After Death, a Campaign to Praise Pinochet
When he died two Sundays ago, Gen. Augusto Pinochet was in disgrace, facing the prospect of trials for human rights abuses and for illicitly accumulating a $28 million fortune.
His closest associates, however, have seized upon his death as an opportunity to rehabilitate his tattered image and rewrite the recent history of Chile.
The widespread publication on Sunday of a farewell letter from General Pinochet to “all Chileans, without exception” was perhaps the most notable salvo in that posthumous public relations offensive, but it was not an isolated move. Rather, it appears to be part of a campaign to portray the former dictator as a victim of a vengeful leftist cabal, instead of a notorious human rights offender and embezzler.
“My destiny is a kind of banishment and solitude that I would never have imagined, much less desired,” General Pinochet lamented in the letter. He also referred to what he called his “captivity in London,” where he was held from late 1998 until early 2000 while British judges debated whether to extradite him to Spain to stand trial for some of the thousands of murders, kidnappings and acts of torture that occurred during the 17 years he was in power.
The main argument being presented to try to restore General Pinochet’s tainted reputation is a variant of one used to eulogize Mussolini, of whom it was said that “he made the trains run on time” in Italy. Right-wing commentators in the generally conservative Chilean press have praised General Pinochet for his role in transforming Chile into Latin America’s most dynamic economy, without mentioning that he crushed labor unions and outlawed political parties in order to do so.
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His closest associates, however, have seized upon his death as an opportunity to rehabilitate his tattered image and rewrite the recent history of Chile.
The widespread publication on Sunday of a farewell letter from General Pinochet to “all Chileans, without exception” was perhaps the most notable salvo in that posthumous public relations offensive, but it was not an isolated move. Rather, it appears to be part of a campaign to portray the former dictator as a victim of a vengeful leftist cabal, instead of a notorious human rights offender and embezzler.
“My destiny is a kind of banishment and solitude that I would never have imagined, much less desired,” General Pinochet lamented in the letter. He also referred to what he called his “captivity in London,” where he was held from late 1998 until early 2000 while British judges debated whether to extradite him to Spain to stand trial for some of the thousands of murders, kidnappings and acts of torture that occurred during the 17 years he was in power.
The main argument being presented to try to restore General Pinochet’s tainted reputation is a variant of one used to eulogize Mussolini, of whom it was said that “he made the trains run on time” in Italy. Right-wing commentators in the generally conservative Chilean press have praised General Pinochet for his role in transforming Chile into Latin America’s most dynamic economy, without mentioning that he crushed labor unions and outlawed political parties in order to do so.