Time, I guess, to debate his legacy. Most people remember Pinochet mainly for the “disappearances” and other human rights abuses of his dictatorship, but some conservatives (American conservatives, mainly) remember him as the hero who saved Chile from going the way of Cuba. But, was Chile really in any great danger of that? Would Allende have canceled the next election, or refused to step down if he lost it?
IOW, would Chile have been better or worse off if Pinochet had never seized power?
As for American involvement in the coup, that needs to be debated in a separate thread, which I’ll start shortly. Someearlierrelevantthreads.
Chile is one of the more stable, economically prosperous, and free Latin American countries. Pinochet, for all his flaws (and they are legion) helped pave the way for this. And, unlike many other dictators, he stepped down voluntarily.
He deserves condemnation for his human rights record, but it is unfair to put him in the same category as Castro or Somoza. If I would have had to live in a country ruled by a dictator, Chile in the 80’s seems like a better choice than almost any place else.
I’ve yet to see good evidence that Allende was the sort of leader who would have gone the way of Castro and Pinochet in terms of crackdowns. If anything, his downfall was that he stuck to democratic procedures in the face of deliberate foreign sabotage and finally a coup. If a foreign government was working to undermine the US economy and destroy key infrastructure as well as bribe, cajole and otherwise influence members of Congress to try and overthrow the President, I have a feeling we wouldn’t call it anything other than international terrorism. But of course, we don’t, because that would means whatever Orwellian convenience we need it to mean.
Here’s the freeper response to the human rights issue today:
Read the declaration passed against him in the Chamber of Deputies just before the coup. It lays out the charges of constitutional and democratic violation against Allende, and calls for the military to overthrow him and restore democracy.
It’s not a matter of black and white. Because Pinochet was a bastard, that doesn’t make Allende a good guy. And we know what Pinochet did because he stuck around and did it. We don’t know how Allende would have acted and what the results would have been if he had ruled for 16 years. It’s possible he could have ended up repressing his opponents worse than Pinochet did.
I never said it made Allende. I was merely pointing out that what happened under Pinochet was far worse.
As for being worse, maybe he would have been. And maybe he wouldn’t. Considering he refused to call for martial law during the whole crisis, I’m inclined to say he wouldn’t have.
Either way, it doesn’t justify Pinochet, nor the actions of those in office in the US, who aided him.
From a practical standpoint, declaring martial law doesn’t help much when it’s the army that’s rebelling.
{quote]Either way, it doesn’t justify Pinochet, nor the actions of those in office in the US, who aided him.
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Why doesn’t it? You can look back with hindsight and say, “Oh, Pinochet was terrible, look at how many people were killed”, but at the time, when the coup was going on, who could know what would happen or how it would turn out? It’s easy to condemn from a distance.
But it is clear. Those were the primary objections to Allende within Chile…that he was centralizing power, suppressing dissent, and using government programs, including but not limited to nationalization and land reform to build up extraconstitutional institutions that paralelled government institutions, but were loyal to Allende and the leftist parties, like the creation of millitias by the Movement for the Revolutionary Left.
Look, I don’t have much use for Pinochet. The guy was nasty. But lets not sugarcoat Allende. He was a Communist, and he wanted to establish a Communist dictatorship in Chile.
Why doesn’t it? You can look back with hindsight and say, “Oh, Pinochet was terrible, look at how many people were killed”, but at the time, when the coup was going on, who could know what would happen or how it would turn out? It’s easy to condemn from a distance.
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Well, I suppose we’ll never know, will we. So that justifies the reign of Pinochet?
Let’s see, from what I can recall, a lot of the problems during Allende’s tenure were caused by US interference, to purposely make the economy collapse. Richard Nixon is quoted saying he wanted to make the Chilean economy “scream”.
From what I’ve read about Allende, no, he wasn’t a saint, but he WAS committed to democracy. And he was, unlike his successor, elected by the people.
Whatever his faults, he helped the UK during the Falklands War.
It was disgraceful that we ‘detained’ him on the basis of a Spanish ‘judge’ trying to accuse him of a crime committed in South America by people who may or may not have been his junior subordinates.