Tanya Harmer has written a creative and deeply researched political biography of Beatriz (“Tati”) Allende, the daughter of Salvador Allende Gossens, the first democratically elected self-proclaimed Marxist president in Latin America, who took office in 1970. Harmer provides an easy to read (but not easy to “hear”) narrative of Beatriz's political life as well as her death by suicide in 1977 when she was in exile in Cuba.
Much of the biography is based on more than a decade of Harmer's research on Chile's place in the inter-American Cold War, on Cuban support for insurrection throughout the Western Hemisphere, on Cuban and Chilean Socialist Party support for the Che Guevara–led guerrilla movement in Bolivia (ELN), and on counterinsurgency operations by U.S. and allied regional governments (mostly, but not always, military dictatorships). An essential starting point is Harmer's pathbreaking book Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (2011), which was based...