Monday, December 11, 2006

France determined to persecute elderly saviors of Chile

For showing how to claw the way back from socialist chaos.

General Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile who died yesterday aged 91, saved his country from Communism and created the most successful economy in Latin America....

Any judgment of Pinochet must take account of the rule of his predecessor, President Salvador Allende, who in 1970 had become the first Communist in the world to win power in a democratic election. Allende's programme of nationalising the means of production, and expropriating foreign-owned industries, banks, corporations and estates, brought economic chaos.

Which offends the French, apparently:

French judges still intend to bring 17 allies of Augusto Pinochet to trial over the disappearance of four French citizens in the 1970s despite the Chilean dictator's death, a legal official said Monday. ....

Nineteen people -- Pinochet and top figures from his military dictatorship -- have been targeted by international arrest warrants issued by a French judge over the disappearance of four Frenchmen in Chile between 1973 and 1975.

.... The four Frenchmen were Georges Klein, a political adviser to ousted president Salvador Allende, Etienne Presle, and two members of a left-wing movement, Alphonse Chanfreau and Jean-Yves Claudet-Fernandez.

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