Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was born in Valparaíso, Chile, on Nov. 15, 1915. His parents, Augusto and Avelina Pinochet, descended, like most of Chile's privileged upper-middle class, from European ancestors. Having spent his youth in Valparaíso, Pinochet left the town at the age of 18 to enroll at the military academy of Santiago, from which he graduated in 1936. After his initial military training, Pinochet attended the University of Chile in Santiago for two years, devoting his studies to the subjects of law and social sciences.

Following his brief stay at the university, Pinochet resumed his military career, rising rapidly through the lower ranks of Chile's army. After a brief stay in the northern Chilean town of Iquique, Pinochet returned to Santiago to resume his studies at the Academia de Guerra, Chile's foremost military college. Having achieved the rank of major in 1953, Pinochet was stationed briefly in Africa, before returning home to take up a prestigious teaching post at the Academia de Guerra. As a professor at the military school, Pinochet taught a variety of courses, including geography, which would remain one of Pinochet's main interests throughout his life.

Pinochet's military career advanced unimpeded throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. Along with his duties at the Academia de Guerra, he briefly served in posts in Ecuador and in the United States, before returning full time to the military academy in 1964 as its assistant director. Pinochet's promotions through the ranks of the military continued under President Eduardo Frei of the Christian Democratic party, who had come to power in 1964. In 1968 Pinochet reached the level of brigadier general.

A career military man, Pinochet demonstrated little ambition for any posts outside of the armed forces, let alone the field of politics. That disinterest in politics, however, began to dissipate after 1970, when the reformist Christian Democratic party was voted out of office by the Chilean population and replaced by a coalition of socialist parties headed by self-professed Marxist Salvador Allende Gossens. Allende, who drew the bulk of his support from a coalition of leftist intellectuals, the working class, and rural poor, came to power with just 36.3 percent of the vote. Despite this lack of an electoral majority, Allende immediately began to implement radical plans for economic and social reform in Chile. Businesses, including numerous foreign industries, were nationalized, and a sweeping land reform essentially turned over much of Chile's farmland to the peasant population of the country.

While Allende's radical reforms proved popular to the formerly dispossessed social groups in Chile, they had a directly opposite effect on members of the ousted ruling elite and middle classes. Opponents of Allende charged that the socialist policies implemented during the first years of Allende's rule had pushed the Chilean economy toward complete collapse. Inflation exploded to more than 600 percent annually, while industrial and agricultural production plummeted. As a result of the economic chaos, anti-Allende strikes, as well as street violence between opponents and supporters of the government, increased in number and ferocity throughout the country.

In an effort to stave off outright civil war, Allende turned increasingly to the military to stabilize the government. In 1970, shortly after his election, Allende appointed Pinochet—who professed his loyalty to the president—to head the military garrison in the capital of Santiago. Following an outbreak of widespread street violence in late 1971, Allende declared a state of emergency in the capital and called on Pinochet to restore peace in Santiago. Threatening to use force to suppress the rioting, Pinochet restored order, and—in a statement that would prove darkly ironic in the ensuing years—warned that “coups do not occur in Chile.”

Pinochet's display of loyalty during the unrest of December 1971 won him the confidence of Allende. In 1972, as work stoppages and riots once again brought Chile to the verge of open revolt, Allende invited several high ranking military leaders to join the government. Pinochet received the post of chief of staff in the army. A year later, on Aug. 24, 1973, he was promoted to commander in chief after anti-Allende members of the military forced the resignation of Carlos Prats Gonzalez, a loyal supporter of Allende. Pinochet's promotion to the top military post came despite warnings that he was secretly allied with anti-Allende forces in the military. Allende's decision to ignore these warnings led to his downfall. On September 9, less than three weeks after being elevated to the top post in the military, Pinochet—along with three other high-ranking military officials—staged a coup to oust Allende. The military succeeded in taking control of the key government institutions in less than 24 hours, and a military junta headed by Pinochet and his three military co-conspirators declared themselves the legitimate government of Chile. Allende's dead body was later found in the presidential palace. Pinochet claimed that Allende had committed suicide during the coup. Several witnesses, including Allende's wife, contended that the president had been murdered by Pinochet's troops during the assault on the presidential palace.

Allende was far from the only casualty of the coup. Following the takeover, the Chilean military conducted a widespread campaign to arrest supporters of Allende's government. Pinochet, who in mid-1974 displaced the other members of the military junta to become Chile's sole leader, boasted that his troops succeeded in purging Chile of all Marxists and leftists. The exact number of victims of the coup and its resultant military dictatorship remained unknown, though most experts on Chile believed that well more than 100,000 leftists were thrown in prison during the first years of Pinochet's rule. Official reports acknowledged that more than 2,100 opponents of the state were executed, while an additional 1,200 people simply disappeared from existence. Unofficial sources placed the number killed during Pinochet's reign at several times those figures, most of whom were likely executed in secret by Pinochet's forces. The crackdown that began in 1973 proved far from temporary, as Pinochet's government proceeded to rule Chile with draconian measures for the ensuing 17 years. Under Pinochet's regime, political terror, repression of human rights, and intolerance of criticism of the government remained constant features.

While Pinochet's legacy of human rights abuses led to an outcry of condemnation from both exiled Chilean leftists—who numbered in the tens of thousands—and international organizations, his supporters argued that whatever abuses committed were far outweighed by the progress made in saving Chile's tattered economy. Immediately after seizing power, Pinochet cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba—the foremost Communist nation in the Western Hemisphere. This suspension of relations with Cuba marked a symbolic and decisive shift away from the socialist policies of Allende's rule. While Pinochet maintained some of the land reforms of the Allende era, he quickly moved to restore free market economic policies to the Chilean government. In addition, hundreds of industries that had been nationalized during the Allende era were returned to their previous owners. More than 40 of these re-privatized industries were owned by corporations from the United States.

The return of numerous major industries to their original United States owners, as well as the crackdown on leftists in Chile, led to widespread speculation that the military coup had been conducted with the support of the United States government. While Pinochet denied these allegations, evidence quickly surfaced that the United States had in fact pumped millions of dollars into the anti-Allende camp through the Central Intelligence Agency with the intent to destabilize Allende's socialist government. Following the coup, United States President Richard Nixon, a staunch anti-Communist who vowed to “make the [Chilean] economy scream” following the election of Allende, openly embraced Pinochet's regime. The United States removed economic sanctions that had been put into place following Allende's election, and billions of dollars worth of aid were funneled into the Chilean economy.

With the firm backing of the United States, Pinochet successfully engineered an economic recovery that brought Chile out of the economic crisis of the Allende years. While keeping an authoritarian grip on public life, Pinochet simultaneously withdrew government control over industry and agriculture. Wages were also frozen to reign in inflation, which was significantly lowered by the late 1970s. As a result of these free-market policies, the Chilean economy grew steadily throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. The wage freeze implemented by Pinochet, however, meant that much of the burden for this economic recovery was placed on the backs of the working classes and rural poor, essentially marking a return to the sharp social divisions of the pre-Allende days.

While economic liberalism proved a steadfast feature of Pinochet's rule, political liberalism proved far more elusive. During the late 1970s, in an effort to improve the less than cordial relations with the United States government of President Jimmy Carter, Pinochet began to allow a greater degree of political openness. In 1980, Pinochet's government unfurled a new constitution for Chile penned by the military. Under the terms of the constitution Pinochet agreed to remain in power for an eight-year term before holding a public referendum to determine whether he should remain in power or hold elections for a new president. After several years of relative calm, opposition to Pinochet's regime began to climb once again in 1983 as a result of an economic downturn caused in part by a worldwide recession. Anti-Pinochet sentiment continued to rise in the ensuing years, culminating in a failed assassination attempt on the life of Pinochet on Sept. 7, 1986. The failed assassination attempt led to a sharp return of repressive policies of previous years.

In addition to the growing internal opposition to his regime, Pinochet also began to face increased international pressure to liberalize his government. United States relations with Pinochet's government experienced a strong reversal after Chilean soldiers publicly and brutally murdered Rodrigo Rojas, a 19-year-old Chilean who was a legal resident of the United States, during a street protest in Santiago. Following that well-publicized incident, the government of United States President Ronald Reagan—who had previously supported Pinochet as an anti-Communist bulwark in South America—turned dramatically against Pinochet's regime. United States officials publicly called for Pinochet to step down from power in 1988, when his legal term in office was scheduled to end. The United States criticism of Pinochet's human rights abuses was forcefully echoed by Pope John Paul II the following year. During an official visit to Chile, the pope—an avowed opponent of Communism—sharply criticized the human rights abuses committed by Pinochet's government in the name of anti-Communism.

Under severe internal and international pressure, Pinochet acted in accordance with the Chilean constitution of 1980 and held a public plebiscite to determine whether the Chilean population wished for him to serve another term as president. An astounding 7.2 million of Chile's 7.4 million registered voters participated in the referendum, and more than 55 percent called for the president to step down. Bowing to the public sentiment, Pinochet called for presidential elections to be held in 1989. Those elections were won by Christian Democratic party candidate Patricio Aylwin, who easily defeated Pinochet's hand-chosen successor for the presidency. Aylwin was sworn in a president on March 11, 1990.

Despite his willingness to abandon the presidency, Pinochet refused to turn absolute authority over to a civilian government. In accordance with the constitution of 1990, Pinochet exercised the right to keep his post as the head of the armed forces, despite calls from opposition candidates that he resign completely from public life. Following his election, President Aylwin issued a firm warning to Pinochet that he keep the army out of Chile's political system. Despite his diminished power, Pinochet—as the leader of the influential Chilean army—remained a powerful behind-the-scenes figure in Chile until his official retirement from the military in March of 1998. Following his retirement from the military, Pinochet received a permanent post in the Chilean senate, despite calls from his opponents that he be barred from participating in the democratic institutions that he so blatantly disregarded and suppressed during his regime.

Pinochet faced another round of controversy beginning in October 1998, when a Spanish judge unexpectedly issued an official request for British authorities to apprehend and extradite the general, who was recuperating from a minor surgical procedure that he had had performed in London. The judge stated that he wished to interrogate the former Chilean strongman on allegations that Pinochet had abused the human rights of Spanish citizens living in Chile during his dictatorship. Lawyers for Pinochet claimed that as a former head of state Pinochet should be granted diplomatic immunity while in England and consequently could not be apprehended on criminal charges. British officials responded by noting that Pinochet had traveled to England for medical purposes and not diplomatic ones and therefore did not have diplomatic immunity. Pinochet appealed the extradition request, and a series of rulings by various English courts guaranteed that he would remain in England until the appeals process had been exhausted.