Timerman describes the ordinary Chilean's survival tactics in a society where one can be arrested without reason, and where thousands have been tortured, murdered or "disappeared" by right-wing squads. He presents a shocking portrayal of the daily horrors of life under General Pinochet's dictatorship. The well-known Argentinian journalist and author of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number discusses the pauperization of Chile's middle class, massive poverty and unemployment, the drying up of cultural life. Interwoven with his short narrative are testimonies from Chileans who were tortured or raped while in prison. Timerman skims over the U.S. role in propping up the military regime it helped install, and his proposals for dislodging Pinochet seem wishful thinking. Still, his report is a powerful and disturbing call to conscience. (Publishers Weekly, 1987).

Verdugo is a journalist whose father was tortured to death by the Pinochet regime. This is her account of the executions without trial of 75 political prisoners in five Chilean cities, carried out by a military team later called the "Caravan of Death" that was sent out following Pinochet's 1973 coup. Originally published in 1989 as Caso Arellano: los zarpazos del puma, the book is considered one of the key documents that led to Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998. This first English-language edition includes an epilogue describing Chile's high-profile judicial hearings on the killings, through Pinochet's January 2001 indictment for planning and covering them up. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

On 11 September 1973, President Salvador Allende of Chile, Latin America's first democratically elected Marxist president, was deposed in a violent coup d'état. Early that morning the phone lines to Allende's office were cut, army officers loyal to the republic were arrested and shortly afterwards bombs from four British-made Hawker Hunter jets began slamming into the presidential palace. Allende refused to leave his post, making broadcasts to encourage the Chilean people until the last pro-government radio station was silenced. Later that morning he was found dead, with an AK-47 that had been a gift from Fidel Castro by his side.The coup had been planned for months, even years before it actually happened. In fact, from the moment Allende's electoral victory in 1970 became a possibility, business leaders in Chile, extreme right-wing groups, high-ranking officers in the Chilean military and the US administration and the CIA worked together to secure a prompt and dramatic end to his progressive social programme.Why Allende seemed such a threat in the political and economic context of the time and how the coup was engineered is the story Oscar Guardiola-Rivera tells, drawing on a wide range of sources, including phone transcripts and documents released as recently as 2008. It is a radical retelling of a moment in history that even at the height of Cold War paranoia - a time when Henry Kissinger described Chile as 'a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica' -shocked the world and which continues to resonate today. As the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the global protests at austerity measures introduced since the crash of 2008 show, the world is struggling to deal with the economic and political dilemmas Allende faced at the time.

Presents an account of the short rise and fall of President Salvador Allende, who died of gunshot wounds on September 11, 1973, following the military coup that deposed him.