Augusto Pinochet

Augusto Pinochet was the Chilean army commander who took power in the military coup of September 1973 and ruled Chile as head of a military government until 1990. His regime carried out free-market economic reforms that remain debated, and official Chilean commissions documented thousands of killings, disappearances and cases of torture under his rule. He died in 2006 facing charges at home but never convicted.

Pinochet was born in Valparaíso on 25 November 1915 into a middle-class family. He entered the Military School in Santiago in 1931 and was commissioned as an infantry officer in 1935. He rose steadily, teaching at the War Academy, spending several years helping to set up Ecuador's war academy and writing on geopolitics. In 1972 he became army chief of staff, and on 23 August 1973 the socialist president Salvador Allende appointed him commander-in-chief of the army.

Less than three weeks later, on 11 September 1973, the army, navy, air force and national police overthrew Allende's government; the presidential palace was bombarded and Allende died there, by suicide according to the military; in 2014 Chile's Supreme Court rejected claims that he was murdered. How early Pinochet joined the plot is disputed: he later presented himself as its leader, while some fellow commanders said he came in only days before. Declassified documents show that the United States, in the context of the Cold War, worked against Allende's government and aided the junta afterwards, though historians disagree on how directly it took part in the coup itself.

A four-man junta suspended the constitution and Congress, banned political parties and imposed censorship. Pinochet quickly outmanoeuvred his colleagues, becoming supreme chief of the nation in June 1974 and president in December 1974. The secret police, DINA, pursued opponents at home and abroad and took part in Operation Condor, a cooperation between South American security services. Victims included the former army commander Carlos Prats, killed in Buenos Aires in 1974, and the former minister Orlando Letelier, killed by a car bomb in Washington in 1976.

Official inquiries after the return to democracy put numbers to the repression. The Rettig Commission found that 2,279 people had been killed for political reasons; the Valech Commission recorded 31,947 people tortured. After further cases were added in 2011, the total of recognised victims reached about 40,000, including 3,065 dead or disappeared. Many thousands more went into exile.

From 1975 the government turned to free-market economists trained in Chicago, the so-called Chicago Boys. They cut tariffs, privatised hundreds of state companies and created a private pension system, though the big copper mines stayed in state hands. The economy grew quickly from 1976 to 1981 before a severe crash in 1982. Supporters credit the reforms with later prosperity; critics point to falling wages, high poverty and widening inequality. A new constitution was approved in a 1980 plebiscite, officially by 67 per cent, amid opposition charges of fraud.

The constitution required a further vote, and in the plebiscite of 5 October 1988 about 56 per cent rejected another eight years of Pinochet. He reportedly sought emergency powers, but the other junta members refused, and he accepted the result. Patricio Aylwin won the 1989 election, and Pinochet handed over the presidency on 11 March 1990, while remaining army commander until 1998 and then becoming a senator for life.

In October 1998, while in London, Pinochet was arrested on a Spanish warrant for human rights crimes, the first time a former head of government was detained under the principle of universal jurisdiction. After a long legal battle he was released on health grounds and returned to Chile in March 2000. Chilean courts then stripped his immunity in several cases. A 2004 United States Senate inquiry revealed secret accounts at Riggs Bank, leading to charges of tax fraud. He died at the Military Hospital on 10 December 2006, with about 300 criminal charges still pending.

Our 1985 map shows Chile under Pinochet's rule, and the 1994 map shows it after the return to civilian government.