It was 1972, and three young men—one accompanied by his wife— arrived separately in Chile from different points in the U.S. Upper Midwest. None had ever been to the slender, mountainous Andean nation. Like some 20,000 other foreigners who’d also recently traveled there, they were chasing a dream: to be part of the social and economic revolution Chileans had embarked on two years earlier by electing Salvador Allende as their first-ever socialist president, the first socialist leader democratically elected in Latin America.

Death does not always mean an end. In early 2013, Venezuela’s president known as Comandante Hugo Chávez died after struggling with cancer. Having won the 2012 presidential elections—and perhaps anticipating the imminent end of his life before taking office—he proclaimed Vice President Nicolás Maduro as his political successor and publicly urged supporters to vote for him should the electoral process need to be repeated.

In the early winter of 1990, one year into the presidency of Carlos Menem, the Buenos Aires police held a public auction of a small fleet of cars that had long been in their service. Immersed as I was in primary research for the book I was writing on the legacies of repression and torture in Argentina, I was horrified.