Word: chileanizing
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...returned home to TV coverage of tear gas and water-shooting tanks. The cops had been called out to protect La Moneda, the target of Pinochet’s bombs in 1973 and a Molotov cocktail on the anniversary of his coup last September. But despite descriptions in the Chilean media of the demonstrations as "massive," in a city of approximately six million people, TV stations estimated that less than 1,000 had gathered at La Moneda. The idea that a crowd smaller than an undergraduate class at Harvard could have posed a serious threat to anything was ridiculous...
Such a focus poses a threat to Chilean stability and democracy in the long run. Though it might be tempting to think of Pinochet’s death as symbolizing the end of an era for military dictatorships in Latin America (after all, Castro is on his way out, too), the region has yet to wrestle with its past. Only after doing so will it be able to bury its dictators for good...
...Pinochet's supporters, who still make up about half of Chilean society, insist the moustached dictator was himself a product of Latin America's other notorious extreme: intolerant leftism. Their point is at least half valid. Salvador Allende, the left-wing Chilean President whom the military ousted and probably killed, hardly shared Pinochet's bloodlust; but his government had indeed run Marxist-amuck by 1973. The economy was in state-run free fall and radical but influential leftist groups were calling for (if not already trying to carry out) an armed shift to Cuba-style communism. Pinochet always asserted that...
...responsible for the deaths or disappearances of more than 3,000 suspected communists and other leftists - "disappeared," in fact, became a noun during his reign - while thousands more were tortured or forced into exile (including Bachelet's family). Even banishment wasn't safe: in 1976, Pinochet henchmen assassinated former Chilean ambassador and Pinochet opponent Orlando Letelier by planting a bomb under his car in Washington, D.C. That same year, Pinochet's successes helped inspire the right-wing military coup that led to the even bloodier Dirty War in neighboring Argentina...
...issued from Spain - where prosecutors wanted to try him for allegedly ordering the execution of leftist Spaniards living in Chile in the 1970s. He was eventually released back to Chile, but he spent his last years in a virtual prison of legal assaults and deteriorating health. In October a Chilean judge ordered Pinochet under house arrest on charges related to human rights atrocities at Villa Grimaldi, a detention center outside Santiago run by Pinochet's vicious secret police...