Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochets reign (1973–1990) still resonates for its brutality and its role in pioneering controversial free-market development policies. This thoughtful retrospective explores that history from a unique perspective. Muñoz, an official in the Allende government overthrown by Pinochet in 1973, found himself vainly confronting the coup with a revolver and a fistful of dynamite, dodging arrest while friends disappeared into the juntas dungeons. In the 1980s he became a leader of the moderate left opposition. His first-hand account of the political movement that, with crucial help from abroad, forced Pinochet from power in 1990, is both shrewd and inspiring. Muñoz, who is now Chiles ambassador to the U.N., is measured in his condemnation of the dictatorship and cognizant of the unstable political environment that formed it. He gives the regimes economic program mixed reviews, on the one hand crediting it with reinvigorating Chiles economy while admitting that it has left most Chileans worse off. He paints Pinochet as a complex character—a canny operator, a man of limited intellect and an ideological lightning rod. Combining sharp historical analysis with telling personal recollections, this is an excellent assessment of a tyrant and his legacy. Photos. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist 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. --David Pitt Review The Daily Beast A gripping first-person account of the 9/11/73 fascist revolution of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. About the Author Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz was Deputy Foreign Minister of Chile in 2000–2002 and Minister Secretary General in 2002–2003 at La Moneda Presidential Palace before assuming his present post as ambassador to the U.N., where he has served as President of the Security Council. The author of several scholarly books, he is frequently quoted on international issues by the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and other journals. He lives in New York City. From The Washington Post From The Washington Posts Book World/washingtonpost Reviewed by Joshua Partlow One fall day in 1991, not long after Gen. Augusto Pinochet lost his grip on Chile, Heraldo Muñoz, a socialist who had spent his life in both clandestine struggle and open opposition to the Pinochet regime, saw the old man himself approaching across a room at the Army War Academy. The former dictator had a pacemaker and was no longer Chiles president but remained commander-in-chief of the army, a post hed held since 1973. Muñoz, a diplomat and intellectual, had accepted an invitation from Pinochet to give a lecture, not expecting the general to attend. When Pinochet attempted to greet him after his talk, Muñoz abruptly turned his back. I could not bring myself to shake his hand, Muñoz writes. That was my closest brush with the man who had had such a baleful influence on my life -- and on the lives of a whole generation of Chileans. This anger, verging on disgust, toward Pinochet is the driving force in Muñozs meticulous and vivid new book, The Dictators Shadow. He calls it a political memoir, but it reads more as a compendium of crimes, whose specificity -- names and dates, weapon calibers, entry wound locations, torturers techniques -- has a prosecutorial flavor, as if Muñoz seeks to secure the conviction that Pinochet, who died in December 2006, successfully avoided during his lifetime. Muñozs impulse seems justified given the political climate in Chile, where Pinochets legacy remains an open debate. The leftist leaders who came to power after Pinochet, now led by President Michelle Bachelet, galvanized popular support in response to the dictators repression. Many suffered personally. Bachelet herself was imprisoned, and her father was tortured in jail and died in captivity. But other Chileans remember Pinochet as the economic savior who embraced privatization and free-market economics, allowing Chile the robust growth that made it the envy of other South American countries. The agonizing question is: Was Pinochet necessary? Could Chile have reached its present prosperity without him? Muñoz asks at the outset of his book. Yet he does not really agonize over the question. The best he can bring himself to say about Pinochet is that the general sometimes selected competent economic advisers, even though he did not fully understand what they were telling him. Under Pinochets long watch, an entrepreneurial spirit emerged in Chile, inflation was kept under control, and exports grew. But Muñoz argues that this recovery could have occurred without the violence and repression. In the end, he contends, it was democracy, not Pinochet, that was necessary. Given Muñozs experience, its hard to see how he could come to any other evaluation of the Pinochet regime. He was a socialist and a member of President Salvador Allendes leftist government (he served as national supervisor of the Peoples Stores, a food distribution program in poor neighborhoods) who went into hiding after Pinochet and other military officers overthrew Allende in a 1973 coup. The book opens with Muñozs recollection of retrieving four sticks of dynamite from a secret cache and rushing to a safe house, prepared to begin an armed resistance that did not materialize. He later took refuge in the United States, where he studied international relations alongside Condoleezza Rice at the University of Denver and was a fellow at the Brookings Institution. After Pinochet lost a 1988 plebiscite and eventually stepped aside, Muñoz became a diplomat and is now Chiles ambassador to the United Nations. His access to top Chilean officials and once-secret documents enriches this history, allowing him to trace not only the conflict between Pinochets team and the opposition but also the divisions within each camp. His account of an attempt by militant communists to assassinate Pinochet is particularly gripping. Muñoz draws a damning portrait of the dictator as an officer of limited intellect who was, above all else, a survivor. Raised in an upper middle-class family, Pinochet reluctantly joined the coup against Allende, then systematically pushed aside his fellow conspirators (and executed his political rivals) to seize sole control of the country. The qualities that put Pinochet in this position, Munoz writes, were uninspiring: Insensitive and sardonic to those below him, he was crafty, submissive, and obsequious with his betters. Though Pinochet was anti-Communist, his ideology was self-interest. Once he seized power, as jets bombed the presidential palace and Allende committed suicide, the situation quickly turned grim. Several of the worst atrocities recounted in this book -- corralling opponents into the national soccer stadium in Santiago and executing more than 100 of them, the international plot known as Operation Condor to track down and kill dissidents -- have been documented at length elsewhere. Still, Muñoz recounts them in chilling detail. He notes, for example, that to advance his career before the coup, Pinochet used to visit regularly with Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his family, bringing presents to the children. Yet a few years later, the author alleges, Pinochet ordered the assassination of Letelier, who was killed by a car bomb in Washingtons Sheridan Circle in 1976. Even though democracy has returned to Chile for nearly 20 years, the wounds of Pinochets 17-year reign are still being treated. In June, Gen. Manuel Contreras, former head of the secret police, was sentenced to two life terms in prison for his role in political slayings. And Chilean officials have proposed converting a former government torture house in Santiago into a museum. Muñozs memoir is part of a long, collective effort to uncover what the dictator and his henchmen buried in secrecy, fear and blood; in that sense, this book is a contribution to Chiles healing process. It can be slow reading, particularly when the author dwells on the minutiae of opposition politics, the endless meetings and internal disputes. But Muñoz delivers a compelling, personal account of life in a police state and a strong reminder of how far Chile has come. Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 09:36:20 +0000
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