Behind the plan of exterminating those innocent men whose only sin was to have supported the legitimate president of Chile, behind the plan of sequestering their bodies so that no one could find their remains, there was the presumption that the desert would be a place of silence, that the desert was too vast and forbidding to ever yield its secrets. There was the certainty that the desert would be barren, quiet, as dead as the men who had been murdered. Those who committed these crimes were wrong. from the afterword by Ariel Dorfman

On September 11, 1973, with the backing of the...