Soldiers in a Narrow Land

Pinochet himself was a reluctant participant in the 1973 coup, but quickly grew into the role of absolute dictator, disposing of potential military rivals as well as civilian dissidents. His notorious secret police were responsible for acts of terrorism at home and abroad, including the 1976 assassination of exiled Chilean minister Orlando Letelier and his American coworker in a car bombing in Washington, D.C. Spooner, who spent nine years in Chile working as a correspondent for such publications as Newsweek and the Economist, was on hand to witness the creation of the regime's new, authoritarian constitution and the successes and failures of its controversial experiment in free-market economics. She saw the first nationwide antigovernment protests and the subsequent regime crackdown, and she voted in the one-man presidential plebescite in 1988 that Pinochet and his backers believed he could not lose.