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Secret Pinochet payments linked to BAE
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Saturday December 18, 2004 16:30
by Brian Vernon
he British arms firm BAE yesterday refused to comment on documents showing mysterious payments linked to UK weapons purchases by General Augusto Pinochet.
Sums of up to $5m (£2.57m) are listed in Gen Pinochet's bank records obtained by a Senate investigation in Washington.
Some appear to be linked to arms purchases he agreed to make from Royal Ordnance, a BAE subsidiary.
http://www.12thharmonic.com/wordpress/index.php?p=548
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Jump To Comment: 1My Case Against Pinochet
by Francisco Letelier
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1217-24.htm
When I read that Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the 89-year-old former leader of Chile, had been placed under house arrest earlier this week and declared competent to stand trial for his many crimes, it was no abstract issue for me. This was a man, after all, who had a tremendous influence on my life, the man who robbed me of my father, who tore my family apart.
I met him first in the days before the military coup that put him in power. He was a guest for dinner at our home in Santiago, Chile. I was 14 years old. I can see him now in my father's study, the Andes visible in the windows behind him. I remember that he looked strangely disconcerted, amid the bookcases and leather-backed tomes. Perhaps he was already making plans for the future.
Only a few months later, on Sept. 11, 1973, Pinochet seized power in a coup that ousted the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Allende died during the coup, and life was turned inside out for my family and for my father, Orlando Letelier, who had served as Allende's ambassador to the United States and later as foreign minister.
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