- The Guardian,
- Thursday October 7 1999
The former prime minister summoned up all her star power at a rally to free Augusto Pinochet, her first speech at a Tory conference since 1990. What she served up was a perverse inversion of the truth, a distorted attempt to recast a dictator as an innocent and to forget the cruelty of the regime he headed for so long. With breathtaking cheek, Thatcher deployed the language of Amnesty International to present the general as the victim of a human rights abuse: "he was arrested by night on his bed of pain ... in circumstances which would do credit to a police state ... held in a tiny room under sedation." His enemies were planning "a show-trial" and "a lingering death in a foreign land".
The baroness forgets that the former dictator is actually living in luxury in Surrey, waited on hand-and-foot and surrounded by his family - hardly the treatment Pinochet allowed to those incarcerated when he was in charge. She also displayed a mental block as to why Pinochet is under arrest, forgetting the tens of thousands of Chileans who were held without trial, often tortured, following the 1973 coup.
It is laughable to imagine that Augusto Pinochet was ignorant of these crimes. He led a coup against a democratically-elected government: he is not in any true sense a political prisoner, but a man suspected of the grossest crimes. Margaret Thatcher may win applause from the devoted, but on the case which brought her out of retirement she is disgracefully wrong.
