José Del Pozo has provided a much-needed, well-crafted, and balanced interrogation of what has been researched, remembered, debated, and reimagined about Marxist president Salvador Allende in various fields of inquiry and creative production, including biography, literature, film, testimonials, and theater, in addition to historiography, since the 1973 coup. Over the book's eight pithy chapters, Del Pozo also develops a contextual landscape that helps the reader grasp the extent to which such Allende-related material has been part and parcel of ongoing political clashes.
Allende: Cómo su historia ha sido relatada begins with what Del Pozo calls “Allende's second death”: the assassination of Allende's character by the new regime in the days and months following the Socialist physician's suicide on September 11 (p. 15). Amid repression and censorship, and with the assistance of anti-Allende scholars like the historian Gonzalo Vial, that second death partially rested on the fiction that Allende was planning...
