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Pinochet: goodbye and good riddance

by · 10th December, 2006

It was with some delight that I read the news this evening that General Pinochet had died. It cheered me up somewhat since I’ve been feeling rather depressed this week.

I don’t have any personal connections with Chile but remember seeing a video at school about Amnesty International presented by Paul Gambaccini, in which there was a section about a man who was burned to death in the street by Pinochet’s thugs in the 1980s. By the time we saw this, Pinochet was well on his way out (we weren’t told this at the time), but he kept popping up in the news as people continually protested as he was warmly welcomed to this country for visits to arms fairs in London.

Then the government changed, Major’s Tories were out and Labour were in, and Pinochet turned up for some kind of medical treatment to have a Spanish arrest warrant served on him for murdering Spanish citizens. Major’s government would have ignored the request, regarding him as a “good friend” who had helped us out in the Falklands and was in the country on trust. At that time, it has to be remembered, the Labour government were not seen as American patsies but as a fresh and reforming government who did not see themselves as being in debt to the West’s unsavoury Cold War allies (as if we needed Pinochet anyway; it was not a front line in the Cold War at all).

At the time, we heard a lot of this sanctimonious nonsense, mostly from the Conservative benches and press, about Pinochet being such a good friend and that he wasn’t as brutal as some other dictators (such as those of Argentina) and that he had held a referendum and honoured its result. I’m sure there was a lot of this talk in Chile recently as the general was tried for human rights abuses (why don’t they just call it torture and murder?) and tax evasion. The problem is that none of this detracts from the fact that he staged a bloody coup against an elected (if inefficient) government, arranged the kidnapping, false imprisonment, torture, rape and murder of thousands of people, kept millions of others in poverty, and tested out an imported economic model on his people which eventually nearly bankrupted the country. So what if he left of his own accord? The reason for this is that he was finished.

For him or his supporters to plead that he should not be turned on and prosecuted for the murders and other crimes he got away with for years because he was the leader of a dictatorship is a bit like a rapist pleading that he should not be prosecuted because he left of his own accord. Rapists are sometimes kicked off or dragged off, but usually leave their victims because they have finished the act, not because they have some sort of fit of conscience. Even if they did, there would be no question of leaving them unpunished - unless you believe that the victim asked for it, which some right-wing commentators said that Pinochet’s victims did, by being Marxists (which many of them were not). I am sure we will see plenty of laudatory articles in the right-wing press this coming week which will gloss over the mass murder and torture, and the fact that he was an international terrorist who had his opponents (definitely not Marxists) bumped off with car bombs in the USA and Argentina, in favour of his “economic miracle” and “loyalty”, but generals are not meant to be loyal to foreign powers but to their own people.

(Update: actually the British right-wing press seems to have lost its enthusiasm for dictators - after all, the fashion now is supposedly for deposing rather than indulging them. See Daniel Finkelstein, Stephen Pollard, the Telegraph’s obit which is hardly laudatory except to inform us that he saved Chile from communism, for starters. And the title is changed, as his legitimacy was not in question even if his régime’s definitely was.)

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