Word: pinochets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...reaction of Chile's military commanders to the indictment of their erstwhile chief may well have sent a shiver of fear through the hearts of many Chileans. The the generals signaled they were deeply unhappy. Navy chief Admiral Patricio Arancibia warned that Pinochet's indictment had brought tensions in Chile "to a critical point," while armed forces commander General Ricardo Izurieta demanded a meeting with the president to convey the military's discontent. General Izurieta, too, warned that the ruling harmed "the climate of tranquility" in Chile, although as it turned out, only a couple of hundred people turned...
General Augusto Pinochet is not a particularly scary man, now that he's out of uniform. He appears in public these days as a rather feeble octogenarian sporting soft colors, smiling affably, his eyes vaguely anxious and his demeanor almost eager to please. These days, the ruthless dictator of yore inspires more pity than terror, particularly now that the veneer of international respectability of his 17-year reign of terror has been stripped away...
...Pinochet had once been able to convince himself that every skull crushed and every tortured body tossed into the ocean by his armed forces was part of the price of defending democracy and Western civilization in Chile against communism, but no longer. After all, it was the support of the United States and Britain that had helped him sustain that illusion, but these days he's the subject of criminal investigations not only in his home country, but also in the U.S. and much of Europe...
...Last week, for the first time, a Chilean judge cut through the veil of fear Pinochet had draped over his country and charged the general with kidnapping. These charges, of course, are only a handful of the more than 100 criminal complaints against Pinochet pending in the Chilean legal system. But they'll do: The case concerns the notorious "caravan of death" in 1973, when a group of senior military officers murdered some 73 political prisoners in the weeks that followed Pinochet's military coup...
...What had held Chileans back until last week from prosecuting General Pinochet was not doubts over the strength of the case against him; it was fear of the consequences. Before he stepped down in 1990, the general, who ruled at gunpoint from October 1973, had authored an immunity decree for himself to avoid just such an eventuality, and it was only 10 years later that Chile's supreme court found the gumption to strike down this pseudo-legal impunity. The reasons for their caution are plain to see: Many Chileans feared that the generals who'd voluntarily allowed the restoration...