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Verdugo, Patricia. Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death. Translated by Marcelo Montecino. Coral Gables: North-South Center Press, 2001. Map, notes, 240 pp.; hardcover $49.95, paperback $21.95. [Originally published as Caso Arellano: los zarpazos del puma, 1989. Updated by the author.]
The Chilean military regime of 1973-90 is still an enigma to scholars of comparative politics. Presided over by a single president for the whole of its 17 years, it nevertheless lacked crucial characteristics of a personalistic dictatorship. Coming to power in a bloody coup, the military government was nevertheless highly legalistic, and it forged a constitution that survives largely intact today. While that government is still often seen as the most successful of the Southern Cone military regimes in that it engineered an economic boom and tightly controlled the terms of the transition to democracy in the late 1980s, Chilean judges have overseen a recent flurry of legal actions against former members of the government, something that many observers said could never happen because of the military's 1978 self-amnesty. Such actions ensnared, most surprisingly, former president Augusto Pinochet himself. In short, there is still much to be debated when it comes to understanding one of the most paradoxical dictatorships in modern Latin American history.
This book contributes to the debate by recounting one of the most sordid stories to come out of the regime, the "caravan of death." In the aftermath of Chile's September 11, 1973 coup d'etat, local military commanders established military courts to quickly try local "subversives" associated with the previous government of Salvador Allende. These prisoners were usually found guilty and sentenced to various prison terms; a few were executed. Subsequently, between October 4 and 19, General Arellano Stark, an "officer delegate" of the commander-in-chief of the army and president of the military junta (Pinochet), arrived by helicopter in several mostly northern towns and demanded to "review and expedite cases" and "harmonize the criteria" applied in them. While this special emissary dined and chatted with the local commanders, officers in his entourage clandestinely rounded up selected political prisoners and executed them. By the end of the caravan's journey, 75 Chileans had been murdered this way. Why would such actions have been ordered, and what were their effects on local communities and...