Pinochet letter tells of regret, necessity

SANTIAGO, Chile – In a letter to Chileans written to be published after his death, Gen. Augusto Pinochet said he wished he hadn’t had to stage the bloody 1973 coup that put him in power, and called the abuses under his long regime inevitable.

His fate was public shunning and unimagined loneliness, he said in the message made public Sunday.

The former dictator, who died Dec. 10 of heart failure at age 91, insisted the military takeover avoided civil war and a Marxist dictatorship, and said his 1973-90 regime never had “an institutional plan” to abuse human rights.

“But it was necessary to act with maximum rigor to avoid a widening of the conflict,” Pinochet wrote.

According to an official report, 3,197 people were killed for political reasons in the 17 years after Pinochet overthrew elected Marxist President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973. Tens of thousands were illegally imprisoned, tortured and forced into exile after the coup, during which Allende committed suicide rather than surrender.

Pinochet’s “message to all my compatriots to be published after my death” was made public by the Pinochet Foundation, a group of former aides and followers. Its president, Hernan Guiloff, said he received the text from Pinochet in 2004 and decided to make it public “on this day of peace” – Christmas Eve.

In the six-page text, Pinochet wrote that “I have left no room for hatred in my heart. My destiny is a kind of banishment and loneliness that I would have never imagined, much less wanted.”

When he died, Pinochet was under indictment charging him with human rights abuses under his dictatorship and tax evasion in connection with secret multimillion-dollar foreign bank accounts.