CHILE: DEATH IN THE SOUTH by...
CHILE: DEATH IN THE SOUTH by Jacobo Timerman (Vintage Books: $6.95)
Once considered the most stable democracy in Latin America, Chile--counter to many reports to the contrary--has declined 15% in total national income after 14 years under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Timerman reports of desaparecidos and of torture, of the rape of female prisoners as a matter of policy. Yet “Chileans say that life goes on in the churches, the courtrooms, and the cemeteries. The rest is survival. They will survive General Pinochet and the dictatorship, because on the other side of their bondage is Chile.”
Timerman reprimands Chilean intellectuals for their nostalgia, their hope of regaining “a previous reality that can never be recovered.” He finds the key to the Chilean future after Pinochet in the new right, led by Andres Allemand. The Chileans, Timerman writes, must “find a road to democracy within an antidemocratic context.”
(Also re-released by Vintage is Timerman’s extraordinary “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.”)
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