Cabello-Barrueto succeeds in becoming a voice for her brother and other victims of repressive states.
In this affecting nonfiction account, a woman describes her civil suit against the Chilean death-squad commander who murdered her brother.
When Pinochet took over Chile in a 1973 military coup, Zita Cabello-Barrueto’s brother Winston Cabello, 28, an economist in Allende’s government, was no political activist. It didn’t matter. He became an early victim of the notorious Caravan of Death, the Chilean army death squad. Along with a dozen other political prisoners, he was driven to the desert, murdered and buried in an unmarked grave. After having immigrated to the United States, where Cabello-Barrueto worked her way up from janitor to professor, she learned years later that the man responsible, Armando Fernandez Larios, was living in Miami, Florida. A criminal case wasn’t possible, but (with pro bono legal help and other assistance) Cabello-Barrueto filed a civil suit against him, tracking down and interviewing many witnesses herself. In 2003, a federal jury unanimously found Fernandez liable for the summary execution, torture and inhumane and degrading treatment of Winston—as well as crimes against humanity. Damages awarded were $4 million, but Cabello-Barrueto writes, the money was never the point. “We knew we would never be paid.” Fernandez remains free. By publishing testimony not presented in court, Cabello-Barrueto hopes to complete the historical record. Her unflinching account shows not just one family’s grief, but also how fear and self-interest play into the interests of the powerful, so that for many Chileans, death squads were an acceptable alternative to Allende’s breadlines. And though constantly motivated by the drive to know why her brother died, she has to conclude that his death was arbitrary. “It is possible. That is all you need to know,” says one military figure she interviewed. Cabello-Barrueto also shows how tangled, painful, tedious and disillusioning the legal process can be (although her exhaustive details can tax reader interest). Her overall mood is optimism, but the book ends on a plaintive note: The U.S. still has not answered Chile’s request to extradite Fernandez.
Cabello-Barrueto succeeds in becoming a voice for her brother and other victims of repressive states.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500256753
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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