The earthshaking news of October 1998 that General Pinochet had been arrested in Britain unleashed two years of international interest in the case and its ramifications for traveling tyrants the world over. But even after the General's return home, the media has ignored the more important story of how his detention lifted a stranglehold that had suffocated Chile's moral sensibility for a generation.

Award-winning journalist Marc Cooper was a translator to President Allende until the coup of 1973. In this reflection on Chile and the role it has played in his life, he reconstructs the tense...

At the age of 20, after being expelled from his California university for anti-war activism, Marc Cooper moved to Santiago and worked as translator for Chilean President Salvador Allende. The heat of Allende's socialist revolution forged Cooper's political and reporting skills, indelibly imprinting them with a radical perspective. In 1973, at great personal risk, he began first-hand reporting on the fiery destruction of Allende's government and Chilean democracy as a result of the US-financed coup.