Chile: Thirty years ago today, firemen carried the corpse of Latin America's first democratically elected Marxist president out through a door of Chile's bombarded government palace after a military coup.
Augusto Pinochet, the general who overthrew Salvador Allende, sealed the door during restorations of the bombed-out palace and, during his 17-year repressive dictatorship, Chileans were scared to even mention Allende's name. President Ricardo Lagos has now ordered that same door opened and will walk through it tomorrow during acts marking the 30th anniversary of the military coup. In opening the door, Lagos means to break down a barrier in Chile's struggle to unite after the coup cut the country in two, and to vindicate his friend, Allende, who killed himself in the palace during the coup.
For half the population, including thousands of union workers and intellectuals, the US-encouraged coup ended dreams of a socialist utopia and raised the curtain on years of hard-line military rule, repression and fear.
For another half of the population, the coup ended economic chaos, imposed law and order and put Chile's economy on the road to becoming the envy of Latin America.
September 11th, 1973 is still so significant to Chileans that they seem oblivious to the 2001 September 11th attacks in the US.
Yet, as the passions of the Cold War-era coup fade into the past, Chile's 15 million people have moved beyond the most painful days of exaggerated devotion to corrosive hatred of Pinochet.
"I feel we can get along. The hatreds have diminished. A sense of the future prevails," said Education Minister Sergio Bitar, who was Allende's mining minister and spent a year as a political prisoner and 10 in exile.
The local media have heralded the anniversary with soul-searching reports on Allende and many ex-supporters now recognise the socialist president helped to provoke the coup with radical land expropriations.
In the other camp, the military has recognised that it made errors in the past, hoping that in exchange the government will drop dozens of trials of members of the security forces charged with torture and assassination.
Pinochet, now 87, ill and homebound, has been pushed offstage. Even loyalists have distanced themselves from the former strongman whose repressive regime took 3,000 lives, tortured thousands and pushed thousands more into exile.- (Reuters)