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Analysis: Pinochet's Troubling Legacy

Council on Foreign Relations

December 11, 2006
Prepared by: Stephanie Hanson

In 1989, Augusto Pinochet said: "I'll go to heaven. Where would I have gone, do you think? To hell? No, don't worry, I'll go to heaven" (BBC). Likely to agree are those Chileans who view Pinochet, head of the military junta that led Chile in the 1970s and 1980s, as a national hero and the economic savior of their country. But the ranks of those who disagree—both in Chile and abroad—loom large. News of his death on Sunday, International Human Rights Day, was met with jubilance (Times of London) by thousands of his opponents, who took to the streets of Santiago. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet announced that Pinochet will not receive a state funeral. Over the last ten years of his life, Pinochet teetered on the verge of prosecution for crimes against humanity and fraud, but ill health repeatedly kept him from standing trial. Amnesty International offers this timeline of the complicated criminal proceedings against Pinochet.

During his rule, at least three thousand people were killed or “disappeared,” and thousands more were tortured. One of the most notorious incidents, and the basis for Pinochet’s prosecution, was the “Caravan of Death” (BBC), a 1973 military delegation that traveled by helicopter from town to town, executing political opponents. For years, there was no official acknowledgement of these crimes by the Chilean government, and no charges leveled against the military (Pinochet had passed an amnesty law preventing prosecution for any human rights abuses committed before 1978.) But “Chile, thanks to the Pinochet affair, is now finally well along the path of recovering a history that was on the verge of erasure,” writes journalist Marc Cooper in the Nation.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.