Chile: Death in the South.

• Author: Rosenberg, Tina

Chile: Death in the South.

Jacobo Timerman. Alfred A. Knopf, $15.95. This chilling book, which first apeared as a New Yorker series, is a textbook on dictatorship and how people learn to live with it. Timerman will horrify those who are romantics about Chile and are still waiting for General Pinochet to be swept out of office by a tide of protest.

The reality Timerman presents is this: Pinochet has maintained himself for 14 years as dictator of what was once the most democratic country in Latin America. He has bought the support, or at least the silence, of the middle and upper classes with cheap consumer goods. He has used feat, with surgical precision, to quiet the poor and those who couldn't be bought. There is active opposition, but on a very small scale. Today the government kills about 55 people a year. No one doubts Pinochet would kill more if he needed to, but he doesn't need to. In this once passionately political country, the latest strikes have been broken and the opposition daily newspapers are in danger of closing for want of readers. Timerman, himself a victim of torture in Argentina, quotes an opposition leader expressing his shock at the tortures who have emerged from the entrails of Chile, but when Timerman uses the quote...