Augusto Pinochet
Chilean general and dictator (1915–2006) who overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in the US-backed coup of September 11, 1973. His 17-year military dictatorship killed over 3,000 people, tortured tens of thousands, and implemented radical neoliberal economic policies designed by the "Chicago Boys."
Augusto Pinochet's significance lies in the consequences of the movement and rule associated with President of Chile: ideology, repression, victims, mass violence, and the collapse of democratic or pluralist safeguards. The page should be read as a historical warning, not as validation of office prestige or state authority.
Details
- birth year
- 1915
- death year
- 2006
- editorial frame
- authoritarian_warning
- monetization allowed
- false
- office
- President of Chile
- historical status
- deceased_historical
This profile uses curated historical sections and source-backed metadata. Auto-generated leader framing, quick-fact synthesis, and monetized modules are disabled for sensitive historical figures.
Overview
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (1915–2006) was the Chilean army general who led the coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, and then ruled Chile as military dictator until 1990. The coup, which had covert US backing through the CIA and Nixon administration, killed Allende in the La Moneda presidential palace and established the most significant US-aligned military dictatorship in South America.
Pinochet's regime operated a systematic program of political repression: an estimated 3,000 people were killed or disappeared, over 30,000 were tortured, and approximately 200,000 were forced into exile. The Caravan of Death — a military death squad that toured Chile in the weeks after the coup — executed 75 prisoners without trial in a deliberate message of terror. The Villa Grimaldi detention center in Santiago became the symbol of the DINA secret police's torture program. Simultaneously, Pinochet's government implemented radical free-market economic reforms designed by a group of University of Chicago-trained Chilean economists (the "Chicago Boys"): deregulation, privatization, reduction of trade barriers, and pension privatization — the first comprehensive neoliberal economic program applied anywhere in the world. GDP growth in the late 1970s and 1980s gave credibility to these reforms, though inequality increased sharply. He was arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish extradition warrant for crimes against humanity — the first former head of state to be arrested under the principle of universal jurisdiction — and returned to Chile on medical grounds. He died under house arrest in 2006, having never been convicted.