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4,564 words · no email, no account
No. 038 · Power & Politics · World Politics
The Stadium Detentions
a biography of Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte
What the book is
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.
At a glance
- Subject
- Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte
- Shelf
- Power & Politics · World Politics
- Written by
- Mateo Salazar
- Chapters
- 19 across 226 pages
- Narrated by
- Edmund Hartley
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01The Port CityRead free
- 02The Democratic Road3,293 words
- 03September Eleven4,350 words
- 04The Caravan of Death4,627 words
- 05The Machinery of Terror3,353 words
- 06The Chicago Boys4,029 words
- 07The Constitution of Power3,307 words
- 08Kissinger3,395 words
- 09The Resistance3,188 words
- 10The Plebiscite3,568 words
- 11The Senator for Life2,996 words
- 12London3,750 words
- 13The Reckoning Begins3,572 words
- 14The Body Failing2,072 words
- 15The Last Maneuvers2,300 words
- 16December Ten2,178 words
- 17The Accounting2,502 words
- 18The Names2,854 words
- 19The Anniversary3,763 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- 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
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who 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.
02Is 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.
03Can 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.
04How long is it?
About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 226 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
