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Thatcher's Pinochet Tribute is an Obscenity |
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Margaret Thatcher's tribute to General Augusto Pinochet, who died yesterday at the age of 91 from heart failure, is an insult to the thousands who were murdered and tortured under the Chilean dictator's savage regime. Even more of an insult is the fact that he was never brought to justice for his crimes against humanity, despite the many efforts to do so. In light of this, we can and must never forget that the Blair government defied an extradition request from a Spanish court in 1998 and released Pinochet from house arrest, thus spitting on the memory of his victims.
On September 11, 1973, a democratically elected socialist government, led by Salvador Allende, was overturned in a military coup orchestrated and led by Pinochet with the close support of the CIA. Allende was brutally murdered, along with 3,000 of his supporters, and with them died the light of socialism and human progress in that nation for a generation.
Throughout the 17 years of his rule thereafter an estimated 250,000 trade unionists, teachers, progressives and leftists were either imprisoned, tortured, or disappeared.
Pinochet was also a key participant in Operation Condor, a pact of murder he entered into along with the then military dictatorships of Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay to target suspected Marxists, socialists, leftists and their supporters in the region.
Thatcher, a repugnant human being and another enemy of the working class, gave succour to the Pinochet dictatorship throughout her years in office, in the form of arms sales and loans with which to purchase those arms.
The brutal nature of this regime was indeed well known to her and to leading members of the British establishment, which is why Solidarity, in response to Pinochet's death and Thatcher's tribute to him, reaffirms its commitment to the cause of socialism around the world. In so doing, we pay tribute to Salvador Allende and to the thousands of Pinochet's victims, all martyrs to the cause of human progress.
The struggle continues.
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