Diary 
Andy Beckett
- Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir by Marc Cooper
The first time I went to Chile, while General Pinochet was still under arrest in Britain, it seemed wise while I was in Santiago to read books about him discreetly. Early on the hot, clear summer mornings, I would cross the screeching road outside my hotel, pass through an elaborate wrought-iron gate, and walk up Cerro Santa Lucia, a steep wooded hill in the centre of the capital. At every entrance to the park there was a desk and attendant where pedestrians were required to sign a visitors’ book, in the thorough manner of Chilean officialdom, democratic and otherwise. I would feel a faint prickle of anxiety about providing my full name and country of origin while a casually-dressed man on a worn chair paid the columns of signatures varying degrees of attention. But then I would be in, with my zipped-tight rucksack of anti-Pinochet polemics: the trees would close over the ascending path, the path would split into a maze of loops and shady dead-ends, and ornamental terraces and battlements would open out in all directions, populated only by gardeners.
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Andy Beckett’s Pinochet in Piccadilly is out in paperback. He is writing a book about Britain in the 1970s.
Other articles by this contributor:
Bringing Down Chunks of the Ceiling · Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City by Dave Haslam
Political Gothic · David Peace does the miners’ strike
When Capitalism Calls · The Protest Ethic by John Lloyd
Another Tribe · PiL, Wire et al
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