This is the timely story of the rise and fall General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. Using interviews and intimate sketches, Roger Burbach unravels Pinochet's historty--from the violent military coup that brought him to power to his ouster in 1990 and eventual arrest in 1998. Burbach reveals the sociopathic, paranoid and authoritarian tendencies that led the dictator to murder thousands of people in the country while authorizing acts of international terrorism.The case of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was among the most sensational of recent international attempts to prosecute human rights violators. Few contemporary figures have galvanized progressive and socialist opinion like Pinochet, and indeed his sins, the overthrow of a legally installed president and the subsequent murder of 3,000 people by most estimates, are unpardonably atrocious. Burbach's excoriation of his subject, which unfolds in biographical material about Pinochet and in a summary of the drawn-out legal process--ultimately a failure--to put him on trial, is more than justified by the historical facts. Burbach, associated with the University of California at Berkeley, performs the organization and citation of these facts in a scholastically capable manner, which increases his work's general-interest value. It is also sympathetic to Pinochet's initial political victim, Salvador Allende, which affects the author's objectivity about Allende's policy of collectivizing the Chilean economy; however, Burbach proves a reliable guide to the activities of the opposition Pinochet provoked. Booklist
