Pinochet's Legacy

Millions of Chileans got an unexpected gift December 10, on International Human Rights Day. The country's 91-year-old former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, was plucked from this earth shortly after midday.

Many of us who survived General Pinochet's dictatorship (I escaped Chile, where I had worked as a translator for Salvador Allende, the elected President overthrown by Pinochet) would have preferred the tyrant to have lived just a bit longer--long enough to stand trial on one of the multiple counts of murder, torture and kidnapping pressed against him as a result of his seventeen-year reign of terror. But greater forces intervened.

Pinochet's very name came to symbolize all the horror that can follow when democracy is supplanted by dictatorship. Even now there are those who justify his brutal rule by citing statistics of economic growth. But there's another, more chilling set of numbers that will forever define the Pinochet dictatorship: In a country of barely 11 million at the time he seized power, 3,200 were murdered by the state, more than 1,000 disappeared (some of them thrown into the ocean, others into pits of lime), tens of thousands were tortured and hundreds of thousands fled into political exile.

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