Justice of a sort for the victims of the Caravan of Death
I see that the leader of Chile’s notorious Caravan of Death, Gen Arellano Stark and five of his underlings have received jail sentences for the extra-judicial killing of people whose politics they didn’t like during the rule of Augusto Pinochet.
The Caravan of Death was like a mobile execution squad who went up and down the country seeking out victims whom the authorities were just too squeamish to wipe out themselves. Their actions were known to Pinochet, the man with whom the former British Prime Minister sipped tea and ate cake. If only she had been able to use the Caravan of Death against the miners, the Militant Tendency, Irish terrorists and their synpathisers in Eire and the CND.
Of course, here in leprechaun land General Pinochet had a considerable fan-club, especially amongst those who were on the way to doing God’ s work. True, he had murdered a democratically-elected president and murdered hundreds, if not thousands of innocent people, but hadn’t he saved Chile from “Godless communism?” The fact that Salvador Allende (pronounced Ayende or Azhende and not Allendy as some conservative politicans believed) was never a communist, or that he had the support of many members of the country’s hierarchy, is forgotten. Pinochet’s supporters point to the fact that when he survived a leftist assassination plot the bullets left the impiression of the Virgin Mary on the car window. They point to the extraordinary economic success enjoyed by Chile thanks to Pinochet, but that ignoramus knew nothing about economics; any economic success was the work of technocrats like Buchl the finance minister.
