WITNESS-The day Pinochet launched his coup
Source: Reuters
By Froilan Romero SANTIAGO, Chile, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Like most Chileans of a certain age, I still have clear memories of Sept. 11, 1973. It was the day General Augusto Pinochet came to power. I was 17 at the time and can remember hearing the fighter planes flying low over the capital Santiago and the sound of bombs falling. We heard only later that they had been dropped on the presidential palace, La Moneda, that socialist President Salvador Allende was dead and that his democratically elected government had been overthrown in a coup. Now, 33 years on, Pinochet is dead. His funeral took place on Tuesday, at a military college in Santiago where some 5,000 relatives, friends and senior military officers bade him a final farewell. His body was cremated, with his family saying they feared his adversaries would vandalize his grave if he were buried. Back in my youth I never thought there could be a coup in Chile, a country with a longer, stronger history of democracy than many countries in Latin America. I remember helping to build what must have been one of the first barricades to stop military vehicles driving through our streets. We made it from tyres and hid behind it until the military got close and started shooting at us. We took off at a run and I could hear the sound of bullets, zipping past my head. The following nights were filled with the sound of machinegun fire and helicopters flying overhead. The dictatorship had begun. Our house was near the end of a road leading down to the Mapocho river, where Pinochet's secret police used to dump the bodies of their victims. When we went down to the river we often found three, four, five corpses. They were usually face down with giant bullet holes in their backs. I have always felt the dictatorship robbed us of our youth, restricting our movements by imposing curfews and preventing us from seeing our friends. During that time there was an enormous amount of distrust in Chile. Even friends would not confide in one another. I personally knew six people who disappeared, never to be seen again, some of the 3,000 opponents or suspected opponents of the government who were killed by Pinochet's security forces. "HE WILL FALL!" In October 1974, I started working for Reuters, helping to send the reports our correspondents wrote on their typewriters. It was from the window of the Reuters office in central Santiago in the early 1980s that I first heard a chant which became a rallying cry for anti-Pinochet protesters: "And he will fall! And he will fall!". Pinochet finally relinquished power in 1990 after losing a plebiscite on his leadership in 1988. He handed power to a center-left government which has won the past four elections. The country's current president, Michelle Bachelet, was tortured during Pinochet's rule and stayed away from his funeral. The country Pinochet leaves behind is still divided, between those who regard him almost as a founding father and those who see him as a tyrant who enslaved his people during those 17 years of dictatorship. Could a dictator like Pinochet take power in Chile again? I hope not and find it difficult to imagine. But then I never imagined that anyone could launch a coup back in 1973.
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