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September 11 has been somewhat eclipsed in the last decade by a more notorious anniversary, but it remains a date etched in Chileans' minds: in 1973, this was the day General Augusto Pinochet seized power from the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende. Forty years after that sudden coup, and 23 years since its return to democracy, Chile is still recovering from the effects of Pinochet's brutal rule.

Its relevance today may not be immediately obvious. The world's attention is focused firmly on the Middle East, particularly the brutal civil war in Syria. As the international community debates what its responsibilities might be, people are dying. The shadow of Iraq looms large, obscuring and darkening the potential consequences of humanitarian intervention.

Yet among all this, Chile's influence can be felt. Javier Zuniga, 70, is a Mexican human rights activist and special advisor at Amnesty International; he argues that "what happened in Chile goes beyond its borders, because it shook the international community into understanding that human rights violations were the business of everybody, inside Chile and outside Chile." Zuniga visited the country many times during Pinochet's rule, documenting abuses and disappearances, and has since campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the relatives of the disappeared.

Carlos Reyes-Manzo is one of many thousands who were detained and tortured by the Pinochet regime. Now 68 and living in London, before the coup he worked for the Allende government, specifically for Chile Films, while also working as part of the Socialist Party. When the government was overthrown, he remembers how suddenly it happened: "In a way, we were expecting something would happen. [But] we never expected it would happen so quickly, and in such a way." By sheer luck, Reyes-Manzo had been at meetings when the militia raided his apartment, and initially avoided capture. Seeing what was happening, he decided to head for the Socialist Party headquarters in the center of Santiago.

"It was quite near to the presidential palace, and on my way I saw bodies in the street. The military immediately started shooting and killing people... And very soon they put fire to the Socialist Party headquarters." Carlos pauses. "That was the day, there was just shooting everywhere and killing everywhere."

By the end of that bloody day, President Allende was dead, having committed suicide as troops stormed the presidential palace.

Within 24 hours, the Socialist government had been deposed and replaced by a military junta. Some were pleased, particularly in the United States, where the coup enjoyed the covert support of the Nixon administration. Allende's sweeping nationalizations and quite radical reforms had proved unpalatable for many Chileans and outside observers, particularly transnational corporations. After the coup, free market economic policies were pursued with vigor, inspired by the theories of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and others.

As for the Socialist Party members, Reyes-Manzo recalls what happened next: "The leaders of the party were detained, some were killed, and some went underground. I went underground myself. So I spent six months underground, working there, just trying to get everything back into place... [Eventually] someone I was working with gave my name and I was detained. They came to my house and almost ransacked everything... I was with two little children and was taken away."

Reyes-Manzo spent months in detention, being moved around to different locations and tortured regularly. In one prison, he found he recognized the voice of the person in charge: it belonged to a man called Romo, whom he had known before the coup -- not that this changed anything. "They were not shy -- in a way they wanted you to know who they were."

Zuniga says "the torturers were mentally prepared to torture because they felt they were defending the country." Today, Reyes-Manzo still remains baffled by this.

"It was impossible for them to believe that what they were doing was wrong. This is the kind of ideology where you've convinced the people it's right to torture, right to kill, right to rape the women, right to... whatever they did, that it was right." He shakes his head. "And that was incredible."

Eventually, Reyes-Manzo managed an extraordinary escape. He was first exiled to Panama, before being kidnapped again by the Chilean secret police. They intended to take him back to Santiago, but first the plane had to stop over at London's Heathrow Airport. He says, "When I arrived to London, I realised it was my only chance to escape." Fortunately, he says, his guards had gotten drunk and had fallen asleep. "I dashed outside the plane, and asked for political asylum."

Reyes-Manzo spoke practically no English, and was nearly returned to Chile -- at the time, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and General Pinochet had a famously close relationship. However, he managed to contact Amnesty International, who in turn got Lord Avebury to raise the case in parliament. Asylum was granted, "and it saved my life, that's why I'm here."

So what lessons can the events of Chile 40 years ago offer to us today? "Some of the lessons are quite clear," Zuniga says. "What happens inside the country is not just a matter for the national authorities. Human rights are something that we are all responsible for. When there is a disappearance in Chile, or in Argentine, or in other countries [like] Sri Lanka, the Philippines, it is also humanity that is aggressed. I am aggressed. I am also a victim of these violations, even if it's not in my country. Because I am a human being... The lesson of Chile is that these human rights are a responsibility of everybody."

Of course, such platitudes don't make the dilemmas presented in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere any easier to grapple with -- and Zuniga accepts that international treaties and humanitarian agreements don't themselves prevent violations and violence.

"You also need the political will of governments inside the countries, and those who are outside to exert the pressure to help the people who are victims," Zuniga says. "And you can see that that is not working the case of Syria."

Nevertheless, Zuniga says organizations such as Amnesty are ready. "Even in very difficult circumstances, it's very important to document violations... Certainly the lessons of other countries like Chile and Argentina [are that] when the conflict ends, then it will be time for accountability."

Though he has travelled around the world's most troubled and violent regions for decades, Zuniga is not despondent. He points to the ongoing trial of 92-year-old Siert Bruins, a former Nazi SS officer, as an example that international law has a long memory. "It takes time," he says. "But there will be justice."

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chile's 9/11: survivors recall horrors of pinochet coup

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Chile's 9/11: Survivors recall horrors of Pinochet coup, 40 years on

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September 11 has been somewhat eclipsed in the last decade by a more notorious anniversary, but it remains a date etched in Chileans' minds: in 1973, this was the day General Augusto Pinochet seized power from the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende.

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https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8XSgiH5TrTXMlRFVzJTLWFrSEE

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- He won a scholarship to ballet Rambert school at the age of 13

- He has created works that are directly concerned with social, politics and ecological issues

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A dictator who ruled by fear

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Over-all, the regime left over 3,000 dead or missing and forced 200,000 Chileans into exile.The dictatorship shaped much of modern Chile's political, educational and economic life. In 1980, it replaced the Constitution of 1925 with a new one crafted by regime collaborators. The constitution was approved in a highly controversial referendum in 1980 but Pinochet's plans to remain in power were thwarted in 1988 when the regime admitted defeat ina referendumthat opened the way for democracy to be reestablished in 1990.

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Gen. Augusto Pinochet, 91, the former Chilean dictator whose government murdered and tortured thousands during his repressive 17-year rule, died yesterday at a Santiago military hospital of complications from a heart attack, leaving incomplete numerous court cases that had sought to bring him to justice.

Pinochet assumed power on Sept. 11, 1973, in a bloody coup supported by the United States that toppled the elected government of Salvador Allende, a Marxist who had pledged to lead his country "down the democratic road to socialism."

First as head of a four-man military junta and then as president, Pinochet served until 1990, leaving a legacy of abuse that took successive governments years to catalogue. According to a government report that included testimony from more than 30,000 people, his government killed at least 3,197 people and tortured about 29,000. Two-thirds of the cases listed in the report happened in 1973.

An austere figure who claimed to be guided by "the spiritual force of God as a believer," Pinochet regarded himself as a soldier rather than a politician. With his stern visage and fondness for military uniforms and dark glasses, he seemed to personify implacable authority. He was both an opponent of communism and a critic of "orthodox democracy," which he said was "too easy to infiltrate and destroy."

"I would like to be remembered as a man who served his country, who served Chile throughout his entire life on this earth," he once told an interviewer. "And what he did was always done thinking about the welfare of Chile and never sacrificing my tradition to hand it to other countries."

Pinochet relinquished the presidency in 1990, but he retained the powerful position of head of the army until 1997, when he became a senator for life. He gave up that position in 2002, claiming mild dementia and physical infirmities -- ailments that helped him avoid trials in hundreds of court cases filed against him in recent years.

But legal actions against Pinochet had gathered momentum in the two years preceding his death, as courts locked several of his key subordinates behind bars and raised hopes among victims' families that Pinochet would meet a similar fate. He had been placed under house arrest in Santiago five times, most recently last month in connection with the murders of two of Allende's bodyguards.

Throughout his later years, Pinochet retained loyal supporters, who credited his government with instituting a fiscal discipline that helped make Chile's economy the region's strongest. But he lost many of those backers after multiple probes in recent years revealed financial corruption, including the discovery of millions of dollars in state funds held in numerous secret overseas accounts, among them several at the former Riggs Bank in Washington. As recently as October, Chilean investigators announced the discovery of 10 tons of gold, worth an estimated $160 million, in Pinochet's name in a Hong Kong bank.

Pinochet remained defiant in the face of the accusations, consistently refusing to apologize for his actions as president. But during his 91st birthday celebration last month, his wife read a statement that indicated the authoritarian took "political responsibility" for his government. The vague nature of the statement did little to appease the families of his victims.

"Today, near the end of my days, I want to say that I harbor no rancor against anybody, that I love my fatherland above all," Pinochet's statement read. "I take political responsibility for everything that was done."

Among the crimes attributed to Pinochet during his reign were several high-profile murders that stretched beyond Chile's borders, many carried out by the Directorate of National Intelligence, or DINA, a fear-inspiring secret police agency that Pinochet organized in 1974.

Prosecutors in Washington in 1999 began investigating Pinochet's possible role in the September 1976 car bombing on Embassy Row that killed Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean foreign minister, and his 25-year-old American assistant, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Six people were imprisoned for the attack, but the case was reopened after Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 and held for 17 months on a warrant seeking his extradition to Spain on charges of murdering and torturing Spanish citizens in Chile.

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Gen. Augusto Pinochet, 91, the former Chilean dictator whose government murdered and tortured thousands during his repressive 17-year rule, died yesterday at a Santiago military hospital of complications from a heart attack, leaving incomplete numerous court cases that had sought to bring him to justice....

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BBC Bitesize - GCSE Physical Education - An insight into Christopher Bruce's 'Ghost Dances'

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An illustrated explanation of Christopher Bruce's most enduring work, 'Ghost Dances'.

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We continue to be the education sector's essential partner for cloud solutions and are proud to continue to provide and develop websites, communications Apps, online booking and payment solutions, VLEs, Learning Platforms and Identity and Access Management Solutions. To find out more, please contact us.

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Interview about Ghost Dancers - Houston Ballet

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Interview about Ghost Dancers - Houston Ballet

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Augusto Pinochet: Augusto Pinochet, leader of the military junta that overthrew the socialist government of Pres. Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973.

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Christopher Bruce has performed and choreographed for television. He was himself the subject of a BBC television documentary in the Omnibus series 'Voices of Children' (1978) which included one of his works to George Crumb's music, Ancient Voices of Children.

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The Ghost Dancers (sometimes referred to as White Ghosts) are three skeleton-like men with skull masks and long, matted hair. They are present on stage throughout the production from the moment the curtain rises to the point at which it falls, apparently awaiting their next consignment of the Dead. Christopher Bruce described them as having ‘hung around for millions of years, and lying on rocks, like... animals. They’d become birds and lizards as well as men. These are symbolic creatures who may be said to be spirits, guardians of the rocky, barren ‘noman’s land’ at the mouth of the cave where the work is set, oppressors, murderers, forces of dictatorship, or death itself.

Ref: http://clc2.uniservity.com/GroupDownloadFile.asp?GroupId=153273&ResourceID=3618312

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During those last years he lived in near seclusion, mostly at his home in Bucalemu, about 80 miles southwest of Santiago, scorned even by many of his former military colleagues and conservative civilian ideologues. Many were disillusioned by revelations that he held, at the least, $28 million in secret bank accounts abroad.

"The humiliation Pinochet has gone through is probably a better outcome than any trial could have achieved," said José Zalaquett, Chile's foremost human rights lawyer.

He won grudging international praise for some of the free-market policies he instituted, transforming a bankrupt economy into the most prosperous in Latin America. They included removing trade barriers, encouraging export growth, privatizing state-owned industries, creating a central bank able to control interest and exchange rates without government interference, cutting wages sharply, and privatizing the social security system. Many elements of the so-called Chilean model were widely emulated in the region.

But by the time of his death, even some of those economic victories had been called into question. The privatizing of Chile's social security system, in particular, has come under attack as unjust and is undergoing revision. And across Latin America, many of the countries that had adopted similar reforms are reversing some of them, responding to a growing wave of popular, leftist anger over untrammeled foreign competition and unequal distribution of wealth.
Little Use for Constitution
General Pinochet initially led a four-man junta in the 1973 military coup that brought him to power, with the support of the United States government. President Allende, a democratically elected Socialist, was found dead after shooting himself during an assault on the presidential palace in Santiago. The coup followed many months of political unrest and economic chaos. Hyperinflation, recession, labor strife and middle-class protests had sapped the Allende government of popular support.

General Pinochet (pronounced pee-noh-CHET) soon made it clear that he had little use for political parties, banning all of them. He also dissolved Congress and scrapped the Constitution. He blamed the democratic political system for having allowed a coalition of Socialists and Communists to take control of the government. In a 1973 news conference, he asserted that Chile would require "an authoritarian government that has the capacity to act decisively" and would not return to the traditional political party system for a generation. It was a vow he kept.

In 1974, General Pinochet elevated himself to president, reducing the rest of the junta to a consultative role. He appointed military officers as mayors of towns and cities throughout Chile. Retired military personnel were named rectors of universities, and they carried out vast purges of faculty members suspected of left-wing or liberal sympathies.

The press was censored, and labor strikes and unions were banned. A fearsome security apparatus known as the National Intelligence Directorate, or DINA, persecuted, tortured and killed Pinochet opponents within Chile and sometimes beyond its borders. A government-commissioned report issued in 2004 concluded that almost 28,000 people had been tortured during the general's rule.

Military governments were the rule rather than the exception in Latin America in the 1970s. Whether right wing, as in Argentina and Brazil, or left wing, as in Peru, military dictators came to power promising to impose economic discipline but departed, after some initial success, with the economy in disarray.

General Pinochet proved to be the exception. Though no economic expert, he had at his service a team of technocrats who, months before the coup, put together a radical plan to overhaul the country's battered economy. Some had studied with the Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago and embraced his notions of free-market forces and monetarism.

But economic transformation was slow and painful. Mistakes by the general's economic team provoked a deep recession in the early 1980s that left more than a third of the work force without jobs. The poor survived with the help of soup lines and temporary employment in public works projects that paid less than the minimum wage.

Attempts at strikes or other forms of protest were ruthlessly put down by General Pinochet's secret police. That repression gave the free-market policies time to take hold. Since the mid-1980s, Chile's gross domestic product has grown an average of more than 6 percent a year, the most impressive performance in Latin America.
A Steady Rise in the Army
There were few hints in General Pinochet's early life that he harbored either political ambitions or ideological convictions. The son of a customs inspector, he was born into lower middle-class circumstances on Nov. 25, 1915, in the Pacific port city of Valparaíso. He graduated from the military academy in Santiago in 1937 and rose steadily in the officer corps. He was already a general, and only 55, when he was given the important post of commander of the Santiago army garrison in 1971.

It was a crucial moment in President Allende's term. Elected the year before with only 36 percent of the vote, Mr. Allende, a physician, had pressed ahead with a Socialist program to nationalize mines, banks and strategic industries, split up large rural estates into communal farms, and impose price controls. The measures soon resulted in steep declines in production, shortages of consumer goods and explosive inflation. A general strike paralyzed Santiago in late 1972, and General Pinochet, as garrison commander, was called on by Mr. Allende to impose a state of emergency in the capital.

This was the first time most Chileans became aware of the tall, broad-shouldered army officer with a brush mustache on his unsmiling face. General Pinochet imposed a curfew, ordered the arrest of several hundred demonstrators on both the left and the right and announced, "I will not tolerate agents of chaos no matter what their political ideology."

His seemingly neutral stance convinced Mr. Allende that he was an officer who could be relied on to observe the Chilean military's century-long tradition of loyalty to civilian government. In August 1973, he appointed General Pinochet commander in chief of the army.

Less than three weeks later, the armed forces overthrew the government. The presidential palace, known as La Moneda, was bombed and strafed by the air force. Mr. Allende shot himself rather than surrender, according to his personal doctor.

Aside from battles at some factories in the Santiago suburbs, there was little resistance to the overwhelming firepower of the military units that fanned out across the country. Tens of thousands of Allende sympathizers were rounded up and brutally interrogated. A majority of the killings took place in the first three months, long after resistance had ended.

In most cases, prisoners from a slum or agrarian community would be executed as a means of terrorizing their neighbors into accepting military rule. The killings were often cynically, and falsely, justified as cases in which prisoners were shot while trying to escape.

The images that most shaped the outside world's low opinion of the military administration were scenes of Santiago's main sports stadium filled with prisoners, and by the public appearances of General Pinochet, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, face set in a scowl, arms folded defiantly across his chest. Although a majority of executions, jailings and cases of torture took place shortly after the 1973 coup, serious human rights abuses waxed and waned over the next 17 years.

By the late 1980s, the economic prosperity General Pinochet created had lulled him into assuming that in free elections he or his chosen candidate would receive the grateful support of a majority of Chileans. But by then most were either too young to remember the Allende years or too confident about the strength of the economy to believe that only an authoritarian government could ensure growth and stability.
Free Elections Ended Rule
In 1980, a new Constitution backed by the Pinochet government made the armed forces "guarantors of institutionality," giving them a nebulous role as political arbiters. It included several other limitations to full-fledged democracy. But in a 1988 plebiscite, an ample majority of Chileans voted against an attempt by General Pinochet to stay on as president for eight more years.

In presidential elections a year later, the former dictator's candidate was handily defeated by Patricio Aylwin, a centrist Christian Democrat supported by parties of the left. In 1993, another Christian Democrat, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, was elected president by an even greater margin.

To the delight of the Chilean business community, foreign investment, which had been stunted during the years the government was regarded with international opprobrium, poured back into the country, and Chilean products were welcomed everywhere abroad. Officials of the new Christian Democratic administration were not inclined to tinker with the roaring economic machine they inherited from the Pinochet administration.

"We may not like the government that came before us," Alejandro Foxley, who was finance minister under Mr. Aylwin and is foreign minister today, said in a 1991 interview. "But they did many things right. We have inherited an economy that is an asset."

With the transition to democracy going so well, even General Pinochet's admirers hoped he would settle into a quieter period. Instead, he staged unannounced military maneuvers or placed his troops on sudden alert and gave notice that he would not tolerate attempts to prosecute his era's human rights violators. "The day they touch one of my men, the rule of law ends," he warned in 1991.

In a rare exception, he stood by as two subordinates were convicted of ordering the murder of Orlando Letelier, foreign minister in the Allende government. Mr. Letelier was killed by a car bomb in Washington in September 1976, along with an American colleague, Ronni Moffitt. The incident, considered the worst act of state-sponsored terrorism on American soil, strained relations between Chile and the United States for almost two decades.

The two went to prison in 1995. Gen. Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, the head of DINA, the notorious secret police, was sentenced to seven years; his second in command, Col. Pedro Espinoza, was sentenced to six years.

Stories of corruption began swirling around members of General Pinochet's family as well as military personnel, and he used his power as army chief to protect them. He quashed judicial and congressional investigations into the financial dealings of his elder son and of army officers who were accused of running an illegal investment banking operation. Until revelations emerged in late 2004 that he had accumulated secret accounts totaling as much as $8 million at Riggs Bank in Washington, the general, who lived spartanly, was rarely accused of corruption himself. Later, Chilean investigators found that he had as much as $28 million in secret bank accounts in a number of countries.

Through his strong-arm tactics against the democratic governments that succeeded him, General Pinochet was making the point to Chileans that if they wanted to enjoy the capitalist virtues of his former dictatorship, they had better overlook his human rights violations.

Those violations were well documented by the National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, a nonpartisan group appointed by Mr. Aylwin to investigate the killings and disappearances carried out under the general's 17-year dictatorship. The commission's report cited victims by name and described the ghastly circumstances of their deaths by firing squads, beatings, mutilations, drownings and electrocutions. In all, the report attributed at least 3,200 killings and disappearances to the Pinochet security forces.

General Pinochet scoffed at his human rights critics. Asked about the discovery of a mass grave of his government's victims, he was quoted in the Chilean press as joking that it was an "efficient" way of burial.
Legal Battles to the End
Protected by personal security squads, the general also continued an active social life. He was feted by wealthy admirers on his birthday and on the anniversary of his coup. He was often invited to speak at luncheons given by political supporters and leading businessmen. When he finally stepped down as army chief, he joined the Senate as an unelected, permanent member, apparently intending to grant himself further immunity from prosecution.

But the general did not count on the determination of jurists abroad to bring him to justice. In October 1998, while recuperating in a London clinic from a back operation, he was arrested by the British police in response to an application from a Spanish judge seeking the general's extradition to Madrid to stand trial on charges of genocide, torture and kidnapping.

A 16-month legal battle ensued, ending with a decision to send him back to Chile in March 2000 because his physical and mental ailments made him unfit to stand trial. Days after his return, Ricardo Lagos, the first Socialist to be elected president since the 1973 overthrow of Mr. Allende, assumed office.

For the rest of his life, the general had to fight off lawsuits and accept the humiliation of constant news reports about widespread brutality under his rule. President Lagos allowed the hundreds of criminal complaints filed against General Pinochet to run their course in the courts. He was succeeded in March 2006 by another Socialist, Michelle Bachelet, a former political prisoner and exile. Her father, an air force general loyal to Mr. Allende, was jailed by his colleagues, tortured and died in prison.

General Pinochet spent his final years in near seclusion, with his wife, the former María Lucía Hiriart Rodríguez, 84, with whom he had two sons, Augusto and Marco Antonio, and three daughters, Lucía, Verónica and Jacqueline. They all survive him.

In rare public remarks, he continued to insist that he enjoyed the gratitude and wide support of Chileans. But polls indicated that well over half of his compatriots believed that he should have been prosecuted for his human rights crimes.

Correction: December 13, 2006

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Augusto Pinochet, Dictator Who Ruled by Terror in Chile, Dies at 91

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During those last years he lived in near seclusion, mostly at his home in Bucalemu, about 80 miles southwest of Santiago, scorned even by many of his former military colleagues and conservative civilian ideologues. Many were disillusioned by revelations that he held, at the least, $28 million in secret bank accounts abroad.

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Ghost Dances (choreographed by Christopher Bruce for Rambert in 1981) came about as a result of a letter received by Christopher Bruce from a widow of a Chilean folk singer who had been murdered. He was asked to do a work for the Chilean Human Rights Committee and was given a lot of South American music with which he fell in love. This stirred him to be sympathetic towards the cause of the Committee who were against unnecessary killings taking place throughout their country.

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http://www.houstonballet.org/Inside-Houston-Ballet/Artistic-Staff/Christopher-Bruce/

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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/world/americas/11pinochet.html?pagewanted=all