General Augusto Pinochet Badd Good President.

Augusto Pinochet was born in Valparaiso , Chile on November 25, 1915 , the eldest of six children of a religious middle-class trading family. Raised apolitically despite the unstable political situation in his tiny country, Pinochet had wanted to become a soldier even in early life – something even his influential mother could not prevent. Despite his being a poor student academically, Pinochet pursued his military education with passion. Joining the military in 1933 at the age of 17, Pinochet spent the following 40 years slowly climbing up the ladder of the army's hierarchy and steadily building a career for himself. Graduating in 1937 as an ensign assigned to the Chacabuco Regiment in Concepcion , Pinochet, even during this time, remained largely apolitical focusing only on his development as a good soldier.

In 1943, he married Lucia Hiriart by whom he had five children — three daughters and two sons.

The years that followed saw the young officer steadily climbing the ranks of the military, concretizing his career with one accomplishment after another. In 1939, he became Second Lieutenant of the Maipo Regiment. In 1948, he entered the War Academy where he eventually became a professor and a member of a commission which, in 1956, set out to assist in the organization of the War Academy in Ecuador . In 1953, he moved to the Rancagua Regiment as Major and became Chief of Staff of the Second Division and Deputy Governor of Tarapaca Province in 1968. At the start of the 1970s, Pinochet's career moved beyond local posts, as he became General Commander of the Santiago army garrison in 1971 and Commander-in-Chief of the Army in 1973.

Ironically it was President Salvador Allende himself, the socialist president Pinochet would eventually overthrow, who appointed the largely apolitical Pinochet Commander-in-Chief of the Army on August 23, 1973 . In less than a month, September 8 to be exact, Pinochet had joined a four-man junta to overthrow Allende's government. He became the sole leader of this junta on September 11 of the same year.

The reasons for Pinochet's decision to turn his back on the man who trusted him enough to make him the head of the powerful Chilean army are unknown to this day. What drove him to grab power after remaining apolitical all throughout his early military life remains a haze. Some credit it to a hidden lust for supreme power that he successfully kept within. Others attribute it to the fact that, in his small-mindedness and religiosity, he actually believed that God chose him to lead the country out of the chaos that Allende and his left-leaning policies plunged the country in. It will be recalled that the day before Pinochet was appointed Commander-in-Chief by President Allende, the Chilean Parliament had voted for the ouster of the president, by force if necessary.

On September 11, 1973, Pinochet and the other members of the military junta called on Allende to step down and resign. Allende refused and Pinochet, the supreme leader of the junta commanded warplanes to bomb the presidential palace. Initially thinking that his general had been kidnapped, the realization that his trusted commander-in-chief had betrayed him proved too much for Allende who put a gun to his head and committed suicide rather then be taken in by the coup plotters.

This coup d’état of September 11, 1973 catapulted its leader, General Augusto Pinochet to power and began his reign of terror which would extend for 17 years.

Arguing that the country needed to be saved from communist subversives, Pinochet sought to consolidate his control by gathering all of Allende’s supporters and transporting them to a military base where they were executed and buried. Throughout the country the so-called ‘Caravan of Death’ targeted political opponents, summarily executing most of them.

Leading a military junta made up of the leaders of the army, navy, air force and uniformed police, Pinochet established a government that utilized terror and torture as a means to suppress all opposition even as he allowed the entry of free market policies and certain democratic processes. The number of people actually killed by government and military forces as part of its efforts to ‘save the country from communism’ are not known although it is estimated that throughout the 17 years that Pinochet was in power there were over 3,000 people killed, at least 30,000 tortured and several thousands exiled.

While initially, the Chileans themselves and the rest of the free world welcomed Pinochet’s take-over, it wasn’t long before they realized that their jubilation was ill-placed. Pinochet's relentless efforts to ‘purge’ Chile of communist threats proved too bloody and atrocious. This purging even when beyond the borders of Chile and the world realized this with the cold-blooded assassination of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States and minister in Allende’s cabinet, in Washington D.C. in 1976, just two years after a similar fate befell Pinochet predecessor and Allende army commander General Carlos Prats.

For 17 years, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte ruled the South American country of Chile as a strong-willed and brutal dictator using torture and death as a means to silence communist dissidents. In 1988, in an unexpected yet overly confident move, Pinochet allowed the holding of a presidential referendum to allow the people to vote him to a new eight-year term. The result proved dismal for Pinochet who then stepped down as Chilean President to give way to an elected successor.

In 1998, while he was recuperating from a back injury in a British Hospital, Pinochet was served a warrant of arrest by the Spanish government for human rights abuses and murder committed against Spanish nationals in Chile. This led to a series of cases filed against the former dictator within his country and out.

When he died of a heart attack on December 10, 2006, Pinochet was facing the prospect of trials for grave human rights abuses and for illegally stashing a $28 million fortune.

In spite of the excesses and political violence his 17-year rule is known for, it cannot be ignored that, unlike Fidel Castro who ruled with an iron hand but who will be leaving Cuba an economically ruined and freedomless country in his death, Pinochet stabilized Chile and made it the strongest and most successful Latin American country.

As his loyal followers point out, he was a nationalist who loved his country and who made sure that it developed sans the internal conflicts that generally made it difficult for other countries to grow and move on. He protected it from communism and has allowed it to develop a vibrant democracy as evidenced by the fact that, just recently its people elected another socialist president Michele Bachelet, who suffered persecution during Pinochet's time.

Economically, Chile is stable and Pinochet's free-market theories are responsible for this stability. Early in his regime, while he protected the country from communism, he allowed a group of economists, whom he called the Chicago Boys because of their devotion to University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman's economic theories, to have free rein in the developing the country's economy. This led to an annual economic growth rate that was three times the average figure enjoyed by all the Latin American countries put together. By offering generous incentives to foreign investors and privatizing business, the Chicago boys successfully transformed Chile into a modern country that enjoyed the latest in terms of medical services and health benefits and lifted its educational standards way above other Latin American countries.

In death, Pinochet is leaving behind a politically stable and democratic Chile with an abundant economy. It is little wonder therefore, that there are people who look at the flaws of his regime in a kinder light and who tend to agree that he did something right in the face of all the charges of human rights abuses being hurled against him. No less than well-known conservatists worldwide have heralded Pinochet's economic achievements, even as they ignore the means by which it was achieved.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick took a great deal of flak for asserting in her book "Dictatorships and Double Standards" the belief that right-wing dictators like General Pinochet prove less harmful to their countries than left-wing ones and this is partly because their regimes open their countries to eventual vibrant democracies. With Pinochet's case in point, the world knows she did not exactly err in her assertion.