In Chile, the death of Pinochet was greeted mostly by shrugs

SANTIAGO, Chile -- The death earlier this month of General Augusto Pinochet, the once-feared dictator, closed the most traumatic chapter in Chilean history. But while the chapter was violent, its closing was uneventful for most Chileans.

There were some anti-Pinochet rallies, but they soon burned out. There was a military funeral, replete with a fiery speech by Pinochet's grandson, also named Augusto, but it, too, passed without turmoil. Six city councilors in the Las Condes neighborhood of Santiago -- a bastion of capitalism, marked by rising American luxury hotels -- voted to name a street after the right-wing dictator. Meanwhile, many human rights activists bemoaned the fact that Pinochet never was brought to trial.

But the vast majority of Chileans seemed undisturbed -- relieved, more than anything else, to have the Pinochet era fully behind them -- but hardly seething for justice.

The relatively quiet end of the Pinochet era comes as the world continues to grapple with how to handle the legacy of brutal regimes. The Balkan wars of the '90s seemingly demonstrated how past grievances, if never properly laid to rest, can flare up almost instantaneously. And the trauma in the former Yugoslavia led the international human rights community to promote war crimes trials as way of reckoning with past misdeeds.

The United Nations tribunals for Rwanda and Bosnia continue to prosecute senior officials for genocide and crimes against humanity, with the hopes of providing a model for future tribunals.

For Rwanda, the trials represented belated international recognition of the horrors that befell the African nation, and thus had powerful symbolism as well as the effect of putting wrongdoers behind bars. The Bosnian tribunal also has convicted many top perpetrators. But the showpiece trial of former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic dragged on for years. It provided an unexpected forum for Milosevic's extreme nationalist views, and ended without a conviction due to his death from natural causes.

In Chile, reminders of the 1973 military coup that deposed the democratically elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende, are visible throughout Santiago. Souvenir stands sell Allende's photo, along with those of the Nobel laureate poet Pablo Neruda, a patron saint of Chilean socialism.

The US-backed coup led to Pinochet's dictatorship. Tremors from the coup reverberated across Latin America and boomeranged on the United States, with some people still accusing former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger of sharing responsibility for Pinochet's crimes.

During Pinochet's 17-year hold on power, about 3,200 political dissidents were killed, and about 30,000 were tortured, according to international human rights groups. Most of the deaths occurred early in Pinochet's tenure, and much of his dictatorship was marked by efforts to create a capitalist economy, assisted by conservative American economists associated with the University of Chicago.

The economy improved, but didn't really take off until Pinochet surrendered most of his power to a democratically elected government in 1990. In the ensuing decades, many nations, including his own, tried to bring him to trial for his alleged crimes, whose victims included Europeans and North and South Americans. He also stood accused of having looted the Chilean treasury. But age and dementia allowed him to avoid facing justice.

Both Britain, which had detained him in 1998, and Chile, eventually found him unfit to stand trial, though legal wrangling continued until his death.

When he died on December 10, at 91, he still had some prominent supporters. The former British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, has long hailed him as a bulwark against communism. Some American conservatives, such as columnist Paul Weyrich, praised his economic policies. Some Chilean capitalists also held him in esteem. But many others -- almost certainly a majority in Chile and elsewhere -- noted that plenty of formerly communist countries have enacted free-market reforms without an intervening dictatorship.

Nonetheless, Chile's attitude toward its recent past is markedly less freighted than in places like Bosnia, Rwanda, South Africa, and some other African and Eastern European nations. Among the factors accounting for the differences could be Pinochet's relatively peaceful surrender of power; the fact that his crimes were acknowledged and chronicled through his various indictments; and contentment with the current center-left government of President Michelle Bachelet, who had been tortured under Pinochet.

Then there is the Chilean economy, which averaged 5 1/2 percent annual growth for the first 15 years after Pinochet's resignation, while per capita income tripled. With copious resources and an educated workforce, Chile has been one of the real winners in global free trade.

The Chilean people may simply be too busy improving their country to indulge in resentment.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.