TROOPS IN THE STREETS

Nation contributing editor and radio host Marc Cooper was tossed out of the California State University system for antiwar activities in 1971 by executive order of Governor Ronald Reagan–and ended up in Chile, working as a translator for Salvador Allende. What footnote could be more oddly appropriate in Cooper’s memoir Pinochet and Me? The book is part diaristic reconstruction of the 1973 coup against Allende, part chronicle of return trips Cooper has made since to Chile and part consideration of that country’s–and Pinochet’s–fate at century’s turn.

Chile “briefly shined as a beacon of inspiration,” Cooper laments, the culmination of fifty years of massive campaigning for democratic socialism and the notion that “perhaps, radical social change and resulting improvements in the lives of common people were possible through democratic, peaceful and legal means.” His firsthand reporting on the twists and turns of the following quarter-century is by turns chilling and poignant.

Cooper could easily have met the fate of Charles Horman (whom he knew slightly), subject of the film Missing; his account of the coup and its aftermath is fraught with chaos, luck and what he calls the “moment of greatest naivety in my adult life”–assuming the US Embassy would be of help. The American consul told Cooper and a few others that “the armed forces are restoring order but there’s still a danger of scattered left-wing snipers.” Cooper may be the journalistic equivalent of the latter, but the only danger he poses is that he fosters understanding of the social forces at work in the country he has, in more than one sense, married into. His account of returns to Chile first under an assumed name and, years later, under his own, are compelling: an arrest for photographing an army bus that civilians had tied to random shootings; an encounter with youths who say they are hungry and beg for guns; the effects neoliberal economics have wrought on everyday life; the feelings of Chileans on Pinochet’s arrest in London. Cooper ends with the inscription on a Chilean memorial to the disappeared: “The forgotten past is full of memory.”

“What we saw in Seattle across those tumultuous days stretching from November 28 through December 3, 1999, and then in Davos, Switzerland, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Prague was the flowering of a new radical movement in America and across the world, rambunctious, anarchic, internationalist, well informed and in some ways more imaginative and supple than kindred popular eruptions in recent decades,” write Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn and his co-authors in this eyewitness chronicle of protests against the WTO and other institutions of the new global economic order. The authors have keen eyes for the social ironies surrounding the events: Jeffrey St. Clair’s Seattle diary observes not just the segregation of the city’s high-tech opulence from south Seattle’s old-economy piers and pulp and chemical factories but an account of an officer frisking a woman whose boyfriend was walking her home from work. Just before unloading his pepper spray on her escort, the policeman tells her, “You’ve no idea what we’ve been through today.” Protest experience at the Democratic National Convention left the authors concluding as well that “America is moving toward the normalization of paramilitary forces in law enforcement.” Winking at the old journalistic saw of quoting taxi drivers to get the street pulse, Nation contributor and former senior editor JoAnn Wypijewski, whose DC diary of World Bank and IMF protests is included, quotes an Ethiopian driver: “What is going on is simply the recolonization of the so-called developing world.” Adds another: “This is why we are taxi drivers.”