In Death, Pinochet Continues To Divide

Chileans Debate General's Legacy

SANTIAGO, Chile, Dec. 11 -- When the Mass concluded with a benedictory prayer Monday afternoon, several hundred mourners mingled quietly for a moment around the glass-topped coffin of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, crossing themselves and stealing one final look at the pale visage of a man who ruled this country with an iron hand from 1973 to 1990.

Then someone began to sing the national anthem, loudly. The whole room joined in, swept up in a defiant brand of patriotism. They punched fists in the air and shouted Pinochet's name, invigorated by a sudden sense of purpose: to convince Chile that the memory of the former dictator, who they consider a valiant protector against communism, should be kept alive.

Others in Chile, however, are determined this week to remember Pinochet for a different reason: More than 3,000 people were murdered and about 29,000 tortured by his government in a ruthless campaign to eliminate dissidents.

Pinochet in death continued to be a point of division and ambiguity as Chileans prepared for his Tuesday morning funeral.

Although flags flew at half-staff over military installations, they billowed at the tops of their poles over other government buildings and the vast majority of Santiago office buildings. President Michelle Bachelet -- herself a victim of torture at the hands of Pinochet's subordinates in 1975 -- dressed in funereal black Monday, but she refused to attend the Mass and spoke little of Pinochet's death during several public appearances.

"I'm not going to deny, in this moment, that I have a very fixed concept concerning a painful, dramatic and complex period that our country lived through," Bachelet said at an event addressing education in Chile. "What we learn from the past ought to help us confront the future."

Government officials refused to grant Pinochet the state funeral normally accorded former heads of state, arguing that he was never elected.

News of his death Sunday, at age 91, prompted some of his opponents to pop champagne corks and dance in the streets. Street clashes between his loyalists and his detractors led to nearly 100 arrests.

According to Chilean news reports, the government was debating how best to handle Pinochet's funeral as recently as last week, even though he had been hospitalized for numerous strokes and was described as near death by his family at various times in recent years. The relatives debated their own plans right up to the end: They opted not to bury him in a family crypt that had been reserved for him in a city cemetery, choosing cremation instead. They said they feared that his burial site would be vandalized by his opponents.

"The government should have declared today a national day of mourning," said Paula Valero, 45, a homemaker from Santiago who waited for nearly six hours outside a military college with thousands of other supporters to get a glimpse of Pinochet's coffin. "He was our savior. If not for him, we would have starved under a communist regime."

Pinochet took power after a bloody military coup on Sept. 11, 1973, that toppled the elected government of Salvador Allende, a Socialist whose leftist coalition government the Nixon White House and CIA had worked to destabilize.

Pinochet's supporters contend that he did what was necessary to combat communism, and they credit him with instituting stringent free-market fiscal policies that made Chile's economy the region's strongest.