From: Pastor Valle-Garay
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 9:19 AM
To: Walter Lippmann
Subject: Untimely Death 
Importance: High 

On escaping the gallows

 

In Final Act Pinochet

Cheats Chilean Justice

 

Por: Pastor Valle-Garay

Senior Scholar, Universidad de York

 

Toronto, Canadá. Chilean justice moved ever too slowly. Death was too generous to the murderer. It walked in hand in hand with the ultimate irony: one of the most sadist violators of human rights would die on December 10, the International Day of Human Rights.

 

It was about time but it was not just. When all is said and done, ex dictator and retired General Augusto Pinochet had cheated Chilean justice. Down came the curtain in the final act. Out went Pinochet at 91. He finally kicked the bucket in Santiago’s Military Hospital. Dead of cardiac failure. In medical parlance “descompesacion aguda.” Acute unbalance.  Some epitaph! Everyone knew all along that the bastard was unbalanced. Still, the death certificate leaves behind a black hole. The cause of death is reduced to its simplest, easiest form. Much too gentle. Much too easy. Pinochet deserved the gallows.

 

In 1973 overthrew the legitimate government of Marxist President Salvador Allende in a bloody, violent coup engineered by the US Central Intelligence Agency. According to statistics from the Chilean government Pinochet, who ruled with an iron fist until 1990, was responsible for the assassination of 3,197 people, for the disappearance of thousands more, and for jailing and sending into exile tens of thousands of Chileans.   

 

Pinochet’s bloody coup initiated a reign of terror unparalleled in Chilean history. His henchmen’s raids rounded up suspected dissidents and filled with prisoners Santiago’s National Stadium. The sports complex became a jail, a centre of torture and of summary executions. Soon after, the dictator set up the Caravan of Death which specialized in throwing political prisoners to the ocean from military helicopters, torturing them to death and burying them in unmarked, common graves still being discovered in the Atacama desert, in the coastal city of La Serena, in the southern town of Cauquenes and in so many other places that is safe to say that Pinochet transformed all of Chile into his private cemetery.

 

Pinochet internationalized terrorism. His death squads crossed borders. In cahoots with right-wing Latin American dictators, Pinochet created Operation Condor. It had a singular purpose: exterminating leftist sympathizers in Chile and abroad. In 1976 Orlando Letelier, former Minister of Foreign Affairs in President Allende’s government became Operation Condor’s most prominent victim. Pinochet’s assassins blew up Letelier's vehicle in Washington D.C. as he travelled to work killing him and his US assistant Ronni Moffitt. 

 

“Not a leaf moves in this country if I’m not moving it,” the General used to brag. He was dead right. To the end. In spite of numerous criminal indictments, Pinochet did escape Chile’s justice. Among other legal subterfuges Pinochet claimed political immunity, senility, dementia and heart disease. He spent his final days in two luxurious mansions, fringe benefits of the systematic, multimillion dollar theft of the nation’s funds secretly deposited in Washington bank accounts. Now it does not matter. Pinochet is dead and he died when he felt like dying. It should have never happened this way but … better late than never.

 

And now, what? In Allende’s last speech, broadcast while Pinochet’s Air Force dive-bombed the Presidential Palace in a brutal attack that would ultimately cause the President’s death in 1973, Allende spoke with supreme conviction. He reassured the nation that “free Chileans would walk again along the tree-lined boulevards.”  It happened. Now it would be only fair to hang Pinochet from the tallest tree in the boulevard. It would be a grim but deserving reminder of the genocide committed against the nation.  

 

Pinochet would not be the first to deserve the treatment. It was accorded to Benito Mussolini at the end of World War II. Of course, Chileans won’t lower themselves to the executioner’s level. They are much too civilized. However, just in case, Pinochet was dubious about his final resting place. After being gifted with such an uneventful death he anticipated the worst. In a statement to the press his son Marco Antonio, also indicted in the multimillion frauds to the nation, indicated that the tyrant’s last wish was to be cremated in order to avoid the desecration of his tomb “by the people who always hated me.”

 

¡Such presence of a feeble mind! It makes me wonder if Pinochet’s hunch originated after reading the poem written by the exquisite Marxist poet and Catholic priest Ernesto Cardenal. The poem was dedicated to Anastasio Somoza, the brutal ex dictator and ex General of Nicaragua who, like Pinochet, died in infamy. It speaks of the ceremony in which Somoza unveiled a statue of himself mounted on top of a horse. Ironically it was a statue of Mussolini, an iron left over from his days al Il Duce. Somoza bought it in Italy for a million dollars, brought it to Nicaragua and placed it in front of the National Stadium.   

 

Ernesto titled his poem “Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue in the Somoza Stadium.” It reads: “It’s not that I think the people raised this statue to me/because I know better than you do that I ordered it myself./Nor that I have any illusions about passing with it into posterity/because I know the people one day will tear it down./ Nor that I wish to erect to myself in life/the monument you’ll not erect to me in death:/I put up this statue just because I know you’ll hate it.”

 

Visionary advise from Ernesto. Accurate assumption by Pinochet. Upon the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979, Somoza fled to Miami. Where else? Nicaraguans wasted no time in tearing down the dictator’s hated statue. It was dragged through the streets. Eventually a piece of the horse's rear end was placed at the Sandinista Ministry of Culture’s main gate. It was a tribute of sorts to Ernesto, by then the Sandinista Minister of Culture. Poetic justice, no?   

 

As for Pinochet, I believe his suspicions were well founded. If he feared his bones would not rest in peace, better to burn them. As for the government of President Michelle Bachelet, if there is an ounce of decency left her government should not honour with a state funeral the remains of a brutal tyrant who dishonoured Chile for so long. The military will do what the military always does: close ranks on one of their own no matter how shameful the colleague conducted himself. As far as everyone else is concerned, let the bastard burn. In secret. Without ceremony. The sooner the better. Avoid the risk of his ashes further contaminating the putrid environment Pinochet leaves behind.