I learned something from this article. I didn't know Allende and his crew had made such calls to violence. Still, I have questions.
How many of the 3000+ suffered death after a trial, without a trial, or during armed resistance? How many more suffered torture? What were the criteria for torture or execution?
Why kill any enemy once you have them under control?
How many got killed by mistake, or for reasons of personal feud?
Did Pinochet steal millions, indicating a character different from "liberator"?
Pinochet was a hero who defeated communism. Your whining can't change that.
I learned something from this article. I didn't know Allende and his crew had made such calls to violence.You've got so, so much to learn.
Chile was a Cold War battlefield. Period.
The failed battles over communism in Asia cost 100,000+ American lives and millions of Asian lives. And you want to complain about Pinochet's Swiss accounts?
Just bloody measure the destruction of communism against the very worst Pinochet did, and he's an angel in comparison. He was a very, very useful weapon against the spread of mankind's most deadly political virus, communism.
Exact details are sketchy and many of the anecdotal accounts of deaths that were reported by the commission that looked into the deaths came from highly suspect sources. For example, somewhere on the order of 400 out of 2,300 recognized deaths were members of the MIR - a marxist terror cell that specialized in car bombs and bank robberies.
What they did report though is interesting. 101 of the "victims" were shot attempting to escape from prison. 59 were convicted in military tribunals and sentenced to death. 93 were killed in "protests" (read: marxist thugs hurling rocks at Pinochet's troops). 90 were killed by private vigilante citizens. 39 were killed in gun battles with the police or military. 815 were allegedly executed in captivity. All of these people were deemed "victims of human rights abuses" by the pro-socialist commission that investigated them, even though many were clearly not (i.e. marxist thugs who were killed attacking the police) and some weren't even done by the Pinochet regime (i.e. the vigilantes).
Another thing to note - over half of the "victims" died during the coup and its 3 month aftermath in 1973.
Why kill any enemy once you have them under control?
Mostly because it was much more complicated than simply arresting them. Some of the "victims" died during the fighting of the coup, and in later gun battles with the police. Many of the "victims" were arrested first and ordered to leave Chile and never return, or else they would be executed. Pinochet followed through on his promise, and as late as the early 1980's they were still capturing marxist guerilla fighters in the jungles who turned out to be ex-Allendist officials who had returned from exile to agitate.
The stats suggest relatively few. Over half of the "victims" came from the three largest marxist political and terrorist organizations. There were dozens of smaller marxist guerilla groups that Pinochet put down on top of that. Only 7 "victims" came from the mainstream left political party, the CDP.
I don't think ANY leader, "dictator" or otherwise, is so shortsighted as to turn his back on leftist enemies. Whether they are defeated or not, they remain your chief problem and endanger any attempts you make to change your system- which Chile, arguably, desperately needed.
I really don't care if they were tried or tortured- the only good leftist is a dead one.