Gen Pinochet is held responsible for numerous crimes committed by the military regime he headed for 17 years.
These include the killing or "disappearances" of more than 3,000 people, mostly opposition activists, according to official figures released by the democratic regime set up after he stepped down as president in 1990.
The first deaths, including that of the democratically elected Socialist leader, Salvador Allende, occurred with the bombing of the presidential La Moneda palace on September 11th, 1973, the day Gen Pinochet staged his coup d'etat.
Other crimes attributed to his regime are the summary execution of several hundred people in the days immediately following the coup, the shooting of more than 70 trade union leaders and socialists in several Chilean cities by a travelling death squad, the assassination in Buenos Aires of his predecessor as army chief, the murder of a Spanish diplomat, Carmelo Soria, and of Allende's foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, who had led Chile's opposition in exile.
Born in 1915, Augusto Pinochet had been pushed by his family into a military career, risen through the ranks, and been promoted to command the army by Allende himself three weeks before the fatal coup.
Although he declared himself "a man with no ambitions", within a year of his seizure of power he had closed down parliament, banned political and trade union activity and declared himself president.
Gen Pinochet's defenders say he cannot possibly have known of everything that his police were doing at a time of intense social and political turmoil, although at the time he himself said: "Not even a leaf moves in Chile without my knowing it."
His international isolation intensified with the murder in 1976 in Washington of Chile's former socialist foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, later shown to have been organised by senior figures of the Chilean secret police.
By the 1980s, the worst of his repression was over, although by then the opposition was reorganising, and when in 1988 Gen Pinochet held a plebiscite on whether he should continue in office, the people decided he should not.
In 1990 he stepped down, although he stayed on as commander of the armed forces for several years. He remains a senator-for-life with domestic immunity from prosecution for events under his regime.
Throughout his rule, Gen Pinochet has had his admirers. Abroad he had the discreet backing of parts of the US political establishment for being a bulwark against communism. The former British prime minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, perhaps his most vociferous supporter, said his help was crucial in Britain's 1982 Falklands war against Argentina, while at home the better-off thanked him for rolling back Allende's policies of forced nationalisation.