MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Mrs. Pinochet described as arrogant and vindictive

Lucia Hiriart, the wife of Augusto Pinochet who now has also been indicted on corruption charges has played a notorious public role gaining over the decades a reputation for arrogance, resoluteness and vindictiveness.

Hiriart, 82, was formally charged this week as an accomplice to tax fraud in connection with an investigation into Pinochet's recently discovered, and huge, personal fortune. Doña Lucia, famous for the flamboyant hats and flowery dresses with which she outfitted members of the official organizations she headed when her husband ruled Chile with an iron fist, was granted bail on Thursday.

She was most closely associated with CEMA Chile, a mothers' group that named her "president for life" when Pinochet relinquished power in 1990. It emerged recently that Hiriart continues to receive an estimated 182,000 US dollars annually in taxpayers' money from CEMA, without any obligation to account for how she uses the funds.

In a biography that is widely accepted as accurate, and which she has never publicly challenged, Lucia Hiriart is reported to have said to Pinochet just days before the bloody September 1973 coup: "There are your children. They will end up under communist tyranny because of you, because you don't dare to act". At that moment General Pinochet had publicly sworn loyalty to elected Socialist President Salvador Allende and was hesitant about joining a group of military officers already plotting the takeover.

Lucia Hiriart said in a 1974 interview that it was she who pushed her husband to lead the violent overthrow of Allende, who took his own life as soldiers supported by fighter-bombers assaulted the presidential palace.

"I told him many times, 'look Augusto, I don't know how much longer the military is going to go on putting up with these wretches. Do you want to tell me what you have pants for?" Finally he heeded". Another revealing episode took place in 1979, when Pinochet had to return red-faced from Manila because then-Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos withdrew an invitation to his counterpart just as the Chilean's plane was touching down in the capital for an official visit.

An enraged Hiriart demanded - and got - the dismissal of Chilean Foreign Minister Hernan Cubillos, whose adroit diplomacy just a few months earlier had averted a war with Argentina and made him the attractive human face of Pinochet's iron fisted authoritarian regime.

In 1984, amid widespread protests against military rule, Lucia proclaimed: "If I were the head of this government, I would be much tougher than my husband and I would have all of Chile under martial law". Despite these examples and the many accounts about the power Hiriart purportedly exercises over Pinochet within the bosom of the family, some question whether she has real influence on important matters.

"Pinochet gives ground tactically in order to be in control strategically" wrote the dictator's friend, Colonel Cristian Labbe describing the couple's relationship.

The daughter of Osvaldo Hiriart, a senator and interior minister in the 1940s under President Juan Antonio Rios, Lucia was married in January 1943 to then Lieutenant Pinochet, whose social standing was greatly enhanced by the match. The pair went on to have five children, one of whom, Marco Antonio, has also been charged in the tax-fraud case.

On October 5, 1988, when Chileans voted in a plebiscite for an end to military rule and a return to democracy, Mrs. Pinochet went on television to blast her fellow citizens as "ungrateful". Doña Lucia, meanwhile, was described by Argentine author Juan Gasparini -in a book called "Mujeres de dictadores" (Dictators's Women)- as "merciless, ambitious and proud of the crimes committed" under Pinochet.

Her whim was fully on display in the saga of the new presidential mansion Pinochet ordered built in Santiago's Lo Curro neighborhood in the eighties, a pyramid-style structure of 1,600 square meters which Chile's leading architects described as a monument to kitsch. But things got even worse once Lucia weighed in. Unhappy with some of the colors, materials and configurations used in the construction, she ordered it torn down and rebuilt, which pushed the final price tag to roughly 70 million US dollars, five times the originally estimated cost.

With the restoration of democratic government in 1990, authorities declined to use the building as a presidential residence and donated it to the army. It is now an officers club. The mansion affair illustrates how far the Pinochet family advanced from 1975 when she publicly stated that "the goals of the government led by my husband are directed toward the absolute good of the fatherland. This government does not covet worldly goods".