The Chilean government applauded remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell this week that the United States was "not proud" of its role in the 1973 coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power, Chilean newspapers reported on Saturday.

Powell's comments on Thursday on the US Black Entertainment Television network, were seen by Chileans as the first time Washington has acknowledged that it intervened in events related to the bloody putsch and death of socialist President Salvador Allende.

In the interview, Powell was asked why Washington considers itself "the moral superior" in the Iraq conflict. The interviewer cited the Chilean coup as an example of the US government acting against the wishes of a local population.

"With respect to your earlier comments about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of," Powell answered.

Under Pinochet's iron-fisted rule, that lasted 17 years, leftist political groups were persecuted and about 3,000 people were killed or disappeared, according to an official report.

"We now have a more accountable way of handling such matters and we have worked with Chile to help it put in place a responsible democracy," Powell added.

Augusto Pinochet had resorted so often to claims of ill health to avoid the pressing attentions of Chile's judges that even the administration of the last rites last week failed to convince his opponents that his end was near. Pinochet's long and brutal dictatorship and its half life of lingering political influence, had invested him with such iconic status that he seemed immortal.

His death robs his opponents of the satisfaction of seeing him sentenced for his crimes. But Pinochet lived to see his corruption exposed and his claims to honourable motives discredited.

Pinochet was admitted late to the plot that led to the coup against President Salvador Allende on September 11 1973. His genius was to appropriate power to himself and to use terror, both to eliminate opponents on the left and to intimidate those members of the armed forces who upheld constitutional rule. The dictatorship he installed was not the bloodiest in Latin America. It was shocking because it happened in a country proud of its democratic traditions.

For his supporters, Pinochet was the man who had saved Chile from communism. For his opponents, he was a murderer who had destroyed the rule of law. For the last 10 years, the dismantling of his reputation has been a struggle to reassert legal norms and restore the right to remember those years.

It was a powerful process. After his arrest in London in October 1998, Pinochet claimed sovereign immunity. But on November 25 1998, the House of Lords rejected his appeal. At the Pinochet Foundation in Santiago, his supporters had prepared a 77th birthday party, complete with giant screens on which they waited for their leader's expected victory message. When the judgment went against him, the party ended in mayhem. Meanwhile, in the house of the widow of one of the disappeared, there were tears of joy.

Two years later the decision of the then home secretary, Jack Straw, to allow Pinochet to return to Chile on grounds of ill health seemed to mock that moment. But his return allowed the Chilean judiciary to declare its own breach with the regime.

Juan Guzman, a senior judge who had begun his career in Pinochet's military courts, took on the case with a diligence and seriousness that confounded both Chile's critics and Pinochet's supporters. He excavated graveyards, interviewed witnesses, took statements and patiently built his dossiers.

Pinochet's lawyers fought back with more claims of ill health, and Guzman was not able to complete the prosecution. But the trial remains a historic process that gradually dismantled Pinochet's impunity and rewrote his legacy. It became clear Pinochet would never have the statue he had planned to erect for himself behind the Moneda palace.

Supporters continued to believe the trial was just another political conspiracy in an ungrateful nation. Their disillusionment did not come until Pinochet's corruption came to light as a piece of collateral damage in the war on terror: scrutiny of suspected funds for terrorism uncovered secret bank accounts. The mythical upright soldier was discovered to have salted away a sum one judge estimated at $28m. Like Al Capone, Pinochet was finally called to account by the tax man.

By the end, Pinochet had only a handful of supporters. He lived to see Chile return to normality, and to elect as president the daughter of a man tortured to death under his regime.

For me, though, Pinochet's lasting legacy is a young woman called Nilda who as a child clung screaming to her father as soldiers dragged him away. He never came back and Nilda has never stopped looking for his grave. Her wounds will never heal.

Pinochet himself would later claim that, for security reasons, he had been planning the coup alone for two years with student officers at the military academy. Other generals, who certainly were involved in the plotting, said that he was considered untrustworthy and played no role. What is not in doubt is that three days before the coup, he was given an ultimatum by the commanders-in-chief of the navy and air force to join them or suffer the consequences.

On the day itself, there was little doubt Pinochet was in charge. "He realized what had dropped into his lap and had no alternative but to follow it through," said one of his closest civilian aides later. Amateur recordings of radio transmissions between the golpista command posts that day reveal the Pinochet the world would come to know. While negotiating Allende's surrender, he joked crudely about flying the president out of the country and crashing the plane on the way. "Kill the bitch and you finish the spawn," he said.

Within a year, as the army asserted its overwhelming strength among the armed services, plans for a rotating presidency between the four members of the ruling junta of service chiefs were dropped and Pinochet was named President of the Republic. A tight group of civilian and military advisers designed a regime focused on him as the incarnation of the military's "historic mission to remake the country". Potential rivals were either retired or died in mysterious circumstances. In 1974, General Prats became one of the victims, killed with his wife in exile in Buenos Aires by a bomb attached to their car - an attack later shown to have been carried out by Pinochet's agents.

The rank of Captain-general, hitherto held only by the Liberator of the country from the Spanish in the early 1800s, Bernardo O'Higgins, was revived for Pinochet. His uniform hat was tailored higher than that of other officers. Officially he became the visionary who, guided by "the mysterious hand of God", had made Chile "the only country in history to have broken free from the yoke of communism". He was reported to enjoy the special protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of both the army and the country. Such was the origin of the saint-like statuettes of Pinochet and the posters of "The Immortal" so widely seen at demonstrations supporting him after his arrest in London.

This personality cult was only one of the ways in which the regime so notably avoided the factionalism that plagued the region's many other military dictatorships. Chile's army was already the most hierarchically disciplined in the region, the legacy of late 18th-century Prussian advisers, and this was skilfully translated into personal devotion to Pinochet. Limitations were placed on the services' own role in day-to-day government, with the brunt of this being left in Pinochet's own hands and those of his circle of advisers. A ruthless secret police watched the regime as much as the opposition.

In the regime a strict ideology reigned, based in personal loyalty to Pinochet, anti-communist dogma of "national security", and the extreme neoliberal economic doctrine imported by a generation of technocrats known as the "Chicago Boys", after the university where some had received their training. Pinochet's own wiliness - his most evident political talent apart from ruthlessness - also came into its own, as he proved adept at nipping factions in the bud and playing them off against each other. In the mid-1980s he would use the same skill with success against the re-emerging opposition.

Especially shocking was the level of repression in a country with a longstanding parliamentary tradition and a hitherto mild record of military involvement in politics by regional standards. Official investigations since 1990 have confirmed over 3000 deaths and disappearances at the hands of Pinochet's security forces. Torture was institutionalised, secret detention centres operated into which detainees disappeared never to be seen again, and murder squads were despatched to kill prominent dissidents abroad.

Meanwhile, in laboratory conditions, with political parties and trade unions banned, the "Chicago Boys" set about radically remaking the heavily state-dependent economy. This was achieved through wholesale privatisation, a complete opening to the international economy, fixing the exchange rate artificially low, and pumping in foreign loans during the petro-dollar glut of the late 1970s. The result was the destruction of national industry and much of agriculture, then near-collapse in the early 1980s amid a frenzy of speculation, consumer imports and debt crisis. The state bailed out most of the country's banking sector and unemployment rose to an official level of over 30 per cent.

Following the debacle, a more moderate group of neoliberals succeded in stabilising the now streamlined macroeconomy. A young and vigorous new breed of capitalists emerged, centred on new exports such as fish, timber and fruit. Reforms such as the privatisation of the pension system became highly influential around the world, growth became steady and Chile became a byword for economic success - though the gap between rich and poor widened to give the country the worst income distribution in the region after Brazil.

In America, the danger is not that too much is remembered of the Pinochet era but that too much of the American role in helping to foment those old horrors may be forgotten.

There is a deceptively comforting story line that sequesters the present from the past, disguising any continuity between the regime change produced in Chile on Sept. 11, 1973, and other American experiments of that nature. In that reassuring historical narrative, Pinochet was perhaps guilty of trampling on democratic niceties and of kidnapping, torturing, and killing socialists and Marxists , but he represented, after all, the lesser of two evils. The alternative evil was commonly depicted as Soviet influence, left-wing radicalism, the expropriation of private property, and falling pro-American dominoes across Latin America.

The former US ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who passed away three days before Pinochet, once propounded a theory to justify American backing for military dictatorships in Latin America. Her rationale rested upon a distinction between totalitarian states like those in the communist world and mere authoritarian regimes. The latter were supposed to be more tolerable because, in contrast to the communist states, they left open the possibility of eventually permitting a return to democracy. It was a theory that failed the test of time, as demonstrated by the nearly bloodless implosion of communism and the flowering of democracy in Poland, Hungary, and the former Czechoslovakia.

Reflecting the spirit of such Cold War notions, a CIA document from the month after Allende was elected president on Sept. 11, 1970, says, "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup" and "it is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG" - US government - "and American hand be well hidden." Whatever the details of US complicity in Pinochet's eventual seizure of power, Americans must not forget that their own democratic leaders share complicity in the disappearances, torture, and killings perpetrated after 1973 by their man in Chile.

The human-rights abuses committed under Pinochet's military junta were widely known throughout the country.

Rights groups estimate that more than 3,000 people were killed after 1973 when Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president, was overthrown and allegedly took his own life with a gun given to him by his friend, Fidel Castro.

Most of the murders took place in the first year of military rule, when Santiago's National Stadium was turned into a detention and torture centre.

Pinochet was facing charges over the "Caravan of Death" in 1973, when it is alleged a military death squad rounded up suspected leftists from prisons around the country and murdered them.

However, it was not such abuses that led to his support eroding - it was allegations of corruption, in 2005, when undeclared foreign bank accounts containing some £15 million were traced to him and members of his family.