SANTIAGO, Chile — The poster makes its plea from one of the pock-marked walls once splattered with blood at Londres 38, a former detention and torture center where 96 people were killed or disappeared during Chile’s long dictatorship. It reads: “Pinochet, may your legacy die.”
Yet that legacy is far from dead. Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s loyalists on Sunday held their biggest gathering since his death in 2006, and it has ignited a national debate about the limits of freedom of speech as groups on the other side sought to block the event and then staged protests to try to disrupt it. Police used tear gas and water cannons to try to disperse hundreds of anti-Pinochet demonstrators protesting the premiere of a documentary about the run-up to his dictatorship years. The film casts him as a national hero who saved Chile from communism and who died victimized by vengeful leftists who accused him of embezzlement and human-rights crimes.
The screening was organized by Corporacion 11 de Septiembre, named for the day when Pinochet seized power in a bloody 1973 coup that brought down the democratically elected government of Marxist President Salvador Allende.
