Tag: Chile

Is Pinochet Still Dead?

Once and awhile I turn my attentions to thew international scene…there are times when the world needs to be reminded of some disgusting situations from the past…back in the dark days of the 70’s there was a prick of a dictator, one Pinochet that lead a coup that overthrew the first popularly elected socialist president of Chile…..for those that do not remember the days…it sucked to be a Chilean leftist…it meant prison, torture and finally death…some 28,000 to be somewhat close…..Pinochet was eventually forced from office and became an instant international human rights fugitive….he eventually died….(I am sure that thousands of Chileans celebrated)…..

I know…this is old news, right?….hang in there …there is a method to my madness….

There has been a presidential election in Chile with some interesting back stories…..

Pinera, 60, won the contest against one-time President Eduardo Frei, a Christian Democrat, unseating the center-left coalition that had governed Chile since dictator Augusto Pinochet was forced from power in 1990.

The victory marks a political shift in Chile, a nation of 17 million people that straddles 4,100 kilometers (2,547 miles) of the Andes Mountains from its northern border with Peru to the Cape Horn.

In the 2010 election, Chileans chose a president with ties to the dictator who led the 1973 coup that left Socialist President Salvador Allende dead. Pinera managed a 1989 presidential campaign for Hernan Buchi, Pinochet’s former finance minister.

Pinera won with the support of two parties founded by former Pinochet collaborators — the National Renovation party and the Independent Democratic Union. Two of Pinera’s top campaign advisers held posts in the dictatorship and a third is a former Pinochet minister.

Pinera, a Harvard University-trained economist and former Citigroup Inc. executive, said during his campaign that he embraces Pinochet’s economic policies of cutting corporate taxes and encouraging investing in the country, and abhors the rule of terror.

Okay Chile has a new president, what is the big deal?……This guy says he was opposed to Pinchet’s Reign of terror, but yet he runs campaigns for some of his closest allies….apparently Pinochet’s policies help make this guy wealthy, so he says he likes the economic policies and that is about it….

The center left parties have been popular since the Pinochet days and the current president has a 80% approval rating but she cannot run consecutively, so this guy is a rightist and leftist policies are popular so how will this new president play out for the next 4 years?  Will he go to any lengths to secure his policies? Even to the extreme?

Chile Joins The Sexual Revolution

Chile, long considered to have among the most traditional social mores in South America, is crashing headlong against that reputation with its precocious teenagers. Chile’s youth are living in a period of sexual exploration that, academics and government officials say, is like nothing the country has witnessed before.

The sexual awakening is happening through a booming industry for 18-and-under parties and an explosion of Internet connectivity, especially through Web sites like Fotolog.com, where young people trade suggestive photos of one another and organize weekend parties, some of which have drawn more than 4,000 teenagers. The online networks have emboldened teenagers to express themselves in ways that were never customary in Chile’s conservative society.

Chilean society was shaken last year when a video of a 14-year-old girl eagerly performing oral sex on a teenage boy on a Santiago park bench was discovered on a video-hosting Web site. The episode became a national scandal, stirring finger-pointing at the girl’s school, at the Internet provider – at everyone, it seemed, but the boys who captured the event on a cellphone and distributed the video. The girl’s parents removed her from the school and even tried to change her name.

The parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers fought hard to give them such freedoms and escape the book-burning times of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. But in a country that legalized divorce only in 2004 and still has a strict ban on abortion, the feverish sexual exploration of the younger generation is posing new challenges for parents and educators. Sex education in public schools is badly lagging, and pregnancy among girls younger than 15 is on the rise, according to the Health Ministry.

The parents of most adolescents today never received formal sex education. Chile’s first public school programs were put in place at the end of the 1960s. But after the 1973 military coup, the Pinochet government ordered sex education materials destroyed, and moral conservatism took hold. It was not until 20 years later, in 1993, that a new sex curriculum was finally introduced in the schools.

Even so, by 2005, 47 percent of students said they were receiving sex education only once or twice a year, if at all. And now educators say they are struggling to keep up with an avalanche of sexual information and images on the Internet.

The Other 9/11

Torture. Murder. Kidnappings. Secret Prisons. Concentration Camps. War. Impunity.

This is the legacy of human rights abuses September 11th sadly leaves us–a legacy first executed by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and, more recently renewed by an equally culpable President George W. Bush.

The 35th anniversary of the September 11th, 1973 Washington-backed coup which saw Pinochet overthrow the democratically elected administration of Salvador Allende, and the General’s subsequent “War on Terrorism” targeting so-called communists (which included anyone who opposed his bloody regime), offers a standard to measure President Bush’s “War on Terrorism,” the U.S. Commander-in-Chief’s legacy of human rights abuses, as well as how he might one day face justice.


The parallels between the two regime’s crimes are frighteningly similar, though it shouldn’t be lost that Pinochet carried out many of his crimes with financial, intellectual and political support from Washington. The Washington Post wrote in 2004 that, “The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy.” Two years later Amnesty International echoed The Post’s observation when it accused President Bush of taking pages out of Pinochet’s playbook in his “acceptance of torture and disregard of legal restraints.”

Nazi Doctor Is Alive

Nazi-hunters say they have strong evidence that the most wanted member of Hitler’s regime – known as Dr Death – is hiding in southern Chile.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre believes Aribert Heim is in Patagonia, where his daughter is known to live.

Heim is said to have documented the victims he tortured and killed at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria during World War II.

He is accused of killing Jews using exceptionally cruel methods. According to Holocaust survivors, he performed operations and amputations without anaesthetic to see how much pain his victims could endure.

Injecting victims straight into the heart with petrol, water or poison were said to have been his favoured method at Mauthausen.

After the war, Heim was detained by US forces but was not charged.

He practised medicine in the German town of Baden-Baden until 1962, when he fled the country after being tipped off that the authorities were about to prosecute him.

If he is still alive, Heim will be 94 years old.