Speaking of Pinochet, Marc Cooper of The Nation, writes,
Pinochet Is Dead. His Legacy Lingers : Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died of complications from a heart attack Sunday at age 91. His death has cheated justice, snatching him from the material world just as he faced the possibility of standing trial for the murder of two bodyguards of his predecessor, President Salvador Allende.
A neatly timed exit, considering the former general was also facing charges on how and why he stashed as much as $17 million in overseas accounts, as well as continuing judicial investigations into numerous human rights atrocities that took place during the bloody and dark period of his rule that stretched from 1973 until 1990. ... Pinochet also embodied a wave of authoritarianism that swept through all of Latin America during the time of his rule. Similar dictatorships imposed their own brand of fear as they clamped down on Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru.Encouraged by the Reagan Administration in Washington and rising Thatcherism in Europe, these military regimes instituted a savage free-market capitalism, in many cases reversing decades of carefully constructed social welfare reforms. At gunpoint unions were outlawed, labor laws were abolished, universities were stifled, tuition was hiked, national healthcare and social security programs were privatized, and these already unequal societies were rigidly stratified into rich and poor, strong and weak, the favored and the invisible.
Pinochet even attempted to build a new Terror International by setting up what became known as Operation Condor. Established in Santiago, the short-lived network aimed at making repression and murder more efficient through increased coordination, information-sharing and joint secret operations among the allied dictatorships. The most prominent victims of this alliance in murder were former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his associate Ronni Moffett, blown apart by a 1976 car bomb in downtown Washington, DC--a bomb set by Pinochet's dreaded secret police, known as DINA.
Even after this barbaric act of terror, even after the world began to learn of Pinochet's other mass crimes, it was jarring to see how much the American press still pandered to him as the man who was bringing economic revival to Chile. No matter that his “shock therapy” nostrums prescribed by the recently deceased Milton Friedman pushed Chile to the brink of bankruptcy and that the first public rebellions against the regime in 1983 were motivated as much by hunger as political rage.
Before Chris Snitchens went off his meds, he wrote about Kissinger and Pinochet:
“The Trial of Henry Kissinger” (Christopher Hitchens)
I have the movie in my Netflix queue, I'll probably get to view it sometime next year.
“The Trials of Henry Kissinger” (Eugene Jarecki)
No wonder the U.S. and Ambassador Bolton lobbied against the International Criminal Court - too many potential charges could be brought against U.S. officials. Not to mention the UN Human Rights Council.
How shameful that the U.S. government wants to be mentioned in the same paragraph as Pinochet.
Technorati Tags: civil_liberties, Chile
