The Southern Tiger: Chile's Fight for a Democratic and Prosperous Future. By Ricardo Lagos with Blake Hounshell and Elizabeth Dickinson. Palgrave Macmillan; 258 pages; $28 and £16.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN 1988 General Augusto Pinochet organised a plebiscite that he was confident would grant him another eight years of absolute power. Ricardo Lagos, a hitherto little-known Socialist leader, used a live television programme—the first to feature opposition politicians since Pinochet's military coup of 1973—to defy the climate of fear that was the dictator's most powerful political weapon. Pointing his finger at the camera, he addressed him directly, saying that it was inadmissible that he sought to remain in power. Ignoring the presenter's attempt to cut him off, Mr Lagos said “I am speaking for 15 years of silence.”

It was a turning point. The opposition went on to win the plebiscite, ushering in Chile's transition to democracy. Mr Lagos would become a minister in the first two democratic governments, and was elected Chile's president in 2000. By far the most interesting and moving part of his memoir concerns his patient and difficult work to build opposition to the dictatorship.

After Pinochet overthrew the elected far-left government of Salvador Allende, almost 3,000 people were murdered or disappeared, 29,000 were imprisoned (nearly all of them were tortured) and some 200,000 sought refuge abroad. Mr Lagos, an academic economist, was an adviser to the Allende government but not a member of it. After the coup, he taught in the United States, before returning to Chile in 1978. He played a prominent role in coaxing into existence a broad centre-left front, called the Concertación. He disagreed with the far-left over its refusal to rule out violence against the regime. That didn't spare him from being detained for 18 days after a failed assassination attempt against Pinochet by communists.

In the first of its two decades in power the Concertación had to govern in Pinochet's shadow. That was changed by the dictator's arrest in London in October 1998 at the request of a Spanish magistrate; by the Chilean Supreme Court's decision to lift his immunity and by the revelation that he had stolen $30m. As president, Mr Lagos oversaw a national dialogue about the past that saw the army own up to its abuses and apologise for them. He is surely right that the process of reconciliation, of finding out the truth about what happened and punishing the abusers where possible, required both time and political determination.

In office Mr Lagos tried to combine a free-market economy with public policies designed to create a less unequal society. He had some success: he signed free-trade agreements with the United States and the European Union and created new anti-poverty, health and housing programmes. This modern and moderate social democracy is an implicit rebuke to Allende, whom he is reluctant to criticise directly.

Despite its title, the book is infuriatingly perfunctory in its treatment of Chile's impressive socioeconomic progress under the Concertación. Mr Lagos's presidency merits just two chapters, one of which focuses on foreign policy. It was to the author's abiding credit that Chile, a member of the UN Security Council at the time, refused to back George Bush's rush to war against Iraq.

Mr Lagos broadly welcomes the student protests that broke out in Chile last year, after the Concertación left office. “These are the children of Chile's democracy, born after the fall of the dictator and raised in a country that has come to expect and demand responsive and responsible government,” he writes. But he doesn't say what he thinks of the student demand to abolish for-profit education. The reader is left wondering whether he might have done more when president to reduce income inequality through tax reform.

“The Southern Tiger” is occasionally marred by the breezy Americanisms of Mr Lagos's co-writers, journalists at Foreign Policy magazine. But between them they have produced a readable book about the consolidation of democracy in Latin America. The pity is that it could have been a much more profound one.