Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

In Chile a former conscript has been charged with the brutal murder of popular singer Victor Jara in the immediate aftermath of General Augusto Pinochet’s fascist putsch in 1973. Victor Jara, among with hundreds of others, was brought to Chile’s National stadium where he was subjected to an orgy of mindless thuggery and violence before being shot forty-four times.

And the man who masterminded the coup and who was the intellectual author of Jara’s murder and that of thousands of others sipped tea in the cosiest of tete-a-tetes with that rabid bitch Margaret Thatcher. He was also the darling of members of the Catholic right in England and Ireland, such Norman Lamont. I remember how I was told by a member of the Knights of Columanus that Pinochet had “rescued Chile from communism” and that most of those who were murdered by the military were communist sympathisers who deserved what they got.

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.