Former dictator Augusto Pinochet achieved many of the things he set out to do, but by dying of natural causes in a hospital bed, having reached a very old age, surrounded by loved ones and with a fan club –however poor in numbers– mourning him in the streets, he has no doubt accomplished his final and most macabre dream.

Other articles featured here provide facts and details concerning the last weeks of his life, the hundreds of reports denouncing murders, disappearances, tortures and other human rights violations, and the several actions that were pending against him. They also tell of a sordid fortune, amassed by murdering, stealing, and arms and drug trafficking, increased with barely-veiled compensations for his subservience to the great global powers, for the betrayal of his people and his neighboring nations.

The “timorousness” of the Chilean justice system in this case leaves us all today with a sickeningly bitter taste in our mouths. A timorousness that contrasts with the vigorous attitude displayed in other cases, such as the one involving three Uruguayan military officers who, acting on Pinochet’s orders, kidnapped the chemist Eugenio Berríos and held him captive in Uruguay, under democratic rule. The body of Berríos would later be found buried in a Uruguayan beach. These three military officers were extradited to Chile, where they were charged and released on bail, without permission to leave the country. The “general”, however, went on laughing.

Pinochet was not an evil specter, but rather the most finely-tuned product of an army bred from the start in the purest and harshest of Prussian traditions, spiked with strong doses of Nazism and Catholic fundamentalism. Pinochet, his regime, turned Chile into a gigantic laboratory, where the most abhorrent theories of the Chicago Boys were applied. The economists of death found a perfect executor in the butcher of Santiago. When the invisibility of the opposers forced the human hunt to come to an end, a ruthless neoliberalism began to lay down the foundations of an economic model that, with some variations, persists to this day.

Pinochet rode into power on the back of the Cold War and with his saddlebags loaded with ammunition from the ITT Corporation; his mission was to reduce to ashes what was then one of the most organized and politically active and aware peoples of Latin America. The cruelty, the brutally of the repression were proportional to the fear that these popular organizations raised in the local and global dominating classes.

In addition to political repression, workers suffered labor repression. No more unions, no more talking about labor rights, no more collective bargaining agreements, wages reduced to nothing more than a handout, and to anyone who dared protest: lead. The “Chilean model” was not only built on 30 thousand disappeared, but also on a suffocated, threatened, controlled, persecuted and starved people.