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 91^st 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