On Chilean television Sunday afternoon, supporters of General Augusto Pinochet were pummeling demonstrators who were celebrating the death of the former dictator.
"Look at that," complained the manager of a car rental agency in Pucón, in southern Chile. "Even now that he’s dead, Pinochet continues to perturb this country."
Chile seemed calmer Monday, with the general’s few remaining admirers filing by his coffin at the military academy here and the rest of the country going about its normal workday activities. But the timing of his death not only has brought back to the surface many of the divisions he created, but also has left a host of troubling legal and political questions unresolved.
Victims of Pinochet’s human rights abuses, for instance, expressed frustration that he had died "without paying his enormous debt to justice" or even standing trial, in the words of Lorena Pizarro, director of the Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared Group. Questions were also raised about what will happen now to the numerous criminal cases opened against him and his subalterns in recent years.
"The big question is whether this will give an impetus to those prosecutions or have the reverse effect," said Sebastian Brett, the Chile representative of Human Rights Watch Americas. "Some might be tempted to ask, ’The old boy’s gone, so what’s the point of going on?’ But I wonder if some of the military officers who have basically held to a pact of silence will begin to talk as a way of cutting their losses now that Pinochet’s rather terrifying influence will have gone."
Rights advocates want those cases to proceed if only to undermine the more extravagant claims of Pinochet’s apologists and to clarify the historical record. Outside the military academy Monday morning, for instance, Ivan Moreira, a right-wing congressional deputy, was arguing to all who would listen that Pinochet was not a brutal executioner but "a great statesman and liberator, the man who saved Chile from Marxism and avoided a war."
Most of the murder, kidnapping and torture accusations against Pinochet also involve other officials and so will not lapse. In addition, his wife and some of his five children were indicted with him on fraud or tax evasion charges stemming from the disclosure by the U.S. Senate in 2004 that he had secretly accumulated an illicit fortune, now estimated at $28 million, in bank accounts abroad.
Pinochet had ceased to be an important player in politics here even before then, as a result of his detention in Britain in 1998 for human rights abuses. But politics here has continued to revolve around him and his legacy, and his death promises to affect both major political alliances.
As one of the great villains of modern history, he has been a boon to the coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats that has been in power since his dictatorship ended in 1990. The two parties were often at odds before he subjected them to the unifying traumas of murder, torture and exile, and some differences between them on social issues and economic policies have intensified.
"It is going to be a huge challenge for the coalition to find common ground and build a platform for future elections," said Patricio Navia, a professor of political science at the Diego Portales University here and at New York University. "They came together to oppose Pinochet and lead the restoration of democracy, and now that Pinochet is gone, the fear that old Chilean politics and old divisions may return should not be discarded."
For the two main right-wing opposition parties, in contrast, Pinochet’s death comes as a relief and an opportunity. They have been stained by their close association with him and his dictatorship, their efforts to reach out to moderate voters blunted and their democratic credentials repeatedly questioned as a result of their reluctance to criticize his abuses.
They have already begun distancing themselves from those links, as evidenced by the Pinochet family’s complaints that certain party leaders failed to visit the general in his last days. But once his funeral is over and the year- end holidays push the news aside, the right will be free to accelerate the process of selective disengagement.
"With Pinochet’s disappearance, that political weight will now drop off," said Juan Bustos, a Socialist member of Congress who is the sponsor of a bill to undo the Pinochet-era amnesty law that has prevented prosecution of human rights offenders. "So there is a certain advantage for them in all of this."
Pinochet’s death has also forced President Michelle Bachelet into a delicate political minuet. The president is not only a Socialist and a physician like Salvador Allende, whom Pinochet overthrew with U.S. support on Sept. 11, 1973, but is also a former exile and political prisoner and the daughter of a general who died in prison after being tortured.
Bachelet has decided that Pinochet will not have the funeral normally accorded a former head of state and has not decreed a period of official mourning. But she has allowed the Chilean flag to fly at half-staff at military installations and has authorized her defense minister to attend the funeral.
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