Amazon.com has come under fire for selling T-shirts glorifying the “death flights” of Chile’s military dictatorship in which left-wing opponents of the regime were dropped from helicopters in an attempt to hide their murders.
More than 3,000 people were killed or forcibly disappeared during former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.
In 2001, then-Chilean president Ricardo Lagos revealed that at least 120 of them were thrown to their deaths from helicopters into “Chile’s ocean, lakes and rivers.”
T-shirts making light of such atrocities have become popular among the far right and were openly on sale on Amazon — where shoppers could choose garments emblazoned with Pinochet’s face alongside images of helicopters or slogans such as “Free Helicopter Rides.”
Survivors of the dictatorship expressed outrage that the e-commerce giant could sell T-shirts mocking violent killings.
“It is unbearable for people like me who had to endure that time when people were thrown alive into the sea from helicopters,” Chilean author Diamela Eltit told reporters.
“This is not only hurtful, it is also of incomprehensible cruelty. It shows how the worst part of humanity can be absorbed by the market and transformed into an object of consumption,” she said.
Other T-shirts available on Amazon depicted a body in free fall from a helicopter beneath the caption “Wanna take a ride?” or showed a helicopter with the legend “Pinochet Is My Co-Pilot.”
One shirt — depicting a helicopter beneath the legend “Anti-Commie Action” — was advertised on Amazon as “the perfect gift for any patriot, Trump supporter, conservative, Republican person you may know.”
Amazon on Thursday declined to comment. Most of the garments disappeared from its Web site soon afterward, but several were still available.
The popularity of Pinochet T-shirts among the US far-right was first highlighted during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white nationalist Christopher Cantwell wore one in an interview with Vice magazine.
Tens of thousands of people were detained or tortured following Chile’s 1973 coup.
In the first month after coming to power, Pinochet ordered his military to round up more than 10,000 students, workers and political activists in Chile’s National Stadium, which became an improvised concentration camp and torture center.
Earlier this month, Amazon was forced to pull Christmas ornaments decorated with images of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where more than 1 million people were murdered during Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.
Eltit, who in 1979 founded the Collective of Art Actions as an act of resistance against censorship during the dictatorship, described the sale of such items on Amazon as a tear in the fabric of society.
“These examples — the Auschwitz Christmas ornaments, or T-shirts depicting bodies thrown alive into the sea — are a metaphor of how the social pacts that bind us together are being broken by free-market consumerism,” she said.
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