Pinochet dies

[PopHistorian]

(http:/)/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6167237.stm

So, it's a good time to remember that this Chilean military dictator who spat upon "human rights" as an "invention of the Marxists," tortured, "disappeared," and outright killed thousands of political opponents, was placed into power by the CIA, who saw to the overthrow of the democratically elected (leftist) government that was then in place in Chile, allegedly masterminded by Henry Kissinger, who also played a role in fomenting other ostensibly "foreign" events that resulted in the slaughter of millions of people.

That reminds me, as Kissinger continues to make his roughly monthly visits to the White House, Bush is thinking about giving the Medal of Freedom to Don Rumsfeld. Let's see, we send our hired killers into a country that didn't and couldn't have threatened the U.S., we destroy its infrastructure and butcher the better part of a million of its people with no rationale given that has ever been show to be true. Yeah, I'd say that he and the other architects of this bloodbath are right up there in Kissinger's league.

 

[aurora]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/06/americas_general_augusto_pinochet/html/1.stm

Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was born in the port city of Valparaiso in 1915, one of six children of a customs officer. He entered military school at 18, apparently encouraged by his mother, and over the following decades rose gradually through the ranks.
In 1973, he was made commander-in-chief by President Salvador Allende (right), a Marxist elected three years earlier on a programme of radical social change. He was one of few high-ranking officers President Allende thought he could trust.
Coup
President Allende's trust in Gen Pinochet proved misplaced. On 11 September 1973, less than three weeks after being made commander-in-chief, Gen Pinochet played a leading role in a CIA-sponsored coup.
The attack, led by the armed forces, culminated in the bombing of the presidential palace. President Allende, inside at the time, died - believed shot by his own hand.
TV address
Three days later, Gen Pinochet addressed the nation on television. Although he quickly gained notoriety as the leader of the coup internationally, it took some months for him to emerge as leader at home - and initially, he even appeared conciliatory.
But his grip on power quickly hardened. By mid-1974, he was declared Supreme Head of the Nation, and by December, president.
Crackdown
His approach to his opponents also hardened. Within weeks of the coup, Manuel Contreras - a personal friend - had set up the ferocious Dina secret police. The parliament was shut down and trade unions banned.
Chile also co-operated with several other South American dictatorships in Operation Condor - a pact to hunt down and kill left-wing opponents. But Gen Pinochet - pictured here in 1975 with Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer - later denied any knowledge of the pact.
Disappearances
Repression of opponents of the Pinochet regime peaked in the early years, though it remained a tool of the government throughout its tenure, particularly at times when economic depression prompted protests.
A 1996 report blamed the regime for more than 3,000 confirmed deaths and disappearances, and later another report documented claims of torture by nearly 30,000 people. Mass graves continue to be found. Here, years later, a woman kisses the recently identified skull of her brother.
Economic policy
From about 1975 on, Gen Pinochet came under the influence of the "Chicago Boys", a group of free-market economists. Under their guidance, government spending was slashed, state services privatised and restrictions on foreign direct investment lifted.
Gen Pinochet's supporters say he created long-lasting prosperity in Chile; detractors say his legacy was a boom-and-bust economy. One admirer of such techniques was the UK prime minister from 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher (pictured in 1999).
Shock defeat
In 1980, Gen Pinochet held a controversial plebiscite to approve a new constitution banning left-wing parties from politics, increasing presidential powers, and granting him at least a further eight years in office.
An economic slump followed, prompting a wave of protests and strikes which were suppressed. In 1986, Gen Pinochet survived an assassination attempt. And in 1988, voters inflicted a shock defeat on him in another referendum intended to grant him a further eight years in office.
Past kept covered
The following year, Gen Pinochet lost the country's first democratic poll for nearly two decades. But he retained the title of commander-in-chief of the armed forces - a position that shielded him from prosecution and which he used to stifle moves to investigate human rights abuses during his rule.
He relinquished this post in 1998, only to take up a parliamentary seat as a senator-for-life, another position he had created for himself - again immune from prosecution.
Arrest in London
In October 1998, Gen Pinochet travelled to London for back surgery, but while convalescing was arrested after Spain requested his extradition on torture charges. His arrest prompted vocal demonstrations by both supporters and opponents.
A long legal battle ensued, but in March 2000 the case against him was dropped on health grounds, after he suffered two minor strokes.
Staunch defence
But efforts to indict Gen Pinochet quickly began back in Chile. During ensuing court battles over his fitness to stand trial, Gen Pinochet insisted he was innocent, acting to "save" his country from communism and looming civil war.
His family were among his staunchest supporters, including his wife of more than 60 years, Lucia Hiriart (right).
Health declines
Attempts to try Gen Pinochet for human rights abuses appeared to have failed in 2001, when a court ruled he was too unwell, but in 2004 another series of cases against him began.
In March 2005, reports of millions of dollars hidden in bank accounts triggered new court cases.
But as the allegations swirled, Gen Pinochet grew frailer.
In December 2006, after suffering a heart attack, he died aged 91.

 

[Mr. Premise]

I take it as a good sign that Pinochet died before Castro. Throw the vile Jeanne Kirkpatrick into the mix and even a better sign.

 

[name]

good riddance.

some of my memories from the junta time:

- i used lived in a small town (google maps http://tinyurl.com/y3gzuk) at the time of 11th september. there is a bridge over the river coming from the lake. we used to cross that river on bike, or go to a boat mooring place nearby to go fishing early in the morning. after 11 september we were not allowed to pass the bridge for some weeks. supposedly it was splattered full of blood from people they had executed there and thrown in the river.

- occasionally our class in school was 'graced' with marching before authorities on sunday at town square. this usually meant standing in formation for hours until it was our turn to march before the podium, our 15 minutes of fame so to say. once, one of the guys from the junta came to visit - i think it was merino. he was obviously drunk. the other people on the podium did their best to discreetly hold him upright, what amused everybody. he held a speech which nobody really understood but which sure did something to make these people more sympathetic.

- the only year i went to a public school, i had a classmate, rosselot, who lived near us. we had our first drinks and smokes together. his parents were very nice people. once his father started telling us what they had done to him while he was 'interned' somewhere in the north somewhere in the desert, in a place surrounded by landmines. he had been town council member for the socialists.

- i am from a privileged family, and went to a big nice school (google maps http://tinyurl.com/y5cmqm) during secondary. neither me nor anybody else from school knew what was really to be /poor/. there were some people in school who got scholarship b/c their parents couldn't afford the $300/month tuition, they were considered 'poor'. during our last year, my class had to take patronage for a school of poor people. we gave some money and collected food and clothing to send them. i didn't understand what difference our pocket money could make, then we went to visit them. they invited us to eat. the kids didn't have normal food, we ate bread with reconstituted powdered dried eggs. i went to take a walk. i noticed that there were some people living below the bridge nearby. when i asked, they told me that some of the kids from the school lived there with their families. in the following google map, the school of the poor kids is the house with two white roofs (one shorter) in the middle, left of the car bridge - http://tinyurl.com/y39sxf

- some of the people from my school went to the military or police officer academy. military service (2 years) was looked askance at b/c it was something only those who had'nt the contacts did, or their parents wanted to punish them for generally being a*holes. i'd sometimes meet some of these people at parties, and they'd tell us about their adventures. they had 'excercises'. these consisted in going to some slum at 3AM, surrounding as many blocks as they could given manpower, ordering everybody to the street over loudspeakers and then searching the houses. if they found anything 'suspicious' they'd detain and/or beat up the people of that house.

- i attended business school in santiago after secondary, and did practice at a big retail business (http://tinyurl.com/y3lxkb). since i had the (social and ethnic) background i have and generally got along quite well with most people, i was soon hit on by the security chief of the place, a retired air force colonel who most people feared. he wanted me to snitch on people he suspected (and i knew) were trying to organize themselves b/c of the awful work conditions and salaries - this would have meant dismissal and possibly jail time for these people. the colonel tried to ingraciate himself with me telling me about his adventures: after AF academy he got a job (assignement) which involved going to the US couple of times a year. he'd fly north packing drugs, then he'd fly back home with new airplanes (cessna bimotors IIRC) which he'd sell, and cash. he told me that he made refueling and service stopovers mostly at (US) military bases along the way, what he could do b/c he was 'on mission'. those are the 'fringe benefits' which go with some jobs in govt.

 

[on_strike_usaexpat]

Thought I'd submit another line of thought from a SotT news page frequent referenced commentator.

FLASHBACK

http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=6254

June 8, 2005

If Pinochet Is Guilty, so Is Bush
by Paul Craig Roberts

General Augusto Pinochet, approaching his 90th year, has survived many years of legal harassments resulting from alleged human rights violations during the period of the Chilean military government's war on terrorism. On the basis of a U.S. Senate staff report, Pinochet is now going to be investigated for stashing $13 million in U.S. banks.

What is interesting about the Pinochet case is that everything the former president of Chile is accused of, George W. Bush and his cronies are guilty of. Indeed, why are Senate staff wasting their time on 30-year-old alleged crimes of an elderly Chilean when the president of the United States ought to be in the dock? The prosecutor's brief - the Downing Street Memo - is already written.

In December 2004, a Chilean appeals court ruled that Pinochet could be put on trial for murders resulting from Operation Condor. An agreement by six South American governments in the 1970s, Condor was a "coalition of the willing" organized to hunt down and kill the terrorists who were attempting to destabilize their societies.

How does Operation Condor differ from the actions of the U.S. and Israeli governments to hunt down and kill terrorists? Both George Bush and Ariel Sharon have used precision missiles, snipers, and special forces hit teams to "take out" suspected terrorists, often with collateral damage. Why can Bush and Sharon conduct a war on terror, but not Pinochet?

Given what we know about the "collateral damage" that often accompanies the "taking out" of terrorists and about the large number of innocent detainees mistaken for terrorists and held in America's gulag of detention centers, it is more than likely that Pinochet's war on terror had collateral damage of its own. However, there is no question whatsoever that

Chilean terrorists committed bombings, assassinations, robberies, and other crimes. The Chilean press of the time was full of reports of such acts of terrorism.

Unlike the U.S., Chile faced many and continuous acts of domestic terrorism, including a professionally planned ambush of Pinochet himself. Pinochet did not create the terrorism by invading another country on false pretenses or by supporting an ally's genocidal ethnic policies.

Uninformed people believe that terrorism was a response to Pinochet's ousting of Allende. Few Americans are aware that the Chilean parliament denounced Allende for abrogating the Chilean constitution. Allende made it clear that both he and the armed revolutionaries he unleashed represented a threat to Chilean democracy.

Pinochet was called to power. He put down terrorism. He assembled scholars and members of the opposition to devise a new constitution. When the task was done, Pinochet submitted to elections and handed over power to a civilian government.

I spent several years researching the story. My coauthor, who had lived in Chile during the Pinochet years, spent two years in Chile during the 1990s locating and interviewing many former terrorists. She interviewed the generals and Pinochet himself on many occasions. She gained access to military files. She interviewed the "Chicago Boys" who ran the offices of the military government and rebuilt the economy that Allende had shattered. She read the newspaper files from the time.

I myself interviewed Pinochet and a former terrorist who had once been on the most wanted list.

The terrorist had been, in effect, pardoned by Pinochet, and at the time I interviewed him was head of the private telephone company, with an expansive office looking out onto the Andes.

The former terrorist told me that he had been mistaken, that his side did not have the support of the people. He maintained that he was motivated by humane sympathy for the downtrodden. He recognized that by resorting to violence he had fallen victim to the belief that the end justified the means.

The result of our inquiry is a book, Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, published in Spanish by a university in Chile.

Pinochet was successfully demonized. What we have to learn about propaganda is that every side has it. Truth everywhere takes a beating.

People get emotionally caught up with "their side," like fans of a sports team and like so many of my conservative acquaintances, who reject out of hand any information, no matter how factual, that does not uphold their belief that Bush is a great leader who is standing up for America against Islamic fanatics who wish to kill us all in our beds.

There are some things about which some people are incapable of rational thought.

For the left wing, Pinochet is one of those things.

But my purpose is not to defend Pinochet. It is simply to note that if he stole $13 million, it does not represent one day's takings from the fraud in Iraq. And if it is an indictable offense for a head of state to pursue terrorists, then Bush and Blair and the "coalition of the willing" are all indictable.

To apply law selectively is not law. It is vengeance.

The terrorists to whom Pinochet turned his attention were real. The weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda that Bush used to justify a war of aggression against Iraq were not.