CHILE:If his talent was not on the field of battle, he certainly was the quintessence of guile, writes Hugh O'Shaughnessy
Augusto Pinochet, who died in Santiago de Chile yesterday at the age of 91, was the sort of officer who gave Latin American military dictators a really bad name.
Like most of them he never went into action against a foreign enemy but at home and on training courses run by the US forces learnt the techniques which he used to make war on his own people during the 17 years he was in power from September 11th, 1973, the Tuesday he overthrew the legitimately elected president, Salvador Allende.
If his talent was not on the field of battle, he certainly was the quintessence of guile. His gifts, which were ably seconded by those of his clever, calculating and ambitious wife Lucía, were those of a politician effortlessly able to hoodwink anyone who crossed his path. His foxiness came to his rescue time and again in his career and blossomed in glorious fullness in his last days of life when he finally managed to escape human judgment in court for his manifest crimes of murder, torture, fraud, drug-running and tax evasion.
In the 1970s, three decades before the events at the US bases at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Pinochet was quietly and with no objections from his Western allies, running his own versions of those establishments on Chilean territory.
The full details of the way he and his family enriched themselves in the narcotics trade have yet to be published but sufficient material is in the public domain - including the actions of Cpl Frankell Baramdyka of the US Marine Corps, a leading drug dealer - to demonstrate that Pinochet was one of the outstanding narcotics dealers of the western hemisphere in his day, able to call on the resources of the Chilean forces which he commanded.
His capacity for deceit was legendary. His first publications, dedicated to geopolitical matters, were lifted from the works of others.
During the presidency of Allende, who named him commander-in-chief weeks before the putsch, the senior officers who were plotting the coup d'état forbore to bring him into their conspiracy until the Saturday before they sprang the trap on the government. They felt he was too loyal to Allende.
For several hours on the Tuesday of the coup President Allende himself was in despair as he worried about what the plotters had done to Pinochet on whom he almost to the last hour had placed his trust.
He and Lucía had no compunction in sending off to a remote island the senior figures in the civilian government whom they had been cultivating socially only days before the coup and whose sugary notes to them remain.
The astuteness of the couple was well shown off in the success they both had in projecting an image of sober honesty at a time when they were deriving mighty financial benefit from raids on the Polla, the national lottery, and from privatisations of state companies. The mine which had the monopoly of iodine was, for instance, sold off for a song to one of the pair's sons-in-law and the family also benefited from the looting of the principal government agency which arranged the state's insurance requirements.
The seamier side of family life was hidden behind the blanket of censorship. One close family member threw a young girlfriend out of his car one night in Santiago into the gutter where she was found dead the following morning. Pinochet put the troops out in the streets of the capital in 1989 when the scandal of his son Augusto jnr profiting by arms deals with the forces - the so-called Pinocheques affair - was about to break.
What was common knowledge in Chile could not have escaped the attention of the UN International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and foreign embassies.
They winked at the situation. Pinochet was received in the White House, was honoured by a visit from Dr Milton Friedman, later a Nobel Prize winner for economics and Dr Henry Kissinger and was assiduously courted by Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister who was delighted with the aid the Chilean regime could give her during the Falklands War.
He also maintained good relations with the regime in Beijing where the government must have taken some delight in the discomfiture the Soviet Union got at his hands.
He presented an image of religious devotion - he wore the scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, patron of the Chilean army. Nevertheless, he barely escaped formal excommunication for his part in torture by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, Archbishop of Santiago, who confided to a close friend that he expected the Almighty to question him at the Last Judgment on the reasons why he had not by name cut him off from the church.