The military coup that toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973 led to one of the most repressive military dictatorships in Latin American history. Although the coup's full origin remains one of the great mysteries of the Cold War, most assume that powers in Washington were largely to blame, given the long history of U.S. interventionism in Latin America. These assumptions were only strengthened by ongoing suspicions about the Nixon administration's role in a failed campaign to prevent Allende's inauguration in 1970. Providing a comprehensive account of the Nixon administration's efforts to undermine and unseat Allende, the book relies heavily on newly declassified records, addressing several crucial questions regarding U.S. involvement. The author explores several counterfactual scenarios to highlight important turning points and crucial decisions which contributed to the failure of Chilean democracy.

The earthshaking news of October 1998 that General Pinochet had been arrested in Britain unleashed two years of international interest in the case and its ramifications for traveling tyrants the world over. But even after the General’s return home, the media has ignored the more important story of how his detention lifted a stranglehold that had suffocated Chile’s moral sensibility for a generation. Award-winning journalist Marc Cooper was a translator to President Allende until the coup of 1973. In this reflection on Chile and the role it has played in his life, he reconstructs the tense atmosphere of the final days of the Allende government, including his hiding and subsequent evacuation under armed UN protection. Twenty-five years later he returns and recounts, in vivid street-level reporting, a country that is a democracy in name only and a society that has been transfigured by one of the most radical, armed capitalist revolutions of our time. Yet, he argues, spasms of protest that seemed like the last rattle of the snake may still presage the crumbling of Chile’s status quo as its people emerge from the long night of reaction to the cry of “Adios General!”