Fear in Chile: Lives Under Pinochet

“Like a García Márquez novel that has suddenly, horrifyingly, come to real life” (New York Newsday), Fear in Chile is an extraordinary collection of firstperson accounts of life under dictatorship. In the 1980s, shortly after Chile emerged from one of the century’s most notorious reigns of terror, Chilean journalist Patricia Politzer interviewed figures including a revolutionary activist, a military leader loyal to General Augusto Pinochet, a bank clerk concerned with the status quo, the mother of one of the “disappeared,” as well as a dozen other men and women from every political position and social stratum of Chilean life. The result is a broad, vivid, yet nonideological view of modern life under military rule, about which Ariel Dorfman writes, “I can think of no better introduction to my country.”

With the October 1998 arrest of General Pinochet in Great Britain and renewed world awareness of the horrendous crimes committed during his regime, Fear in Chile, updated with a new afterword by the author that considers the recent attempts to prosecute Pinochet for human-rights violations, offers a vivid portrait of Chile’s Pinochet era.