SANTIAGO, 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.
Gen. Augusto Pinochet salutes Sept. 11, 1986 in Santiago,
Chile, during a commemoration of the coup bringing him to power in 1973.
Pinochet, the fierce anti-communist dictator who ruled Chile with an iron
fist from 1973 to 1990, died Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006 from heart
complications, the Santiago Military hospital reported. He was 91.
[AP]
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Supporters saw Pinochet as a
Cold War hero for overthrowing democratically elected President Salvador Allende
at a time when the US 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.
Thousands of Pinochet supporters gathered outside the hospital and elsewhere,
weeping and trading insults with people in passing cars. Some shouted "Long Live
Pinochet!" and sang Chile's national anthem.
Many other Chileans saw his 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.
"Not a leaf moves in this country if I'm not moving it," Pinochet said.
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.
He is survived by his wife, Lucia, two sons and three daughters.
The army said Pinochet will lay in state Monday and Tuesday at the Military
Academy in Santiago. The government of President Michelle Bachelet - whose
father died in Pinochet's prisons - said he would not receive the state
funeral usually due former presidents.
His body was to be cremated. Pinochet's son Marco Antonio said his father
feared a tomb would be desecrated by his enemies.