Stretching Pinochet

In an ad in the current New York Review of Books, Basic Books goes a little overboard trying to sell Heraldo Muñoz's The Dictator's Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet, A Political Memoir: "Augusto Pinochet was the most important Third World dictator of the Cold War, and perhaps the most ruthless." He was important, but especially to Chile, and he was a bastard. Still, the "most important" of them all? We'd have to place China outside of the Third World, for starters, but then would still be left with figures such as Pol Pot, Mobutu, Syngman Rhee, Suharto, a whole series of fellow tyrants in the Western hemisphere, to say nothing of Middle East tyrants such as the Shah, Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Hasaf Al Assad--the list goes on. I'm sure Muñoz's book is a valuable contribution to the historiography of Cold War Chile, and of U.S. intervention in Latin America and the wider Third World. This kind of sales job, however (how does one define "important" in this case anyway?), says more about the political position of the publisher than the Cold War in the Third World. And let me hasten to repeat: Pinochet was most certainly a bastard. And let me also hasten to add: the U.S. role in his coming to power and Washington's support for his regime was certainly also misguided, to say the least.