Word: pinochets
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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...
...abuses of Pinochet - who also died, ironically, on the United Nations' International Human Rights Day - were certainly some of the most brutal South America has ever witnessed. His right-wing regime, which lasted 17 years until he ceded power to an elected civilian government in 1990, was responsible for the deaths or disappearances of more than 3,000 suspected communists and other leftists - "disappeared," in fact, became a noun during his reign - while thousands more were tortured or forced into exile (including Bachelet's family). Even banishment wasn't safe: in 1976, Pinochet henchmen assassinated former Chilean ambassador and Pinochet...
...Pinochet's dictatorship symbolized the last throes of CIA-backed anti-communism in South America. When the Berlin Wall fell and Cold Warriors like Pinochet became obsolete - if not denounced - in Washington, Pinochet wisely built a fortress of legal immunity around himself before stepping down. But it 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...
...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...