Was Augusto Pinochet a Villain or Hero for Chile?

For the PanAm Post, it is still unresolved, apparently. Some even denying that Pinochet and Chile had any real enemies;

I was born in Chile, and lived under Allende and Pinochet. So according to you, then I saw things all wrong and I never saw anyone get arrested or killed, and the truth commissions currently being held in Chile now are all lies and communist propaganda.

Next you will quote me from the NY Times that Victor Jara was never murdered by Pinochet-he staged his death so he could move into a house with Elvis in the Bahamas, and that Contreras is innocent and that DINA was not a murderous secret police, but really just a late night food delivery service. Next you will tell me no prisoners were ever held by Pinochet at the National Stadium in Santiago and show me the FIFA report to confirm this. Villa Grimaldi was just a country club and that elections were held every year when Pinochet was in power and that he never tried to stage another dictatorship the night he lost the plebiscite.  You are truly delusional.

 Javier (the author of the above comment) seems determined to miss the point that no one disputes that people get killed during wars. And did in the civil war in Chile after the overthrow of Salvador Allende's Wanna-be-like-Fidel regime. One wonders who Javier thinks the people fighting Pinochet were, peaceful demonstrators petitioning for redress of grievance?

No, in most cases they were armed and dangerous Marxist guerillas. Whether they called themselves MIR, ERP, Tupamaros or Montoneros, they were armed and trained in Cuba or by Cubans to destabilize not only Chile, but Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and several other countries. There were thousands of them in Chile before and after the military overthrew Allende in 1973.

Back in October of 1970, just after Salvador Allende was named as the winner of the Presidency in Chile, there was this exchange on William F. Buckley's Firing Line, among the host and his guests Selden Rodman and Georgie Anne Geyer--who knew Allende so well that she used to go swimming with him and his Cuban girlfriend at the Veradero Beach Club in Havanna almost every day when the both lived in Cuba in 1966 (transcript from the Hoover Institution);

Mr. Buckley: But does Allende, himself, allude to the Cuban situation -- does he say, I want to make things the way they have them in Cuba?
Miss Geyer: Very often.
Mr. Buckley: Yes.
Miss Geyer: When I was there in June, he gave a speech and said very clearly -- I was there -- he said, when I'm elected, we will have the revolutionary axis between Havana and Santiago. And, whenever I have talked to him, which is a half-dozen times over the years, he has always made it very, very clear -- that I don't think there is any --well, his admiration for Fidel is almost worshipful. And, at times....
Mr. Rodman: When the exiles from Che's adventure in Bolivia escaped into Chile, Allende took them personally by plane to Havana, because he thought that they were the heroes of his movement.

And those heroes returned to fight Pinochet again and again. Even into the 1980s, as they almost succeeded in killing Pinochet with a rocket attack on his motorcade in 1986.

Hey, Augusto, take it like a man!, says Javier.