Chile Fall of the Patriarch

Pinochet loses at the polls, but democracy is not the victor yet

"He fell! He fell!"

For 15 years General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, 72, has held Chile in his proud and dictatorial grasp -- once even boasting that "there is not a single leaf in this country that I do not move." So why shouldn't he have believed that Chileans would vote si last week in an extraordinary plebiscite on whether to extend his presidential term to 1997? But shortly before 2 a.m. on Thursday, an ashen-faced official stepped from La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, and headed for a nearby government building. There he told TV viewers that the public had...

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