Word: pinochets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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 the U.S. to either invade...
...only he did it with a masterly, genius-level grasp of mathematics, history and statistics. He proved, inasmuch as it can be proved, that free markets would not impoverish the poor but enrich them, would not ride roughshod over the downtrodden but would empower them. His work with the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile was widely reviled, but Chile is now the free-market powerhouse of the Andes and a democracy. These principles paid off for whole populations in South America, in Russia and in Asia. He was the mentor to Ronald Reagan, to Bush 41, even to Nixon...
...officials have long feared that legal proceedings against "war criminals" could be used to settle political scores. In 1998, for example, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet - whose military coup was supported by the Nixon administration - was arrested in the U.K. and held for 16 months in an extradition battle led by a Spanish magistrate seeking to charge him with war crimes. He was ultimately released and returned to Chile. More recently, a Belgian court tried to bring charges against then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for alleged crimes against Palestinians...
...liberals counter that the social changes being challenged from the right are products not of any government agenda, but simply of the increased personal freedom brought to Chile by economic growth and globalization. Eugenio Tironi, an influential sociologist, sees it, perhaps ironically, as the outcome of Pinochet's own economic liberalization policies. As prosperity grew, the society first rid itself of the General's authoritarian rule, and then began to tackle some of the conservative shackles on personal freedom. Chilean society itself had become more liberal, he says. "What conservative society would dare elect as president a woman, a leftist...