moneda, and books being burnt in the streets. All those images were flashed all over the world. And there was never anything like that for any other military coup which took place in Latin America. So, he became a kind of mirror image of Che Guevara. You had the hero on the left and Pinochet the evil dictator on the right"