While I greatly appreciated Matt Bair’s ‘This Day in History piece (Post, Sept. 11) on the Chilean coup of 1973, I feel that Matt only told us half of the story.
Augusto Pinochet, the army general who deposed the duly elected socialist President Salvador Allende, to the delight of American conservatives considered Pinochet as the savior of South America, was a brutal dictator who systematically murdered many tens of thousands of Allende’s former supporters.
These political opponents of Pinochet were systematically rounded up in the middle of the night and never seen again. To this day, they are known in Chile as “the disappeared.” Decades later, mass graves have been discovered with the remains of “the disappeared,” and skeletal remains of victims who were pushed from helicopters with weights attached to their bodies over the Pacific Ocean have been discovered in the waters of the Chilean coast.
The mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of the disappeared continue to search to this day for the remains of their loved ones. Recently, such remains have been found in the extremely arid high altitude Atacama Desert of Chile, where such remains are protected from decomposition by the extreme dryness.
For anyone interested, I highly recommend the outstanding documentaries The Judge and the General (2008) and Nostalgia for the Light (2010).
Kenneth Brown is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry emeritus at Ohio University.
