# The Stadium Detentions *A Biography of Pinochet* — Legendary Biographies No. 038 - **Subject:** Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte - **Written by:** Mateo Salazar - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / World Politics - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 226 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 226 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 226 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-027-0) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-008-9) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/038-the-stadium-detentions.html ## About this book On the morning of September 11, 1973, Hawker Hunter jets banked over Santiago and put their rockets through the windows of La Moneda. By nightfall, a soft-spoken career officer few Chileans could have picked out of a lineup had taken the country. He would hold it for seventeen years. Mateo Salazar traces the long, unlikely ascent of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte: the provincial cadet from Valparaíso, the dutiful instructor of military geography, the late-blooming general whose quiet Catholicism and bureaucratic patience masked a politics he disclosed to almost no one. Drawing on declassified cables, junta minutes, and interviews with surviving aides, exiles, and prosecutors, she follows him from the parade ground to the presidential sash, and from the Caravan of Death to the Villa Grimaldi cells, to the Chicago-trained economists who remade the country in his name, and finally to a London arrest that broke open the question of what international law could ask of a former head of state. Salazar is interested less in the monster of caricature than in the man his subordinates obeyed: how authority hardens into cult, how a constitution is written to outlive its author, how a society learns, slowly, to name what was done to it. The result is a portrait of power in its most patient and procedural form, and of the country that is still, decades on, deciding what to do with his inheritance. ## Contents 1. The Port City 2. The Democratic Road 3. September Eleven 4. The Caravan of Death 5. The Machinery of Terror 6. The Chicago Boys 7. The Constitution of Power 8. Kissinger 9. The Resistance 10. The Plebiscite 11. The Senator for Life 12. London 13. The Reckoning Begins 14. The Body Failing 15. The Last Maneuvers 16. December Ten 17. The Accounting 18. The Names 19. The Anniversary ## Questions **Who is The Stadium Detentions about?** Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Stadium Detentions — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,564 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 226 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Mateo Salazar is a Chilean-American journalist who reported from Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Caracas for The Atlantic and El País. His biographies cover the Latin American political musicians, dissidents, and victims of state violence. His long-form reporting focuses on archival research and direct interviews with survivors. In his biography, The Stadium Detentions, he reconstructs the personal histories of those held in Chile’s mass detention centers during the 1970s regime. He currently lives in Santiago, Chile, where he works as a freelance correspondent and spends his weekends hiking in the Andes.