Autumn Of The Patriarch His Supporters Portray Him As The Savior Of A Nation, But To Many Gen. Augusto Pinochet Has ‘The Blood Of Chile On His Hands.’

Before a national television audience last week, the aging ex-dictator was moved to tears. It was his last birthday celebration in uniform before military retirement. The right-wing elite lauded him as “our national father” and Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s former iron-fisted ruler, wept over the adoring kisses of a young woman.

In her living room, meanwhile, the solitary figure of Sola Sierra, 70, watched the celebration with a photo of her husband, one of thousands of Chileans spirited away by Pinochet’s men in the 1970s and 1980s, never to be heard from again. “It causes me such pain when they do that - when they make him out to be a hero,” Sierra said. “That man has the blood of Chile on his hands.”

After 25 years as commander in chief of the Chilean armed forces, including 17 as self-imposed ruler during which political dissent was crushed, Pinochet, at 82, is being compelled by law to retire and could leave office as early as January. In the waning days of the general, seen by many as the last great dinosaur of South America’s age of military domination, Pinochet’s legacy is being hotly debated inside and outside Chile as never before.

Pinochet supporters portray him as the savior of a nation transformed into an economic juggernaut - so financially sound that it has been dubbed the “South American Switzerland.” But while Pinochet may have charted a sure economic course, many say the psychological damage done to this Andean nation during his grip on power outweighed the benefits, which came mainly to the upper classes in any case.

A government poll recently showed more than 70 percent of Chileans will remember him primarily not as an economic savior but as a military dictator. Despite the passage of time, relatives of victims of his harsh rule continue to push for investigations and to search for mass graves in a quest to lay to rest the memories of their loved ones.

“He will go down in history as the man who (seized) one of the most democratic nations” in the hemisphere, said Jose Joaquin Brunner, secretary general in President Eduardo Frei’s Cabinet.

Once Pinochet hangs up his general’s uniform, he will put on a civilian suit and begin serving as Chile’s only “senator for life,” a job he ensured himself before relinquishing presidential power in 1990. But in a decade that has brought a profound regional shift toward democracy, his military retirement is nevertheless being viewed as the passing of an era, not only for Chile but for all Latin America.

“Latin America and Chile have had to deal with a gross distortion of military power in our past,” said Enrique Correa Rios, a former Cabinet member. “The end of Pinochet’s military career is symbolically a mark in time for all of us.”

Pinochet, who by many accounts still fancied himself a darling of the public even after an attempt on his life and violent protests by hundreds of thousands of Chileans, permitted a transfer of power to an elected government after voters, in a 1988 plebiscite, rejected his continued rule. Shocked and wounded by the vote, the graying general, who now uses a hearing aid and walks slowly, still kept watch as army chief.

Through the “designated senators” in Chile’s upper house, who are picked by the military and other public institutions, he can block changes he finds distasteful, including attempts to investigate crimes committed during his dictatorship.

During the past seven years, however, democracy has begun taking root again. One of the first acts of the new civilian government, for instance, was the reopening of the famous gates to La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace closed since Pinochet bombed it during his 1973 coup against President Salvador Allende, a democratically elected Marxist.

But echoes of the old days persist. The military maintains the right to censor television and movies. And only last year, Pinochet had Communist Party President Gladys Marin arrested and jailed for publicly calling him a “psychopath and blackmailer.”

“Anyone who thinks Pinochet still doesn’t have enormous power in Chile is fooling themselves,” said Congressman Juan Pablo Letelier, whose father, former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, was assassinated in Washington in 1976 by Pinochet’s secret police. “He’s going to hold on to it, too. I don’t think this country will ever have peace from this man until he’s dead.”

Many Chileans are still uncomfortable with publicly discussing the general, but his retirement is forcing the nation to face its past. Pinochet’s name is being bandied about with startling frequency lately, considering the tendency of his critics to land in jail.

Many Chileans, even those who don’t support the general, reject such public criticisms, seeing them as reminders of a period they would rather forget. “Pinochet is like the dark, locked door in the house,” a Chilean journalist said. “Everybody knows what’s inside, but nobody wants to open it again. We want to look forward now, not back.”

That door was built in 1973, when Pinochet launched a bloody military coup that successfully ousted Allende, who had divided the nation with his efforts at widespread nationalization of industry. He and his supporters called the coup necessary to prevent a civil war, but it ended Chile’s history as one of Latin American’s most democratic societies.

In his war against leftists, Pinochet, his military and his notorious secret police, known as the DINA, launched an era of political repression during which an estimated 3,000 citizens “disappeared.”

His supporters insist Pinochet did “what had to be done.”

“We were at war,” retired Gen. Alejandro Medina Lois, a former Pinochet aide, said in an interview. “You think the leftists were pure? Do you think they were innocent? They tried to assassinate him. They were communists getting help from the Russians and the Cubans. These were tough people we were fighting.”

Medina and other loyalists credit Pinochet with turning this nation of 14 million into a financial Wunderkind.

“When you look at the result, I think you have to admit that Pinochet knew what was best for Chile,” said Hernan Guiloff, a Santiago businessman and board member of the Pinochet Foundation.