Pronouncements on the fate of human rights and democracy in Latin America can become dated overnight. Witness how the elation of the “transition to democracy” quickly gave way to the frustrations of economic crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Human rights organizations struggled to remain relevant in new democracies, in spite of the fact that unreformed judiciaries protected known torturers and murderers. Yet in recent years, surprising turns of fate, not least the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, have punctured the climate of cynicism and breathed new life into movements for justice and legal reform.
Thomas C. Wright’s State Terrorism in Latin America provides a concise and extremely readable synthesis of these twists and turns in two countries, Chile and Argentina. Wright details the workings of state terror in Chile under Pinochet (1973 – 90) and in Argentina under the military junta (1976 – 83). He carries his narrative...
