Word: pinochets
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...political right once was. Last week saw the reburial ceremony for Victor Jara, a popular 20th century Chilean folksinger. His remains were exhumed recently to help determine just how he was killed in 1973, after he had been arrested by the brutal right-wing dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990. (An autopsy revealed that Jara was tormented in a game of Russian roulette and then executed by machine-gun fire.) This week, a Chilean judge ruled that former President Eduardo Frei Montalva, a Pinochet opponent who died in 1982, had actually been fatally poisoned...
...give voters pause. But the exhumations underscore how important it is that the right, after almost 20 uninterrupted years of center-left rule, gets a new chance to govern South America's most developed country. It can prove once and for all that it has purged the ghosts of Pinochet, who died in 2006. "This election," says political analyst Guillermo Holzmann, "is an opportunity to see that a center right exists in Chile." (See a story about the death of dictator Augusto Pinochet...
...campaign run by Piñera and his conservative coalition, the Alliance for Chile. The Chilean right is known less for open minds than for Opus Dei, the ultra-conservative Roman Catholic society. But Piñera, 60, a Harvard-educated tycoon whose brother was a government minister under Pinochet, has deflected charges that he's a right-wing lapdog by embracing progressive causes like gay rights - a stance that has scandalized the country's Catholic Church. As an economist in the 1970s and '80s, Piñera followed Chile's free-market orthodoxy, but on the stump today...
...concerns abound that if he's elected, Piñera faces heavy pressure from conservatives, especially in the military, to move Chile far back to the right. The recent exhumations indicate how nervous many Chileans are that the rightward shift will enervate the robust human-rights apparatus established since Pinochet stepped down after a 1988 referendum rejected his continued rule. Piñera himself opposed Pinochet in that plebiscite. But last month he told a gathering of retired military and police officials who served under Pinochet that he'll work to rein in the trials - "proceedings that...
Among them were leftists like Jara and, as the court has now declared, moderates like Frei Montalva, who was President from 1964 to 1970. He was succeeded by Salvador Allende, whose sharp leftward turn alarmed Chile's conservatives and prompted Pinochet's ironfisted 1973 military coup. Along with thousands of others in the putsch's early and darkest days, Jara was rounded up and held in Chile Stadium in the capital, Santiago. After he was tortured and killed, his body was tossed into the streets. Frei Montalva originally backed Pinochet's rule, but by the 1980s opposed it. According...