Professor Pion-Berlin's Personal and Professional Biography

Personal Tidbits

I am a Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Riverside. I'm married with two children. My wife, Lisa, is President and CEO of Parents Anonymous, a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing child abuse and neglect by strengthening families all  around the world.  For further information go to the website http://www.parentsanonymous.org.  My son's name is Jeremy and my daughter's name is Emma.

I was born in Flushing New York in 1952, just three months before the death of Evita Perón, and while Harry Truman was still president. That makes me rather ancient. I grew up wanting to be either an artist, a sports hero, or a rock star. When those options quickly faded, I naturally settled for becoming a political scientist [hey, the money's not as good but you can't beat the status].

I had a rather unexceptional childhood, unless you want to count demerits in junior high school and occasional shoplifting to be of note. Once I even set fire to a grassy lot, but that was purely accidental (I think).

In 1969, a high school friend of mine asked me if I'd like to go to upstate New York for an outdoor rock concert. I said why bother, but he convinced me and so we went to Woodstock. My parents nearly freaked out when they saw the television coverage: 1/2 million rain-soaked, crazed hippies high on God knows what, playing in the mud and listening to Joplin and Hendrix. They breathed a deep sigh of relief when I turned up alive at their door step three days later. Believe me, it was worth it.

As far as hobbies go, I learned bird watching from my father at an early age and still do it. So does he. After a lapse of some 35 years, I’ve rediscovered painting. I dabble in acrylics and oils, and specialize in portraits. Stay tuned for the web-based appearance of my paintings.

Eventually I went on to college, without any master plan: no real sense of what I'd be when I grew up, but determined to enjoy the journey. At that time, (1970-74) anti-war activities were part of my life, as they were for nearly everyone. And so some of the time I spent in the classroom, some of the time I spent protesting in Washington, D.C., trying to get arrested at least once so I could tell everyone back home (I never was). And part of the time I was attending Grateful Dead concerts (My first being at Woodstock and my last being in December of 1994 at the LA Sports Arena--about 30 in all). After graduating from Colgate U. in 1974, I was chosen to be intern for the Peace Studies program there, where I team taught a couple of courses, trained students in non-violent resistance, and led an inter-nation simulation game (Colgate was the first University to conduct such a simulation).

In 1975, I was accepted as a research assistant at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. While there, I worked with Saul Landau and others concerned with human rights violations in Latin America. I met many Chilean refugees who had fled the Pinochet tyranny after the September 1973 military coup, and soon developed professional and personal relationships with them. I knew and worked with Isabel and Orlando Letelier. Orlando had been Chile's ambassador to the United States under the Allende Administration, had been detained for a year at Dawson Island concentration camp right after the coup, before being released due to international pressures. Isabel, his wife, was working at IPS at the time. Both were widely admired and regarded as leaders of the international resistance against the Pinochet dictatorship. On September 21, 1976, just north of Dupont circle, agents of the Chilean government blew up the car Orlando Letelier was driving, instantly killing him and a co-worker. I had lost a friend and colleague. I was suddenly thrust into a new situation, having been asked to participate in IPS's own investigation into the murder (not before being interviewed twice by the FBI regarding the murder--not a pleasant experience). To make a long story short, IPS was successful in steering the FBI in the right direction (after a number of false starts) and some of the guilty parties were soon discovered and prosecuted, while others remained inside Chile escaping extradition. It took 19 years until the mastermind of Letelier's murder, General Manuel Contreras, former head of the feared Chilean intelligence agency the DINA, was finally brought to justice.

The Letelier saga marked an important chapter in my life, because it sharpened my interest in Latin American affairs, and my determination to make some scholarly contribution in the area of political repression and human rights. That led me to choose graduate school, which brings me to the professional aspect of my biography.

Professional Tidbits

I received my Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1984. I had the good fortune while there to work with John McCamant, a Latin Americanist, and James Caporaso, an authority on dependency theory and editor of the journal Comparative Political Studies. The title of my dissertation was "Ideas as Predictors: Economic Doctrine and Political Repression in Argentina and Peru." GSIS nominated my dissertation for two awards, both of which I won. The first was the 1985 Gabriel Almond Award for best doctoral dissertation in the field of comparative politics. The second was the 1985 Western Political Science Association award for best dissertation in political science from that region.

My first job was at Ohio State University, where I taught for 6 years, before moving on UCR. Most of my work has centered on Argentina and its neighbors, Uruguay and Chile.

I've published four books, and numerous articles of mine have appeared in such journals as Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, The Human Rights Quarterly, Armed Forces and Society, The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Latin American Research Review, and Studies in Comparative International Development. Please see my vita and abstracts pages for more information on these pubs. I have also been a contributor to several edited volumes. I have also received grants from the Fulbright Commission, the National Science Foundation, The Tinker Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society.