Augusto Pinochet

Augusto Pinochet led the military coup of 11 September 1973 that overthrew Chile's elected president Salvador Allende and ruled as head of a military junta and then president until 1990, when a 1988 plebiscite rejected his bid to extend his rule. His government created the National Intelligence Directorate, DINA, which carried out several hundred forced disappearances between 1975 and 1976; the Rettig Report later found more than two thousand Chileans killed, disappeared, or executed under his rule, on top of an estimated five thousand to fifteen thousand killed during and immediately after the 1973 coup itself. He also turned Chile's economy over to a group of economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, known as the Chicago Boys, whose free-market shock therapy was imposed by military order, without the debate a democracy would have required, and whose benefits reached only a fraction of the population by the end of his rule.