From Booklist
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.
Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Review
“This riveting book recounts the first historic September 11 in 1973 when Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile and launched a seventeen-year reign of state and international terrorism with US backing. The dramatic consequences of this coup are still shaking our world today and enable us to understand why Washington is so fanatically opposed to the International Criminal Court.”--Mike Davis
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