Santiago, Chile – Chile’s military will hold a wake today for former leader Augusto Pinochet, as supporters mourned and opponents celebrated the death of the retired general whose 17-year dictatorship was marked by human-rights abuses.
Pinochet, who was 91, died Sunday of heart failure, according to the Santiago Military Hospital where he had been treated since Dec. 3 after a heart attack. The wake will be held at a Santiago military academy, where Pinochet’s funeral Mass will take place Tuesday before his remains are cremated, the government said Sunday on its website.
News of his death led thousands of people to pour into the streets of the capital, chanting, waving flags and pounding drums in a celebration that led to clashes involving police using tear gas. Across town, supporters held candles, waved Chilean flags and held photos of the late general outside the hospital where he died.
President Bush’s administration reached out to Pinochet’s opponents Sunday, saying his regime “represented one of the most difficult periods in that nation’s history.”
“Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.
Pinochet headed a regime that killed more than 3,000 suspected opponents, according to a government commission established after Chile’s return to democracy in 1990. He also imposed economic policies that created the foundation for the region’s wealthiest economy, said Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
Walking along a Santiago street with confetti in her hair, Angelica Munoz said Pinochet should have been in jail.
“He should have died a prisoner,” Munoz, 53, said. “He thought himself a god with power over people’s lives.”
Munoz, whose daughter stood beside her, said she was pregnant in 1974 when her husband, a Socialist, was detained by the regime’s forces and never returned.
Chilean judges charged Pinochet during the past year with involvement in disappearances and murders after the 1973 coup that brought him to power. He was also charged last year with evading taxes on $26 million that an investigating judge said he hid in foreign bank accounts. Pinochet avoided trial on earlier charges by saying his health was too frail for him to appear in court. He was never convicted of a crime.
To opponents, he was a brutal dictator who crushed democratic institutions while introducing economic policies that benefited his supporters and hurt the poor.
To supporters, the former general put a stop to communism, salvaged a faltering economy plagued by strikes and shortages and set the conditions for economic expansion by opening the nation to trade.
“The country wouldn’t be working as it is if it weren’t for him,” said Nancy Orellana, 59, surrounded by Pinochet supporters holding candles outside the hospital where he died.
“He saved us from the communists,” said Monica Loayza, waving a large photo of a smiling Pinochet.
Lawyers for Pinochet denied in court that he had any connection to crimes of violence and said he deposited his life savings in bank accounts abroad to avoid “political persecution” in Chile. Pinochet also denied defrauding the state during his regime.
Augusto Jose Ramon Pinochet Ugarte was born in the port city of Valparaiso on Nov. 25, 1915, to Augusto Pinochet Vera, a customs official, and Avelina Ugarte Martinez.
He entered military school in 1933 and graduated in 1936. Socialist President Salvador Allende named Pinochet army chief in August 1973, as shortages of food and gas eroded support for his presidency, which the U.S. opposed, Roett said.
On Sept. 11, 1973, military commanders, including Pinochet, coordinated aircraft and tank attacks that set fire to the presidential palace in Santiago. Allende, who had nationalized the nation’s copper industry and expropriated land to help the poor, committed suicide during the confrontation, Roett said.
Pinochet ruled Chile until 1990, after losing a national plebiscite in 1988 that led to democratic presidential elections. He remained chief of the armed forces until 1998.
In October 1998, he was arrested during a visit to London following an extradition request from Spain, where a judge investigated his involvement in murders tied to his regime. He was held under house arrest for 16 months. The British government allowed him to go back to Chile in March 2000, saying he was too frail to face trial.
During his final years, Pinochet lived in seclusion at his heavily guarded Santiago mansion and his countryside residence.
The government said Sunday that Pinochet will not receive the state funeral normally granted to a former president, but only military honors at the Santiago military academy.
President Michelle Bachelet, who was imprisoned and mistreated during the dictatorship, recently said it would be “a violation of my conscience” to attend a state funeral for Pinochet.
