 |
|
|
 News from Around the Americas | December 2006 
Augusto Pinochet, Chilean Dictator, Dies at 91
 Jonathan Kandell - Herald Tribune
| | Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, in 1996. (Cris Bouroncle/AFP) |
General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption, died Sunday at the Military Hospital of Santiago. He was 91.
His death, which was announced by Juan Ignacio Vergara, head of the medical team that had been treating him, came a week after he underwent an angioplasty after an acute heart attack.
Pinochet seized power on Sept. 11, 1973, in a bloody military coup that toppled the Marxist government of President Salvador Allende. He then led the country into an era of robust economic growth. But during his rule, more than 3,200 people were executed or disappeared and scores of thousands more were detained and tortured or exiled.
Pinochet gave up the presidency in 1990 after promulgating a Constitution that empowered a rightist minority in the Senate well into the new century. He held on to his post of commander in chief of the army until 1998. With that power base, he exerted considerable influence over the democratically elected governments that replaced his iron- fisted rule.
He set limits, for example, on economic policy debates with frequent warnings that he would not tolerate a return to statist measures, and he blocked virtually all attempts to prosecute members of his security forces for human rights abuses. Through intimidation and legal obstacles, Pinochet sought to ensure his own immunity from accountability and in fact was never brought to trial.
But in an astonishing turn of events nearly a decade after he stepped down, he was detained in Britain and then, on his return to Chile, forced to spend his retirement years fighting a battery of legal charges relating to human rights violations and personal corruption.
During those last years, he spent most of his time in near seclusion at his home in Bucalemu, about 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, southwest of Santiago, scorned even by many of his former military colleagues and conservative civilian ideologues. Many were disillusioned by revelations that he held, at the least, $28 million in secret bank accounts abroad.
"The humiliation Pinochet has gone through is probably a better outcome than any trial could have achieved," said José Zalaquett, Chile's foremost human rights lawyer.
Pinochet won grudging international praise for some of the free-market policies he instituted, transforming a bankrupt economy into the most prosperous in Latin America. They included removing trade barriers, encouraging export growth, privatizing state-owned industries, creating a central bank able to control interest and exchange rates without government interference, cutting wages sharply, and privatizing the social security system. Many elements of the so-called Chilean model were widely emulated in the region.
But by the time of his death, even some of those economic victories had been called into question. The privatizing of Chile's social security system, in particular, has come under attack as being unjust and is undergoing revision. And across Latin America, many of the countries that had adopted similar changes are reversing some of them, responding to a growing wave of popular revolt over foreign competition and unequal distribution of wealth.
Pinochet initially led a four-man junta in the 1973 military revolt that brought him to power. Allende, a democratically elected Socialist, was found dead after shooting himself, apparently a suicide, during an assault on the presidential palace in Santiago. The coup followed many months of political unrest and economic chaos. Hyperinflation, recession, labor strife and middle-class protests had all sapped the Allende government of popular support.
Pinochet soon made it clear that he had little use for political parties. He banned them, dissolved Congress and scrapped the Constitution. He blamed the democratic political system for allowing a coalition of Socialists and Communists to take control of the government.
He asserted at a 1973 news conference that Chile would require "an authoritarian government that has the capacity to act decisively," and would not return to the traditional political party system for a generation. It was a vow he kept.
In 1974, Pinochet elevated himself to president, reducing the rest of the junta to a consultative role. He appointed military officers as mayors of towns and cities throughout Chile. Retired military personnel were named rectors of universities and they carried out vast purges of faculty members suspected of leftist or liberal sympathies.
The press was censored and labor strikes and unions were banned. A fearsome security apparatus known as the National Intelligence Directorate, or DINA, persecuted, tortured and killed Pinochet opponents within Chile and sometimes beyond its borders. A government-commissioned report issued in 2004 concluded that almost 28,000 people had been tortured during the general's reign.
Military regimes were the rule rather than the exception in Latin America in the 1970s. Whether right wing, as in Argentina and Brazil, or left wing, as in Peru, military dictators came to power promising to impose economic discipline but departed, after some initial success, with economies in disarray.
Pinochet proved to be the exception. Though no economic expert, he had at his service a team of technocrats who, months before the coup, put together a radical plan to overhaul the country's battered economy. Some had studied with the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago and embraced his notions of free-market forces and monetarism.
But economic transformation was slow and painful. Mistakes by the general's economic team provoked a deep recession in the early 1980s that left more than a third of the work force without jobs. The poor survived with the help of soup lines and temporary employment in public works projects that paid less than the minimum wage.
Attempts at strikes or other forms of protest were ruthlessly put down by Pinochet's secret police. That repression gave the free-market policies time to take hold. Since the mid-1980s, Chile's gross domestic product has grown an average of more than 6 percent a year, the most impressive performance in Latin America.
There were few hints in Pinochet's early life that he harbored either political ambitions or ideological convictions. The son of a customs inspector, he was born into lower middle-class circumstances on Nov. 25, 1915, in the Pacific port city of Valparaíso. He graduated from the military academy in Santiago in 1937 and rose steadily in the officer corps. He was already a general, and only 55, when he was given the important post of commander of the Santiago army garrison in 1971.
It was a crucial moment in Allende's term. Elected the year before with only 36 percent of the vote, Allende, a physician, had pressed ahead with a socialist program to nationalize mines, banks and strategic industries, split up large rural estates into communal farms and impose price controls. The measures soon resulted in steep declines in production, shortages of consumer goods and explosive inflation. A general strike paralyzed Santiago in late 1972, and Pinochet, as garrison commander, was called on by Allende to impose a state of emergency in the capital.
It was the first time most Chileans became aware of the tall army officer with a brush mustache on his unsmiling face. Pinochet imposed a curfew, ordered the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators on both the left and the right, and declared, "I will not tolerate agents of chaos, no matter what their political ideology."
His seemingly neutral stance convinced Allende that he was an officer who could be relied on to observe the Chilean military's century-long tradition of loyalty to civilian government. In August 1973, he appointed Pinochet commander in chief of the army.
Less than three weeks later, the armed forces overthrew the government. The presidential palace, known as La Moneda, was bombed and strafed by the air force. Allende shot himself rather than surrender. Aside from battles at some factories in the Santiago suburbs, there was little resistance to the overwhelming firepower of the military units that fanned out across the country. Tens of thousands of Allende sympathizers were rounded up and brutally interrogated.
In most cases, prisoners from a slum or agrarian community would be executed to terrorize their neighborhoods into accepting military rule. The killings were often cynically, and falsely, justified as cases in which prisoners were shot while trying to escape.
The images that most shaped the outside world's low opinion of the military regime were scenes of Santiago's main sports stadium filled with prisoners, and by the public appearances of Pinochet, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his face set in a scowl, his arms folded defiantly across his chest. Although a majority of executions, jailings and cases of torture took place shortly after the 1973 coup, serious human rights abuses waxed and waned over the next 17 years. |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us