Excerpt:
The grassroots revolution in Chile presents a pivotal moment in the history of Latin America, revealing a clear departure from previous violent movements found in Cuba, Argentina and Mexico. Instead, Chile experiences nonviolent change through the Yarur Mill strike. The process proves to be a dramatic build up to a short-lived social victory, rapidly extinguished by a violent counterrevolutionary coup led by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Unlike the revolutionary power plays at the top levels of government in Argentina and Mexico, Chile experiences dual top-down and bottom-up social revolutions. Historian Peter Winn takes a journalistic approach, weaving together first-hand accounts with interviews of those in the center of the worker struggle. The result is a compelling narrative framed to leave the reader cheering for the underdogs – the Yarur workers.
