- While the much of the world will spend Saturday remembering
the victims of the hijacked airline attacks on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon, many Chileans will relive their own horrors on Sept. 11.
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- In 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power and began
a 17-year reign of terror that left some 3,200 people dead.
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- Those dark dictatorial days -- which began with the Sept.
11 ousting and eventual suicide of leftist President Salvador Allende --
stand in stark contrast to the progressive free-market democratic politics
of current President Ricardo Lagos.
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- On Friday, a two-day memorial began for Allende, whose
widow Hydrangea Bussi led the annual mass in his memory.
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- Chilean security officials are preparing for possible
protests on Saturday, but don't expect there to be much in the way of violence.
"Everything is going to be normal tomorrow, I hope," said Interior
Minister JosÈ Miguel Inzulza.
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- For many however, Sept. 11 will always be a day that
is anything but normal. For those with friends and loved ones who died
in the subsequent months and years of the Pinochet regime, it is a day
that lives in Chilean infamy.
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- Hoping to provide some semblance of justice for those
lost and left behind, the Lagos administrations and the Chileans courts
have steadfastly pursued the aging Pinochet hoping to put him on the stand
before he reaches the grave.
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- Last month, the Chilean Supreme Court Thursday denied
the 88-year-old Pinochet immunity from prosecution for human rights violations.
The court voted 9-8 to uphold a lower court's ruling that the former dictator
could be prosecuted for abuses committed in the 1970s while heading up
"Operation Condor," a joint operation of the military regimes
of Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay.
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- On May 28, the Santiago Appeals Court stripped Pinochet's
immunity on charges of kidnapping, illegal association and torture in connection
with Condor. Just three years earlier courts determined he was mentally
unfit to stand trial. However, a TV appearance in the United States where
Pinochet seemed quite lucid help prosecutors and human rights watchdogs
seal their case against him.
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- "Today's ruling is an important step toward holding
Pinochet accountable for the abuses his regime committed," said JosÈ
Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights
Watch at the time. "He can no longer use his status as a former head
of state to shield himself from justice."
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- Adding more fuel to the Pinochet prosecution's fire was
a statement made last year by the U.S. State Department condemning U.S.
policy in Chile during the 1970s. Secretary of State Colin Powell said
somewhat cryptically in February 2003 that American involvement in the
region at the time was "not a part of American history that we're
proud of."
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- Powell's predecessor during the Nixon administration,
National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was widely
believed to be the U.S. mastermind behind American support for Pinochet
and the coup plotters that ousted Allende, even though he told Senate investigators
that the United States has severed ties with the coup plotters by Oct.
15 1970, three years before Pinochet assumed Chile's reins.
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- In May, official transcripts were released in the United
States of Kissinger's telephone conversations. In referring to Chile on
Sept. 16, 1973, he said, "Well we didn't -- as you know -- our hand
doesn't show on this one, though."
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- "We didn't do it. I mean we helped them," he
added, mentioning someone or some organization blacked out in the transcript
had "created the conditions as great as possible."
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- All these discoveries and admittances lent much needed
weight to the Pinochet prosecutors' case, though during the late 1990s
it look like the general would slip the prosecutors noose and simply live
the rest of his days with impunity.
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- Though his arrest back in 1998 in London at the request
of a Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon -- based on the deaths and disappearance
of Spanish citizens in Chile during his rule -- created what was widely
known as the "Pinochet precedent," his degenerative condition,
exaggerated some would say to avoid imprisonment, allowed him to slip the
noose, marking an enormous defeat for human rights groups and Chilean justice
seekers.
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- With Chile's recent court ruliing, Pinochet now faces
questioning about his role in Condor, though the session scheduled for
earlier this week has been postponed.
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- Even if Pinochet goes to his grave having never seen
the inside of the prison cell, the current Chilean administration is making
some efforts to rectify the dictator's past misdeeds.
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- Last year, the government decided to compensate financially
those tortured under the Pinochet regime. Until then, only the families
of those killed received money.
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