Augusto Pinochet:General Augusto Pinochet, who has died aged 91, was the most notorious of Latin America's 20th century military rulers. Dictator of Chile between 1973 and 1990, after which he remained as army commander-in-chief, then senator-for-life, he bestrode the final decades of the cold war in the region like no one else but Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Then, in 1998, a Spanish judge ended his career as he could never have expected: under arrest in London and converted into a symbol of hope that heads of state who violate human rights may no longer escape a reckoning under international law.
Pinochet sprang to world attention when he headed the coup that overthrew the left-wing government of Dr Salvador Allende in September 1973. Allende's election three years before at the head of a socialist-communist coalition had a significance far beyond Chile, being widely seen as the harbinger of similar projects in countries such as France and Italy, as well as the beginning of a "second Cuba" in Latin America. Pinochet, with his dark glasses and harshly downturned mouth, became the paradigm of the Third World anti-communist strongman.
By the late 1980s, while reviled worldwide for the brutality of his regime, Pinochet was also lauded by many for turning his country's economy into a dynamic free-market model for the developing world.
The son of a customs official, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was born in 1915 in the Pacific port of Valparaiso. He was educated by conservative Marist priests before being twice rejected by the country's military college. He was finally accepted at the age of 15, backed in his choice of career by his mother, Avelina Ugarte, a formidable woman of Basque extraction.
Augusto snr wanted his son to be a doctor. Augusto jnr graduated in 1937 as an infantry officer. His subsequent career was steady but routine, distinguished mostly for his expertise in "geopolitics", the subject he taught at the country's war academy.
According to his memoirs, Pinochet was first alerted to the "truly diabolical attractions of Marxism" in 1948, while commanding a prison camp for banned communists.
Here he first met Allende who, in 1973, died in the fighting at the La Moneda government palace rather than surrender the presidency. At the time, Allende was a young doctor and socialist senator who came to visit the prisoners.
Members of Allende's presidential staff remembered the pre-coup Pinochet as a bluff and somewhat sycophantic officer. Three weeks before the coup, Allende appointed Pinochet as commander-in-chief in the belief that he was the only remaining loyal member of the army high command.
"I wonder what they have done with poor Pinochet," the doomed president remarked to aides as the first news of the coup broke.
Pinochet later claimed that, for security reasons, he had been planning the coup for two years with student officers at the military academy.
Three days before the coup, he was given an ultimatum by the commanders-in-chief of the navy and air force to join them or suffer the consequences.
On the day itself, there was little doubt Pinochet was in charge. While negotiating Allende's surrender, he joked crudely about flying the president out of the country and crashing the plane. "Kill the bitch and you finish the spawn," he said.
Within a year, as the army asserted its overwhelming strength among the armed services, plans for a rotating presidency between the four members of the ruling junta of service chiefs were dropped and Pinochet was named president of the republic.
Chile's army was the most hierarchically disciplined in the region, the legacy of late 18th-century Prussian advisers, and this was skilfully translated into personal devotion to Pinochet. A ruthless secret police watched the regime as much as the opposition.
The level of repression in a country with a long-standing parliamentary tradition and a hitherto mild record of military involvement in politics by regional standards was especially shocking.
Official investigations since 1990 have confirmed more than 3,000 deaths and disappearances at the hands of Pinochet's security forces. Torture was institutionalised, secret detention centres operated into which detainees disappeared never to be seen again and murder squads were despatched to kill prominent dissidents abroad.
With political parties and trade unions banned, the "Chicago Boys" radically remade the heavily state-dependent economy.
This was achieved through wholesale privatisation, a complete opening to the international economy, fixing the exchange rate artificially low and pumping in foreign loans during the petro-dollar glut of the late 1970s.
The result was the destruction of national industry and much of agriculture, then near-collapse in the early 1980s amid a frenzy of speculation, consumer imports and debt crisis. The state bailed out most of the country's banking sector and unemployment rose to an official level of over 30 per cent.
Following the debacle, a more moderate group of neoliberals succeeded in stabilising the now streamlined macroeconomy. Reforms such as the privatisation of the pension system became highly influential around the world, growth became steady and Chile became a byword for economic success - though the gap between rich and poor widened to give the country the worst income distribution in the region after Brazil.
In 1980, the short-lived boom that preceded the crash was exploited to help deliver victory in a plebiscite approving a new constitution. It set the opening of a limited congress for 1990, subject to military veto powers and with most of the left permanently banned.
A further plebiscite was to follow in 1988 to ratify Pinochet in power for 10 more years. Such hopes were dashed by the economic collapse. In 1983, the first protests erupted, led by trade unionists rather than the bickering leaders of the political opposition.
In 1988, against all the regime's calculations, Pinochet was defeated by 56 to 43 per cent in the plebiscite to ratify him in power. In December 1989, the Christian Democrat opposition leader, Patricio Aylwin, won the country's first general elections in 19 years.
Twice in the ensuing months, troops were put on alert in protest against court citations of officers on human rights charges and a congressional investigation of the army's purchase of a bankrupt arms company from one of Pinochet's sons. But the sabre-rattling died away and Pinochet earned grudging tributes from the government for allowing the transition to go ahead relatively smoothly.
In 1994 he visited Britain to inspect a missile project being developed jointly between the Chilean army and the Royal Ordnance arms company. On this and subsequent visits over the following two years, he was warmly welcomed by foreign office officials and on occasions was given a Special Branch escort.
He came to feel at ease in Britain and cultivated a mutually admiring relationship with former British prime minister Baroness Thatcher. During the 1982 Falklands War, Pinochet aided Britain with intelligence and facilities for military planes flying south, so for Mrs Thatcher, support was a matter of principle.
By this time, a small group of officers had been imprisoned in Chile for human rights abuses. In January 1998, proceedings were opened against Pinochet himself on charges of genocide brought by the Communist Party. He felt safe, however, protected by his past status, parliamentary immunity and the amnesty decree passed by the junta in 1978 to protect themselves against such charges
In October 1998, nine months after he stepped down, he almost over-reached himself. Ignoring both the change of government in Britain and the fact that warrants were out for his arrest in Spain over the disappearance of Spanish citizens after the coup, he went to Britain once again, in part for arms purchases and in part for back surgery.
British human rights organisations acted quickly, with the Spanish judge in charge of the cases in that country, Baltazar Garzon. On October 16th, Pinochet was arrested in his room at the London Clinic, off Harley Street, pending extradition proceedings at Judge Garzon's behest.
In a complex series of decisions, the House of Lords ruled that extradition could go ahead, while reducing the grounds to the few cases occurring after the Convention Against Torture was ratified by the UK in 1988.
Pinochet was ordered to be sent back to Chile in January 2000 by British home secretary Jack Straw on compassionate grounds, after confirmation that he was suffering the effects of a series of minor strokes.
But, beyond Pinochet's own 16-month detention in two private clinics and an eight-bedroomed house in Surrey, the internationally vital precedent had been established. Judges in France, Belgium and Switzerland also began extradition requests.
His return to Santiago in March 2000 was one of forced triumphalism by his supporters. Greeted at the airport by a military band playing his favourite tune, Lili Marlene, he hobbled across the tarmac from his wheelchair and waved his walking stick in the air - a gesture interpreted as proof that he had fooled the English doctors.
But, against the expectations of many, the courts stripped him of his parliamentary immunity and proceedings against him went ahead, in the capable hands of Chile's answer to Judge Garzon, Judge Juan Guzman.
Eventually, in July 2001 the Chilean courts adopted the Straw approach, suspending investigation on grounds of "dementia" caused by continuing minor strokes. But by this time, Pinochet's standing was in tatters, as political expediency on the political right and revelations of the brutalities of his regime reduced his admirers to a small hard core. In 2006, his last immunity to prosecution, as a former president, was removed to allow him to be charged in a notorious case of the murder of opponents abroad. By the time of his death, some 300 cases had been filed against him.
For many former supporters, however, the final straw was not murder or torture, but the revelation in 2005 by a US Senate investigation of terrorist financing that in the previous two decades Pinochet had opened and closed at least 128 bank accounts at nine US banks, an apparent money-laundering web through which almost $20 million (€15 million) had been shuffled back and forth.
Later investigations revealed other accounts around the world and, by early 2006 the alleged amount of deposits had risen to some $28 million (€21 million).
Pinochet married Maria Rodriguez in 1943, they had two sons and three daughters.
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte; born November 25th, 1915; died December 10th, 2006