See the nice picture? The happy, elegant man is Augusto Pinochet, dictator, murderer, torturer, and heart patient. The woman on the right, so solemn and supportive, is former British Prime Minister, Maggie Thatcher. About the time this picture was taken, the government of Spain was requesting that Britain extradite Mr. Pinochet so that he could be tried for the torture and murder of a Spanish student in Chile in 1973.
Does Maggie Thatcher have any children? I don't know. It's hard to picture her reading "Winnie the Pooh" to a cuddly little child, and then going off to have dinner with a man who believes that no one has the right to tell him not to have students tortured and murdered.
Margaret Thatcher is the former prime-minister of Great Britain, a nation which tirelessly brags of itself as the birthplace of the Magna Carta, a document which ensured that the subsequent rulers of England could not govern without the consent of at least some of the governed. Thatcher is a good friend of Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Pinochet was a general in the Chilean national army in 1973 when, with the help of the CIA, he decided to put an end to Salvadore Allende's democratically-elected socialist government. Allende was murdered in the presidential palace and Pinochet took control of the government.
After seizing power, Mr. Pinochet decided to destroy any possible opposition to his new government by arresting anyone who was ever likely to have supported Mr. Allende and socialism, or democracy, or unions, or free speech, or human rights. Once they were arrested, the army tortured many of them to try to get the names of more people to arrest. They used electric shock, torches, rubber hoses, and lots of other devices. Then thousands of them were cold-bloodedly murdered. All of this was done at the direction of General Pinochet.
Mrs. Thatcher happens to like Mr. Pinochet and thinks it is an awful shame and a travesty that the British House of Lords has ruled that Mr. Pinochet can be extradited to Spain to face charges of murder and torture. Why, it's as if he were just an ordinary man, like you and me! What is the world coming to when dictators are arrested and held accountable for all the people they murdered!
Chile was an object lesson in the real meaning of democracy in the Western hemisphere: people are free to elect any government they want, so long as it is the "right" government. The Americans like to portray Cuba as a dictatorship because they don't have free and open elections and Castro likes to put dissidents in prison. Of course Nicaragua and the Honduras and El Salvador also had un-elected governments that were far more repressive than Castro during the 1970's, but the U.S. didn't call them "dictatorships". The U.S. called them "democracies" and proceeded to introduce their leaders to our own banana and coffee growers.
So what they really mean when they say that Cuba is a dictatorship is that they have the "wrong" government, and that is why so many conservatives go crazy at the very mention of Fidel Castro.
What does it mean that Margaret Thatcher, the former prime-minister of Great Britain, poses for a picture with the former dictator of Chile? Doesn't it bother you? Isn't it strange that the leader of a "free" country considers herself a good friend of an enemy of freedom? How would you feel if you saw a similar picture of Reverend Billy Graham standing beside Gypsy Rose Lee? Would Billy Graham say something like, "Yes, in an ideal world, I prefer virtuous women, but sometimes you just have to have a slut around."
So, for all the blather in the U.S. and the U.K. about freedom and democracy and rights, the truth is that those principles don't seem to matter very much when it comes to foreign policy.
And that is why Kissinger and Nixon and the CIA went crazy when Chile elected socialist Salvador Allende. And that is why they helped Pinochet over-throw the government. And that is why Margaret Thatcher proudly poses for pictures with a torturer and murderer today.
