Pinochet's Death Sparks Clashes in Chile

Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who terrorized his opponents for 17 years after taking power in a bloody coup, died Sunday, putting an end to a decade of intensifying efforts to bring him to trial for human rights abuses blamed on his regime. He was 91.

Violent clashes broke out between police and Pinochet opponents who threw rocks at cars and set up fire barricades on the city's main avenue. Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd. Authorities said there were a number of arrests, but no immediate reports of injuries.

Supporters saw Pinochet as a Cold War hero for overthrowing democratically elected President Salvador Allende at a time when the U.S. was working to destabilize his Marxist government and keep Chile from exporting communism in Latin America.

But the world soon reacted in horror as Santiago's main soccer stadium filled with political prisoners to be tortured, shot, disappeared or forced into exile.

Pinochet's dictatorship laid the groundwork for South America's most stable economy, but his crackdown on dissent left a lasting legacy: His name has become a byword for the state terror, in many cases secretly supported by the United States, that retarded democratic change across the hemisphere.

Pinochet died with his family at his side at the Santiago Military Hospital on Sunday, a week after suffering a heart attack.

"This criminal has departed without ever being sentenced for all the acts he was responsible for during his dictatorship," lamented Hugo Gutierrez, a human rights lawyer involved in several lawsuits against Pinochet.

Hundreds of Pinochet supporters gathered outside the hospital, weeping and trading insults with people in passing cars. Some shouted "Long Live Pinochet!" and sang Chile's national anthem.

Many Chileans saw Pinochet's death as reason for celebration. Hundreds of cheering, flag-waving people crowded a major plaza in the capital, drinking champagne and tossing confetti.

"Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile represented one of most difficult periods in that nation's history," said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman. "Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families."

Chile's government says at least 3,197 people were killed for political reasons during Pinochet's rule, but courts allowed the aging general to escape hundreds of criminal complaints as his health declined.

The mustachioed Pinochet left no doubt about who was in charge after the Sept. 11, 1973 coup, when warplanes bombed the presidential palace and Allende committed suicide with a submachine gun Fidel Castro had given him.

But he refused for years to take responsibility his regime's abuses, blaming subordinates for killings or tortures.

Only on his 91st birthday last month did he take "full political responsibility for everything that happened" during his long rule. But the statement made no reference to the rights abuses, and said he had to act to prevent Chile's economic and political disintegration.

Born Nov. 25, 1915, the son of a customs official in the port of Valparaiso, Pinochet was appointed army commander just 19 days before the coup by Allende, who mistakenly thought Pinochet would defend constitutional rule.

The CIA had worked for months to destabilize the Allende government, including financing a truckers strike that paralyzed the delivery of goods across Chile, but Washington denied having anything to do with the coup itself.

Soon after Pinochet's seizure of power, soldiers carried out mass arrests of leftists. Tanks rumbled through the streets of the capital, and many detainees were herded into the National Stadium, which became a torture and detention center. Other leftists were rounded up by death squads, and the "Caravan of Death" to Chile's forbidding Atacama desert left victims buried in unmarked mass graves.

Pinochet disbanded Congress, banned political activity and crushed dissent. In addition to the dead, more than 1,000 victims remain unaccounted for. Thousands more were arrested, tortured and forced into exile.

Pinochet defended his authoritarian rule as a crusade to build a society free of communism. He even claimed partial credit for the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

"I see myself as a good angel," he told a Miami Spanish-language television station in 2004.

He showed no mercy to his perceived enemies. When investigators uncovered coffins that had been stuffed with two bodies each in the aftermath of the coup, he dismissed it as a "a good cemetery space-saving measure."

Pinochet seized power at a time when Chile's economy was in near ruins, partly due to the CIA's covert destabilization efforts and partly to Allende's mismanagement.

He launched a radical free-market program that at first triggered a financial collapse and unprecedented joblessness. But it laid the basis for South America's healthiest economy, which has grown by 5 percent to 7 percent a year since 1984.

Pinochet lost an October 1988 referendum to extend his rule and was forced to call an election. He lost to Patricio Alywin, whose center-left coalition has ruled Chile since 1990.

Pinochet avoided prosecution for years after his presidency. He remained army commander for eight more years and then was a senator-for-life, a position guaranteed under the constitution his regime wrote.

It took a Spanish judge to remove Pinochet's cloak of invincibility, and inspire Chileans to make their own efforts to hold him to account. He was in London for back surgery in 1998 when the judge asked Britain to extradite him to Spain for human rights violations. British authorities ruled he was too ill to be tried, and sent him back to Chile, where ghosts of the past were coming forward.

More than 200 criminal complaints were filed against him and he was under house arrest at the time of his death, but courts repeatedly ruled he could not face trial because of poor physical and mental health.

Even longstanding Pinochet allies abandoned him in 2004, when a U.S. Senate investigative committee found Pinochet kept multimillion-dollar secret accounts at the Riggs Bank in Washington. Investigators said he had up to $17 million in foreign accounts, and owed $9.8 million in back taxes. He, his wife and several of his children were indicted on tax evasion charges.

During his final years, Pinochet lived in seclusion at heavily guarded Santiago mansion and his countryside residence.

The government said Sunday that Pinochet will not receive the state funeral normally granted to a former president, but only military honors at the Santiago military academy. President Michelle Bachelet, who was imprisoned and mistreated during the dictatorship, recently said it would be "a violation of my conscience" to attend a state funeral for Pinochet.

As he requested, Pinochet will be cremated, according to son Marco Antonio, to avoid desecration of his tomb by "people who always hated him."

The government said it had authorized the Chilean flag to be flown at half-staff at military barracks nationwide.

NEITHER FIDEL CASTRO!!!!
Pinochet Is History
But how will it remember him?

An NRO Symposium

12/11/2006

Former Chilean dicator Augusto Pinochet died Sunday at age 91. National Review Online asked some experts how he ought to be remembered.

Anthony Daniels
The reason Augusto Pinochet was universally hated by leftists and many academics worldwide was not because he was so brutal or killed so many people (he hardly figured among the 20th century’s most prolific political killers, admittedly a difficult company to get into) but because he was so successful. There is no doubt that there was indeed much brutality and hardship in the wake of his coup, but unlike the much less reviled military dictators of Argentina and Uruguay, he actually achieved something worthwhile, namely the prosperity of his country.

Worse still, he did so by adopting the very reverse of the policies for so long advocated by third worldists and academic development economists, who were certain that the cause of the third world’s poverty was the first world’s wealth, and that everything would have to change before anything could change. His demonstration that a country could draw itself up by its bootstraps, by embracing trade, was most unwelcome. It forced a change of world outlook, never welcome to those who live by ideas.

That a hick general from a humble background should so obviously have done much more for his country than a suave, educated, aristocratic Marxist was a terrible blow to the self-esteem of the Left in every Western country. As for holding a referendum on own his rule and abiding by the result when he lost, that was quite unforgivable, setting as it did a shocking precedent for left-wing dictators.

— Anthony Daniels, author of Utopias Elsewhere , is a doctor in England.

Roger W. Fontaine
Augusto Pinochet enjoys a reputation outside of Chile that is the reverse of the adage about a prophet in his own country. Enlightened opinion elsewhere, he is loathed: the butcher of human rights; a reactionary speed bump delaying social progress in Chile and Latin America for a generation.

In Chile, it’s a bit different. Human rights did suffer under Pinochet. And Chile spent years under Pinochet recovering from his predecessor Salvador Allende’s mad dash to a Soviet ---- command economy. It has also lately been shown he was personally corrupt. Finally, at least for Americans, there was the small matter of the caudillo’s secret services committing murder on the streets of Washington, D.C.

But Pinochet will also be remembered as leaving the country better off than he found it. It was Pinochet who obeyed his own electorate by stepping down from power after he lost a national referendum. And unlike his fellow Latin American generals, he let market-oriented civilians lay the basis for Chile’s economy — the most productive in the region. Can his fellow caudillo in Cuba — soon to be among the departed as well — say the same?

— Roger W. Fontaine was a National Security Council staff officer in the Reagan administration. He is a guest lecturer at the Institute of World Politics.

Mario Loyola
A Spanish joke: a reporter traveled to Spain to learn what people think of Franco. Upon arriving in a village, the reporter asked one man, but the man insisted they walk out into the country. Yet once there, he still hesitated. "Let's go by that lake," he said. When they arrived at the lake, the reporter asked yet again, but the man insisted that they take a row-boat out of the middle of the lake. When they got there and the reporter asked again, the man finally leaned over and whispered, "I like him."

Pinochet's coup d'etat and the murder of Salvador Allende along with 3,000 or more suspected opposition members, were perhaps the worst thing that has ever happened to Chile, just as the Cuban Revolution was the worst thing that ever happened to Cuba.

But there is one vital difference between the two. Once he consolidated power, Pinochet worked hard to protect the bases of a modern progressive democracy. Castro, by contrast, made it his business to ruin those in his country — and now a new generation of Latin American leaders fondly dream of walking in his footsteps.

Pinochet did something else that few dictators ever do: Upon losing by a small margin in a plebiscite that pitted him against the entire spectrum of political opposition, he resigned. The crimes of Pinochet may be unpardonable. But at least he tried to redeem them. We shouldn't be surprised by the number of Chileans who are still thankful for that.

— Mario Loyola is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies .

Ion Mihai Pacepa
In my other life, as a Communist general, I lived under two tyrants who killed and jailed over one million people. Pinnochet saved Chile from becoming another Communist hell. God bless him for that, and may he be forgiven for his later aberrations. Not only in Chile does power corrupt.

— Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.

Otto J. Reich
Augusto Pinochet was a tragic figure. Instead of being remembered for saving Chilean democracy from a communist takeover, and starting the country on the longest-lasting economic expansion in Latin America, which he did, he will be remembered mostly for carrying out a brutal campaign of human-rights abuses.

Contrary to revisionist history and mainstream media myths, Pinochet’s military coup against President Salvador Allende was supported by a majority of Chileans, two-thirds of whom had voted against Allende in the 1970 election. The three-way electoral tie had been decided by the Chilean Congress in favor of Allende. By 1973, however, Chileans were demonstrating in the streets against shortages, inflation and unemployment brought about by Allende’s failed socialist policies.

Facing widespread opposition to his rule, Allende secretly prepared a “self-coup,” with the help of Fidel Castro, who surreptitiously sent large quantities of weapons to arm Allende’s minority of supporters. Army Commander Pinochet beat Allende to the coup, which was justified by the Allende-Castro plans. What was not justified was the bloodbath which followed, when Allende supporters and innocents alike were summarily executed, imprisoned and tortured, including loyal military officers who disagreed with the coup.

Today, thanks to the KGB files smuggled out of Russia by Vasily Mitrokhin, we know that Allende was receiving payments from the KGB. There is no doubt that if he had succeeded in his plans, Chile today would be an impoverished Communist prison like Cuba, instead of a shining example of democracy and prosperity. With some compassion and self-discipline, Pinochet could have been remembered as a liberator and not a despot. He was both.

— Otto J. Reich served President Bush from 2001 to 2004, first as assistant secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere and later in the National Security Council. He now heads his own international government-relations firm in Washington.

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