Santiago, September 11

The bargain begins the way these bargains always begin — sold as an exception against a defined enemy.

The coup that brings Augusto Pinochet to power frames itself, from the first bulletin, as a temporary, surgical intervention against a discrete threat: Marxists, Allendistas, the foreign-financed left. Every regime in this book will sell the same exception. The enemy will change name — Senderistas, mareros — but the structure of the offer never changes. The state asks for permission to suspend its own rules in exchange for the promise that the suspension will be aimed only at the people who deserve it. The promise is what is being sold. The apparatus that gets built to deliver on the promise is the part nobody is asked to vote on.