CHILE: Augusto Pinochet, who was for 17 years the merciless dictator of Chile, will be spending a lonely 90th birthday today doing what he has done for many decades: bringing discomfort and disgrace to those who surround him.
He will have by his side the octogenarian Lucía, daughter of a senator and minister and his wife for the past 63 years who unashamedly declared in 1984: "If I were head of the government I would be very much harder than my husband." Her own iron will and lust for power and cash have earned her the name of the Lady Macbeth of the South Pacific.
The former general whom I watched seizing power from the constitutionally elected civilian president, Salvador Allende, in Santiago on September 11th, 1973, was arrested on Wednesday, placed under house arrest - as happened a year ago - and bailed under a surety of six million pesos (€9,500).
In an 80-page indictment, he is accused of evading 1.28 billion pesos (€2 million) in taxes, using false passports and falsified official documents, and a false declaration of assets.
His lawyer, Pablo Rodríguez Grez, formerly a leader of the violent right-wing organisation Patria y Libertad, announced an immediate appeal. He added that his client had never taken one cent irregularly but had been persecuted by international Marxism throughout his time in government.
Nevertheless, like Al Capone, who avoided charges connected to bloody racketeering during the Prohibition era but was jailed for tax offences, the once-pious child who dedicated himself to Our Lady of Mount Carmel may well be condemned for his financial offences. He will escape jail - custodial sentences are not imposed in Chile on those aged over 69 - even if, as some of the relatives of his victims hope, he will also be charged and found guilty of genocide.
The formal charges and the informal accusations he faces date back to his dictatorship. Until he seized power from the socialist Allende he had been seen as an uninspiring figure committed to the Chilean army's disassociation from party politics. President Allende put total confidence in him till the very morning of the coup. Not realising that Pinochet was leading the forces of insurrection, Allende worried that the man he had just made commander of the army had been kidnapped by plotters.
Those who knew Pinochet intimately realised he was severely henpecked by a bossy wife conscious that her family's social position put her husband, the son of a happy-go-lucky customs clerk, in the shade.
Once he had shoved his fellow plotters in the navy, air force and gendarmerie aside after the coup, he subjected his opponents to an untrammelled programme of summary execution, imprisonment, torture and exile.
The accumulation of a personal fortune of many tens of millions of euro and the channelling of assets to his wife - who also faces charges of looting - and family were rooted in the right-wing policies of deregulation of the economy. Pinochet closed congress, banned political parties, carried out a wholesale privatisation of state assets, including telephones, electricity, cellulose, the government's insurance agency and iodine (of which Chile is the world's largest producer). He also effectively emasculated the trade union movement, assassinating many of its leaders.
These privatisations were the key to his wealth, much of it administered by the Riggs Bank in Washington, London and various tax havens. His assets multiplied though his salary never rose much above €8,500 a year.
Prosecutors are also investigating his links with drugs traders, one of whom, a former US marine, Frankell Baramdyka, was later imprisoned in the US for narcotics dealing.
The businessmen who yesterday embraced enthusiastically his "free market" strategies have long since abandoned him, realising that association with him today is bad for business.
Once he received firm political backing from the US government and others, including the communist Chinese: in 1976, then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, accompanied by 80 assistants, visited him to pledge continuing support.
Economic backing came from the US treasury and the UN financial institutions.
Prof Milton Friedman of Chicago University, the apostle of monetarism and later a Nobel Prize winner, who also visited him in Chile, lauded his strategies while ignoring the human rights violations which facilitated them.
Reuters reports: Gen Pinochet was indicted yesterday for the second time in two days, this time for three disappearances that are a part of a 1974 human rights case. The charges were for the crime of "permanent kidnappings", which in Chile's legal system refers to people who were arrested by state forces and are presumed dead but whose bodies have never been found.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy is author of Pinochet: the Politics of Torture