William K. Wolfrum Chronicles

Augusto Pinochet died today at the age of 91. With help from the CIA, Pinochet overthrew the elected government of Chile in 1973. Henry Kissinger announced he won’t be attending the funeral, as he’d be immediately arrested and charged with war crimes if he stepped foot in South America.

From the AP:

Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president in a bloody coup and ruled the Andean nation for 17 years, died Sunday, dashing hopes of victims of his regime’s abuses that he would be brought to justice. He was 91.

As the mustachioed Pinochet crushed dissent during his 1973-90 rule, he left little doubt about who was in charge. “Not a leaf moves in this country if I’m not moving it,” he once said.

Pinochet, born November 25, 1915, as the son of a customs official in the port of Valparaiso, was commander of the army at the time of the 1973 coup, appointed 19 days earlier by the president he toppled.

The CIA tried for months to destabilize the Allende government, including financing a truckers strike that paralyzed the delivery of goods across Chile, but Washington denied having anything to do with the coup.

In the days following Pinochet’s seizure of power, soldiers carried out mass arrests of leftists. Tanks rumbled through the streets of the capital.

Many detainees, including Americans Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, were herded into the National Stadium, which became a torture and detention center. The Americans were among those executed by the Chilean military, their deaths chronicled in the 1982 film “Missing.”

Other leftists were rounded up by a death squad known as the “Caravan of Death.” Victims were buried in unmarked mass graves in the northern Atacama desert, in the coastal city of La Serena and in the southern city of Cauquenes.

Pinochet disbanded Congress, banned political activity and started a harsh anti-leftist repression. At least 3,197 people were killed, more than 1,000 others are unaccounted for, and thousands more were arrested, tortured and forced into exile.

Pro-War Americans have pointed out that thousands and thousands died during D-Day and the Battle of Normandy, so the deaths of 3,200 under Pinochet is a small price to have created a thriving, successful, Pro-American democracy in Chile.

–WKW

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Politics, Life and Such, satire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.