"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go 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." — Henry Kissinger. Cited in "The United States and Chile: Roots and Branches" Foreign Affairs Magazine Jan 1975.
Pinochet’s death on Sunday, 10th December, 2006 in Santiago Chile revived bitter controversies about his bloody military coup on 11th September 1973 overthrowing the lawfully elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende. On hearing the news of his death thousands of anti-Pinochet protesters gathered in the streets of Santiago disappointed that the General could not be tried for his crimes of genocide and his brutal torture of political opponents during the 17 years of his military regime. Judge Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who tried to extradite the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet from Britain, expressed the anguish of the protesters when he said, "Perhaps we would have liked to have tried Pinochet so victims would have received the compensation and reparation of a sentence. Unfortunately it has not been this way."1
Pinochet's military coup signaled the end of Democracy in Chile and ushered in an era of systematic crushing of political dissent in Chile. Old file pictures show the smoldering remains of La Moneda, the presidential palace in the heart of the nation's capital, Santiago, that symbolized the abrupt termination of Chile’s experiment with Socialist Democracy described by the Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda as "a long petal of sea, wine and snow.’
Even though the horrors of the Pinochet regime cannot be remembered perfectly, as human memory is short and fallible, an attempt must be made to exhume history in order to understand the tragedy that befell ordinary Chileans. Perhaps the starting point would be to turn to eyewitness accounts of the regime’s repression and human right abuses.
Mike Gatehouse, who worked at the Chilean Forestry Institute, recalls the brutality of the early days of the regime. As he says in his own words, ‘We were taken to the National Stadium, Chile's equivalent of Wembley, a large football stadium with other sports facilities clustered around it. We were herded into a mustering area which was full of newly arrived prisoners in white coats, doctors and orderlies from several Santiago hospitals which had been raided that day, victims of a savage proscription by the far-right dominated Chilean Medical Association, which accused them of having failed to go on strike against the legal government. The 'cells' into which we were herded were the team changing rooms. There were 130 prisoners in ours, and at night we were so tightly packed that we could sleep only by lining up in rows and lying down 'by numbers', dovetailing heads and feet.’2
.jpg?t=20120527181101)
Article comments
1 - Bliffle
The enthusiasm with which Kissinger, Nixon, et al, embraced the idea of undermining a fairly elected government gives one a hint as to what may be in store for the USA should the childish voters not elect, in some future election like 2008, an administration suitably inclined to continue the BushCo Long War against Islam.
2 - Fred Prescott
Nice comment...
Perhaps don't know what about you are talking.
3 - Bliffle
If the Childe Voters of Chile are not allowed to elect their own leaders why should the (equally childish) Childe Voters of the USA?
4 - Anand Menon
Standard Schaefer writes"...The Chilean experiment originated in an exchange program of economists between the University of Chicago and Chile's Catholic University in Santiago. In August 1972, more than a year before the military coup, the CIA funded a 300-page economic blueprint which it supplied to the country's military and some of the most ambitious business families in an effort to hasten the overthrow of Salvador Allende's socialist government, which had been elected by a small plurality in 1970.
The Chicago-style monetary plan described efforts to privatize industry, reign in government spending to lower inflation, and to create a more active stock market financed by labor's own forced savings in order to increase stock prices. The hope was that capital gains would suffice to pay off the loans that the government gave its supporters and cronies to buy industrial companies will little or no cash down.
Neoliberals call Chile's 1974-90 period a miracle, but it is best seen as what should have been a warning against imposing similar policies in other countries. Under what became known as the Washington Consensus the economy was subjected to totalitarian libertarian doctrine. Public enterprises were given away of to the junta's supporters with virtually no money down. The result was mass bankruptcy, economic collapse, and a polarization of wealth and political power that transformed the country that had been one of Latin America's most stable middle-class democracies....."
Prof Michael Hudson writes"...What seems to have upset Mr. Kissinger was the fact that socialism came to power through democratic election. It was a basic axiom of right-wing "free market" philosophy that socialism could only take over by dictatorship. Allende's victory showed this premise to be wrong. So a theory of society and doctrine of the global future was being threatened.
A second axiom was that socialist planning could not provide a prosperous economic environment, and especially that prosperity could not be gained by breaking away from what now is called the Washington Consensus. Under Allende, Chile sustained a hefty 8.9 percent increase in its GNP and at first succeeded in reducing the country's inflation rate. During his nearly three years in office he gained support by providing the poor with better access to housing, education, food and health care than previously.
Kissinger felt that the United States needed to show that socialism was bound to fail economically. Rather than leaving this to the "free market," America used the famous "invisible hand" not Adam Smith's invisible hand of free enterprise, but the covert hand of CIA destabilization.
One remaining problem had to be countered. That was the threat that Chile's army might obey its constitution and promote the country's independence rather than favoring U.S. policies. The leading Chilean general was a constitutionalist who believed that the army should stay out of politics. He had to be murdered in order to replace him with a more U.S.-oriented general, who turned out to be Augusto Pinochet who quickly became an acolyte of the Chicago Boys....."
Roger Burbach writing more recently said".....As the proceedings against Pinochet advanced, new reports of US complicity in the coup and the repression began to surface, particularly about the role of Kissinger. The Chilean courts tried to compel Kissinger to testify, but they received no cooperation from the US Justice Department. French courts also issued orders for the interrogation of Kissinger, making him realize that he like Pinochet did not enjoy international impunity from prosecution. Small wonder that Kissinger wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, decrying the use of the principle of 'universal jurisdiction' by courts to bring human rights violators to justice....."
Carl Estabrook writes"...As national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations (1969-77), Kissinger oversaw a murderous American foreign policy, particularly in Latin America and in southern Asia, from Israel to Vietnam and Indonesia. "Foreign policy is not missionary work," he is reported to have said as he delivered up a no longer useful population (in this particular case, Kurds) to be slaughtered..."
and also..."Kissinger still enjoys the media's fawning regard as a "foreign policy expert": he wrote complacently at the outset of his government "service" that an expert was someone who articulated the consensus of the powerful....."
and more tellingly..."It is necessary to examine the historical record accurately and recognize the Kissingers and the Pinochets, the Kennedys and the Reagans, as the war criminals they were. It has been rightly said that if the principles of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials of 1945-6 had been enforced in the US, every President since then would have been hanged....."
.....and this is the guy who has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973....now who says the Norwegians don't have a sense of humour...
5 - Non
The popular election of 1973 you say? You have to check your sources, because there was no election in 1973.
IMO (speculatively), if there were, Allende would have lost. Remember that in that time there was economic and political chaos. Regardless of who destabilised the country, there was a strong opposition against Allende by that year.