Why Thatcher's shadow still lingers over Latin America

[steve2470]

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/2013414125927351482.html



On April 8, hours before news of Margaret Thatcher's death broke, the British press reported that the body of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda would be exhumed to clarify the cause of his death nearly 40 years ago and put the matter to rest once and for all. Neruda died in September 1973, a matter of days after the right-wing coup that overthrew the democratically elected left-wing President Salvador Allende, of whom the poet was a staunch supporter.

Although the official version of events stated that Neruda died of cancer, there has since been significant speculation that his death may have been slightly more sinister affair, undertaken by the military government that took power through the coup. Within a couple of hours, the short article on Neruda had been overshadowed by the announcement that Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Prime Minister for over a decade (1979-1990), had died peacefully in her bed at London's Ritz Hotel at the age of 87.

However, these two seemingly unrelated news items - one about the exhumation of a Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet and the other about the death of the first female Prime Minster of Britain - are united by their protagonists' link to the notorious General Pinochet, one of the ringleaders of that fateful coup who would become dictator of Chile and, until 1990, head one of the most murderous regimes in Latin America during the Cold War.

This is the very same Pinochet that Thatcher called a friend and remained loyal to even after the Chilean dictator was arrested on charges, including murder and torture in London, in 1998 at the request of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon. Pinochet's arrest and the controversy surrounding his regime of terror - still subject to considerable scrutiny and investigation today as the Neruda exhumation indicates - did not deter Thatcher's adoration of Pinochet, as she wrote to then Prime Minister Tony Blair to appeal for her friend's release. She openly thanked Pinochet for his support and assistance during the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas conflict between Britain and Argentina.