Well, Pinera (who won over Frei whose father was also a former president of Chile and murdered via poisoning by Pinochet's minions during a hospital stay as recent DNA testing has revealed) is certainly no Pinochet. Acually, he's not that far away from Frei (a Christian Democrat, not a socialist or social democrat, though he was in a coalition with both), he has promised to continue the policies of the anti-Pinochet alliance which has ruled the country for twenty years. That is a good thing, the great advantage of democracy is that you now and then get new people making new mistakes. I prefer that to always the same people making the same mistakes over and over in a prolonged fashion!
Similarly to Spain, where almost every family has a rift going through it between Franco-supporters and -haters, Chileans are split in two about Allende and Pinochet. No one we met condoned Pinochet's murders and corruption, but memory of Allende is largely one of "there was nothing to buy in the shops". And in the south there is a strong feeling that "Grandpa Pinochet" was the first government head that did not concentrate on just Santiago and other urban centers, but brought infrastructure to the south (Pan Americana Highway etc.). Very much like Franco who is also more appreciated in rural areas in Spain than in urban centers.
But people also say that there was always an air of oppression in Chile under Pinochet - when police or army turned up anywhere, you immediately started feeling uncomfortable and left for other errands. And of course, in the aftermath of the 1973 crackdown and the coup against Allende (who had ironically trusted and supported Pinochet's career as he liked his less than quite middle class background) unspeakably vile things happened: Victor Jara, a Chilean leftist protest singer had both his hands broken by soldiers who then mocked him to "play guitar and sing, you're a singer after all". When he then began to sing one of his revolutionary songs, they rifle butted him down and eventually shot him.
But history has a way of compensating things: Victor Jara, Slavador Allende and also Pablo Neruda (Chile's nobel prize winning poet and author who was a member of the communist party) now all have commemorative public graves (Jara, at his widow's wish, is inconspiciously buried in the wall of Santiago's Cemeterio Central together with other victims of Pinochet's raging soldateska after the coup), while Pinochet was denied a state burial and is now buried secluded on his family's hacienda at the outskirts of Santiago to avoid his grave being vandalized.
