Word: pinochets
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...departure from my semester abroad in Chile, Augusto Pinochet, the country’s ex-dictator, died. My host sister called it the best farewell the country could have given...
Pinochet’s death made the air electric, gave every stranger something to talk about. For the next four hours, a crowd assembled spontaneously in the blazing sun, hugging, waving flags, and jumping ("el que no salta es Pinochet") to the chants of "se siente, se siente, Allende está presente." Half a metro line uptown, nearly as many people were in mourning for their "friend" and "father," the ex-general...
...week the world mourns the death of one of the twentieth century’s most notorious leaders—General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. Pinochet rose to power in 1973 via a violent coup d’état and his tenure would eventually witness the deaths of over 3000 of his political enemies. He overthrew a democratically elected government, only to institute a ruthless totalitarian regime bathed in blood. He was a criminal, murderer, and thief—or so the headlines ubiquitous in the mainstream media would have us believe. Pinochet, however, is a man misunderstood...
...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...
...Along with the iron fist, Pinochet epitomized another specter that still haunts Latin America: a dogmatic mind. If it continues, the region's addiction to ideological governance - the chronic oscillation between right-wing and left-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...