A major reinterpretation of the Salvador Allende era in Chile, Weavers of Revolution is also a compelling drama of human triumph and tragedy that exemplifies "the new narrative history" at its authentic best.

Patrick Barr-Melej here illuminates modern Chilean history with an unprecedented chronicle and reassessment of the sixties and seventies. During a period of tremendous political and social strife that saw the election of a Marxist president followed by the terror of a military coup in 1973, a youth-driven, transnationally connected counterculture smashed onto the scene. Contributing to a surging historiography of the era's Latin American counterculture, Barr-Melej draws on media and firsthand interviews in documenting the intertwining of youth and counterculture with discourses rooted in class and party politics. Focusing on "hippismo" and an esoteric movement called Poder Joven, Barr-Melej challenges a number of prevailing assumptions about culture, politics, and the Left under Salvador Allende's "Chilean Road to Socialism." While countercultural attitudes toward recreational drug use, gender roles and sexuality, rock music, and consumerism influenced many youths on the Left, the preponderance of leftist leaders shared a more conservative cultural sensibility. This exposed, Barr-Melej argues, a degree of intergenerational dissonance within leftist ranks. And while the allure of new and heterodox cultural values and practices among young people grew, an array of constituencies from the Left to the Right berated counterculture in national media, speeches, schools, and other settings. This public discourse of contempt ultimately contributed to the fierce repression of nonconformist youth culture following the coup.

A major reinterpretation of the Salvador Allende era in Chile, Weavers of Revolution is also a compelling drama of human triumph and tragedy that exemplifies "the new narrative history" at its authentic best.

On the 50th anniversary of the coup that overthrew Allende, a new edition of this classic text on Chile's socialist president The election in Chile of the Marxist leader of the Socialist Party, Salvador Allende, to the presidency in October 1970 inaugurated a political situation unique in Latin America and of world-wide significance. Allende's Popular Unity coalition embraced Socialists and Communists and campaigned on an election programme of unprecedented radicalism – nothing less than the abolition of monopoly capitalism and imperialism in Chile. In this book, Régis Debray, recently released from his Bolivian gaol, questioned President Allende about his strategy for socialism. These discussions ranged widely over the history of the workers’ movement in Chile, the strength of imperialism in Latin America, the experience of the first months of the Allende government, the role of the Chilean armed forces, Allende's personal background and friendship with Che Guevara, the seizure of land by peasants since the Popular Unity victory, and the international outlook of the new Chile. In an introductory essay, Debray furnished an analysis of Chilean history and politics which situated Allende in the past and present of the country and explored the dynamics of the class struggle now unfolding there. For this new anniversary edition, leading Chilean leftist scholar Camila Vergara has written a new introduction which appraises the book in the light of recent political developments in Chile.