Profiles

Obituary: Augusto Pinochet     

The 17 years of General Augusto Pinochet's military rule cast a long shadow over Chile that the country only began to fully emerge from in recent years.

Pinochet suffered an acute heart attack on December 3, days after his 91st birthday and an acknowledgment, for the first time, that he was politically responsible for the actions of his military government which ran the country between 1973 and 1990. He died on December 10.

It is estimated that about 3,000 people deemed to be opponents of the junta were executed or "disappeared" and were presumed to have been killed under his leadership.

About 28,000 people were also believed to have been tortured under Pinochet and tens of thousands of others fled the country.

Since relinquishing power in 1990 more than 250 lawsuits were brought against the general, mainly on charges of human rights abuses and fraud.

Coup d'etat

A variety of reasons including immunity from prosecution due to ill health and "mild dementia" have meant he has never stood trial.

At the time of his heart attack, Pinochet was under house arrest on charges linked to the disappearance of two security guards who had been working for Salvador Allende, the former president.

Allende, an elected Marxist leader, was deposed by Pinochet, then commander-in-chief of the army, in a bloody coup on September 11, 1973, in which the presidential palace, La Moneda, was bombed.{styleboxop}{/styleboxop}

A junta headed by Pinochet was established and consolidated its power by targeting opponents, with the first few months after the coup seeing the worst violence.

In the days after September 11, the national stadium in Santiago was transformed into a concentration camp that at one stage was a detention post for about 40,000 people.

In October the same year, an estimated 70 people were killed during operations by the "Caravan of Death", a Chilean army team that flew by helicopter from the south to the north of the country and ordered or carried out executions of people held in custody.

In 1991, after Pinochet had relinquished power to a democratic government, a commission set up to investigate alleged human rights abuses under the government listed a number of detention centres used by the secret police to torture people.

Military man

One such centre was Villa Grimaldi, where Chile's current president Michelle Bachelet, and her mother were both tortured for a month in 1975.

Pinochet was born in the port of Valparaiso on November 25, 1915. He was expelled from school when he was 15 and joined the army.

After slowly rising through the ranks he was appointed as the head of the military by Allende, just a month before he was to depose him.

A year after the coup, Pinochet named himself president. He is quoted as once saying, "Not even a leaf moves in Chile without my knowing it," although it took until recently for him to acknowledge his power officially.

Before and during his rule it is believed that his military government received support and approval from the US, although this is still disputed.

Chile was one of the few countries in South America to support the government of Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands war in 1983.

Pinochet's presidency still divides Chile. Despite the human rights abuses, many Chileans admired his campaign against communism and his free-market economic policies that laid the foundations for the economic outlook the country enjoys today.

Legal wrangles

A number of supporters held a vigil outside the hospital where he was being treated after his heart attack and there are still doubts over how the present government would handle his funeral.

Pinochet reluctantly stepped down in 1988 after defeat in a plebiscite on whether he should remain in power for another eight years.

But he ensured that he would not lose political influence when a new constitution was passed that allowed him to remain as army chief until 1998 and gave him a lifetime seat in the senate.

Pinochet was arrested in Britain during a private visit in 1998 under a warrant issued by a Spanish judge seeking to try him for human rights abuses. He was released after 503 days of house arrest for health reasons.

In 2000, Chile's supreme court stripped him of his parliamentary immunity and a short time later he was again placed under house arrest.

In June 2005, a court lifted his immunity from prosecution for fraud but annulled human rights charges for his role in a crackdown conspiracy of South American dictatorships.

The nearest he ever came to any kind of prosecution was in 2000 when he was interrogated in connection with a "Caravan of Death" case, but avoided trial because of ongoing appeals and medical problems.