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Our own Michael Rob­bins has two reviews out this week:  a wickedly hilar­i­ous take­down of Robert Hass’s selected poems in the new issue of Poetry mag­a­zine, & a less wickedly hilar­i­ous appraisal of John Ashbery’s latest in the London Review of Books (sub­scriber only, but per­haps a copy could be pro­vided backchan­nel), which con­tains the first cita­tion of our own Oren Izenberg’s forth­com­ing Being Numer­ous. Please check ‘em out.

A little over a month ago, I pub­lished a report that con­clu­sively demon­strated for the first time that the U.S. financed Hugo Banzer’s 1971 coup in Bolivia. That report relied in part on a tran­script of a con­ver­sa­tion that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had on the morn­ing June 11, 1971.

Now it turns out that another con­ver­sa­tion Nixon and Kissinger had during that same meet­ing adds more evi­dence for the long-​held sus­pi­cion that the CIA par­tic­i­pated in the murder of Rene Schnei­der, the Chilean army commander-in-chief.

Here’s the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Jeff Stein report­ing on the new tran­scripts (PDF) released by nixontapes.org:

“1945-1998″ by Isao Hashimoto

For nearly four decades, there’s been an open ques­tion about the 1971 coup that brought dic­ta­tor Hugo Banzer Suárez to power in Bolivia: was the U.S. gov­ern­ment involved? Thanks to newly declas­si­fied doc­u­ments, we now have an answer.

Banzer was a dic­ta­tor of Bolivia from 1971-8 and a demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected pres­i­dent from 1997-2001. His three-​day coup in August 1971 was sig­nif­i­cant not only for the fight­ing that accom­pa­nied it, which left 110 dead and 600 wounded, but for the seven-​year regime that fol­lowed, one of the most repres­sive in Bolivia’s his­tory. Under Banzer’s rule, more than 14,000 Boli­vians were arrested with­out a judi­cial order, more than 8,000 were tortured—with elec­tric­ity, water, beatings—and more than 200 were exe­cuted or dis­ap­peared. (I’m writ­ing a long arti­cle about the legacy of the regime for Nar­ra­tive Mag­a­zine. It will hope­fully be out by the end of the year.)