Augusto Pinochet

Pinochet, here seen dressed as his wrestling persona, "M. Bison".

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Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (1915–2006), pronounced almost like "pee-no-shit"^{[note 1]} in Spanish, was a murderous dictator and corrupt embezzler of government assets^{[2][3]:206-207} who ruled Chile from 1973 until 1990. He attained rule by overthrowing the democratically-elected socialist President Salvador Allende by military force (with support from the US government, as was the case with other Latin American dictatorships), following a resolution from the right-wing-dominated Chilean Congress accusing Allende of many "civil rights abuses."^[4] Ironically, however, Pinochet performed many of those alleged abuses to a much greater extent than his predecessor.

A fierce supporter of economic neoliberalism, he has been called the "ultimate free marketeer".^[5] However, he did not respect dissidents' self-ownership enough to refrain from interning them in soccer stadiums, brutally torturing and murdering them, including the great Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara. Not only did he betray President Allende, but he also car-bombed General Carlos Prats (his exiled predecessor in the role of Commander-in-Chief of the Army) and poisoned former President Eduardo Frei Montalva and possibly the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda.^[6] Suffice to say, he was a dick.

Life and ascension to power[edit]

Born in the province of Valparaíso, Pinochet entered the military career at 17 after being rejected three times. According to his biographer, James Whelan, Pinochet lived a quiet childhood, with his mother playing a very important role in forming his character.

Quietly but quickly, Pinochet rose through the officer corps and, as early as the 1950s, he headed the clampdown^[7] on the Chilean Communist Party. However, he was a provincial simpleton who knew nothing about politics at the time and, despite later self-aggrandizement, his military career was mediocre at best. By the early 1970s, having been promoted to general merely a couple years before, Pinochet was about to be forcibly retired, but his greedy wife literally begged on her knees for it not to happen. Paradoxically, it was for his apparent lack of political ambition that he advanced to the rank of Commander-in-Chief under the left-wing Popular Unity government led by Salvador Allende, who believed in Pinochet's trustworthiness.

Many believed that Pinochet backed Allende's government, including Allende himself. In fact, during a previous coup attempt (the June 1973 Tanquetazo) Pinochet had remained loyal to the President. Since Allende's election in 1970, Chile had teetered precariously on the edge of a full-blown civil war. Allende's socialist platform advocated nationalizing foreign-owned industry and rectifying Chile's gross economic disparity. Further polarizing the situation, the US government under Richard Nixon smuggled funds to the military for arms and anti-Allende propaganda. The US also funded the far-right paramilitary group Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty), which carried out a terrorist campaign against the government.

Allende appointed Pinochet Commander-in-Chief of the Army on August 23, 1973, but by September 9, Pinochet had been peer-pressured^[8] into joining a CIA-supported four-man junta to overthrow the government. By September 11, Santiago was under a state of siege that would be lifted infrequently over the next 17 years.

The bombing of the presidential palace, La Moneda, on September 11, 1973

Early on the morning of September 11, the junta informed Allende that he must surrender to the army. Allende refused, and British-made warplanes bombed the presidential palace. Pinochet's treachery perhaps shocked Allende most, and in the first hours of the coup, he believed that the junta had taken his general hostage. Once Pinochet's treason and the forces against the ousted leader became clear, Allende committed suicide.

Pinochet was not the leader of the coup. It had been masterminded by the alcoholic self-proclaimed Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Admiral José Toribio Merino, and by the Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force, General Gustavo Leigh,^{[note 2]} and supported by the CIA, the Brazilian military dictatorship, and the intelligence services of fucking Australia of all places.^[9] Pinochet was a lifelong coward and he only joined the conspiracy (reluctantly) two days before the coup.^{[note 3]} However, after the death of Allende was confirmed, Pinochet assumed complete control of the group because he decided that such a volatile situation could be controlled only by one leader, specifically by the Commander-in-Chief of the oldest branch of the Chilean armed forces (the Army, of course).

Dictatorship[edit]

Declaring himself as "Supreme Chief of the Nation" (June 1974) and later President of Chile, Pinochet abolished the Constitution and eliminated Congress, political parties, freedom of speech, habeas corpus, and trade unions. He also founded the DINA (the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional — National Intelligence Directorate) as his secret police, ferreting out opposition and silencing the nation with intimidation and oppression. All of this, of course, was in the name of preserving liberty and human rights.

The image of a mailed fist well fit Pinochet's brutal secret police.

A brutal reign of terror began immediately after the coup, interning and torturing thousands of dissidents in Santiago's soccer stadium and other improvised concentration camps. Bullet-ridden bodies littered the streets, or were found washed up at beaches and the Mapocho River in Santiago. In October 1973, a special military operation (the Caravan of Death) traveled through the northern provinces by helicopter, hunting for political prisoners who had voluntarily surrended to the new authorities, brutally executing and "disappearing" at least 100 of them. The Pinochet regime is charged with killing or forcibly disappearing thousands of citizens and causing nearly a million people to flee during his rule; Amnesty International cited a figure of between 10,000 and 20,000 Chileans killed in the coup and in the months following the coup in 1974;^[10] the currently accepted number is slightly over 3,200,^[11] 56% of whom had no political affiliation (only one quarter of the victims were communists and 14% were socialists).^[12] And, like many other banana republic dictators of European descent, Pinochet was a racist who proclaimed that in Chile "there are only Chileans and no other people" (as if "Chilean" were an ethnicity, not a nationality); he was responsible for the torture and attempted genocide and ethnic cleansing of Chile's indigenous people.^[13]

The Pinochet dictatorship also participated in Operation Condor since 1975. This was a secret CIA operation (similar to Operation Gladio in Europe) that effectively synchronized the repressive activities of the security forces in the region, with the DINA in Chile acting as a nucleus or base of operations. In fact, it was named "Condor" after the national bird of Chile. Within the framework of Operation Condor, the participating military dictatorships in the region (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay), assisted by European neofascists, West German, French, and British intelligence services, and Cuban anti-communist terrorists, murdered over 60,000 people and illegally detained an additional 400,000 (most of whom were tortured).^[14] The United States initially backed Pinochet's takeover, especially through Henry Kissinger, and actively supported the Pinochet regime militarily and economically after the takeover. The CIA also assisted Pinochet in creating and establishing the DINA in the aftermath of the coup and made many of its operatives, such as its director Manuel Contreras (a School of the Americas graduate), into paid contacts.^[15] However, after a series of major atrocities, including the gruesome murders of former Allende Ambassador to the U.S. Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old American assistant Ronni Karpen Moffitt by a car bomb in downtown Washington D.C., the White House cautiously removed support, but only on the surface. The United States formally suspended military aid to Pinochet under the Carter Administration in 1977. In April 1978, fearing a possible loss of power, Pinochet introduced an Amnesty Law covering any crimes committed by the armed forces since he seized power in 1973.

Like the haze overhanging Pinochet's quick about-face, questions remain about the dictator's motives for ruling through terror, which did not exclude the assassination of fellow generals such as Carlos Prats (former Army Commander-in-Chief and Vice-President under Allende; killed with his wife Sofía Cuthbert in a car bomb blast in Argentina),^{[note 4]} Alberto Bachelet (father of future President Michelle Bachelet; jailed, tortured, and beaten to death for opposing the 1973 coup), Augusto Lutz (head of the Military Intelligence Service and one of the organizers of the coup who became a critic of Pinochet's brutality;^{[note 5]} poisoned), and Óscar Bonilla (Minister of Interior and Defense and personal friend of Pinochet turned critic, helped save many political prisoners and ordered the arrest of the chief of the secret police; killed in a not-so-accidental helicopter crash),^{[note 6]} among others. Some note a driving lust for power and control that Pinochet concealed well in the army, while apologists believe that Pinochet was simply a conservative and a nationalist, condoning one-man rule to return justice and order.

In 1988 Pinochet called a plebiscite for the 1989 presidential election but lost. Contrary to popular myth, the dictator did not accept defeat gracefully. Pinochet was so embittered over his loss that he attempted to carry out a self-coup; he only grudgingly agreed to accept the electoral results when the other members of the junta suddenly grew a pair and refused to support another coup.^[16] He stepped down from the presidency in 1990 to be replaced by democratically-elected Patricio Aylwin. Yet politics in Chile remained under his watchful eye as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, frequently reminding the new authorities of his lingering control. For example, in December 1990, he placed the Army on alert after his son was investigated for corruption, and he would throw an even worse shit fit in 1993 after the investigation was re-opened.

Friedman-fighter[edit]

Despite depicting himself as an archenemy of communism, Pinochet had no problems chilling with commies when the need arises.

Today's Chilean society remains sharply divided in its attitude towards Pinochet. At the beginning of his tenure, Pinochet gave free rein to a group of economists called the "Chicago boys," nicknamed because of their devotion to University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman's free-market theories.

By offering generous incentives to foreign investors and privatizing business, it has been argued Pinochet's dictatorship transformed Chile into a modern land of plenty and boosted life expectancy, salaries, access to health services, and educational standards above those of any other Latin American country. Before his trial for human rights abuses, Pinochet made a series of world tours in the 1990s and dined with fellow authoritarians and nationalists such as China's Deng Xiaoping, Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, to a young Vladimir Putin, demonstrating that crushing dissent in the name of economic improvement has no political boundaries.^[17][18] Even today, conservatives and nationalists around the world herald Pinochet's economic ends and ignore his means, even though Pinochet's practices ended up increasing the income disparity ratio in Chile, a large proportion of the populace was in poverty, and they could not protest or demand better salaries, and in fact, Chile's GDP per capita under Pinochet consistently lagged behind the South American average and only increased after his time in office. Yay? And let's not forget the Crisis of 1982, which saw a spike in unemployment and GDP decrease to the degree that the junta had to nationalize the banks. Good work, Milton.

Terrorism, U.S. wingnut complicity, and apologia[edit]

Orlando Letelier in 1976

In September 1976, a car bomb in Washington, D.C., killed exiled Chilean Pinochet critic Orlando Letelier and his American assistant. There was good reason to suspect Pinochet's hand in this assassination, but Pinochet vigorously denied it. However, documents declassified by the Obama Administration document that Pinochet directly ordered the hit on Letelier.^[19]

Throughout much of the 1970s, William F. Buckley and his right-wing rag National Review had money funneled in from Chile via the so-called American-Chilean Council (ACC) to support paying many of their writers, who in turn announced Pinochet innocent of all crimes. This hackery included spewing all sorts of speculative, alternative scenarios to the Letelier murder and attacks on the victim. John Judis observed in his biography of Buckley:

In March 1977, National Review editor Kevin Lynch, who had also worked for the ACC, suggested that Letelier had been a Cuban agent and that the Chilean government had nothing to do with his killing. In July, the National Review speculated on whether Letelier had been "an agent of the USSR."^[20]

One National Review author claimed Letelier had ties to "international terrorism," and Buckley himself argued that "there are highly reasonable, indeed compelling, grounds for doubting that Pinochet had anything to do with the assassination."^[20]

Another noted apologist is British right-wing historian and Nixon fanboy Paul Johnson, who argued that Pinochet "saved Chile from descending to chaos" and blamed DINA for committing human rights atrocities without Pinochet's knowledge.^[21] He and fellow Pinochet fanboy MP Norman Lamont (who himself called Pinochet a "good and brave and honourable soldier") tried in vain to prevent Pinochet's arrest for human rights abuses.

Fascism[edit]

Historians of far-right totalitarianism, such as Robert O. Paxton, rejected labeling Pinochet a fascist simply because his regime did not follow the laundry list of characteristics of fascism. Of course, this short-sighted assessment of the Chilean military dictatorship ignores the personal sympathies Pinochet had for card-carrying fascists like Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and Italian terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie (responsible for the attempted assassinations of two prominent Chilean politicians living in European exile: Carlos Altamirano and Bernardo Leighton).

His inferiority complex led him to emulate tyrants like Franco or Hitler. Despite his blue eyes and penchant for grandiose uniforms, Pinochet was no Elton John Napoleon. He was ignorant (stupid, even),^{[note 7]} superstitious, had an unpleasant, high pitched, nasal voice (think of the Martians from the movie Mars Attacks!) and was prone to malapropisms. Because of this, he desperately tried to stand out among his peers. He promoted himself to Captain General (a military rank that had not been in use since colonial times), wore oversized caps, taylor-made uniforms, capes, canes and a solid gold ruby ring (what was he, a dictator or a fucking pimp?), and loved big parades and torch rallies.

In addition, he sought to rewrite the history of his role in the 1973 coup. El Día Decisivo (The Decisive Day), a 1980 book written by Pinochet (or at least published under his name) became the regime's official version of what happened on September 11, 1973; in it, Pinochet painted himself as a brave patriot who secretly planned the coup over the course of several months and made his generals swear a solemn oath of allegiance in front of the sword of Bernardo O'Higgins, Chile's national hero. This pamphlet was widely distributed for free^{[note 8]} to students (yay, indoctrination!), soldiers, regime ass-kissers, diplomats, etc., and thus became a national best-seller despite being a poorly written load of fascist bullshit. Sounds familiar?

His favorite song was the Spanish-language version of a Nazi march ("Ich hatt' einen Kameraden"). And he once lamented that the post-WW2 German Army was full of "potheads, drug addicts, long-haired homosexuals, and syndicalists." Oh, and he also claimed he didn't know if the Holocaust really happened.

Last years and death[edit]

"Yep, I'm pretty sure he's dead".

On March 10, 1998, Pinochet stepped down from the Army and entered the Senate as Senator-for-life, a post created in the Constitution under his regime. On October 16, while recovering from back surgery in London, Pinochet was arrested on a warrant issued by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who sought his extradition to Spain on charges of torturing and murdering Spanish citizens in Chile. Incredibly, President Eduardo Frei (whose father, former President Eduardo Frei Montalva, had been assassinated by DINA agents) and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, the "socialist" José Miguel Insulza, fought tooth and nail to bring the old dictator back to his home country. Frei's rationale was that Pinochet, a Chilean citizen, had to be put on trial by Chilean courts... many of which were composed of judges who had been appointed under the Pinochet regime and had done jack shit other than applying the 1978 Amnesty Law to cases of grave human rights violations. Held for 17 months, British authorities allowed Pinochet to return to Chile because of deteriorated health. However, as soon as he put a foot on Chilean soil, his health problems seemed to miraculously disappear as he stood up from the wheelchair he was in and started to walk as if nothing had happened to him. What an asshole.

In 2001, Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia issued the first indictment of Pinochet on human rights charges, but the case faltered because courts found his "poor health" ruled out a trial. Pinochet's alleged ill health again seemed to vanish when he was no longer under indictment, however. Three years later, a U.S. Senate investigation revealed that Pinochet had a fortune in foreign bank accounts under alias names,^{[note 9]} estimated by a Chilean judge at US$28 million, and he was indicted for tax evasion. Not all of Pinochet's wealth came from tax evasion (the junta was, by South American standards at least, not very corrupt), but from the manufacture of "black cocaine" - so-called as apparently the carbon additive mixed into the raw cocaine makes the source of the product difficult to determine.^[23]

In 2006, Pinochet suffered a heart attack and died on December 10 (Human Rights Day, oh baby). Days before, on his 91^st birthday, Pinochet had issued a half-assed statement taking "full political responsibility" for the crimes of his regime, just like Jorge Rafael Videla not too long after. Despite the evils committed under him, Margaret Thatcher stood by him until the end.^[24] Why? Ideological affinities aside, without Chilean radar and support for UK warships and downed UK special forces' she may have lost the Falklands War and, thus, the next election, not to mention the huge export revenue driven by arms sales to Chile.^[25] Say what you will, she remembered her friends.

In 2020, Chileans voted for the draft of a new constitution, replacing the one drafted in Pinochet's interests in 1980, burying his legacy once and for all. The proposed progressive constitutional draft, however, would be overwhelmingly rejected in 2022 due to an organized right-wing terror/misinformation campaign, and another proposed draft, this time crafted by the far right which would have been the 1980 Constitution on steroids, was also (thankfully) rejected the following year. Thus, the 1980 constitution will remain in force for the foreseeable future.

"Free Helicopter Rides", rape dogs, and other torture methods[edit]

"Free helicopter rides for leftists" is a meme circulating on alt-right/ancap message boards.^[26][27] It's "funny" because Pinochet ordered thousands of executions of various people who he took a dislike to, sometimes by having them thrown out of helicopters over the open ocean (though such "death flights" happened way more often in Argentina under Jorge Rafael Videla's junta; Bolivia's own junta committed similar murders too, albeit throwing prisoners into the jungle instead of the ocean). And frankly, helicopter rides were the least evil thing Pinochet did; the forced incest at gunpoint, pedophilia, cannibalism, and insertion of living rats and spiders into a victim's rectum or genitals, among other things, were far worse.

For instance, a German Shepherd canine (called Volodia) was trained to rape captives.^[28] To suppress the voices of suffering inmates, Pinochet's goons would blast loud music in the secret torture facility, which would give its informal name "La Discothèque" (French for "The Disco").^[28] The torture center was hosted in a house on Calle Irán, in south-east Santiago, Chile's capital.^[28] The widespread use of sexual violence against detainees, blindfolded at all times, prompted its macabre name of "Venda Sexy" (Spanish for "Sexy Blindfold"), allegedly coined by the torturers themselves.^[28] Women were particularly targeted for sexual abuse, suffering rape, forced pregnancies, abortions, and sexual slurs.^[28] Female and male prisoners were also subjected to beatings, hangings, electric shocks, Russian roulette, asphyxia, and sleep deprivation, among other torture methods.^[28] According to the survivors association, at least 85 political prisoners were held in the torture center between 1974 and 1977; more than a quarter of them (23) was killed and made disappear.^[28] They were among the 41,470 victims of political detention, torture, forced disappearance, and extra-judicial execution perpetrated by Pinochet's regime across 1,168 detention centers — crimes that, in many cases, as Amnesty International notes, are still waiting for truth, justice, and reparation to be served.^[28] Much of the evidence for the Chilean military's murderous campaign had been intentionally destroyed or hidden, indicating consciousness of guilt on the part of the military.^[29]

For some reason, the Pepes never seem to bring those up.^[30][31] For "anarcho"-capitalists, these guys sure do love iron-fisted dictators.

In 2016, Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte invited comparisons to the death flights. He definitely wants to be Pinochet^{[note 10]} and throw people out of a helicopter, even if he's telling stories.^[32]

See also[edit]

• Francisco Franco
• F.A. "The Mixed Bag" von Hayek — While Friedman and Pinochet met briefly, it's not on the same level as Hayek and Pinochet (who had some serious brolove).
• Alberto Fujimori — The Peruvian version.
• Alfredo Stroessner
• Jorge Rafael Videla
• School of the Americas
• Sebastián Piñera

External links[edit]

• Augusto Pinochet biography
• A Chilean Dictator's Dark Legacy, Washington Post
• People have hope because they don't see death standing behind them.

Notes[edit]

References[edit]