Pinochet's atrocities

[ButterflyBlood]

give me a link that details them. I've got some people arguing about how he helped Chile and there's a lot of propaganda about him. I heard he enjoyed girls as young as 12 being raped and liked to use immolation as a method of execution.

[Cleita]

1. Google brought this up.

http://www.trentu.ca/~mneumann/pinochet.html

Since I know a few Chileans, who lived through his dictatorship, I got the impression that the middle class conservative Chilean thought he did the country good by improving the economy by opening up trade. Of course if you were a Communist or had relatives who had disappeared under his rule, I'm sure your view was completely different.

[Colin Ex]

2. People are DEFENDING Pinochet?

What the HELL is that about?

-C

[ButterflyBlood]

5. yeah, Ann Coulter called him great

the right views him as a hero for overthrowing a democratically elected socialist government. just go look at Free Republic.

[0rganism]

7. That alone should be a warning sign

The fact that Pinochet wins praise from Coulter and the freepers is no accident.

[OKHRANA]

3. there's a lot of false propaganda about him...

Some people will accuse me of being right wing for saying this but I don't care one bit because I know I'm not that, and know what I'm talking about. This is just one of those cases where the truth is not what the conventional wisdom and the angry propaganda of a lot of people says it is. The best we can do is get the facts.

I'm Chilean (I left Chile in the mid 60's) and have followed the Pinochet story ever since he took over on 9/11/73. I visited there for several weeks, 6 months before he took over and 6 months after. While there I talked to a lot of people and saw a lot of things on my own. Truth is Allende's time was nasty, and most Chileans (except the hard core Allende segment) were really relieved to have Pinochet save the day, like thanks to him they dodged a real big bullet (they did).

Pinochet took over because Allende singlehandedly brought Chile, a peaceful and relatively successful country, to economic, political and social collapse in less than 3 years, and on the brink of a bloody civil war, and a big majority of the people were begging the military to take over and save the country (I heard countless stories about this), including the Supreme Court at the time formally asked the military to take over, the Congress did too, the former President Frei (not in Pinochet's party), and others, because Allende's government itself was being totally lawless, blatantly just ignoring the law and it was actually planning to cause a violent civil war very soon (I know, most propaganda neglects to discuss these things).

Pinochet did stop that right in the nick of time. It was an unreal time. I heard a lot of unbelievable stories then. Allende himself publicly said there was not enough food for 3 more days for the whole country, 3 days before Pinochet took over for a reasonably prosperous small country. Allende and his administration and thousands of radical Communist goons from the Soviet Union, North Korea, China and Cuba who were infliltrated into the government and govt agencies and given managerial, training, and leadership positions, were preparing a violent takeover to create another Cuba in South America with huge warehouses of weapons that Castro exported. They had big lists of names of tens of thousands of regular people who disagreed with them who they were going to slaughter, and Pinochet stopped all that. You will normally never hear about this, but you can take it to the bank it's accurate.

Pinochet led the takeover as a patriotic defensive effort to save the country from outside forces. Many will say the CIA helped this happen, and I think it did help, but nobody says the KGB and other organizations were also helping the opposite happen. Nobody ever talks about that.

It turned out to be like a small civil war, where about 200 people got killed in the first day, and about 3,000 altogether, in over 17 years of rule by Pinochet, which while that is a lot of people, it is not on the kind of scale of brutal dictatorships, not even close. Chile's a peaceful country, always has been, and Pinochet kept the peace. He's a big-time hero for Chile. Anyone who says Pinochet was a brutal dictator is either lying or out of good intentions repeating other people's lies. Inform yourself, get the facts, and question your sources if their facts contradict themselves.

Almost half of these deaths were Pinochet's soldiers who were for the first few years always being shot at by communist guerrilas mostly at night, kind of like they have in Colombia now. Thanks to Pinochet Chile doesn't have that now, at all, and there has even been a healthy national reconciliation movement going on, involving the government and military, where all the truth is coming out, where people from both sides are patching things up in formal ways, which is fantastic to see.

True, there were quite a few incidents of these rebels being tortured and some people getting caught in the crossfire, and nobody can defend that, but those cases were mostly in the first couple of years in interrogations that got out of hand by lower ranking soldiers and not because of any orders from Pinochet. I'm told stuff like that happens in most wars. I'm not saying its good, just that you have to keep it in perspective.

Pinochet himself was always a very religious decent family man devoted to his professional military career and was doing what he did out of patriotism. He just happenned to be in that position at the right time and he never hung on to power for personal gain like Castro and other dictators.

There were also about 30,000 Chileans who were real close to Allende ideologically and also probably working for his government who left Chile in 1973 out of fear, because it was a tense time, who settled around the world. Many of those have returned since then.

Pinochet put his rule up for a referendum vote in 1980 and I think he got about a 59% vote of support for the next 8 years. In 1988 he put himself up for a vote again and he lost that one with 55% against. He respected the vote of the people and turned power over to civilian rule shortly thereafter in 1990 and Chile has since had a solid return to civilian constitutional government.

Pinochet did an excellent job while he was in charge, better than any previous president, in large part because he knew what to do and had the power to do it. The proof is in the pudding, the real achievements during his time, or as a result of his time.

He assembled the best legal minds from all points of the political spectrum to draft a new constitution over a couple of years, and then had the people vote on it and they approved it. That is one of his big contributions because that constitution was well written and functional, and still working quite well today, not disfunctional like the one before.

Pinochet totally transformed the Chilean economy (historically always sluggish and barely getting by) by putting in a big team of U.S. educated economists who totally fixed it structurally. From the mid-80's until now, Chile's had the healthiest economy in all Latin America, with average of 7% annual real growth, and that is expected to continue. Chile's successful economic measures have been used by many developing nations including in Eastern Europe as a model, even Russia studied what Chile did to see what it could apply from it.

Chile's real poverty has been cut more by well over one half in real economic terms in 15 years (never been done in history so fast by any nation), and is now only about 20% of the population, the best in Latin America. It continues to go down even in slower years.

There's been similar impressive gains in other areas, all made possible by Pinochet, where before him bureaucratic paralysis hardly ever allowed change.

He dealt with corruption which used to be a serious and systemic problem, and now Chile has the lowest corruption rate in all the Spanish speaking world, and ranks right next to the U.S. and Germany in the top 20 in the world (source Transparency International).

The proof that Pinochet did a lot of good is that after he left power very few of his policies, and none of his important ones, have been changed.

You'd never know that by reading the regular media, because Pinochet was made into the big bogey-man because he did ruin the party for a lot of parasitic people who had other plans, people who at the time were sure that Chile was the next Cuba, and that it was going to keep going North after that until it got to the U.S.

But Pinochet's action stopped that cold, and this was the first country at that time in which Communism had been stopped. Communism never recovered after that. Pinochet was made a symbol of that, and that is why he was hated so much, and why so many lies were spread about him. Soviet communists never forgave him.

But you watch, when he dies and at close to 90 that should be one of these days, a lot of people, a big part of Chile, is going to shed a lot of tears in public as they mourn his death, because there is a lot of love for this man, and it's a rare thing for people to shed tears for old leaders when they die.

The short-term history since 1973 has been filled with hateful false propaganda, but long term history will sort the truth out, and be very kind to Pinochet IMHO. You watch, that is what I predict.

[uhhuh]

4. Yeah, right.

1970 - In September, following Salvador Allende's victory in the Chilean presidential vote, United States President Richard M. Nixon orders the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to do all it can to prevent Allende from being inaugurated.

Under the supervision of national security adviser Henry Kissinger, the CIA will develop the so-called 'Track II' plan to oust Allende, allocating US$10 million while formally insulating the US embassy in Chile from any involvement.

The agency attempts to bribe key Chilean legislators and funds a group of military officers plotting a coup, providing them with a further payment following the assassination on 22 October of General Rene Schneider, the commander-in-chief of the army, who had refused to approve the coup plan.

One CIA document from October states, "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. ... It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG (US Government) and American hand be well hidden."

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT

http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/pinochet.htm

much, much more.

[gold_bug]

14. Also try

Chile's Free Market Miracle: A Second Look
by Joseph Collins, John Lear, Walden Bello, Stephanie Rosenfeld

Here on Amazon

[Judi Lynn]

16. Thanks for making it painless for us to pick up a lot of information

on Pinochet and his reign of terror.

(snip) Pinochet liked to say that no blade of grass moved in Chile without his order. (snip)
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/printout/0,13155,901020701-265371,00.html

In this link, you can find "Declassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup, September 11, 1973"

(snip) Revelations that President Richard Nixon had ordered the CIA to "make the economy scream" in Chile to "prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him," prompted a major scandal in the mid-1970s, and a major investigation by the U.S. Senate. Since the coup, however, few U.S. documents relating to Chile have been actually declassified- -until recently. (snip)
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm


Manuel Contreras, head of Chilean secret police, planner of assassinations, and Pinochet

[OKHRANA]

21. I think you are correct in these facts

Pinochet did say that, and it was an arrogant and stupid thing to say.

The picture shows Manuel Contreras and Pinochet, and Contreras was head of the secret police and it did engage in torturing some people. What's never reported is that Pinochet for 3 years did not know of those abuses and when he found out he fired Contreras and disbanded that police force (DINA) and I believe Contreras has been prosecuted and is in jail.

The other point, about Nixon and the CIA doing what they could to disrupt Allende is also true.

However, also never reported is that the KGB, Cuba, and other communist countries were even more active supporting Allende and setting up a violent takeover of Chile to make it into another Cuba. They did a lot of damage including killing people.

Unfortunately Chile was caught in the middle of two large global ideological forces fighting each other, headed by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and in the end pulled itself out of that mess.

here's a couple of links to two very good articles and I hope for the sake of fairness you can look at them, instead of only looking at one point of view:

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/special_packages/focus/6763208.htm

http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2000/04-10-2000/vo16no08_pinochet.htm

[iverglas]

32. what on earth is all this noise?

However, also never reported is that the KGB, Cuba, and other communist countries were even more active supporting Allende and setting up a violent takeover of Chile to make it into another Cuba.

Last I heard (and yes, I was an adult at the time it happened), Allende was elected.

I don't recall ... what percentage of the popular vote did Pinochet receive in the election in which he beat Allende?


The other point, about Nixon and the CIA doing what they could to disrupt Allende is also true.

Isn't it just?

Even if you do understate the case just a trifle.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/ciachile.htm
"How the CIA Took Aim at Allende"

Plans were already in motion. Five days earlier, on Oct. 11, Broe sent this cable from CIA headquarters to the Santiago station:

SUB-MACHINE GUNS AND AMMO BEING SENT BY REGULAR (deleted) COURIER LEAVING WASHINGTON 0700 HOURS 19 OCTOBER DUE ARRIVE SANTIAGO LATE EVENING 20 OCTOBER OR EARLY MORNING 21 OCTOBER.

The United States did not spur the Chilean military to act, but it was not for want of trying, as shown by an internal C.I.A. report, "Chilean Task Force Activities," dated Nov.18. ...

That's just top of the list on a quickie search.


As an aside, one of the saddest outcomes of the whole saga is the disappointing results of the heroic efforts of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo -- the mothers of missing people (and grandmothers of the children who were stolen from those people, and often "adopted" by officers of the military and the dictatorship) who demonstrated weekly for years, demanding information about their children's fate. A vast project was set up years ago (through the expert assistance offered by USAmerican private citizens) to archive DNA information from the families so that if the children were ever found, they could be identified.

As I understand it, many of those children have now declined contact with their birth families. All that stuff is just so ooold, and they're alright where they are now, thank you very much.

When this is done to another people's children, it's called genocide under international law. When someone does it to own people, when a people's governing class rears the people's own children to identify with those who tortured and killed their parents, it's just enormously sad.

But theirs is exactly the kind of mentality I've seen expressed here. Minimizing and denial and revision.

Thanks to those in this thread with the stomachs and nerves to stand up to the attempts at revisionism. For those of us who actually did stand in solidarity with the people of Chile at the time of the atrocities, it's more than a little depressing to see it, let alone have to counter it.

.

[Judi Lynn]

35. Thank god you remembered and posted info. on the stolen children

I haven't seen anyone mentioning this astounding criminality in several years, I'm sorry to say. It should NOT be buried and denied.

Have NEVER seen this anywhere but Pinochet's Chile: taking children of torture victims, and giving them to couples of the illegal, murderous coup party. Barbaric beyond words.

(snip) After the dictatorships fell in 1983, Argentina convicted five junta leaders of murder, torture and other crimes. But a series of military rebellions frightened the civilian governments into issuing amnesties and, in 1990, pardoning the junta members still in prison. Even today, however, the outraged families of victims pursue justice and information about the missing. Mothers of the disappeared still march, and an organization of the children of the missing is active nationwide. Another group, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, has located 76 of the babies taken from prisoners. The grandmothers' efforts led to numerous trials of low-level baby-snatchers -- a crime not covered by amnesties or pardons -- and made possible the trials of junta members today. (snip)

http://www.remember-chile.org.uk/comment/00-03-21nyt.htm

[iverglas]

37. except, oops, I must be even older than I thought

I referred to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were of course in Argentina. And I was thinking of the movie "The Official Story", a navel-gazing apology for the Argentine kidnapped-children atrocity, and of recent reports of the poisoning of those children's minds.

http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/reviews/searching.html

Rita Arditti. Searching For Life. The Grandmothers Of The Plaza De Mayo And The Disappeared Children Of Argentina.

The final two chapters are concerned with the problem of human identity and the politics of memory. The author sensitively describes the problems of coping with now-grown children whose adoptive parents have provided them with a pro-military belief system, and the very different situations of children adopted in good faith by parents who did not know of the conditions of their birth-mothers.

But apparently I may not actually have unfairly maligned Pinochet (is such a thing possible??):

http://www.warresisters.org/nva0500-3.htm

When you search for a loved one, a person who was arrested, tortured, murdered and disappeared, who never committed any crime, that gives you the strength to continue searching. I believe that nothing justifies what they did to him or to so many other opponents of the military regime, because a person has the right to dissent. No one can steal that right and take away the life of another. They committed very grave violations of human rights, things so terrible that they cannot remain amnestied. They have to be investigated and punished because these crimes were committed by human beings, by Chileans against Chileans. I have heard so many stories about the detained — for example, the pregnant mothers who gave birth in captivity and no one knows now where the children born in captivity are. What happened to them?

... and it seems to have been a favourite practice of that crowd:

http://www.tni.org/pinochet/watch/watch24.htm

URUGUAY TO INVESTIGATE CASES OF DISAPPEARANCES

In what the Washington Post heralded as another example of a spreading phenomenon called the 'Pinochet Effect', Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle recently signed a decree creating a new commission to investigate the whereabouts of more than 150 Uruguayans who disappeared during the nation’s military government. The delegation, officially called the 'Commission for Peace' (Comisión para la Paz), consists of representatives from families of victims, labor organizations, political parties, the church, and the executive branch of the government. The commission will serve to analyze political means of reparation and to organize a search for information about the disappeared, including information on the whereabouts of the illegally adopted children of some of these victims.

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Events/fall2003/
(at least these ones weren't turned over to their parents' murderers)

"Searching for El Salvador’s Disappeared Children"

The counterinsurgency campaign carried out by the Salvadoran military during the early 80’s resulted in many civilian deaths and the destruction of villages. Often, children that survived were kidnapped by the military and subsequently turned over to the Salvadoran Red Cross, which in turn arranged for their adoption or placed them in orphanages. Following the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992, parents and families began searching for their missing children. The NGO Pro Búsqueda was formed in 1994 as part of this movement. The group estimates that at least 200 children disappeared during the conflict. Padre Cortina will discuss the efforts made by families of the missing to locate their children and the advances in genetic testing that have helped make some family reunifications possible.

In any event, I might check a little more ... but from your link:

The other reason that time has not brought silence is that many of those who were killed simply disappeared. Their bodies were never found, and every family still lives, even after 25 years, with a flicker of hope that the missing son will someday walk through the front door. They cannot move on. As the past year has shown, nor can a society truly bury the past while the bones are missing, the killers free and the dead unmourned.

-- I'm curious whether the figure our apologist friend has given for the number of people dead under Pinochet includes the "disappeared".

Ah -- http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2000/wha/736.htm

Of the 1,156 persons who disappeared under the military regime, the remains of 985 have yet to be found. The government agency in charge of the compensation program for the families of those executed or disappeared under the military regime recognizes 3,197 victims of the Pinochet era. These include 2,095 victims in which circumstances of death have been established and 1,102 cases in which the persons disappeared.

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/exhibit/showrev.cgi?path=70

The results of a recent survey of young Chileans shocked me. Thirty-five percent of the youth questioned had no idea what had happened on September 11, 1973, the day the Chilean military overthrew the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende. Equally, 35 percent did not know anything about Augusto Pinochet or his regime. Forty-two percent had never heard of Salvador Allende (La Tercera, 23 July 1998). Although these figures reveal a variety of things, they indicate two facts that are relevant to this review of Patricio Guzman's latest film, Chile, Obstinate Memory. First, they demonstrate the extent to which the seventeen-year dictatorship of August Pinochet negatively influenced people's awareness of their own history. Second, more subtly, they reveal the extensive process of depoliticalization that the military government achieved or attempted to achieve during its rule.

... Many of the people to whom Guzman showed the film were born after the military coup or were children when it happened. Their reactions vary. One student criticizes the film for being one-sided since it focuses only on the workers. "What about the owners of the factories?" he asks. Another disagrees with the film's contention that the CIA was involved in the coup. Like many rightists in Chile, he believes that the U.S. unjustly criticized the military of abusing human rights. Why did the U.S. desert the Pinochet government when it led the first successful rollback of a "communist" government? The young man concludes that it is obvious that the CIA was not involved in the overthrow of the UP government because "the coup was a perfect military success. The Chilean army was much more efficient in the fight against Marxism Leninism than the U.S. army." He justifies the coup and the human rights abuses that followed by pointing out that "only 2,132 people died. The coup was efficient and surgical. It saved the country from a civil war." His words reflect the position adopted by many on the right when confronted with the findings of the Rettig Report (the truth commission established by the Aylwin government to determine the numbers and types of human rights abuses committed by the Pinochet dictatorship): those who died were not victims but armed combatants in a civil war. The military fought and killed them as part of its duty to protect the nation. Thus, there were no human rights abuses. The rest is all communist propaganda.

Am I hearing an echo?

[Judi Lynn]

38. "Am I hearing an echo?" Sure looks like it to me...............

Surely no one can be that historically challenged, you'd think, but we have a lot of examples of denial right here, don't we?

Thanks so much for enlightening us on the reality of stolen children also occuring in other Latin American countries. It's something I want to look into more closely, to know more about it. I'm quite sure it could have been years at my normal speed before I found out what you shared in your post.

Found the following in a quick look for information on what Chile has been like since Pinochet's bloody coup:

(snip)....In 1973 when General Pinochet Agusto overthrew Allende, the golpe marked the beginning of 16 years of terror. During the '70s and '80s, thousands of women, children, and young men were killed, tortured, or kidnapped. Pinochet and his military committed some of the worst human rights abuses and very few military generals have actually been found guilty. Today, years after Pinochet´s reign of terror, Chileans are still crying out for justice and peace. Thus, for many Chileans, the realities of more conflict, of more death, and of more destruction, would only be a reminder of a gloomy past that they have been trying to put behind them.

This past weekend when I attended a Shakira concert live in the Estadio Nacional, these sentiments of hatred became even more evident. During one of Shakira´s songs, a huge image of Agusto Pinochet and President George W. Bush was depicted on the large screen. The two leaders were laughing and playing a game of chess. Yet, when you looked a little closer, the chess pieces were images of women and children of all races. And then standing above Pinochet and Bush was the grim reaper. When this image appeared on the screen, everyone in the stadium began to cheer. In the eyes of some Chileans, Bush and Pinochet are one of the same. As I stood there watching Shakira sing in front of this image, I began to feel that the possibility of war, of death was very much a reality. The conflict with Iraq was beginning to consume every action, every thought, and every word of mine. I stood there, feeling angry, sad and lost. I was angry at the thought that the future of our world lay at the hands of the irrational and personal decisions of Bush and Hussein. I was sad because I felt that all of my innocence had been lost. But mostly I felt lost.

Although I was chanting "no a la guerra" in unison with thousands of other Chileans, I felt lost because of the uncertainty of what lay ahead in my future. I was having difficulty processing everything that was surrounding me. The irony that I was standing in the same stadium where Pinochet had executed and tortured thousands of people sent chills down my spine. Was the world really going to face the reign of terror that Chile had been exposed to during the reign of Pinochet? Was this the grim future that lay ahead of us? As the song came to an end, I found myself staring at the ground with one thing in mind: peace is the only solution. Tears began to stream down my face as the crowd applauded the end of the song. At that moment, I knew that this would be something I was never going to forget. A week later, I still find myself having a difficult time putting words to this very concrete experience. What I can say is this though: Peace is the only answer, the only solution. For the sake of our future, for the sake of mankind, for the right to live, we can only seek peace. Hearing the testimonies of mothers who lost children or husbands during Pinochet's reign of terror is a constant reminder of how fragile life is. (snip)

http://www.bcheights.com/news/2003/03/17/Columns/Lessons.From.The.Past-393934.shtml

[LibertyorDeath]

6. WTF what part of his propaganda ministry did you work for?

Shall I send your post to Amnesty International and see what they say or should I contact the relatives of the missing the dead and the tortured under your illustrious hero Pinochet.

It is common knowledge and well documented that Pinochet's Regime used kidnapping and torture on a routine basis.

Your adoration of a Dictator is sickening.

"Some people will accuse me of being right wing "

Do ya think....

[Judi Lynn]

12. Horrid!

Some "commemorative" photos from that time:


http://eltiempo.terra.com.co/inte/latin/chile30aosdelgolpe/ARTICULO-WEB-_NOTA_INTERIOR-1242070.html


One of the "torture ships," "La Esmeralda," where an English priest was tortured to death





Kissinger & Pinochet

(snip) Kissinger dismissed American human rights campaigns against Chile's government as "domestic problems." And he assured Pinochet that he was against sanctions such as those proposed by Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, which would ban arms sales and transfers to governments that were gross human rights violators.

Kissinger joked with Pinochet, saying: "I don't know if you listen in on my phone, but if you do, you have just heard me issue instructions to Washington to make an all-out effort to --if we defeat it, we will deliver the F-5E's as we agreed to do." He told Pinochet, "We held up for a while in order to avoid providing additional ammunition to our enemies."

Both men also indicated worry about an amendment by Representative Donald Fraser, Democrat of Minnesota, to ban nonmilitary aid to egregious human rights violators. "As you know, Congress is now debating further restraints on aid to Chile," Kissinger told Pinochet. "We are opposed." (snip)
http://www.thememoryhole.org/pol/kissinger-declass.htm

Good post, LibertyorDeath.

[OKHRANA]

18. do you really need to resort to insults when you disagree?

If you do, you are breaking the rules of DU, and I don't want to play that game.

I just gave you some input from my own personal experience. I knew some would call me right wing, and lo and behold, you did, and a few others did too in one way or another. The lynch mob forms...

But your premises are mistaken, there was no kidnapping or torture on a routine basis. Why don't you argue things with facts?

And I stated that there were some cases of torture by some people acting without authority, and I did not nor do I endorse that, or make light of it, and I hope anyone who engaged in that gets what they deserve.

Have a nice day.

[0rganism]

9. Why not tell us about the massacres at the National Stadium, then?

You know the ones.

Go ahead. Tell us all about how rounding up political enemies for bouts of murder and rape is beneficial to the economy. It's all good, clean fun, just like baseball.

Tell us about how 40% of the country lived in poverty after Pinochet finished re-segregating the wealth, while you're at it.

It's very important that you give us a complete account, don't leave anything out.

[Name removed]

10. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[annagull]

11. Do you deny that entire families were killed under Pinochet?

Do you deny that an entire stadium was filled with people who were not "right wing" and executed? Do you deny that most people in Chile had someone in their family who was killed, or even worse, "disappeared"? And, if they were found, were in pieces? Is that a way to combat communism? What, exactly, was it you were fighting for? Refresh my memory...

[OKHRANA]

15. you are not citing any objective facts...

Of course an entire stadium of non right wing people or even a small portion of one was NOT executed. That is just so ridiculous. Check your source of information, you will find none of it is supported with any facts.

Hello. The total number of people killed in that entire civil war and during 17 years of Pinochet was 3,197, and a large percent of those were military deaths. Do the math.

More people died in car accidents during that time than died during this period of civil war, and most of the people that died did so while armed and attacking police officers establishing civil order. And if any died by being tortured, I condemn that.

I've also never even heard of any allegations of entire families killed under Pinochet. Don't let yourself be manipulated by idiots who open their mouths and say anything.

This is just the type of false information that was spewed out that I was talking about, thanks for proving my point.

[rman]

23. and what are your sources?

you cite none.

[OKHRANA]

31. I cited several sources and can cite many more...

And I'm talking about reliable sources not ones that spread false propaganda.

I'm able to sort good from bad data (and there is a lot of bad data) because of my own personal experience in Chile, and that of others whom I've spoken with in great detail over the years.

Even liberals in Chile accept that Allende tore down the country and that Pinochet did a tremendous amount of good and that most of the allegations against him are totally exagerated or made up. Only the most extreme radicals stand by Allende and spread false propaganda on Pinochet.

Many in the new generation in Chile who did not live through that time are being brainwashed to believe in how great Allende was and how bad Pinechet was. Stuff like that goes on everywhere. Unfortunately that is the only thing many of us get access to.

I read fluent Spanish and have read extensively on this topic over the years and will provide here some excellent links from Chile in Spanish.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/special_packages/focus/6763208.htm

http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2000/04-10-2000/vo16no08_pinochet.htm

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/4910/castellano.htm

http://www.fundacionpinochet.cl/

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/1770/Spanish.html

[rman]

22. that certainly puts some of your other posts in perspective

The ones that associate global RW-conspiracies with Extra Terrestrial shape shifters.
aka misinformation

[AP]

8. Read The Pinochet Files -- published in last year.

No matter what he did sexually, the worst thing he did was entrench the oligopoly and destroy democracy.

[OKHRANA]

17. Just what did he do sexually?

this is dumb, it's the kind of thing that only a segment of the most uninformed people who don't know Chile could fall for.

Maybe in these cases there's some good intentions but it's sad because it has absolutely no bearing on reality. If you're going to debate issues, it helps if you do it from an informed perspective, and I mean no offense by that.

[Judi Lynn]

19. AP, I read this article some time ago

Don't know if you've run across it, but it's worth reading:

(snip) SANTIAGO, Chile, Sept. 7 — Felipe Agüero says the nightmarish evening in late September 1973 is forever fixed in his mind. Then 21 and a student at Catholic University, Mr. Agüero had been arrested for having leftist pamphlets in his car five days after the military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. At the National Stadium in Santiago, a hood was put over his head, and he was stripped, burned and beaten, he said. When his captors allowed him to dress, the hood came loose for a moment, and he caught a glimpse of one of his torturers.

Fifteen years later, Mr. Agüero, by then a professor, was at an academic conference in Santiago. Among the 15 or so professors at the table, Mr. Agüero said, was the face he saw that night. "I never forgot that face," Mr. Agüero said in a telephone interview from Miami, where he now lives.

The face that Mr. Agüero said he remembered belongs to Emilio Meneses, a prominent and popular professor of military studies at the Institute of Political Science at Catholic University in Santiago. Mr. Agüero, who teaches at the School of International Studies at the University of Miami, said he was too shaken to confront Mr. Meneses at the 1988 conference and didn't make any accusation until February this year, prompted by a more open atmosphere in Chile.

Mr. Meneses said he was shocked by the charges. He denies torturing Mr. Agüero or anyone else. "I had no relation of any kind with Professor Agüero's interrogation or stay in the stadium," Mr. Meneses said in a written response to questions from The New York Times. "I did not know him then, nor did I see him." Mr. Meneses said he did spend about three weeks as a naval reservist at the stadium at the time, but his job was to process arriving prisoners and he was too far away to hear or see any abuse. Only weeks after he left the stadium did he hear word of the torture and murder, he said. In May, Mr. Meneses filed suit in Chile, accusing Mr. Agüero of libel, a crime punishable there by three years in prison.
(snip)

(snip) Mr. Agüero said he had finally found the resolve to confront Mr. Meneses this year after details about the torture of a family friend who later died, Eugenio Ruiz Tagle, came to light.

Three former prisoners accused the second in command of the Chilean Air Force, Gen. Hernán Gabrielli, of torturing Mr. Tagle and others. This was the first time someone so high in the military and on active duty had been charged with human rights violations. (General Gabrielli brought a libel suit against the prisoners, but it was dismissed; five cases brought by other former prisoners or their families are still pending. Under Chilean law, the statute of limitations on the crime of torture is five years, which has long passed.)

Mr. Agüero said that when he learned about Mr. Tagle's suffering — his nose was smashed, his ears were sliced off and his back was broken in several places — he decided that he shared responsibility for those torturers who had escaped punishment. "I am a silent accomplice," he said.
(snip/...)

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~pdn200/news/NYT20010908.htm

I have a really hard time actually trying to view torture and murder as simple "human rights violations," don't you? Quite the euphemism.

[annagull]

13. I believe that being "right wing" means you excuse mass murder

after seeing "The Battle for Chile" and the return film 23 years later, "Chile's Obstinate Memory" comments from their right wing were terrifyingly antihuman. The way they justify killing people is astonishing. The way that they can idealogoue any reality is really a site to behold. You can almost see people in America justifying the deaths of whole families simply for their ideology. So scary, what we can do to our neighbors.

[OKHRANA]

20. thanks for your comment...

I haven't seen the film you refer to. I don't know what terrifying anti-human comments you refer to. If I knew of any terrifying anti-human comments made by Pinochet, I would admit it to you and would have a different opinion of him.

Maybe being right wing means you excuse mass murder, but I would never excuse mass murder, nor do I know of any in Chile.

I'm sorry that this impression has been communicated by anyone because it just is not so, but I believe even Pinochet's opponents to this day agree that the official death/disappeared total is 3,197 or very close to that, and as I said in another post, that is over 17 years and includes about a third which are military casualties, and during periods of serious civil disturbance.

If there is serious interest by posters and you are open-minded I can get backup for all this (later on as I have to get some sleep, I'm in the West).

[Bridget Burke]

24. The Okhrana was the Czarist secret police...

Interesting name you've picked.

Kindly supply us with some documentation.

[JanMichael]

25. A nasty group. But I'm sure the 26,000 people murdered by them

without trial is "OK" to a Pinochet groupie.:shrug:

[OKHRANA]

28. 3,197 casualties in 17 years is accepted even by Chilean Socialists

Where you get the number 26,000 I have no idea, but I suspect it is thin air. Or maybe you have a source. If so, name it so we can see who spreads such falsehoods.

3,197 is still a lot even in 17 years, even during times of serious civil disturbances which many called a civil war; but it is not 26,000 and that is a big difference (8X) and it is important to make that distinction.

Moscow Radio announced in November 1973 that the total deaths after only two months was 700,000 and that was the type of lie that was spread. Maybe that was your source after they later modified their first "erroneous" reports. But we all know about the old Soviet media.

When we had our own civil war in the 1860's, over 600,000 American soldiers lost their lives and nobody called Abraham Lincoln a vicious human rights abuser, even though he was constantly on his generals to prosecute the war.

Remember how advisors told Lincoln that General Grant was a drunk, and he replied that Grant fights, Grant attacks, and maybe he could get some of Grant's whiskey to the other Generals so they could fight like Grant?

In all it's history since the mid 1600's, Chile's had remarkably few wars or violent internal conflicts, including Pinochet's years, and in all it's conflicts combined, internal or external, Chile's combined casualties have been under 40,000. Yes its a smaller country but the ratio is still extremely low.

Yes, 40K is still a lot of people, but historically and compared to most other countries in the world including the U.S., it's one of the lowest records of loss of life due to violence, bar none, and as a progressive Chilean, and despite Pinochet's faults, I take some pride in that.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/special_packages/focus/6763208.htm

http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2000/04-10-2000/vo16no08_pinochet.htm

[JanMichael]

30. I was talking about your Czarist fascist secret police.

Not Pinochet's atrocities.

Thanks for paying attention.

[OKHRANA]

26. no it wasn't

it was the Russian intelligence office in Paris involved in collecting intelligence on revolutionaries active throughout Europe from the late 1800's until the Russian Revolution.

I read some document collections from there which are on the internet, and it is an in-depth study in intelligence, and it is said that most major intelligence agencies of the future, including the Soviet and U.S., were offshoots of Okhrana and greatly influenced by the knowledge of these files, and intelligence is something which interests me.

My grandparents were refugees of the Russian Revolution and taught me Russian, love of the language and culture, and the word Okhrana just had a nice ring to it.

Their experience with extreme and brutal Communism also helped me form my views on what Pinochet helped Chile avoid.

Extremes on both sides can be bad.

[Bridget Burke]

27. We're still waiting....

For those links to the glories of Pinochet.

What's the difference between an "intelligence office" and a secret police?

[0rganism]

34. What a coincidence!

One of my great grandfathers, who happens to be my namesake, fled Czar Alexander III's extreme and brutal persecution, immigrated to America near the turn of the century, and earned money as a trapper with which he assisted the rest of his family in leaving monarchist Russia for the USA. I have to wonder if maybe your loyalist family was employed to murder my ancestors. Perhaps the reason I find your fawning admiration for right-wing causes, fascism and absolute monarchy, so distasteful is also tied to some trace of cultural and genetic memory.

Could it be that you are my nemesis? We should swear the oath of eternal enmity.

[gold_bug]

29. anti-human comments

by Pinochet... well, here's one of his better know quotations:

"Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood."
--Augusto Pinochet

And he certainly never displayed any hesitancy to reign over the murders of civilians. There's some other, more grotesque, Pinochet quotations but I can't find them at the moment.

And if you seriously think the righwingers have any qualms about unleashing that type of bloodshed perhaps you should look into things such as Operation Condor:
The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. John Dinges. New York: New Press, 2003. read a review of the book here on the Foreign Affairs website

[0rganism]

33. Oh, Pinochet was full of 'em

"Lamentably, almost everyone in the world is a Marxist - even if they don't know it themselves."

"Not a leaf moves in this country if I am not moving it. I want that to be clear!"

"I always acted in a democratic way," he said of the period after he ousted socialist President Salvador Allende in a coup and outlawed political parties in Chile.

"History teaches you that dictators never end up well." (after his arrest in Spain)

[Judi Lynn]

36. ButterflyBlood, here's a link which discusses the three torture ships

(snip) CHILE
TORTURE AND THE NAVAL TRAINING SHIP THE "ESMERALDA"

Background

Following the military coup on 11 September 1973, the military junta which seized power immediately embarked on a program of systematic and large-scale repression, exerting absolute control over the resources of the State and using these to commit human rights violations. Constitutional guarantees were suspended through more than 3,500 decree laws and four "constitutional laws" passed over several years. Congress was dissolved and a country-wide state of siege declared, under which hundreds of people were detained and countless more extrajudicially executed, a state policy of "disappearance" put in place and torture was used systematically.

With the return to civilian rule in 1990, two bodies were created in different periods to gather information leading to the clarification of the truth about "disappearances", extrajudicial executions and deaths resulting from torture by state agents. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (know as the Rettig Commission) (Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación) was set up by the administration of President Patricio Aylwin, and published its report in March 1991. The National Reparation and Reconciliation Corporation, (Corporación Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación) was established in 1992 as a successor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Rettig Commission) and published its final report, when its mandate came to an end in 1996. The combined findings of the two commissions officially documented 3,197 cases of victims of "disappearances", extrajudicial execution and death resulting from torture. This figure did not include the victims of torture who survived their ordeal.

The report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Rettig Report) registers a number of navy vessels used as detention and torture centres by the Chilean navy at the time of the coup lead by General Augusto Pinochet. The Chilean naval training ship "Esmeralda" is listed together with the "Lebu" and the "Maipo". According to the Rettig Report, in the "Esmeralda", a special group of Navy officials "installed a unit for the interrogation of detainees. Such interrogation included, as a general rule, ill-treatment and torture".(1)

In September 1999, following denials on national television by Navy Commander-in-Chief-(Comandante en Jefe de la Armada) Admiral Jorge Patricio Arancibia Reyes, that naval ships or installations were used as torture centres, two former prisoners, Antonio Leal, a deputy for the Party for Democracy in 1973, and Ivan Aldoney Vargas, publicly stated that political prisoners were tortured on board the "Esmeralda" and other naval vessels and installations. In a September 1999 press conference Antonio Leal described the type of torture carried out on the "Esmeralda" including the use of electric prods, high-voltage electric charges applied to the testicles, hanging by the feet and dumping in a bucket of water or excrement (Santiago Times, 7 September 1999).
(snip/...)
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR220062003?open&of=ENG-325

GENERAL MAYHEM:

(snip) After sabotaging Allende’s electoral endeavor in 1964, and failing to do so in 1970, despite their best efforts, the CIA and the rest of the American foreign policy machine left no stone unturned in their attempt to destabilize the Allende government over the next three years, paying particular attention to building up military hostility. Finally, in September 1973, the military overthrew the government, Allende dying in the process.

They closed the country to the outside world for a week, while the tanks rolled and the soldiers broke down doors; the stadiums rang with the sounds of execution and the bodies piled up along the streets and floated in the river; the torture centers opened for business; the subversive books were thrown into bonfires; soldiers slit the trouser legs of women, shouting that “In Chile women wear dresses!”; the poor returned to their natural state; and the men of the world in Washington and in the halls of international finance opened up their check-books. In the end, more than 3,000 had been executed, thousands more tortured or disappeared.
(End of Killing Hope excerpt)

In the bloody coup of September 11, 1973, Henry Kissinger and the CIA helped General Augusto Pinochet overthrow the democratically elected leftist government of President Salvador Allende.

The Fascist puppet-regime of Pinochet then embarked on a 17-year terror campaign against the people of Chile, which included mass arrests and executions, death squads, torture and disappearances.

Many of the victims were fingered as “radicals” by lists provided by the CIA.

Santiago’s national stadium was used as a mass execution site. Robert Saldias, the first army officer to come forward publicly without concealing his identity, said prisoners entering the stadium were identified by yellow, black, and red discs. “Whoever received a red disc had no chance,” Saldias said.

Many of the professional torturers and assassins in the Chilean military (and in every other Fascist country of Central and South America) were trained at the “School of the Americas”, in Fort Benning, Georgia.
(snip/...)

http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/usgenocide/CrbnCnSthAmrc.html#Chile73