Augusto Pinochet

Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte , pronounced almost like "pee-no-shit"The pronunciation of "pee-no-shit" is /pi'noˈʃɪt/ in IPA. The actual pronunciation of Pinochet has 4 different pronunciations but not that one: /pinoˈʃet/, /pinoˈtʃet/, /pinoˈʃe/ or /pinoˈtʃe/. in Spanish, was a murderous dictator and corrupt embezzler of government assetsAugusto Pinochet 'amassed $21m fortune' (5 June 2010) Belfast Telegraph (archived from June 8, 2010).Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2021) W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393868419. 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."Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile's Democracy 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".Political Compass 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.Cancer Didn’t Kill Pablo Neruda, Panel Finds. Was It Murder?, The New York Times Suffice to say, he was a dick.
==Life and ascension to power==
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 clampdownSome desperate reference to The Clash! surely needs to be entered here. 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-pressuredThe dictator's shadow: life under Augusto Pinochet 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.
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,Leigh was forced out of the military junta in 1978 for challenging Pinochet, after it became clear that the dictator had no intention of calling for democratic elections. He was replaced by Fernando Matthei, the father of future center-right presidential candidate Evelyn Matthei. In 1990, Leigh lost an eye after surviving an assassination attempt allegedly carried out by a leftist rebel group, but most likely a hit ordered by his former friend Augusto. and supported by the CIA, the Brazilian military dictatorship, and the intelligence services of fucking Australia of all places.Questions over Australian involvement in Chile coup Pinochet was a lifelong coward and he only joined the conspiracy (reluctantly) two days before the coup.The night before the coup, Pinochet sent his wife and children to the Los Andes High Mountain School whose director was his personal friend, Colonel Renato Cantuarias. Pinochet made Cantuarias promise that he would get his family safely out of the country if the coup failed. Less than a month later, however, Cantuarias was arrested and forced to commit suicide by Pinochet's goons. He knew too much. 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==
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.
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;Amnesty International Annual Report 1973-1974, 38: the currently accepted number is slightly over 3,200, 56% of whom had no political affiliation (only one quarter of the victims were communists and 14% were socialists)."Los números que son memoria", La Tercera 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.https://www.democratic-erosion.com/2020/12/16/democracy-for-the-indigenous-people-of-chile/
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).Los Archivos del Horror del Operativo Cóndor by Stella Calloni, on Nizkor's website (Spanish) 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.CIA Acknowledges Ties to Pinochet's Repression, George Washington University 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),32 years after the assassination, Prats's grandson would literally spit on the dictator's coffin. 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;Before his change of heart, however, General Lutz was involved in the murder and disappearance of American journalist Charles Horman, the case which is depicted in the film 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),Later, the French manufacturer that produced the helicopter sent two experts to Chile to investigate the "accident"... and they both died in a similar crash during the investigation. What an unfortunate coincidence. 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.Constable, Pamela and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet, p. 310-311 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 and he would throw an even worse shit fit in 1993 after the investigation was re-opened.
===Friedman-fighter===
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.How Pinochet turned Chile into a globally admired model of authoritarian capitalism Centre for Imperial and Global History, University of Exeter. May 9, 2019 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 , 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==
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.Pinochet directly ordered killing on US soil of Chilean diplomat, papers reveal, The Guardian
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:
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."
Another noted apologist is British right-wing historian and Nixon fanboy , who argued that Pinochet "saved Chile from descending to chaos" and blamed DINA for committing human rights atrocities without Pinochet's knowledge."Rightwing fan club tinkers with Chile history", The Guardian, 20 January 1999 He and fellow Pinochet fanboy MP (who himself called Pinochet a "good and brave and honourable soldier") tried in vain to prevent Pinochet's arrest for human rights abuses.
== Fascism ==
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), 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 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==
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,Most of said aliases were unimaginative variations of his real name (Ramón Augusto Pinochet, Augusto Ramón Pinochet, Ramoncito Ugarte, etc.), with the notable exception of Daniel López, a name so randomly bland when compared to the ominous and evil-sounding Augusto Pinochet it became a meme. 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.Pinochet 'sold cocaine to Europe and US' by Jonathan Franklin, The Guardian, Tuesday 11 July 2006
In 2006, Pinochet suffered a heart attack and died on December 10 ( oh baby). Days before, on his 91st 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. Thatcher stands by Pinochet, BBC 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.'Without Chile's help, we would have lost the Falklands' by Harriet Alexander, The Telegraph, 07 Jul 2014 Say what you will, she remembered her friends.
In 2020, 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==
"Free helicopter rides for leftists" is a meme circulating on alt-right/ancap message boards.Futrelle, David, "If Donald Trump offers you a free helicopter ride, say no", We Hunted the Mammoth 6.17.16. Pinochet negotiating some free flying saucer rides"I Need a Pinochet" - Bonnie Tyler cover (because fuck intellectual property rights). 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 "" 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.Chornik, Katia, Sexual violence, torture and Chile’s struggle for historical memory, OpenDemocracy, 7 October 2019. 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"). The torture center was hosted in a house on Calle Irán, in south-east Santiago, Chile's capital. 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. Women were particularly targeted for sexual abuse, suffering rape, forced pregnancies, abortions, and sexual slurs. Female and male prisoners were also subjected to beatings, hangings, electric shocks, Russian roulette, asphyxia, and sleep deprivation, among other torture methods. 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. 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. 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.How a Pinochet ‘death flight’ helicopter became UK gamepark prop by Charis McGowan (4 Aug 2023 07.00 EDT) The Guardian.
For some reason, the Pepes never seem to bring those up.Comerford, Cathy, "Law lords told of Pinochet atrocities", Independent (20 January 1999 00:02 GMT)."Chile, Germany establish Colonia Dignidad commission", Deutsche Welle, 13 July 2017. Pinochet helicopter memes should be replaced with Pedobear cartoons. 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 PinochetDespite also styling himself as an anti-American "leftist." and throw people out of a helicopter, even if he's telling stories."Philippines Duterte: I threw suspect from helicopter", BBC 12.29.16.
==See also==
*Francisco Franco
*Friedrich August 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.
*Jorge Rafael Videla
*School of the Americas
*Sebastián Piñera
==External links==
*Augusto Pinochet biography
*A Chilean Dictator's Dark Legacy, Washington Post
*People have hope because they don't see death standing behind them.
==Notes==
==References==
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