Pinochet dies in Santiago, aged 91

Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte died of a heart attack in Santiago, Chile on Sunday, 10 December. He became the dictator of Chile in 1973 when a military coup, backed by the United States, ousted the democratically elected regime of President Salvador Allende was overthrown. Pinochet ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 and had been under investigation for human rights abuses during his period as dictator.

Pinochet was a descendant of Breton emigrants to Chile and was born in Valparaíso on November 25, 1915.He entered military school in 1933. In 1972 he was appointed General Chief of Staff of the Chilean army and ni August 1973 he was appointed Army Commander in Chief Salvador Allende. They were both members of the same lodge of the Masonic order. That appointment was made just one day after Parliament voted a resolution calling Allende's removal, by force if necessary. He came to power in a coup d'état on 11 September, 1973 after the Chamber of Deputies in its Resolution of August 22, 1973 declared that Allende had violated the Constitution. President Allende died before being captured, allegedly by his own hand, but that has long been in dispute. Pinochet was  proclaimed President on 27 June, 1974.

Under Pinochet, Chile became the laboratory for the neo-liberal economic experiment, which ahs since become the western world's orthodoxy. He declared that he wanted "to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of proprietors." He obtained the advice of the famed Chicago economist,  Milton Friedman, who also died recently. He engaged ni a programme of deregulation and privitisations, involving state industries, banks and the pensions system. He lower income tax. The result was strong economic growth, accompanied by high unemployment and huge inequality. A commission established after he left office, the Rettig Commission, listed 2,095 deaths of opponents of his regime murdered by the State security services.  Pinochet lost the 1988 referendum, where 55% of the votes rejected the extension of the presidential term, against 42% for "Sí", and, though a plebiscite is technically non-binding, this one triggered multi-candidate presidential elections in 1989 to choose his replacement. Pinochet left the presidency on March 11, 1990 and transferred power to Patricio Aylwin, the new democratically elected president.Pinochet remained as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, until March 1998. He was then sworn in as a senator-for-life, a privilege first granted to former presidents with at least six years in office by the 1980 constitution.

His senatorship and consequent immunity from prosecution protected him, and legal challenges began only after Pinochet had been arrested in the United Kingdom.There have been several reports which describe the human rights abuses carried out by the Pinochet regime. In January 2005, the Chilean Army accepted institutional responsibility for past abuses. Other institutions also accept that abuses took place, but blame them on individuals, rather than official policy. Lucía Pinochet Hiriart, Augusto Pinochet's eldest daughter, said the use of torture during his 1973–90 regime was "barbaric and without justification", after seeing the Valech Report.Pinochet left behind a series of abandoned concentration camps. Most of them have been either destroyed or dismantled, others remain partially intact or have been turned into museums or sites of remembrance. Some of these include Villa Grimaldi, Chacabuco, National Stadium and Pisagua.On Pinochet's 91st birthday, November 25, 2006, in a public statement to supporters, Pinochet for the first time accepted "political responsibility" for what happened in Chile under his regime, though he still defended his 1973 coup against Salvador Allende. In a statement read by his wife Lucia Hiriart, he said, "Today, near the end of my days, I want to say that I harbour no rancour against anybody, that I love my fatherland above all. ... I take political responsibility for everything that was done."