Dictator's Gallery: Augusto Pinochet, The Wicked Wizard

More than 2500 people were "disappeared" during seventeen-year military regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, with more than 35,000 tortured to prevent, as he believed it, the country from sliding into communism. In the meantime, he was secretly funneling Chile's riches into the bank accounts of his family, his buddies, and himself.

Recognized as one of the most ruthless and violent dictators in the history of Latin America, General Augusto Pinochet's name became synonymous with human rights atrocities during the last quarter of the 20-th century. Of those, 1100 were "disappeared"—abused to death and buried in still-secret graves, or thrown from military helicopters into the Pacific Ocean. An estimated 35,000 Chileans survived imprisonment and severe torture by agents of Pinochet's political police - electric shocks, severe beatings, near-drowning, and rape in secret detention facilities. In the mid 1970s, the Pinochet reign also organized a network of secret police agencies (given the code name Operation Condor) that coordinated the repression of groups and individuals who had been identified as opponents of the military governments of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay). Condor's methods included secret surveillance, kidnapping, interrogation, torture, and terrorist attacks. International efforts to hold General Pinochet legally accountable for human rights atrocities in Chile and acts of terrorism abroad led to his arrest for crimes against humanity in London in 1998.

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