Allende

José Del Pozo has provided a much-needed, well-crafted, and balanced interrogation of what has been researched, remembered, debated, and reimagined about Marxist president Salvador Allende in various fields of inquiry and creative production, including biography, literature, film, testimonials, and theater, in addition to historiography, since the 1973 coup. Over the book's eight pithy chapters, Del Pozo also develops a contextual landscape that helps the reader grasp the extent to which such Allende-related material has been part and parcel of ongoing political clashes.Allende: Cómo su historia ha sido relatada begins with what Del Pozo calls “Allende's second death”: the assassination of Allende's character by the new regime in the days and months following the Socialist physician's suicide on September 11 (p. 15). Amid repression and censorship, and with the assistance of anti-Allende scholars like the historian Gonzalo Vial, that second death partially rested on the fiction that Allende was planning the assassination of generals and opposition politicians (the so-called Plan Zeta). Del Pozo then turns his attention to Chileans in exile, including filmmaker Helvio Soto and historian Alejandro Witker, who came to Allende's defense in the mid-1970s. Witker, while living in Mexico, assembled Allende-related speeches, documents, and other materials that together became the “Salvador Allende Archive.” Furthermore, exiled political figures and intellectuals, including leaders of the Chilean Left, and media working abroad and clandestinely in Chile also defended Allende and endeavored to explain (with very little self-reflection) what the via chilena al socialismo was and wasn't.By the early 1980s, Allende's public resurrection in Chile was well underway, with gatherings to mark the ten-year anniversary of the coup and commemorations at the site of the Socialist's original interment in Viña del Mar. Later that decade, as the legitimacy-hungry Augusto Pinochet regime increasingly tolerated the political opposition, images and remembrances of Allende were front and center in the “No” campaign preceding the 1988 national plebiscite. This opening also saw a miniboom of books on Allende, including testimonials. At about that time, Fernando Alegría, who had worked for Allende as a cultural attaché and became a renowned professor in Spanish departments at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, published his novelized biography of the former president, Allende, mi vecino el presidente (1989). Seeking to “demystify” the president's life and introduce it to a generation of Chileans born after the coup, Alegría fuses fictional elements with Allende's speeches and other nonfiction material, contributing to what Del Pozo concludes is an “ambiguous” book (pp. 82–83).After the return of democracy in 1990, Allende's image saw further resuscitation in and outside academia during the civilian governments of Christian Democrats Patricio Aylwin (1990–94) and Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994–2000). Del Pozo examines the works of important figures like the sociologist Tomás Moulian, who, in his Conversación interrumpida con Allende (1998) and other contributions, criticizes the weaknesses of postdictatorship governments and presents Allende as a “moral example for the new generations,” as Del Pozo describes (p. 103). Moreover, while the 1990s saw structural conditions (including the founding of new publishing houses) that would seem conducive to the emergence of additional literature on Allende, many scholars, especially those without permanent faculty positions, were hesitant to work on Allende-related projects for fear of wading too far into what was an extant and heated national debate over the deceased leader.Del Pozo moves on to a clutch of important biographies, including Diana Veneros's Allende: Un ensayo psicobiográfico (2003) as well as distinguished filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's documentary Salvador Allende (2004), which, in addition to Pinochet's 1998 arrest in London, helped reignite focus on Allende in the early 2000s. That resurgence of interest included what Del Pozo describes as “the Right's counterattack,” which saw interventions by the aforementioned Vial (until his death in 2009) and a series of polemical books by the philosopher Víctor Farías, who has argued that Allende was an anti-Semite and eugenicist, among other things. Del Pozo concludes the book with discussions of theatrical, cinematic, and literary contributions that creatively explore the dramatic circumstances of Allende's death on September 11, as well as a robust treatment of historian Patricio Quiroga Zamora's La dignidad de América: El retorno histórico a Salvador Allende (2016), which Del Pozo praises as a pro-Allende but genuinely balanced and critical analysis—an uncommon approach in the “broadened historiography” of the former president and his place in the evolution of the Chilean Left.The book's focus makes for a nicely concise discussion firmly grounded in Chilean circumstances, conditions, and actors that have influenced the production of Allende-centered scholarly and creative works since 1973. While one might quibble with Del Pozo's conceptualization of what constitutes (a “broadened”) historiography, he has provided an insightful and quite valuable book that will appeal to specialists (among them, graduate students cramming for comprehensive exams) and many nonspecialists interested in Allende's continuing presence in politics, academia, and cultural production

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