05 March, 2000

Mark Falcoff, resident scholar at  the American Enterprise Institute, expert on Latin American history and politics, and author of "Modern Chile, 1970-1989: a critical history", has written an article titled "Who killed Latin democracy?". This article appeared in National Post on March 4, 2000. The article was timely in that it appeared shortly after General Augusto Pinochet was allowed to return home from Britain, where he had suffered a long enforced detention, in his own words, as "the only political prisoner in Britain". The detention was occasioned by a request for Pinochet's arrest and extradition to Spain to face charges of crimes against humanity which the general is alleged to have committed (and in a way, no doubt he did) during his dictatorial rule of Chile. It just so happens that the Spanish government is Socialist and the judge who issued the arrest order is even more so.

Since 1991 we often encounter the statement that 'Communism and real Socialism have been consigned to the ash heap of history.' Some of us dispute this assertion because we are not at all sure that is the case. The class of political ideologues collectively known as the Left is large and ubiquitous throughout the world. The Left remains, as ever, the incubator of new variants of coercive utopianism and totalitarianism, as well as the place for hibernating and recycling of already discredited older forms of it. The Pinochet affair reminds us exactly how influential and powerful the Left is. It also reminds us that the Left, since their first capture of power under the leadership of Lenin, have never forgotten or ignored their effective opponents -- those who have, or could, hurt them; to this day they observe the maxim that such enemies must be hunted down and put paid to with great persistence and tenacity.

So, that's what the effort to "get" Augusto Pinochet is all about. The Left thirsts for revenge against Pinochet because he was, in his day, arguably the smartest and most effective demolisher of Leftist totalitarianism that the world has seen. The Mark Falcoff article contains a very comprehensive account, reproduced here, on the progressive Allende take-over of Chile. As will be seen below,  the destruction of the societal and economic infrastructure of Chilean democracy was already well under way, proceeding according to tried and proven Communist practice, when the army staged its coup. It was classic Sovietization of a nation in progress and Pinochet stopped it cold in its tracks. For that the Left must hound him to the very gates of hell, if need be.

                          -- -- -- excerpt from "Who killed Latin democracy" -- -- --    

The harsh truth is that without Salvador Allende there would have been no Pinochet. The former was elected in 1970 with a bare plurality - slightly more than a third of the popular vote. Only Chile's firm tradition of recognizing the winner in its first-past-the-post electoral system assured his inauguration. Even so, to win the votes of Christian Democrats in Congress, he was forced to agree to a Statute of Democratic Guarantees that obliged him to recognize such liberties as freedom of the press and unfettered access to the electronic media.

Allende was a likeable man -- but remarkably ignorant, fatuous and weak. He thought of himself as both a democrat and a Marxist, and professed to see no particular contradiction between the two. Unfortunately, within his own government coalition (four parties, two of them formally Marxist), the lines were far more sharply drawn. Ironically, the Communists were the moderates of the piece, since they were carrying water for Moscow, which had other fish to fry in more central theatres of political conflict. (The great concern of the Soviets in Chile -- apart from not wanting to pay for another Cuba -- was not to scare off Christian Democrats and Socialists in Western Europe who might be toying with similar coalitions in the future). Allende's Socialists -- a somewhat sui generis party made up of social democrats, anarchists and Trotskyites -- were far closer ideologically to Fidel Castro's Cuba, which, by the way, maintained a remarkably outsized diplomatic and military mission in Santiago, and also the principal source of illegal weaponry that poured into Chile during these years. Intoxicated by their own rhetoric and ideology, and also deluded by the apparent proximity of total power, the Socialists and their allies on the farthest left (the so-called MIR) were impatient to move to a final confrontation with the "bourgeoisie". During 1972 and 1973 they actively took the initiative, seizing factories and farms, far exceeding the government's own program of reform and forcing the president to recognize their audacious strokes as faits accomplis. Unfortunately, the nationalized sector of the economy lost money so quickly that the only way to pay its workers was to print unbacked currency in massive quantities; the result was a hyperinflation hitherto unknown to Chile -- 600% in 1973. In the countryside, improvised expropriations -- some of the  farms rather smaller than those marked for division by the existing agrarian reform law -- polarized opinion, produced a mini-civil war and greatly dislocated the provision of food to Chile's cities. The result was drastic shortages and a flourishing black market.

Meanwhile, the pell-mell expropriations of factories and the intentional bankrupting of large enterprises had another consequence, one not entirely unwelcome to the Allende government -- independent newspapers and radio stations lost a principal source of financing (advertising). Indeed, it is an inconvenient but incontrovertible fact that Chile would have had no independent press at all in the last days of the regime were it not for clandestine financing by the hated CIA.

Economic chaos and political polarization propelled Chile's middle class, many of whose members had voted for Allende in 1970, toward the right. The result was a new political coalition between Christian Democrats and Conservatives that obtained 56% in the March, 1973, parliamentary by-elections -- a decisive vote against the government but short of the two-thirds needed to impeach Allende. What the new congress could do, however, was to declare the regime "outside the law", which it surely was. At the same time, many members of the opposition were knocking on the doors of the barracks, virtually imploring the military to break the political stalemate.

As it happens, I was in Chile in August, 1973, which is to say, about 30 days before Allende's fall. A coup of some sort was almost universally expected, though no one was quite certain what form it would take or in what direction it would move. For his part, President Allende, from the very beginning, had assiduously courted the high command. He had invited several generals into his cabinet during 1972 and again in 1973. He even managed to seduce politically General Carlos Prats, the commander-in-chief of the army. A "left wing" military government was by no means unimaginable; one already existed in near-by Peru (with economic policies which were remarkably similar to those of Allende), another in Bolivia. Across the Andes in Argentina General Juan Peron was about to return to power with leftist support.

What many of us failed to see was that General Prats was increasingly isolated from his own officers, who shared the concerns and anger of the middle class. A little more than a week before the coup, he was forced to retire, replaced by his chief of staff, General Augusto Pinochet. On the day of the coup, the new army commander was a personality virtually unknown to all but a handful of Chileans. Small wonder that no one saw what was coming. Most Christian Democrats imagined that after a brief interlude, new elections would be called in which Allende's predecessor, Eduardo Frei Montalva, the former president, would be the inevitable victor. Instead, all politics came to an end, and many politicians, labour leaders, and intellectuals ended up in prison or exile. More than a thousand ended up in graves whose precise location remains to be revealed. Even General Prats, Pinochet's closest professional friend, failed to take the full measure of his successor. Permitted to emigrate to Argentina, he and his wife were murdered there a year after the coup, apparently on orders from Pinochet himself.