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SET 3. AUGUSTO PINOCHET’S DEATH





Article 1. NEWS REPORT (Quality Newspaper)

AUGUSTO PINOCHET, DICTATOR

WHO RULED BY TERROR IN CHILE, DIES AT 91

By Jonathan Kandell

Published: December 11, 2006 New York Times

 

Gen. 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 yesterday at the Military Hospital of Santiago. He was 91.

Dr. Juan Ignacio Vergara, head of the medical team that had been treating him, said he died at 2:15 p.m., a week after being hospitalized and undergoing angioplasty and another operation after an acute heart attack. Dr. Vergara said his condition degenerated sharply yesterday morning, and he was moved to the intensive care unit, where he died.

General 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.

General Pinochet gave up the presidency in 1990 after promulgating a Constitution that empowered a right-wing minority for years. 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, General 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 lived in near seclusion, mostly at his home in Bucalemu, about 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 Jose Zalaquett, Chile’s foremost human rights lawyer.

He 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 unjust and is undergoing revision. And across Latin America, many of the countries that had adopted similar reforms are reversing some of them, responding to a growing wave of popular, leftist anger over untrammeled foreign competition and unequal distribution of wealth.

Article 2. NEWS REPORT (Tabloid Newspaper)

CHILE'S PINOCHET DIES

By Online Reporter,The Sun

December 10, 2006

 

CHILE'S former dictator Augusto Pinochet has died at the age of 91, a week after suffering a heart attack and undergoing bypass surgery.

Military doctor Juan Ignacio Vergara told reporters outside the hospital in the capital of Santiago: "He died surrounded by his family.''

Pinochet ruled the South American country from 1973 to 1990 after grabbing power from Marxist President Salvador Allende.

He then spent his later years fighting human rights, fraud and corruption charges but efforts to bring him to trial in Chile failed as lawyers argued that he was too ill.

Under Pinochet's regime, more than 3,000 people died in political violence, while tens of thousands were tortured.

On November 25 – his 91st birthday – Pinochet issued a statement accepting ''political responsibility'' for acts committed during his rule but said his only motive was to make Chile ''a great place and prevent its disintegration.''

 

Article 3. LETTER TO THE EDITOR

CHILE AFTER PINOCHET

Published: December 16, 2006 New York Times

Re ''The Half-Life of a Despot,'' by Ariel Dorfman (Op-Ed, Dec. 12):

 

While it may be impossible for survivors of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s regime to exorcise him from memory, the battle for Chile’s soul is not lost.

General Pinochet’s arrest in London almost a decade ago showed that the victims who had been struggling for years to bring him to justice had international support. It opened a door in Chile that many thought was closed forever, and thus delegitimized General Pinochet’s version of the truth and set off a reversal of policies that once made impunity the law of the land.

Today, dozens of former military personnel – responsible for tens of thousands of cases of torture, ill treatment, disappearances, killings and forced exile – continue to live at large, in Chile and abroad. Chile’s government and judiciary have clear choices: they can bring these perpetrators to justice or allow justice delayed to become justice denied.

Larry Cox

Executive Director

Amnesty International USA

New York, Dec. 14, 2006

Article 4. EDITORIAL

DICTATORS RIGHT AND LEFT

December 11, 2006 (Los Angeles Times)

 

IT'S A COINCIDENCE that Jeane Kirkpatrick, the astringent U.S. envoy to the United Nations in the 1980s, and former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died only a few days apart. But in death as in life, the two are associated with a political theory that defined the early days of the neoconservative movement in the United States. Unfortunately for Kirkpatrick, its author, the theory proved to be dead wrong.

The idea was that right-wing authoritarian governments were much better bets for conversion to democracy than left-wing totalitarian ones. This is how Kirkpatrick put it in "Dictatorships and Double Standards," the influential 1979 essay in Commentary magazine that brought her to the attention of Ronald Reagan.

"Although there is no instance of a revolutionary socialist or communist society being democratized, right-wing autocracies do sometimes evolve into democracies – given time, propitious economic, social and political circumstances, talented leaders and a strong indigenous demand for representative government." Kirkpatrick's article, which focused on the Carter administration's policy toward Iran under the shah and Nicaragua under Anastasio Somoza, made some valid points about the differences between Marxist and traditional authoritarian societies. But the article – and Kirkpatrick – are remembered most for the suggestion that dictatorships of the right (especially those friendly to the United States) offered more fertile ground for democratization than dictatorships of the left.

Chile, where the murderous Pinochet eventually relinquished much of his power after a 1988 referendum, seemed to vindicate the Kirkpatrick doctrine. But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of more democratic governments not only in the formerly captive states of Hungary and Czechoslovakia but also in Russia. And as China has shown, spectacularly, Marxist states can turn capitalist in a hurry, though political freedoms may still lag.

Like other reductionist theories, the Kirkpatrick doctrine ran up against the wisdom of H.L. Mencken's observation that "for every problem, there is a solution that is simple, clean and wrong."

 

Article 5. OP-ED

SPITTING ON THE DEAD DICTATOR

By Ariel Dorfman, Ariel Dorfman is the author

of "Exorcising Terror" and "Burning City." December 17, 2006 Los Angeles Times

 

WHEN GEN. Augusto Pinochet breathed his last on Dec. 10, this much seemed clear to everybody in Chile: The man who had lived his whole life and never paid for even one of his crimes had done it again. Once more – one final time – everybody in Chile thought that Pinochet had escaped judgment. Everybody, that is, except for a young man named Francisco Cuadrado Prats, who decided that some sort of punishment, no matter how symbolic, was merited. So he walked up to Pinochet's coffin and deliberately, calmly spat on the dictator's face as he lay there in full regalia.

The story of that young man is also, of course, the story of Chile. Though it culminates at Pinochet's funeral, it started 33 years ago, in late August 1973, when the grandfather of the young man, Gen. Carlos Prats, was commander in chief of the Chilean army. Feeling he could no longer stop the impending military coup against President Salvador Allende, Prats resigned his post and recommended that his replacement be the most loyal of his generals, a man he had befriended and protected his whole life – Augusto Pinochet.

I was working at the presidential palace and can remember how glad, almost giddy, we were when Allende followed Prats' advice. At a farewell gathering honoring Prats, the name Pinochet was on all our lips. He was someone we could trust, someone who would save democracy and avoid the violence descending upon us. Among those present at the party were Allende's last two ministers of defense, Jose Toha and Orlando Letelier. They relied on their "friend" Augusto, "good old Pinochet," to rescue the republic from disaster.

One week later, Sept. 11, 1973, Allende was dead, Toha and Letelier were prisoners of a military junta and Prats had been banished to Argentina. Good old Pinochet had betrayed his president, his friends and his country.

But that was not enough. The new ruler had to be rid of the men who had believed in him, who had seen him obsequiously swearing allegiance to the president, who had witnessed his duplicity. Toha was murdered in a Chilean dungeon a few months after the coup. Letelier was assassinated in Washington in 1976. As to Carlos Prats, he and his wife were blown up on a Buenos Aires street on Sept. 30, 1974, by agents of Pinochet's secret police.

Francisco Cuadrado Prats was 6 when he heard the news that his grandparents had been killed. In the years that followed, many more Chileans would disappear, be tortured or murdered by the man who had been his grandfather's best friend.

But not all was despair. The grandson would also watch and participate in the Chileans' movement to defeat the dictator and recover their lost democracy. By 1990, Pinochet no longer ruled the country. But for the next eight years, he thwarted the emergence of a full democracy by using various authoritarian features of the system and his role as commander in chief of the army. He threatened rebellion at whim, publicly warning Chile's elected leaders, for instance, that if they dared touch, let alone prosecute, one of the men under his command, he would rise up again. There appeared to be virtually no chance that justice would be done.

Then, almost miraculously, Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 after Spanish authorities charged him with murder, torture, illegal detention and disappearances. He escaped extradition to Spain by feigning dementia, but upon his return to Chile, he found that the country had changed. Some of the fear he had inspired was gone. The judiciary and politicians, shamed before the world by the charges issued in Spain, were ready to indict him for all manner of human rights violations. Among the cases was the murder of Carlos Prats and his wife, Sophia.

But Pinochet's lawyers, often with the connivance of sluggish judges and a wary political class, successfully delayed the numerous proceedings against the dictator, and he never was convicted of anything. (Chilean judges denied on a technicality an Argentine magistrate's demand that the general be extradited for trial in Prats' murder.)

Then, just when death seemed to protect Pinochet from punishment, insult was added to injury when the former dictator was rewarded with funeral rites he didn't deserve. Although President Michelle Bachelet (herself a torture victim whose father died of maltreatment in Pinochet's prisons) refused to give the dead dictator a state funeral, she could not stop the army from burying him with full honors.

It was too much for Prats' grandson.

Let me confess that spitting on a dead man – even if he is responsible for the deaths of so many of my friends, the devastation of my life and the agony of my country – makes me feel queasy and uncomfortable. There is something sacred about the dead, about their sad vulnerability, about the rules and protocols that we need to honor when a life, no matter how miserable, has ended.

Yet, who can blame Francisco Cuadrado Prats? His was the tiniest of revolts, barely two or three seconds long (after which he was beaten and kicked by rabid Pinochet supporters before being rescued by a group of military policemen), but it spoke for his murdered grandparents and for all the mutilated and missing bodies of his land. It expressed what millions of Chileans had long dreamed of doing and what only one of us finally dared to do.

I wish this were the end of the story.

But there is a bizarre epilogue. Pinochet also has a grandson, an officer in the Chilean army. He also wanted to vindicate his grandfather's honor, also felt that justice had not been done. In an unscheduled appearance at the funeral, Capt. Augusto Pinochet Molina, flouting all military regulations, stood up and delivered an impassioned defense of the dictator's life and work, denouncing all who had persecuted him. The next day, he was expelled from the army.

Yet his was the most applauded speech at the funeral. This grandson of Pinochet expressed what many followers of the dead general, inside and outside the armed forces, feel but do not dare articulate: that Pinochet is the greatest man in the history of Chile and one of the towering figures of the 20th century, a man who saved his country from communism and opened it up to free-market economics. The suffering, the presumed suffering, of a few does not matter because it was the birth pang of a new world.

There is the true story of Chile, told by two grandsons of generals. For reconciliation to occur in Chile, the grandson of Carlos Prats would have to forget the death of his grandfather, renounce all desire for justice, betray the deepest sources of his wounded identity. Or the grandson of Augusto Pinochet would have to accept that his grandfather was a murderer and ask forgiveness for the dead man's actions.

Neither of these grandsons will ever be able to do this. Francisco will not take back the moment when he spat on the body of his grandfather's enemy. Augusto will not take back the moment when he spoke out as the victor of history, spoke out in the name of his family.

And the heartbreaking story of Chile is that there was a time many years ago – so remote it almost seems mythical – when their grandfathers dreamed that these boys might visit each other and play with each other and might have been, perhaps, who knows, the best of friends.

 

 

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