Word: coups
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...seat of government, La Moneda. I 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...
...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 he was not part of a coup but a "civil war." In that sense, Pinochet maintained until his death that he had "saved" Chile...
...peaceful, in the violent world of Levantine politics, insinuating that a wartime prime minister collaborated with the enemy is just a few steps away from calling for an assassination. At the very least it complicates any potential for compromise: how can one negotiate with traitors, or for that matter, coup plotters? The accusations of treason are also at odds with how many in Lebanon remember Siniora's behavior during the war: He broke down in tears on television asking the world, and especially the United States, to push Israel for an immediate cease-fire...
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...
...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...