And from wiki:
"Various reports and investigations claim that between 1,200 and 3,200 people were killed, up to 80,000 people were interned and as many as 30,000 were tortured during the time Pinochet was in government."
I might be impressed by such sentiments if the Left had a fraction of the same attitude towards the 5 orders of magnitude greater number of people killed by the type of people Pinochet and company killed. Yep, it generally agreed that a bare minimum of 100 million were killed by Communists in the 20th Century; my rough guess, with a non-standard accounting for pre-1949 China, is more like 250 million.
"Some people just need killing", and I put Communist revolutionaries very high on that list.
The vast majority of those deaths are from famine (and if you're seriously going to add an extra 150 million from pre-1949, how many are you going to put on the ledger of the Nationalist government or the Japanese?)
Here's a couple posts (from an unexpected source) that go into depth on these kind of numbers, and the things that come up when you take seriously the assumptions that went into generating them and seeing where that leads.
I was perhaps was not clear about pre-1949 China: "only" 60-70 million were estimated to have been killed in that period as of the early '80s, and that includes those killed by the Japanese. I attribute more deaths to the Communists than most.
As for famine, if you're trying to suggest events caused by "agrarian reformers" like the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward just happened to have starved a lot of people due to "bad luck" or the like, I don't see us having any basis for discussion.
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On the subject of famine it is also important to have some perspective regarding the incredible pressures the communist countries were subjected to, and the desperate programs of industrialization they were forced to adopt. From the outset, the west was intensely hostile to communism and placed it under perpetual threat of military defeat. This was true from the early invasion of the newly declared USSR by WWI allied governments, to the runup to and ultimate defeat of Nazism by the Soviet Union, to the Cold war, to the western backing of the Nationalist government in China, to Eisenhower's threats of catastrophic nuclear retaliation against China during the 1950s. In every case, it was absolutely imperative that the communist governments industrialize as rapidly and as thoroughly as possible, costs be damned. In the USSR, the wisdom of the industrialization policy was proven by the defeat of fascism in 1945; but throwing every possible hour of labor into industrialization meant that other aspects of the economy were neglected and catastrophic mistakes like the famine in Ukraine could occur. The exact same motivation and consequence were what caused the Great Leap Forward and the famine associated with it."""
Note that this is very different than the famines we know about that were actually engineered by a government, such as, to pick just one example, the Bengal Famine of 1943 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943)
I was under the impression that once the Russian Civil War was over, Western governments lost interest in the kind of regime in place in the USSR. On the other hand, Stalin had no qualms helping the Nazis prior to WWII. As for the Ukrainian famine, its causes are far from being as clear-cut as you present them, IMHO.
People like Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot had evidently very little regard for human life. This doesn't mean that all communist regimes should be put in the same bag (eg, Castro, as far as I know, didn't genocide anybody, and I don't think his suppression of political opponents was particularly worse than what Batista's secret police did).
Trying to excuse Pinochet's crimes "because Stalin" or "because Mao" is as bizarre as trying to pretend that Stalin or Mao were not mass murderers. Where I can sympathize is that Western-engineered massacres are rarely mentioned in comparison.
September 11th, 1973. Never forget.