12-20-06, 8:59 am
Augusto Pinochet died December 10, escaping justice. An Italian scholar of progressive views whom I know said to me cynically that it was a “good death.”
Pinochet wasn't hung by his heels by anti-fascist partisans as Mussolini was in 1945. He didn't kill himself to avoid capture by Red Army troops in the rubble of Berlin as Hitler did, adding one more death to the tens of millions, including millions of Germans, who perished in the World War that Hitler launched.
While Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco died in greater personal comfort 30 years ago, no major leader of the U.S.-NAT0 bloc praised Spain's “economic miracle” or hailed Franco for “saving Spain from the Socialists and the Communists,” as some did now for Pinochet.
Of course, Franco owed his bloody victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) to Hitler and Mussolini, although his postwar survival was largely the result of cold war induced aid for the U.S.
Pinochet seized power in a Nixon administration supported bloody coup against the Popular Unity (People's Front) government of Salvador Allende and then combined the fascist state terror associated with Hitler and Mussolini – mass killings, political prisons, torture, and the obliteration of all democratic rights – with the neo “laissez-faire” economic policies associated with Nobel prize winning U.S. economist Milton Friedman and his associates at the University of Chicago.
Some of these “Chicago School” policy planners were involved in the “great Chilean experiment” that is the privatization of nearly everything, happily building their paradigms while Pinochet built his fascist police state apparatus.
Margaret Thatcher, now a Baroness in Britain, announced that she was “greatly saddened” by Pinochet's death. Perhaps Thatcher was trying to twit all the liberals, social democrats and Communists of the world who denounced the Pinochet dictatorship and sought to give aid to its victims, many of whom, the lucky ones, ended up going into exile. Or maybe she was simply reminiscing about the “free market” economic policies and monetarist manipulations that Pinochet introduced to Chile at the point of a gun in 1973 and she brought to Britain following her election victory in 1979.
Of course Baroness Thatcher couldn't outlaw the unions and imprison their leaders, as Pinochet did, although she enacted legislation that weakened them significantly (and which the “Labor” government of Tony Blair has left in tact).
She did follow Pinochet's lead in carrying forward the “privatization” of the state pension system, which had very negative consequences for Britain, and disastrous ones for Chile, although rightwing Republican ideologues continue to praise both. She also attempted to privatize anything and everything that she could, but not having the powers of a fascist dictator like Pinochet, she “accomplished” far less than Pinochet.
Not that Pinochet in his 17 years as dictator really stuck to “free market” policies that Chicago school economists initiated when they privatized and in effect sold off the banks and all public sector industries to speculators, eliminated all minimum wages and all other public protections for workers (something that right wingers have dreamed of doing since the 1930s).
Real wages plummeted under the dictatorship, poverty rose from 20% when Allende took power to over 40% when Pinochet left power. By the early 1980s, the Robber Baron capitalism his dictatorship initiated led to massive bank defaults, currency collapse and riots.
Faced with these disasters which threatened the dictatorship, Pinochet returned largely to the state capitalism associated with his ideological forbearers, Hitler and Mussolini. Minimum wages were revived, the devastated public sector was strengthened with a half million jobs program and many banks and businesses were for a period of time “renationalized, especially the still nationalized. Copper industry which is at the heart of the Chilean economy
Although the privatized pension system and other economic horrors of the Pinochet dictatorship continue, the “Chilean Economic miracle” which right-wingers still hail in the U.S. and other countries was and is a big lie. Virtually all real positive economic developments that Chile has experienced followed the end of the Pinochet regime in 1990 and are the result of center and moderate left forces picking up the pieces of a broken country and restoring and economy and a civil society while “co-existing” with the supporters and partisans of the former regime. In agriculture and other areas, subsequent positive economic developments had their roots in Allende Popular Unity policies which benefited farmers and workers
The fascist police state that Pinochet led for seventeen years cannot be so easily praised outside of ultra-right circles, but U.S. media has largely minimized and or ignored it. The quasi-official estimates used in U.S. establishment circles contend that the murdered numbered around 3,000 and the tortured around 30,000 in the seventeen years of the Pinochet dictatorship, but virtually all sources connected to the victims multiply those numbers by many times.
In the first years of the regime, over 130,000 were imprisoned and/or “disappeared.” The murder of Allende himself in the presidential palace, which capitalist media has continued to try to define as a “suicide” and the murder of revolutionary singer Victor Jara in the soccer stadium which served as a concentration camp for thousands of
Pinochet's enemies in the immediate aftermath of the coup were etched into the consciousness of people throughout the world.
That the regime was by the most conservative estimates one of the most terrorist dictatorships in modern Latin American history is not in dispute. The September 11, 1973 coup and its immediate aftermath was the bloodiest in the history of 20th century Latin America.
Some political scientists note that the existing democratic traditions and institutions that characterized Chilean life help to explain why such brutality was necessary. One might say the same thing about Italy and Germany, where strong left led labor movements and parties were outlawed and suppressed with terrorist violence, but that of course is no justification for the regime's crimes in overthrowing a democratically elected government which, even with its commitments to building a socialist Chile, respected and defended the Chilean constitution.
Chile also participated with Argentina and other right-wing Latin American regimes in Operation Condor, which sought to hunt down and murder political dissidents in exile abroad. In 1976, Orlando Letelier, a former minister in the Allende government and ambassador to the U.S. mass murdered in Washington along with his American secretary, Ronnie Moffitt, in a car bomb instigated by Pinochet's agents. Two years earlier in Argentina (before the right-wing junta was established there) General Carlos Prats, a Chilean general who had supported constitutional and democratic government against Pinochet, was murdered by agents of the regime.
For Americans, it is important to remember that Pinochet could not have taken power or remained in power without the support of the Nixon administration and subsequent U.S. governments.
In Chilean presidential elections in 1964 and 1970, the CIA intervened extensively to defeat Allende's Popular Unity coalition, successfully in 1964 and unsuccessfully in 1970. U.S. aid to Chile, which had been substantial under Allende's predecessor, Eduardo Frei, virtually disappeared.
After Allende's victory in 1970, the CIA launched a “two track” program to keep him from taking power. Track one, to undermine the election in the Chilean Congress and keep him from taking office; track two, to work with Chilean generals to overthrow him. The CIA's “track two” involvement in the 1970 kidnapping and murder of General Rene Schneider, the army chief of staff and a defender of the Chilean constitution, backfired and led Chileans to rally behind their newly elected president.
In the years 1970 to 1973, Henry Kissinger first as National Security Advisor and then as Secretary of State played a significant role in the plots against Allende. Kissinger's only problem with the first coup attempt in 1970 which led later to the murder of General Schneider was that it was botched.
CIA documents released in recent years have confirmed what many in the U.S. have believed since the coup – that is, that the CIA particularly worked closely with Pinochet's political police, the DINA, to the point of having many of its most brutal killers on the U.S. payroll, including in one famous instance the DINA chief Manuel Contreras.
Documents also show that the U.S. provided essential economic and technical aid for Operation Condor, the multi-national assassination network which today would be called “international terrorism.”
It is also clear that Richard Nixon's order to CIA director Richard Helms after Allende's 1970 election victory “to make the economy scream ... [to] prevent Allende from coming to power or unseat him” was carried forward before and during the coup and in active support of the dictatorship's campaign of terror and murder which followed the coup.
It is also clear that major U.S. corporations complied with U.S. ambassador Edward Korry's private statement upon hearing in Santiago in 1970 that Allende had won the election: “Once Allende comes to power we shall do everything in our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans to the utmost deprivation and poverty.”
So much for democratic institutions, fair play, the role of law, and all that. Salvador Allende, Rene Schneider, Carlos Prats, and many others who really practiced those principles ended up as corpses in Chile in the early 1970s. Nixon, Ford, Reagan, et al, not to mention the “Chicago School” free marketers and “supply side” economists who paid lip service to those principles as they went on their merry way supporting a regime that subjected the Chilean people to 17 years of a brutal dictatorship which they called variously a “free market miracle,” a necessary if unpleasant defense of U.S. “national security” interests against Cuban and Soviet Communism or just another opportunity to flex U.S. power in “our” hemisphere.
Henry Kissinger, who joined Baroness Thatcher in fondly remembering Pinochet at his death recently and whom Chileans and others have long sought to try for human rights abuses for his involvement in the overthrow of Allende(and also for his activities in the Vietnam War), captured best the Nixon administration policy. Foreign policy in the entire cold war period was about when he said “I don't see why we should stand by and watch while a country goes communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
Although Chile today has a moderate center-left government opposed to the policies associated with the Pinochet dictatorship, it is important for the U.S. in the future to acknowledge formally its role in this horror, to fully open its records to expose the perpetrators of terror and murder in Chile and their backers here and to end the kind of interventions in the affairs of other nations which produced Pinochet.
Under the cloak of the “war against terrorism,” such actions are being carried forward and praised in many parts of the world, as leaders the Bush administration dislikes are targeted for elimination and relations with war lords and murderous military cliques are developed in the name of U.S. “national security.”
Chile shows that such actions are acts of terrorism themselves and create an international order where terrorism is both multiplied and normalized, even though the Chilean people overcame Pinochet and today struggle to free themselves from the remnants of his regime.
Progressive forces in the U.S. fight to create a U.S. foreign policy that will help to rid the peoples of the world of the Pinochets rather than providing them with support and facing the inevitable recriminations and guilty consciences which flow from that support.
--Reach Norman Markowitz at
