THE CHILEAN GOVERNMENT has been accused of trying to airbrush the country’s history after decreeing that children’s schoolbooks may no longer refer to the era of General Pinochet as a “dictatorship”.

The country’s education minister Harald Beyer says the use of the phrase implies a bias against it – and that Pinochet’s era must now instead be referred to as a “military regime”.

Although he personally recognised the regime as a “dictatorial government,” Chilean news website I Love Chile said, he endorsed the finding of the National Education Council which rejected the other term as political motivated.

“It is about using the same expression that is used around the world, a more general term such as military regime,” Beyer is reported to have said.

The declaration has prompted national controversy in the country, the BBC reports, with left-wing parties accusing the administration of attempting to “whitewash” history.

The row has rekindled a burning debate in Chile over how it perceives Pinochet’s rule from between 1973 and 1990 – and whether the regime could even be described as a “dictatorship” at all.

Although thousands of people were tortured under his 17-year rule, the Financial Times carries the comments of a museum director who acknowledges that a large part of the public “does not criticise what happened” under his tenure.

“The dictatorship in Chile began as a military junta but over time became a military-civilian regime,” the director of the Museum of Memory said.

Though Pinochet rose to power after a military coup, he did oversee an eventual return to democracy and allowed himself to be succeeded by a popularly-elected president in 1990.