“I was only an aspirante dictator,” General Augusto Pinochet said—a candidate for dictator. “I’ve always been a very studious man, not an outstanding student, but I read a lot, especially history. And history teaches you that dictators never end up well.” He said this with an ironic smile.

Pinochet’s famously stern public countenance has been softened by the passage of time. He smiles more than he scowls now, and the sinister dark glasses that he used to wear are gone. He looks like someone’s genteel grandfather. His voice is tremulous and hoarse, his carefully parted and combed hair and trim mustache are white. He has a potbelly, wears a hearing aid, and shuffles uncertainly. A conservative business suit and a tie accented discreetly with a pearl pin have replaced his military uniform.

Some things haven’t changed, though. Pinochet’s expression remains inscrutable. His pale-blue eyes are small and set in a wide, bullish face, and his stare is coldly foxy. The many lines around his eyes come from his smile, which appears suddenly but evaporates just as quickly. And his views don’t seem to have shifted much. “Lamentably,” he says, “almost everyone in the world today is a Marxist—even if they don’t know it themselves. They continue to have Marxist ideas.”

Pinochet is almost eighty-three years old, and justifying his actions, clarifying his place in history, is on his mind. He explained to me why he wasn’t a real dictator as we sat at a large table in the dining room of a house he uses as an office, just around the corner from his former Presidential residence, in Las Condes, a tony Santiago neighborhood. Security agents with walkie-talkies stood watch on the street in front and roamed through the adjacent rooms and the garden, their weapons bulging under their jackets. Two of Pinochet’s aides, one of them a colonel on active duty, sat at the table with us. They took notes and taped our conversation. The people around Pinochet don’t like him to talk to journalists, but his daughter Lucía had encouraged him to see me, because she thinks that if people understand her father better he will be maligned less. She had warned me that he is brusque, and asked me not to upset him by bringing up the topic of human rights. There are several civil and criminal cases pending against him having to do with torture and murder.

Pinochet shook my hand when he walked into the room, but he didn’t look me in the eye, and when he sat down he stared fixedly at his daughter. Lucía, a woman in her early fifties with her father’s wide cheekbones, had told me that he was affable in private, and had a sense of humor, so I said that I was grateful that he had come, especially since I understood that he was “terrified” of journalists. That made him laugh, and then he looked at me. He wasn’t terrified, he said. It was just that journalists always twisted his words.

Pinochet explained that he had avoided the historical pitfall of dictators because he had never wielded absolute power. At the beginning, he and three other generals, the commanders of the branches of the armed forces, had made up a junta. “In time,” he said, “I became the one who led, because the thing led by four doesn’t work. You’re giving orders here, the other there, the other over there—it’s nothing, nothing. It doesn’t advance! That’s why I was chosen.” Then he had tackled Chile’s constitution, ushering through changes that, among other things, legitimatized his de facto rule by making him the country’s President. The old constitution had been a nuisance. “It tied one up! How can you let yourself be tied up? You have to be able to set the goalposts to be able to act! You can’t have a field where you don’t know where you’re shooting from. So I set the goalposts.”

Augusto Pinochet, all quibbling about definitions aside, is that rarest of creatures, a successful former dictator. According to Chilean opinion polls, roughly a quarter of his fellow-citizens revere him. He has few modern parallels, except perhaps Francisco Franco. (Pinochet was the only foreign head of state to attend Franco’s funeral, in 1975. Ferdinand Marcos sent his wife, Imelda.) Like Franco, Pinochet is an ultra-conservative Catholic nationalist, a military officer with an unremarkable personality who suddenly rose to prominence. Both men imposed their power through violence, and used security forces to maintain it. And, over time, both transformed their societies and built strong modern economies. Pinochet knows that he is frequently compared to Franco, and he is cagey about the analogy. “There is an appropriate leader for each country,” he said guardedly. “Franco was necessary for Spain.”

Pinochet was born in 1915 in the port city of Valparaíso. His father was an easygoing customs agent who hoped that his son would study medicine, but Augusto wanted to become a soldier, and his mother backed his decision. He entered the military academy in 1933, at the age of seventeen. His father died when he was still a young man, but his mother lived until a few years ago, and remained a strong influence in his life until the end. In 1943, he married another strong woman, Lucía Hiriart, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a former senator and government minister. When I met her in Santiago, Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, a gracious woman in her early seventies, confessed that, as a politician’s daughter, she had found the “subjection” of her husband within the military hierarchy hard to take, and that she had urged him to strive for higher office. “When we discussed his future,” Mrs. Pinochet said, “he said he’d like one day to be Commander-in-Chief. I told him he could get to be Minister of Defense.”

Pinochet climbed up through the officers’ ranks, and in 1971 he was made commander general of the Army’s Santiago garrison. He was by then the author of several books on military geography and on geopolitics. In August, 1973, Salvador Allende, who had become President three years earlier, appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army. Mrs. Pinochet says she couldn’t believe it when her husband told her the news; she thought he was joking. Then, less than three weeks later, the Army staged a coup and Allende killed himself during the attack on La Moneda, the Presidential palace. Her husband would rule Chile, and she would become the First Lady. “My husband had taught me that in a normal career he’d get to be colonel. Anything above would be good fortune and a bit of luck. He became a general because of politics. They call me messianic for saying so, but I believe it was divine Providence that he got to be President.”

He stayed in power for seventeen years. Upward of three thousand people were killed or “disappeared” while he was in office, and tens of thousands more were imprisoned or fled into exile. The new constitution, which was passed in 1980, gave Pinochet an eight-year term as President, but he was so confident of his popularity that in 1988 he held a referendum proposing that his tenure be extended for another eight years. To his surprise he lost, and stepped down from office two years later. A civilian, democratic government was reëstablished, and a Christian Democrat was elected President. Next year is an election year, and the man widely tipped as the winner, Ricardo Lagos, is a former Allende aide and a Socialist.