Contesting Legitimacy in Chile

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

1. Seeing the Political Through the Familial

2. The Hidden Story: Familial Beliefs and Political Conflict

3. Competing Fathers: The 1970 Presidential Election

4. A Feuding Family: Mobilizing for and Against Allende

5. Pinochet’s Chilean Family: Constructing Authoritarian Legitimacy

6. Mobilizing Families: Justifying Political Dissent Under Pinochet

7. Reconciling the Family: Legitimizing the Transition to Democracy

Conclusion: The Political Is Personal

Bibliography

Index

“Gwynn Thomas’s book offers an engaging and innovative discussion of two important decades in Chilean political history. Drawing on extensive research, Thomas shows the heretofore-unacknowledged extent to which Chilean political parties and culture employed and responded to familial appeals, justifications, and criticisms in order to legitimize or attack politicians and parties. Thomas’s analysis covers widely divergent political contexts, and she convincingly shows how deeply rooted the familial framework is in the national psyche—and how Chileans formulated and understood the intense political conflicts that have divided the country in recent decades.”

—Margaret Power, Illinois Institute of Technology