Best Books on the 1973 Chile Coup and Pinochet's Dictatorship

## The Day the Planes Bombed the Palace On September 11, 1973, Chilean Air Force jets bombed the presidential palace in Santiago. Inside was Salvador Allende, the world's first democratically elected Marxist head of state. By afternoon he was dead, and General Augusto Pinochet was in control of the country. What followed was seventeen years of military dictatorship, systematic torture, forced disappearances and exile. The 1973 coup is one of the most documented political events of the twentieth century, partly because the United States' role in destabilizing the Allende government has been gradually revealed through declassified documents, congressional investigations and journalistic research. It is also a story about what happens when ideology collides with economics, when a democratic experiment runs into the limits of tolerance from powerful neighbors, and when a society is forced to choose between versions of itself. The books on this subject range from immediate journalism to decades-long historical retrospectives, and the best of them refuse simple villains and heroes. ## Peter Kornbluh and the Declassified Record Peter Kornbluh's *The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability* is the essential document-based account of American involvement in the coup and its aftermath. Kornbluh worked with the National Security Archive to obtain thousands of declassified CIA, State Department and NSC records, and he builds his analysis directly from those primary sources. What emerges is a detailed picture of how the Nixon administration and Henry Kissinger worked to prevent Allende's election in 1970, then to destabilize his government once he took office, and then to support Pinochet's regime through the worst of its repression. The book does not claim the United States pushed the button on September 11, but it shows clearly that American policy created conditions in which a coup became likely and then shielded the perpetrators from international accountability. This is a book for readers who want evidence rather than assertion. ## Ariel Dorfman on Living Through It Ariel Dorfman was a senior official in the Allende government. On the day of the coup he happened not to be at the presidential palace, which saved his life. His memoir *Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey* covers his entire life, from his Argentine childhood through his years in Chile and his eventual exile, and it is one of the most honest accounts of what it felt like to build a political project and then watch it destroyed in a single morning. Dorfman writes in both English and Spanish, sometimes within the same passage, as a way of inhabiting the divided self that exile produces. The book is not a policy analysis. It is a human record of what happens to people when history breaks over them. ## The Economic Laboratory Pinochet's Chile became famous for a different reason than the coup itself. The military junta brought in a group of Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, and they used the country as a laboratory for radical free-market reform. Tariffs were slashed, state industries privatized, and social spending cut. The results were contested then and remain contested now. Naomi Klein's *The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism* uses Chile as one of its central case studies in the argument that extreme free-market policies have historically been implemented under conditions of crisis or repression, when populations are too traumatized to resist. Klein's thesis is polemical and has attracted criticism from economists across the spectrum, but her account of the Chicago Boys' influence in Santiago is grounded in solid research and forces readers to connect the political and economic dimensions of the Pinochet years. ## The Long Reckoning The 1998 arrest of Pinochet in London on a Spanish warrant reopened the question of accountability and sparked a global debate about whether international law could reach former heads of state. Chile itself spent years processing the truth commission reports that documented the scale of torture and disappearance. That reckoning is still underway. The books listed here provide the context for understanding both what happened in September 1973 and why its consequences rippled through Chilean society for generations. ## Further Reading For more titles on Cold War history and Latin American politics, visit [/category/cold-war](/category/cold-war).