SANTIAGO, Chile - Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who terrorized his opponents for 17 
years after taking power in a bloody coup, died Sunday, putting an end to a 
decade of intensifying efforts to bring him to trial for human rights abuses 
blamed on his regime. He was 91. 
 
 
 | 
    Gen. Augusto Pinochet salutes Sept. 11, 1986 in Santiago, 
 Chile, during a commemoration of the coup bringing him to power in 1973. 
 Pinochet, the fierce anti-communist dictator who ruled Chile with an iron 
 fist from 1973 to 1990, died Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006 from heart 
 complications, the Santiago Military hospital reported. He was 91. 
 [AP]
  
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Supporters saw Pinochet as a 
Cold War hero for overthrowing democratically elected President Salvador Allende 
at a time when the US was working to destabilize his Marxist government and keep 
Chile from exporting communism in Latin America.
But the world soon reacted in horror as Santiago's main soccer stadium filled 
with political prisoners to be tortured, shot, disappeared or forced into exile. 
Pinochet's dictatorship laid the groundwork for South America's most stable 
economy, but his crackdown on dissent left a lasting legacy: His name has become 
a byword for the state terror, in many cases secretly supported by the United 
States, that retarded democratic change across the hemisphere. 
Pinochet died with his family at his side at the Santiago Military Hospital 
on Sunday, a week after suffering a heart attack. 
"This criminal has departed without ever being sentenced for all the acts he 
was responsible for during his dictatorship," lamented Hugo Gutierrez, a human 
rights lawyer involved in several lawsuits against Pinochet. 
Thousands of Pinochet supporters gathered outside the hospital and elsewhere, 
weeping and trading insults with people in passing cars. Some shouted "Long Live 
Pinochet!" and sang Chile's national anthem. 
Many other Chileans saw his death as reason for celebration. Hundreds of 
cheering, flag-waving people crowded a major plaza in the capital, drinking 
champagne and tossing confetti. 
"Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile represented one of most difficult 
periods in that nation's history," said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman. 
"Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families." 
Chile's government says at least 3,197 people were killed for political 
reasons during Pinochet's rule, but courts allowed the aging general to escape 
hundreds of criminal complaints as his health declined. 
The mustachioed Pinochet left no doubt about who was in charge after the 
Sept. 11, 1973 coup, when warplanes bombed the presidential palace and Allende 
committed suicide with a submachine gun Fidel Castro had given him. 
"Not a leaf moves in this country if I'm not moving it," Pinochet said. 
But he refused for years to take responsibility his regime's abuses, blaming 
subordinates for killings or tortures. 
Only on his 91st birthday last month did he take "full political 
responsibility for everything that happened" during his long rule. But the 
statement made no reference to the rights abuses, and said he had to act to 
prevent Chile's economic and political disintegration. 
Born Nov. 25, 1915, the son of a customs official in the port of Valparaiso, 
Pinochet was appointed army commander just 19 days before the coup by Allende, 
who mistakenly thought Pinochet would defend constitutional rule. 
The CIA had worked for months to destabilize the Allende government, 
including financing a truckers strike that paralyzed the delivery of goods 
across Chile, but Washington denied having anything to do with the coup itself. 
Soon after Pinochet's seizure of power, soldiers carried out mass arrests of 
leftists. Tanks rumbled through the streets of the capital, and many detainees 
were herded into the National Stadium, which became a torture and detention 
center. Other leftists were rounded up by death squads, and the "Caravan of 
Death" to Chile's forbidding Atacama desert left victims buried in unmarked mass 
graves. 
Pinochet disbanded Congress, banned political activity and crushed dissent. 
In addition to the dead, more than 1,000 victims remain unaccounted for. 
Thousands more were arrested, tortured and forced into exile. 
Pinochet defended his authoritarian rule as a crusade to build a society free 
of communism. He even claimed partial credit for the collapse of the Soviet 
bloc. 
"I see myself as a good angel," he told a Miami Spanish-language television 
station in 2004. 
He showed no mercy to his perceived enemies. When investigators uncovered 
coffins that had been stuffed with two bodies each in the aftermath of the coup, 
he dismissed it as a "a good cemetery space-saving measure." 
Pinochet seized power at a time when Chile's economy was in near ruins, 
partly due to the CIA's covert destabilization efforts and partly to Allende's 
mismanagement. 
He launched a radical free-market program that at first triggered a financial 
collapse and unprecedented joblessness. But it laid the basis for South 
America's healthiest economy, which has grown by 5 percent to 7 percent a year 
since 1984. 
Pinochet lost an October 1988 referendum to extend his rule and was forced to 
call an election. He lost to Patricio Alywin, whose center-left coalition has 
ruled Chile since 1990. 
Pinochet avoided prosecution for years after his presidency. He remained army 
commander for eight more years and then was a senator-for-life, a position 
guaranteed under the constitution his regime wrote. 
It took a Spanish judge to remove Pinochet's cloak of invincibility, and 
inspire Chileans to make their own efforts to hold him to account. He was in 
London for back surgery in 1998 when the judge asked Britain to extradite him to 
Spain for human rights violations. British authorities ruled he was too ill to 
be tried, and sent him back to Chile, where ghosts of the past were coming 
forward. 
More than 200 criminal complaints were filed against him and he was under 
house arrest at the time of his death, but courts repeatedly ruled he could not 
face trial because of poor physical and mental health. 
Even longstanding Pinochet allies abandoned him in 2004, when a U.S. Senate 
investigative committee found Pinochet kept multimillion-dollar secret accounts 
at the Riggs Bank in Washington. Investigators said he had up to $17 million in 
foreign accounts, and owed $9.8 million in back taxes. He, his wife and several 
of his children were indicted on tax evasion charges. 
During his final years, Pinochet lived in seclusion at heavily guarded 
Santiago mansion and his countryside residence. 
He is survived by his wife, Lucia, two sons and three daughters. 
The army said Pinochet will lay in state Monday and Tuesday at the Military 
Academy in Santiago. The government of President Michelle Bachelet - whose 
father died in Pinochet's prisons - said he would not receive the state 
funeral usually due former presidents. 
His body was to be cremated. Pinochet's son Marco Antonio said his father 
feared a tomb would be desecrated by his enemies.