Grateful for what?

Presumably he subscribes to the guiding principle of American foreign policy that "people can have the Government of their choice, only if it is one we approve of." We should not forget that, following the election of the government of President Salvator Allende, the American Central Intelligence Agency, with the active encouragement of President Nixon, spent three million dollars in an effort to destabilise the Chilean economy, to try, in Nixon's words, to "make the economy scream."

General Pinochet was never elected by anybody. His military dictatorship bombed the Presidential Palace, killing Allende, took power by force, and subsequently tortured, maimed and killed thousands of his own people to make Chile safe for God, Motherhood, Apple Pie, and Chicago-trained 'Free Market" Economists.

I can never quite understand why we should support the notion that superpowers like America have the God-given right to tell the rest of us what we should and shouldn't do, much less pick our governments for us.

I cannot at all understand why we should encourage and admire General Pinochet and his ilk. There are lots of appropriate names for the sort of system in which the ruling elite have to maim and kill large numbers of their fellow countrymen in order to retain power. 'Democracy' isn't one of them.

The story of how the folk singer Victor Jara was treated by Pinochet's soldiers is particularly instructive. After one of them had smashed his hands with a rifle-butt so that he would never again be able to play the guitar, he snarled -- "Now sing, you b......" Jara was later killed. To do that to any musician is barbaric. So was the Pinochet regime.

Cllr Peter Johnston

Kendal Road, Bolton

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.