Horrifying but also inspiring, The Dictator’s Shadow is a unique tale of how geopolitical rivalries can profoundly affect everyday life.This memoir of Munoz’s life in post-Allende Chile begins on the day in 1973 when the country’s democratically elected government was violently overthrown, and General Pinochet, who proved to be a ruthless dictator, assumed power. Munoz, who stayed as an anti-Pinochet revolutionary in Chile after the coup and—years later, after Pinochet was gone—became the country’s deputy foreign minister, tells a powerful story of greed, ambition, political manipulation, and appalling mistreatment of ordinary citizens. He also examines the role of the U.S.(and other countries) in keeping Pinochet in power—a dictator, so the thinking went, was better than a Communist regime—and details some of Pinochet’s policies that were emulated by other countries (George W. Bush was inspired by Pinochet to launch a plan to privatize Social Security). Shying away from the sort of Pinochet-was-a-monster rhetoric one might expect, Munoz seems more interested in showing us the real person: a man of limited intelligence who was both puppet master and puppet, dictator and savior, villain and hero. - Booklist
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