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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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