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wolfy
Fire-eater
Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2510
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 Posted:
Dec 11, 2006 - 09:20 AM |
 
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| Post subject: Pinochet is brown bread! Hooray! |
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hammerforlife
Fire-eater
Joined: May 24, 2004
Posts: 2701
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| Posted:
Dec 11, 2006 - 09:53 AM |
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"Hey Mr. Pinochet
You've sown a bitter crop
It's foreign money that supports you
One day the money's going to stop
No wages for your torturers
No budget for your guns
Can you think of your own mother
Dancin' with her invisible son
They're dancing with the missing
They're dancing with the dead
They dance with the invisible ones
They're anguish is unsaid
They're dancing with their fathers
They're dancing with their sons
They're dancing with their husbands
They dance alone
They dance alone" |
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shanghaiceltic
Board Royalty
Joined: Sep 20, 2005
Posts: 7582
Location: Perth WA
Status: Offline
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| Posted:
Dec 11, 2006 - 03:56 PM |
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The obit from the Telegraph on line
General Augusto Pinochet
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 11/12/2006Page 1 of 7
General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile who died yesterday aged 91, saved his country from Communism and created the most successful economy in Latin America; he was also responsible, however, for the widespread torture and murder of his political enemies.
Any judgment of Pinochet must take account of the rule of his predecessor, President Salvador Allende, who in 1970 had become the first Communist in the world to win power in a democratic election. Allende's programme of nationalising the means of production, and expropriating foreign-owned industries, banks, corporations and estates, brought economic chaos.
Inevitably, such a government did not appeal to the Americans. Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, sought means to "make the (Chilean) economy scream", while the Nixon administration cut off all aid and credits. Such measures exacerbated inflation in Chile, and intensified class conflicts. By the end of 1971 there was widespread rioting and industrial unrest.
advertisementOn the other hand, Allende enacted most of his reforms constitutionally, and — the published returns suggested — actually increased his share of the vote in the congressional elections of March 1973. His expropriation of American copper mines was widely popular, and under his rule the workers and peasants received a greater share of the national income, although food production actually fell and there were increasing shortages.
According to Pinochet's supporters, the only way to prevent Chile from becoming another Cuba was to engineer a coup.
In 1972, in an attempt to buttress his regime, Allende had introduced several military men into his cabinet. In August 1973, assured by General Carlos Pratts that Pinochet was reliable, Allende appointed him commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
The promotion suggested to Pinochet that he had been divinely ordained to rid Chile of Communism, and on September 11 1973 he struck. While the navy seized the port of Valparaiso, the presidential palace at La Moneda was ringed with tanks and bombed by the air force. Allende was later found dead, clutching a submachine gun that had been given him by Castro. It was not clear whether he had died fighting or had committed suicide.
By the end of the day Pinochet was in command of Chile. At first he ruled in a junta with three other officers; within a year, however, he had concluded that things would run better if he took sole control, and he assumed the title of Supreme Chief of the Nation. Of his cabinet of 15, 10 were military men.
He dissolved the National Congress, imposed censorship, outlawed Marxist parties, purged universities and abolished trades unions. Hundreds of suspected political opponents were herded into the national football stadium; many were tortured; many were killed, some by a travelling hit squad known as the "Caravan of Death". Detention camps sprang up throughout Chile.
Though the atrocities were at their worst in the first three years of Pinochet's rule, sporadic killings went on into the late 1980s. It has been estimated that more than 3,000 perished, though the number of los desaparecidos — "the disappeared" — will never be accurately known.
advertisement"I am not a murderer," Pinochet insisted in the aftermath of the coup, "but if people insist on fighting, we will act as we do in time of war." Later, in his retirement, he would point to the outrages perpetrated by the opposition during his rule.
The only real argument — not justification — for Pinochet is that he presided over an economic miracle in Chile. He inherited triple-digit inflation, and left an economy which served as a model to enthusiasts of the free market.
He began by returning to their former owners the land and factories expropriated by Allende. He also promised compensation to the American companies for the copper mines which had been seized.
Then, advised by "the Chicago Boys", Chilean disciples of the American economist Milton Friedman, he slashed government spending, privatised public enterprises, provided generous incentives for foreign investors, deregulated the banks, lowered trade barriers and promoted exports.
Over the next two decades Chile achieved a growth rate three times greater than the average for South America. There were occasional falterings on the way to prosperity. In the early 1980s Pinochet pegged the peso to the American dollar, only to see the rising dollar price Chilean exports out of the market.
But when the peso was allowed to float again, the economy resumed its onward march, and from 1984 to 1998 the growth rate averaged 14 per cent. Mrs Thatcher was full of admiration. Equally, Frank Field, charged with reforming British pensions when Labour came to power in 1997, turned his attention to the Chilean system, under which workers owned individual pension accounts, and chose who should run them.
Less satisfactorily, the disparity between rich and poor in Chile is the most marked in Latin America. Even in 1998, nine years after Pinochet left office, 25 per cent of Chileans were living below the poverty line. On the other hand, there was a 95 per cent literacy rate, low infant mortality and an average life expectancy of 74 years.
Pinochet was not only an extraordinarily successful dictator; he was also one of the very few to surrender power at the behest of the electorate. The Constitution of 1980 gave him an eight-year term as President; and in 1988 he held a referendum in the confident expectation that his tenure would be extended for another eight years.
advertisementBefore the referendum took place, the electoral registers were reopened and legislation passed to allow non-Marxist political parties to function again. Pinochet even announced that all Chilean exiles (including Allende's wife Hortensia Busi) would be permitted to come home to vote.
In the event, a united coalition of 16 parties campaigned against the President, and to Pinochet's surprise obtained 53 per cent of the vote. The same coalition prevailed over Pinochet's candidates in the congressional elections of 1989.
Grudgingly, but peacefully, Pinochet handed over power in 1990 to a democratic civilian government, claiming that his mission to restore Chile had been accomplished. Yet until 1998 he remained Commander-in-Chief of the army, and when he stepped down he named his own successor.
Under the Constitution of 1980 Pinochet, as a former president, was automatically made a senator for life, and on the day after resigning from the army he took up his seat in the 48-member Senate.
Together with nine other designated senators (who included several of his former military aides), and with the support of Right-wing parties within the Assembly, Pinochet commanded a majority capable of holding off those who sought vengeance.
Perhaps a quarter of the Chilean population revered him, while the Augusto Pinochet Foundation strove to maintain his legacy. Up to October 1998 it seemed that he had arranged for a far more successful retirement than his hero Napoleon achieved. Events, however, were to prove otherwise.
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was born in Valparaiso on November 25 1915, the eldest of six children. Their father was a customs agent, whose ancestors had arrived from Brittany during the 18th century.
advertisementPinochet grew up in a humble but hard-working milieu, and always dreamed of becoming a soldier. His father wanted him to train as a doctor, but, backed by his powerful mother, the young man stuck to his determination to enter the army.
Twice rejected by the military academy on account of his thin, gangling frame, Pinochet managed at the third attempt to persuade the selection board to accept him. Yet, having graduated as a lieutenant at 18, it took him 20 more years to reach the rank of major. By then he was a burly figure, obsessed with keeping fit.
He was appointed adjutant at the Under-Secretariat of War, and lecturer at the War College. Clearly suited to life as a staff officer, he served briefly as military attaché at the Chilean Embassy in Washington. In 1968 he published two books on the geography of Chile and the Estados Islands, followed four years later by further volumes on Argentina, Peru, Bolivia and the Pacific War of 1879.
In 1971 Pinochet was appointed commander-general of the army's Santiago garrison. He still appeared an entirely conventional figure, proud of the Chilean army's professionalism in the mould created by the Prussian Emil Koerner who, at the beginning of the century, taught the troops discipline, along with the goose-step.
Pinochet's elevation two years later to Commander-in-Chief caused some surprise, not least to his wife, who was convinced that he was joking when he told her the news. Subsequently she learnt, like Pinochet himself, to discern the hand of providence
In fact, Pinochet had been secretly preparing for the coup for at least a year, keeping even his wife in the dark. On September 5 1973 he held secret talks with the heads of each branch of the armed forces; on September 9 they all committed themselves to the coup.
The measures which Pinochet took to destroy the Communist opposition proved too much even for the United States, which suspended military aid in 1976. Relations were further soured when, later that year, Allende's Foreign Secretary Orlando Letelier, and his American secretary Ronnie Moffit, were killed by a car bomb in Washington.
The advent of Jimmy Carter as American President in 1977 brought Pinochet under increased pressure to change his ways and hold elections. But Pinochet remained unimpressed. As one of Reagan's emissaries remarked, he was "the toughest nut I've even seen. He makes Somoza and the rest of those guys look like a bunch of patsies."
advertisementWithin Chile, Pinochet escaped a number of assassination attempts. The most dramatic was staged in September 1986, when a group of Left-wing extremists ambushed his car and opened fire. Five bodyguards died, but the president escaped with a cut hand. Once more, he believed, divine providence had intervened.
One of the attackers was believed to belong to the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, the armed branch of the Chilean Communist Party. On June 16 1987 Pinochet's secret police launched Operation Albania. By dawn, 12 Communist guerrillas were dead: three women and four men killed in a deserted suburban house which they were occupying; two victims shot on the streets; and three others killed when police fired on their homes.
The Roman Catholic Church in Chile, however, stood forth as the champion of the thousands of families who had lost members after the dictator's advent to power. Special groups were formed to care for relatives left abandoned after the police squads had rounded up Leftists and carted them off to prison.
When Pope John Paul II visited Chile in 1987, he was given an album containing photographs of 758 people who had disappeared after the coup of 1973. It was perhaps to counter the bad impression this made that Pinochet announced that political exiles would be allowed to return home and vote.
For some years after his fall, Pinochet continued to take a robust view of the excesses of his regime. Faced with evidence of a mass execution, with the victims huddled together in a pit, he observed, according to one report: "Whoever buried them served the Fatherland well, by saving money on nails."
In retirement Pinochet continued to visit Britain, which, he declared, was his favourite country. His affection was reciprocated by Mrs Thatcher, who knew better than most how valuable Chile's support had been during the Falklands War in 1982.
In September 1998 he arrived in London for a back operation, which duly took place in October. Shortly afterwards, however, after a Spanish court had contacted the Metropolitan Police, he was arrested under the Extradition Act of 1989, and charged with murder.
advertisementAllthough the High Court ruled that Pinochet was immune from prosecution as a former head of state, the House of Lords reversed this decision in November. But this ruling was itself called into question when it was revealed that Lord Hoffman, one of the judges, had contacts with Amnesty International. Pinochet was held under house arrest at Wentworth, in Surrey, pending the Lords' rehearing of the case.
In March 1999 the Lords decided by six to one that the former dictator was not entitled to immunity from charges of torture. They also held that he was liable to face trial in Madrid only on charges of torture carried out since 1988.
But the legal process advanced slowly, and in the autumn of 1999 Pinochet apparently suffered two strokes. A medical examination of the general ordered by the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, established in January 2000 that he had suffered extensive brain damage. Straw announced that he was "minded" to release Pinochet, and in March decreed that he would not be extradited.
Pinochet returned to Chile, where he was joyously received by his supporters. But his enemies were also active. In August 2000 the Chilean Supreme Court rejected Pinochet's claim that he was immune from prosecution, and four months later Juan Guzman, the judge investigating his conduct, issued a warrant for his arrest, though the Supreme Court overturned the warrant on the ground that the general had not been questioned.
General Augusto Pinochet
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 11/12/2006Page 7 of 7
This led to Pinochet being once more examined to see if he was fit to be questioned. The doctors reported that he had heart problems, diabetes and "moderate dementia". Shortly afterwards, he was interrogated by Guzman. Earlier in January 2001, the Chilean army admitted that the bodies of 130 of those who had disappeared during Pinochet's dictatorship had been thrown into the sea or into lakes.
Pinochet doggedly refused to acknowledge guilt. He had a series of further setbacks to his health, and further indictments; within the last two weeks he was admitted to hospital with serious heart problems.
Augusto Pinochet married María Lucía Hiriat Rodríguez; they had two sons and three daughters. |
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I have parrallel bars at home, one for gin and one for whiskey |
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wolfy
Fire-eater
Joined: Sep 13, 2004
Posts: 2510
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| Posted:
Dec 11, 2006 - 04:27 PM |
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^ That's very biased reporting (to be expected from the Telegraph though). Here is a fairer obituary:
Augusto Pinochet
Malcolm Coad
Monday December 11, 2006
The Guardian
Captain-general Augusto Pinochet, who has died aged 91, was the most notorious of Latin America's 20th-century military rulers. Dictator of Chile between 1973 and 1990, after which he remained as army commander-in-chief, then senator-for-life, he bestrode the final decades of the Cold War in the region like no one else but Fidel Castro in Cuba. Then, in 1998, a Spanish judge ended his career as he could never have expected: under arrest in London and converted into a symbol of hope that heads of state who violate human rights may no longer escape a reckoning under international law.
Pinochet sprang to the attention of the world, and of his own people, when he headed the coup that overthrew the leftwing government of Dr Salvador Allende in September 1973. Allende's election three years before at the head of a socialist-communist coalition had a significance far beyond Chile itself, being widely seen as the harbinger of similar projects in countries such as France and Italy, as well as the beginning of a "second Cuba" in Latin America itself. The coup, in which CIA destabilisation played a part, was as much of an iconic event of the time as the war in Vietnam or the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Pinochet, with his dark glasses and harshly downturned mouth, became the paradigm of the third world anti-communist strongman.
By the late 1980s, while reviled worldwide for the brutality of his regime, Pinochet was also lauded by many for turning his country's economy into a dynamic free-market model for the developing world. When post-communist Russian television began an interview with him in 1994 by apologising for Soviet media coverage of his regime, there could have been no clearer example of the turning of the world-historical tide - unless it was the flood of his former ministers and technocrats invited to ex-Soviet-bloc countries to explain the marvels of untrammelled capitalism in Chile.
All this was no mean feat for the apparently unremarkable son of a customs official, born in the Pacific port of Valparaiso. By his own admission, the young Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was "a weak lad", educated by conservative Marist priests before being twice rejected by the country's Military College. He was finally accepted at the age of 15, backed in his choice of career by his mother, Avelina Ugarte, a formidable woman of Basque extraction. Augusto Senior, the descendent of Breton cheese-makers who settled in Chile in the early 18th century to escape the Wars of the Spanish Succession, wanted his son to be a doctor.
Augusto Jr graduated in 1937 as an infantry officer. His subsequent career was steady but routine, distinguished mostly for his expertise in "geopolitics", the subject he taught at the country's War Academy. This quasi-science, which regards nation-states as living entities and was one of the sources of Nazism, was the subject of a book he published in 1968, and which was attacked by specialists outside Chile for comprehensive plagiarism.
According to his memoirs, Pinochet was first alerted to the "truly diabolical attractions of Marxism" in 1948, while commanding a prison camp for banned communists. It was here too that he first met Dr Allende, who in 1973 would commit suicide in the bombed ruins of La Moneda government palace rather than surrender the presidency. At the time, Allende was a young doctor and Socialist senator who came to visit the prisoners. The then Lieutenant Pinochet threatened to shoot him if he tried it - though Allende always associated a different officer with the incident. Members of Allende's presidential staff would remember the pre-coup Pinochet as a bluff and somewhat sycophantic officer - "the guy we would call if we needed a jeep," said one. Three weeks before the coup, when the constitutionalist General Carlos Prats resigned as commander-in-chief amid growing political crisis, Allende appointed Pinochet to replace him in the belief that he was the only remaining loyal member of the army high command. "I wonder what they have done with poor Pinochet," the doomed president remarked to aides as the first news of the coup broke.
Pinochet himself would later claim that, for security reasons, he had been planning the coup alone for two years with student officers at the military academy. Other generals, who certainly were involved in the plotting, said that he was considered untrustworthy and played no role. What is not in doubt is that three days before the coup, he was given an ultimatum by the commanders-in-chief of the navy and air force to join them or suffer the consequences.
On the day itself, there was little doubt Pinochet was in charge. "He realized what had dropped into his lap and had no alternative but to follow it through," said one of his closest civilian aides later. Amateur recordings of radio transmissions between the golpista command posts that day reveal the Pinochet the world would come to know. While negotiating Allende's surrender, he joked crudely about flying the president out of the country and crashing the plane on the way. "Kill the bitch and you finish the spawn," he said.
Within a year, as the army asserted its overwhelming strength among the armed services, plans for a rotating presidency between the four members of the ruling junta of service chiefs were dropped and Pinochet was named President of the Republic. A tight group of civilian and military advisers designed a regime focused on him as the incarnation of the military's "historic mission to remake the country". Potential rivals were either retired or died in mysterious circumstances. In 1974, General Prats became one of the victims, killed with his wife in exile in Buenos Aires by a bomb attached to their car - an attack later shown to have been carried out by Pinochet's agents.
The rank of Captain-general, hitherto held only by the Liberator of the country from the Spanish in the early 1800s, Bernardo O'Higgins, was revived for Pinochet. His uniform hat was tailored higher than that of other officers. Officially he became the visionary who, guided by "the mysterious hand of God", had made Chile "the only country in history to have broken free from the yoke of communism". He was reported to enjoy the special protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of both the army and the country. Such was the origin of the saint-like statuettes of Pinochet and the posters of "The Immortal" so widely seen at demonstrations supporting him after his arrest in London.
This personality cult was only one of the ways in which the regime so notably avoided the factionalism that plagued the region's many other military dictatorships. Chile's army was already the most hierarchically disciplined in the region, the legacy of late 18th-century Prussian advisers, and this was skilfully translated into personal devotion to Pinochet. Limitations were placed on the services' own role in day-to-day government, with the brunt of this being left in Pinochet's own hands and those of his circle of advisers. A ruthless secret police watched the regime as much as the opposition.
In the regime a strict ideology reigned, based in personal loyalty to Pinochet, anti-communist dogma of "national security", and the extreme neoliberal economic doctrine imported by a generation of technocrats known as the "Chicago Boys", after the university where some had received their training. Pinochet's own wiliness - his most evident political talent apart from ruthlessness - also came into its own, as he proved adept at nipping factions in the bud and playing them off against each other. In the mid-1980s he would use the same skill with success against the re-emerging opposition.
Especially shocking was the level of repression in a country with a longstanding parliamentary tradition and a hitherto mild record of military involvement in politics by regional standards. Official investigations since 1990 have confirmed over 3000 deaths and disappearances at the hands of Pinochet's security forces. Torture was institutionalised, secret detention centres operated into which detainees disappeared never to be seen again, and murder squads were despatched to kill prominent dissidents abroad.
Meanwhile, in laboratory conditions, with political parties and trade unions banned, the "Chicago Boys" set about radically remaking the heavily state-dependent economy. This was achieved through wholesale privatisation, a complete opening to the international economy, fixing the exchange rate artificially low, and pumping in foreign loans during the petro-dollar glut of the late 1970s. The result was the destruction of national industry and much of agriculture, then near-collapse in the early 1980s amid a frenzy of speculation, consumer imports and debt crisis. The state bailed out most of the country's banking sector and unemployment rose to an official level of over 30 per cent.
Following the debacle, a more moderate group of neoliberals succeded in stabilising the now streamlined macroeconomy. A young and vigorous new breed of capitalists emerged, centred on new exports such as fish, timber and fruit. Reforms such as the privatisation of the pension system became highly influential around the world, growth became steady and Chile became a byword for economic success - though the gap between rich and poor widened to give the country the worst income distribution in the region after Brazil.
In 1980, the shortlived boom that preceded the crash was exploited to help deliver victory in a plebiscite approving a new constitution. This enshrined Pinochet's dream of a "protected democracy', purged for ever of Marxism and other threats to "national security". It set the opening of a limited Congress for 1990, subject to military veto powers and with most of the left permanently banned. A further plebiscite was to follow in 1988 to ratify Pinochet in power for ten more years.
Such hopes were dashed by the economic collapse. In 1983, the first mass prοtests erupted, lead by trade unionists rather than the bickering leaders of the political opposition. A mixture of repression and partial reforms headed off the prοtest movement, but by then the opposition was a visible and growing presence, including a small armed left which, in the shape of the communist-led Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, narrowly missed assassinating the General in September 1986.
Two years later, against all the regime's calculations, Pinochet was defeated by 56 to 43 per cent in the plebiscite to ratify him in power. In December 1989, the Christian Democrat opposition leader, Patricio Aylwin, won the country's first general elections in 19 years. In March 1990, in a ceremony in the new Congress building built by Pinochet in his home town of Valparaiso - 80 miles from the capital, Santiago, and intended to remain well out of mind of the real centres of power - a sombre Pinochet handed the presidential sash over to Aylwin.
Danger signals sounded twice in the ensuing months, as troops were put on alert in prοtest against court citations of officers on human rights charges and a Congressional investigation of the army's purchase of a bankrupt arms company from one of Pinochet's sons. But the sabre-rattling died away, and Pinochet earned grudging tributes from the government for allowing the transition to go ahead relatively smoothly. He seemed to thrive on his refurbished role, blustering about repercussions if any of his men were touched by the courts, but in practice seldom going beyond the plain-man avuncularity and bluffness that so captivated his supporters.
It was in these years that Pinochet discovered a vein of Anglophilia. In 1994 he visited Britain to inspect a missile project being developed jointly between the Chilean army and the Royal Ordnance (RO) arms company. On this and subsequent visits over the following two years, he was warmly welcomed by Foreign Office officials and on occasions was given a Special Branch escort.
He came to feel at ease in Britain, enjoying visits to Harrods, White's Club and Madam Tussaud's, and cultivating a mutually admiring relationship with Baroness Thatcher at various meetings for tea. During the 1982 Falklands War, Pinochet - who had himself almost gone to war with neighbouring Argentina four years before - aided Britain with intelligence and facilities for military planes flying south, so for the Baroness support was a matter of principle.
By this time, a small group of officers had been imprisoned in Chile for human rights abuses, notably Pinochet's first secret police chief, General Manuel Contreras, who was jailed for the murder of Allende's former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, in Washington in 1976 (like Prats, Letelier was blown up by a bomb in his car). In January 1998, proceedings were even opened against Pinochet himself on charges of genocide brought by the Communist Party. He felt safe, however, protected by his past status, parliamentary immunity and the amnesty decree passed by the junta in 1978 to protect themselves against such charges. Even less did he consider the possibility of trouble abroad.
In October 1998, nine months after he stepped down as commander-in-chief to take the lifelong senate seat guaranteed to him in his constitution, healmost over-reached himself. Ignoring both the change of government in Britain and the fact that warrants were out for his arrest in Spain over the disappearance of Spanish citizens after the coup, he came to Britain once again, in part for arms purchases and in part for back surgery at the London Clinic.
British human rights organisations had got wind of his visits before, but were never able to bring legal action before his departure. Now they acted quickly, together with the Spanish judge in charge of the cases in that country, Baltazar Garzón. On October 16, Pinochet was arrested in his room at the London Clinic, off Harley Street, pending extradition proceedings at Judge Garzon's behest.
What happened next passed into the annals of international jurisprudence as the first time a former head of state had faced arrest under international human rights law, principally the Convention Against Torture that came into force in 1987. In a complex series of decisions, the House of Lords ratified that extradition could go ahead, while reducing the grounds to the few cases occurring after the Convention was ratified by the UK in 1988.
In the event, Pinochet was ordered to be sent back to Chile in January 2000 by Home Secretary Jack Straw on compassionate grounds, after confirmation that he was suffering the effects of a series of minor strokes. But, beyond Pinochet's own 16-month detention in two private clinics and an eight-bedroomed house in Virginia Water, Surrey, the internationally vital precedent had been established. Judges in France, Belgium and Switzerland also began extradition requests.
More significantly for Pinochet himself, events in London had stimulated the opening of scores more cases against him at home. His actual return to Santiago in March was one of forced triumphalism by his supporters. Greeted at the city's airport by a military band playing his favourite "Lili Marlene", he hobbled across the tarmac from his wheelchair and waved his walking stick in the air - a gesture interpreted by friends and foes alike as proof that he had fooled the English doctors. But, against the expectations of many, the courts stripped him of his parliamentary immunity and proceedings against him went ahead, in the capable hands of Chile's own answer to Judge Garzón, Judge Juan Guzmán.
Eventually, in July 2001 the Chilean courts adopted the Straw approach, suspending investigation on grounds of "dementia" caused by continuing minor strokes. But by this time, Pinochet's standing was in tatters, as political expediency on the political right and revelations of the brutalities of his regime reduced his admirers to a small hard core. Before long, reforms of parliament abolished his senate seat and a series of court rulings declared him fit to stand trial. In 2006 his last remaining immunity to prosecution, as a former president, was removed to allow him to be charged in a notorious case of the murder of opponents abroad.
By this time, imprisoned military officers, including Contreras, were openly expressing disgust at Pinochet's refusal to accept any responsibility for abuses while his subordinates were being jailed and disgraced. By his death some 300 cases had been filed against him and proceedings were going ahead in three especially infamous cases. For one of these - multiple murders, torture and disappearance in a notorious secret detention centre in Santiago known as Villa Grimaldi - he was placed under house arrest. The most recent trial, begun in October 2006, is for the disappearance of officials of Allende's government from La Moneda palace on the day of the coup.
For many former supporters, however, the final straw was nor murder or torture, but the revelation in 2005 by a US Senate investigation of terrorist financing that in the previous two decades Pinochet had opened and closed at least 128 bank accounts at nine US banks, an apparent money-laundering web through which almost US$ 20 million had been shuffled back and forth. Later investigation revealed other acounts around the world, and by early 2006 the alleged amount of deposits had risen to some US$28m, a fortune apparently still tended by Pinochet himself despite the supposed mental incapacity that had got him off the hook in London.
In Chile, investigations for tax evasion and passport falsification were added to those for murder and torture, and speculation abounded about state funds siphoned off and kickbacks for arms deals. For decades it had been common to hear members of the Chilean elite claim that "Pinochet may have been vicious but at least he was honest," and many had donated money for his defense and living expenses in London. Now, as comparisons with Al Capone, another notorious man of violence finally jailed for tax crimes, became commonplace, they finally turned their backs.
He married María Lucía Hiriart Rodríguez om 1943, and they had two sons - Augusto and Marco Antonio - and three daughters - Lucía, Jacqueline and Veronica. His strong-willed wife, the daughter of a former member of Congress, was always believed to be more of a political animal than her husband. An opinionated First Lady, she was an important influence on him throughout his career and, like him, was loathed or adulated.
• Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, politician and soldier, born November 25, 1915; died December 10 2006. |
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Good old English spirit! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MG27BKwjaI |
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foreverinchina
PopStar
Joined: Nov 21, 2005
Posts: 1249
Location: 徐家汇
Status: Offline
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| Posted:
Dec 12, 2006 - 04:25 PM |
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Jeane Kirkpatrick died last Thursday. As per her doctrine, Pinochet was a lesser evil. Which i agree, certainly if we compare him to Casto or other leftist dictators. |
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To govern a big country is like cooking a small fish.
Stir as little as possible.
- Lao Zi, Daode Jing 256 BC |
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