Since the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship ended in 1989, Chile has been ruled by a coalition of the Christian Democratic Party (pDC) and the “renovated” or “reformed” Left of the Socialist Party (pS) and the Party for Democracy (pPD). This means that the Chilean Right has not won a presidential election since 1958. Yet despite the apparent electoral hegemony of the center-left for the last half century, the single most successful political party in Chile today is the party most closely identified with the Pinochet regime, the far-right Independent Democratic Union (UDI), which has recently garnered over 20 percent of the vote in national parliamentary and municipal elections. In addition, the UDI has displayed unexpected electoral success in poor neighborhoods and districts that historically have been bastions of the Left, as historian Verónica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate points out in this prodigiously researched and skillfully crafted study of the recent history...

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