Salvador Allende

A U.S. economist who worked for the Popular Unity government analyzes its successes, goals and mistakes and recounts the events that led to its overthrow.

The unanticipated arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London on October 16, 1998 served to punctuate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the most cataclysmic event in Chilean history -- a violent coup d'etat that abruptly ended decades of democratic rule. A steadily increasing series of explorations, interviews, and images in the popular press and media has begun to unearth the horrors of the dictatorship and its defenders and to reevaluate the stories of the democratically elected Allendists the coup had brutally purged. Based on interviews and analysis of a generation of young leaders of the Chilean political elite who came to power with Allende's election in 1970, When the Romance Ended focuses on how Allende's followers conceptualize and justify their political objectives and programs through the course of their political victory, violent defeat, and gradual return to politics during Chile's redemocraticization process. Examining the 1960s generation's program of revolutionary social transformation, as well as the integral role the group played in the return to democracy in Chile, Hite explores what happens to the political identities of leaders such as these in a context of traumatic political upheaval and change.

Investigating the dramatic political changes in Chile over the past 30 years, this book focuses on identifying the dynamics of political conflict underlying this turbulent period and examines the attempt to enact revolutionary socialism in the country.

Mass arrests, torture, & executions followed General Pinochet's coup on September 11, 1973. Almost immediately people began fleeing Chile & over the next fifteen years some 200,000 Chileans sought exile in nearly 140 countries. Out of their anguish & anger comes the first oral history, or testimonies, of their fractured lives.

Alexander, a long-time observer of the politics of Latin America, has been an active correspondent with the key figures of the region for decades. In this volume, he provides interview transcripts and letters from nearly a score of the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. With some of the correspondence and interviews spread over a considerable length of time, the shifting views and attitudes as well as the comments on other key players makes for fascinating insights into the politics of change in Latin America.

After Fidel Castro's guerrilla war against dictator Fulgencio Batista triumphed on January 1, 1959, the Cuban Revolution came to be seen as a major watershed in Latin American history. The three decades following Castro's victory gradually marginalized Cuba from the Latin American mainstream. But, as long-time Cuba observer Thomas C. Wright shows, the Cuban Revolution owed its vast influence in Latin America to the fact that--most evidently in its early years--it embodied the aspirations and captured the imaginations of Latin America's masses as no other political movement had ever done.