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In 1986, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front shot down Augusto Pinochet's vehicle. It was a near-perfect plan, but the dictator survived.
Cuba's Havana Film Festival Friday will premiere "Killing Pinochet," a film based on real events that recounts the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) attack on Chile's dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1986.
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In 80 minutes, the film directed by Juan Sabatini revived the preparations for the attack that Chile remembers as 'the Operation of the 20th Century'.
The assault arrangements began in 1980, seven years after Pinochet led the bombing of the La Moneda Palace to overthrow President Salvador Allende.
On September 7, 1986, the tyrant's vehicle was shot down while returning to Santiago city from his rest home in Cajon del Maipo. Five bodyguards were killed and Pinochet was wounded in his left hand.
José Carrasco Tapia, Pepone, periodista, dirigente del MIR. Preso entre 1975 y 1976, exiliado volvió en los 80. En la foto, detenido en una protesta. Un mes después fue asesinado en represalia al atentado a Pinochet, junto a Gastón Vidaurrazaga, Felipe Rivera y Abraham Muskatblit pic.twitter.com/ZKw5vbkfRj
— gloria elgueta (@mgep) September 8, 2019
The planning of the attack was thorough. It included the training of some of the FPMR members in Cuba. It was a near-perfect plan, but Pinochet survived. Those responsible were hunted down and killed months later.
The action was highlighted by the dictatorship as a perfect intelligence operation. "I thought I would not get out alive," Pinochet acknowledged.
The punishment of the dictator who settled the terror in Chile from 1973 to 1990 did not come by armed or institutional means. He died of a heart attack in a hospital bed on December 10, 2006.
The film will be shown in Havana a year after Chile's social outbreak that triggered the process of reforming the Pinochet-era Constitution.
#Chile says NO to a tradition of neoliberal politics with roots in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.#ChileViolatesHumanRights #ChileSomosTodos #SebastianPiñera pic.twitter.com/NBSZdSBNvB
— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) October 23, 2019
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