After Allende was overthrown, General Pinochet headed a ruthless military regime which began with the murder of many leftists and drove many thousands more into exile. After 1973, there was no large-scale public protest, until 1983 when a series of protest days involving stay-at-homes and pot-banging attracted mass participation. In the face of repression and internal division, that wave of protest could not be sustained, but in 1986 opposition forces regrouped, and in 1988, when Pinochet announced a plebiscite designed to legitimize his presidency for a further eight years, they had enough backing to oblige Pinochet to permit parties to have TV spots in the campaign and to have their own monitors at the count in addition to international observers. Divisions in the military junta and the withdrawal of US support from the dictatorship constrained Pinochet to accept the result and ultimately to step down in March 1990.
The principal accounts focusing on the role of nonviolent action in the defeat of Pinochet (Ackerman & DuVall, Huneeus, and Nepstad) naturally make little mention of the variety of sub-cultural forms that nourished a spirit of resistance, such as women forming groups to sew arpilleras (tapestries out of scraps of material), or the relatively behind-the-scenes work of Serpaj-Chile, in particular with Movement against Torture Sebastian Acevedo. There is little in English on Serpaj-Chile or the Acevedo movement, but there is a valuable resource for readers of Spanish – Vidal, Hernán , El Movimiento Contra la Tortura ‘Sebastián Acevedo’ [1986] Minneapolis, Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, , 2002, pp. 568 .