Overview

The unanticipated arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London on October 16, 1998 served to punctuate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the most cataclysmic event in Chilean history-a violent coup d'etat that abruptly ended decades of democratic rule. A steadily increasing series of explorations, interviews, and images in the popular press and media has begun to unearth the horrors of the dictatorship and its defenders and to reevaluate the stories of the democratically elected Allendists the coup had brutally purged. Based on interviews and analysis of a generation of young leaders of the Chilean political elite who came to power with Allende's election in 1970, When the Romance Ended focuses on how Allende's followers conceptualize and justify their political objectives and programs through the course of their political victory, violent defeat, and gradual return to politics during Chile's redemocraticization process. Examining the 1960s generation's program of revolutionary social transformation, as well as the integral role the group played in the return to democracy in Chile, Hite explores what happens to the political identities of leaders such as these in a context of traumatic political upheaval and change.

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9780231110174

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This is an important, caring and respectful book documenting the evolution of ideological perspectives and political attitudes within the Chilean left during the period 1968-1998...Without a doubt, this is an important book for scholars of identity politics and for general readers interested in Chilean politics. -- Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies Highly suggestive for understanding political leadership... and the leaders' personal stories, which Hite allows her interviewees to narrate in long, direct excerpts, make for gripping reading -- Choice The author effectively addresses questions of political identtity, leadership, and change through the lens of interviews with Chilean leaders of the Left. She contributes to our understanding of the transformation of the Left universally and the evolution of political culture in the Chilean national setting. Her conceptualization of individual political trajectories provides a powerful explanatory framework to comprehend the formulation of political thought and action. -- Jadwiga E. Pieper, The Historian

This is an important, caring and respectful book documenting the evolution of ideological perspectives and political attitudes within the Chilean left during the period 1968-1998...Without a doubt, this is an important book for scholars of identity politics and for general readers interested in Chilean politics. Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies Highly suggestive for understanding political leadership... and the leaders' personal stories, which Hite allows her interviewees to narrate in long, direct excerpts, make for gripping reading -- A. B. Cochran Choice The author effectively addresses questions of political identtity, leadership, and change through the lens of interviews with Chilean leaders of the Left. She contributes to our understanding of the transformation of the Left universally and the evolution of political culture in the Chilean national setting. Her conceptualization of individual political trajectories provides a powerful explanatory framework to comprehend the formulation of political thought and action. -- Jadwiga E. Pieper The Historian

Author Information

Katherine Hite is an assistant professor of political science at Vassar College and is a coeditor of The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Representation.

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