Marc Cooper – författare

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. Twenty years later, travelling as a radical journalist in a reactionary world, Cooper continues to chronicle, with humor and detail, the events that make the headlines. In this book, he takes readers on a tour of the New World Order, including Pinochet's Chile, Nicaragua in the last hours of the Sandinistas, Soweto under siege, Panama still smoking after the US invasion, Baghdad bracing for the apocalypse and into the new Moscow mafia. The title piece shows Che Guevara's grandson and a new generation of Cuban youth still yearning for Che's ever-elusive promise of freedom. The second half of the book, set exclusively in the US, gives a ground-level view of a society in dizzying decay. Readers fly in Bill Clinton's private campaign plane from New Hampshire to Georgia while the candidate shifts his image-even his accent-in the quest for votes. Readers are guided through America's cultural background, from Dan Quayle and his confrontation with Hollywood to the ambassadors from armageddon who dominated the 1992 Republican Convention. When Cooper's home town, Los Angeles, burns with a thousand fires of rage, he takes readers to the very edge of history, describing America's war with itself. This journey culminates in a personal trip to the city that stands as an icon for the marketplace ethos of today-Las Vegas.

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 atmosphere of the final days of the Allende government, including his hiding and subsequent evacuation under armed UN protection. Twenty-five years later he returns and recounts, in vivid street-level reporting, a country that is a democracy in name only and a society that has been transfigured by one of the most radical, armed capitalist revolutions of our time. Yet, he argues, spasms of protest that seemed like the last rattle of the snake may still presage the crumbling of Chile's status quo as its people emerge from the long night of reaction to the cry of "Adios General!"