Word: chiles
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...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 he was not part of a coup but a "civil war." In that sense, Pinochet maintained until his death that he had "saved" Chile...
...wing - will keep it from entering the 21st century as surely as Pinochet and leftist despots like Fidel Castro kept it from entering the 20th. Chileans seemed to indulge the old habits Sunday night as Pinochet backers and haters squared off in the streets. But perhaps the reason that Chile's democratic institutions are still more the exception than the rule in South America today is because its citizens experienced most directly how the utter lack of such a foundation will rot any modern nation. In that sense, both Latin America's conservatives and victorious leftists should use Pinochet...
General Augusto Pinochet picked a symbolically apt moment to die. The former Chilean dictator succumbed Sunday at age 91 after suffering a massive coronary earlier this month while finally awaiting trial for the murders and torture that terrorized Chile in the wake of his 1973, U.S.-backed military coup. His passing comes near the end of a year in which the leftist political forces he worked so violently to expunge have swept back into power in presidential elections all over Latin America - including Chile, where socialist Michele Bachelet now rules. As a result, pundits from Mexico City to Buenos Aires...
...couldn't withstand the level of pent-up outrage at home and abroad. In the most bizarre case, British authorities arrested Pinochet in London in 1998 on an arrest warrant 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...
...near stalemate may be a good thing: For most of the 20th century, Latin America swung between oligarchic capitalism and populist socialism, and neither fixed the continent's tragic gap between rich and poor. A more sensible, European-style mix - a Third Way - was often discussed; but reactionaries like Chile's Augusto Pinochet and communists like Cuba's Fidel Castro gave it no room to breathe. Now, with democracy more entrenched in the region, the two camps have been forced to face the fact that Latin voters prefer fresh ideas to stale ideology - and that they don't want...