SANTIAGO, Chile -- Erich Honecker, the former East German Communist leader who built the Cold War's most chilling monument, the infamous Berlin Wall, died of liver cancer Sunday at his home in exile. He was 81. Honecker, who ruled for 18 years before the collapse of communism, had lived in Chile with his wife and his daughter's family since January 1993, when Berlin judges ruled he was too ill to stand trial in connection with shootings at the Berlin Wall. He lived his final days in sickness and bitterness, according to Chilean friends, still a committed Communist who fretted about the "social deterioration" of reunified Germany. Although Honecker led the Communist East German state between 1971 and 1989, he will be remembered most for what he did long before -- building the Wall. The structure served as a metaphor for the uncompromising, neo-Stalinist views Honecker held during his rule. His regime fostered the most pervasive secret police organization in Communist Europe, penned in its people and shot those who tried to flee to the West. Honecker's successor as head of the East German state, Egon Krenz, pleaded for "a fair judgment" on Honecker's life. "He wanted to realize the dream of humanism." But a spokesman for the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, stated that Honecker had failed in his political goals. "His policies brought harm to countless people," said government spokesman Dieter Vogel. "Erich Honecker failed. Perhaps he didn't recognize it, but history gave proof of his failure." News of Honecker's death drew shrugs of indifference in his homeland. "At this point I couldn't care less about Honecker, and I'm sure the same goes for most East Germans," said Klaus Sternberg, a teacher in the northern town of Schwerin. "He's in heaven now, and he can sit down with Marx, Engels and Lenin and think over what went wrong," said Lutz Wagner, a salesman in eastern Berlin. In the early part of his 18 years in power, Honecker enjoyed success. But later, poor health, advanced age and political isolation left him increasingly vulnerable to the winds of change sweeping the region. An unbending hardliner, he disliked the Soviet Union's reform-minded leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and was deeply suspicious of the liberalization under way in other parts of Moscow's empire. In the end, Honecker was toppled by the massive antigovernment street demonstrations that marked the decisive phase of the 1989 East German revolution. Three weeks later the Berlin Wall fell too. His control over the East German state had been so complete, and his fall so sudden, that Politburo colleagues who witnessed his political demise said Honecker was incapable of grasping what had happened. Krenz has said that when he informed the ousted leader of his expulsion from the Communist Party, Honecker "had not understood at all" the contents of the message. In his 1980 memoirs, "About My Life," Honecker described proudly how, as the Politburo member responsible for state security, he organized the operation that in a matter of a few pre-dawn hours on Aug. 13, 1961, cut one of Europe's largest cities in two, closed the last remaining hole in the Iron Curtain and stunned the West. "At midnight the alarm was sounded and the action began," he wrote. "With it began an operation that ... would make the world take notice. Later we determined with satisfaction that we had forgotten nothing essential (in the preparations)." The 100-mile-long, heavily fortified wall through and around West Berlin endured for 28 years as the most compelling symbol of an ideologically divided world.