Okay, now I know a little more about Pinochet and Chile than I used to. A friend of mine loaned me a copy of Pinochet in Piccadilly (he warned me - left-leaning author, etc.) and I finished it over the weekend.
I thought it was all right, actually. The author, Andy Beckett, provides details of the links between Chile & Britain going back to the early 1800s. Some of it I found hard to believe - like his description of the fear in Britain of a Pinochet-style coup in the mid-70s - but mostly I thought it explained a lot about why Chile is such a hot topic in Britain (and here too, I suppose).
I'd still like to know more about Salvador Allende and his government and the involvement of the CIA/American government in deposing that government. Beckett mentions it as a given without providing any evidence or background. He also dismisses fairly lightly the notion that Allende's rule might have been or become like the centralized/totalitarian regimes that Marxists seemed to favor in the 70s.
{This 2003 article by Andy Beckett, on the Chilean "internet" from the Allende days is interesting.}
