The Pinochet Regime

"Basically, there have been a number of ways of defending the Pinochet regime. You can say that it was necessary to deal with the turmoil of the Allende years. You can say that Pinochet ran the economy well and so on. What this book does is seek to destroy all these kinds of justifications. Running through the whole book is a sustained attack on the legitimacy of Pinochet’s regime and its attempts to portray itself as a genuine reformer in Chile . There is a lot on the human rights episodes. So it is a very effective demolition of any kind of attempt to justify what went on in those years. It is extraordinarily well-documented and impeccable academically. And it is also very good on how clever Pinochet was at managing to stay in power during all those years. He was the commander-in-chief of the army and nothing happened without his say-so. He could have vetoed the whole operation if he had wanted to. One of his main opponents was General Leigh, the air force general. He was very important in the whole regime. He wanted to maintain a nationalist stance and was very unhappy when Pinochet began to adopt the free market economic model. But Pinochet was able to get rid of him without much difficulty and that removed the one person in the junta who might have been able to be a focal point of opposition to Pinochet."