The Death of the General

At 2:15pm on 10 December, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte died of heart failure and pulmonary oedema at a military hospital in Santiago. Although a minority of Chileans and international admirers (such as Baroness Margaret Thatcher) may beg to differ, the General’s gravestone, if written honestly, should read as follows:

Here rests a brutal and corrupt dictator who betrayed the Chilean people, their democratically elected President Salvador Allende and the country’s Constitution. Bereft of a serious intellect, he was a coward who had friends and civilians murdered, tortured and exiled while he looted State coffers of millions of dollars. A servant of powerful interests, he will best be remembered as a spineless opportunist.

No matter how hard one tries to understand the General, a thuggish and colourless character always appears. He was a poor orator whose speeches during his 17 years in power were short and riddled with bad pronunciation. His favourite topic was always the same: hacking rants about his war on communism.

In early 1974, Pinochet told Lutheran Bishop Helmuth Frenz and his Catholic counterpart Bishop Enrique Alvear that:

The plague of communism has invaded the people. That’s why I need to exterminate communism. The most dangerous communists are the extremists of the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario, the Revolutionary Movement of the Left]. They have to be tortured, or they won’t sing, if you get my meaning. Torture is necessary to exterminate communism. For the good of the fatherland.

Chilean culture also suffered greatly under the General, beginning with the murder of folk singer and political activist Víctor Jara — whose body was found on the outskirts of Santiago riddled with bullets and with his hands smashed — and followed by the exodus of countless artists and intellectuals. As compensation, Chileans were treated to ghastly military parades, beauty pageants with women who looked anything but Chilean, US televangelists, empty football stadiums with poorly performing teams and grinding poverty.

Many myths surround the General and his regime. One of the most childish is the one he created in his 1980 book The Decisive Day, where he claimed that he had planned the 11 September coup that brought him to power in 1973, just 19 days after President Salvador Allende appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Army.

In reality, as numerous investigations have shown, the coup was orchestrated by Air Force General Gustavo Leigh and Navy Commander Admiral José Toribio Merino. Pinochet himself vacillated until the very end when he knew he would be playing for the winning team.

Historically, the role of the Nixon Administration, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the overthrow of Allende have also been a point of contention. But internal US Government documents that have been scrutinised by the Director of the National Security Archives’ Chile Documentation Project, Peter Kornbluh, reveal what many suspected from the beginning: that the US Government was heavily involved.

One of the greatest distortions about the General’s rule, however, was his Government’s economic policies. Chile today is often presented as one of the models of neo-liberal economics and the General is credited with implementing the necessary changes. Greg Palast, a journalist and former student of economist Milton Freidman, points out in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy that after nine years of economic policies guided by Freidman and his ‘Chicago Boys’, Chile saw the abolition of minimum wages, an outlawing of trade unions’ negotiating rights, and a 22 per cent unemployment rate. Real wages declined by 40 per cent.

Palast also notes that once the Chilean economy went into a depression in 1982, the General "nationalised banks and industry on a scale unimagined by the socialist Allende. The General expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation".

When he was arrested in London in 1998, the old dictator pleaded he could not stand trial due to ill health and an unsound mind — then miraculously walked unassisted out of his wheelchair once he was on Chilean soil. On a right-wing US television show in 2003 he showed no regrets stating: "Everything that I did, I would do again, everything was thought through". Modesty not being one of his strengths, he concluded the interview by stating, "I’m a good person, I feel like an angel".

But not all were lies and deceit with the General, and it would be unfair to deny that he had a sense of humour. When a Chilean journalist asked him in the mid-1990s if he had any comments about the discovery of two bodies in the one coffin, the General laughed and replied "good economisation!".

At the end of his life, while he was under house arrest on his 91st birthday, a statement was read out by Pinochet’s wife Lucía in which her husband assumed "full political responsibility for what happened" under his reign.

Again, it was "done [with]no other goal than making Chile greater and avoiding its disintegration". Stating that he "gladly offered" all of the "humiliations, persecutions and injustices that affect me and my family, for the sake of the harmony and peace that should reign among Chileans", the General at 91 had not lost his grotesque sense of humour.

Australia , like many other countries, has its share of the General’s victims (which official numbers have at 3000 people dead or disappeared and approximately 35,000 tortured). Last Monday a group of about 50 Chileans gathered to celebrate the General’s death outside Town Hall in Sydney. They chanted ‘¡Lucía, Lucía, se fue tu porquería!’ (Lucía, Lucía, your rubbish is gone!), drank champagne and danced — yet the mood in essence was sombre.

Sandra Pinto Silva with her son and a picture of her father who disappeared in 1976. Photo: Danijel Boskovic

Sandra Pinto Silva was there with a photo of her father, who disappeared in 1976. What was his crime? He was a member of the Communist Party and a driver of Luis Corvalán, a communist politician who served in Allende’s Government. Ten years after Sandra’s father disappeared, her sister Gloria was killed by the secret police. A year later Sandra herself had to flee Chile after an attempt was made on her life. Reflecting on the General’s death she said, "My father died alone unlike that criminal. Pinochet’s death is a relief but I’m still sad that justice was never done".

Another victim at the gathering was Carlos Alberto Mendoza whose brother was accused of having kidnapped a colonel and was eventually murdered. Carlos was imprisoned at San Miguel jail in Santiago. Philosophical about his plight, he recalls how fortunate he was to have arrived in Australia during a Labor Government. Carlos doubts he would have been accepted as a political refugee today, and said that in contrast to when he was there, Villawood Detention Centre is now like a ‘concentration camp’.

The most moving story was Eduardo Figeroa’s. As a trade unionist, Eduardo was a prime target of the General’s henchmen. Fleeing to Peru with one of his sons in 1974, he returned to Chile four years later to reunite with his wife and other child. Fighting back tears he described his experience:

I was tortured, electric shocks. Twelve days. I lost eight days of my life. I cannot remember where they are gone. My son was tortured in the room next door and I could hear his screams.

Pinochet did not directly bloody his hands with the day-to-day mechanisms of his job. He simply had breakfast with his head of intelligence every morning to discuss who would live and who would disappear.

The General was dull on many levels, but he was also cynical, a thief, cunning, an opportunist interested in personal power and essentially a petty thug who reached the apex of power through little skill of his own.

Now that the tormentor is dead, only a few words keep circling in my mind: good riddance to human garbage.