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Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet checking hands with his loyal political advisor, William Thayer. Photo: WIKIPEDIA

Latin America's Schindler

You probably remember Schindler's List, the movie about about Oskar Schindler, a vainglorious German businessman that amid the Nazi regime turned his factory into a refuge for Jews, risking his life to save them.

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You probably remember Schindler's List, the movie about about Oskar Schindler, a vainglorious German businessman that amid the Nazi regime turned his factory into a refuge for Jews, risking his life to save them.

Well, forty later, Chile had Roberto Kazak, a man that under General Pinochet’s rule of terror saved thousands of people from the dictator’s brutal secret police. The British newspaper The Guardian runs today a story about this less known Latin American Schindler. 

In the years following the 1973 military coup, Kozak and diplomats from other countries helped an estimated 25,000-35,000 Chilean political prisoners escape from captivity and find safe haven abroad.

Deploying a combination of diplomatic charm, patience and crates of imported whisky, he set about painstakingly negotiating the release of detainees, almost all of whom were from the Chilean left. He even hid some of them in his own house, reports The Guardian. He died on September 2015.

 

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