Just to show that lack of patience is the best ally of fascism. Besides, the same excuse was used to justify the coup in Venezuela. The difference was the people had the power to say no to the army and the new Pinochets were stopped.
While there is evidence of the heavy hand of Chavez, and I would not mind seeing him lose next time, the fact is that all the end of time predictions of him being in power did not materialize. The reality is that in Chile the timing of the coup was made to fit with the worst conditions, Venezuela did pass trough similar conditions that were made worse by the opposition, time was not on the side of the oposition if the economy got better. I see Pinochet as an oportunist, besides of being a murderer.
Ummm, there was never a runoff election. Allende won when Congress due to the support of the Christian Democrat Congressmen. That doesn’t mean anything at all. Runoff elections were introduced in the Constitution of 1981, which was approved in a plebiscite in 1980.
In your previous post, you say that the plebiscite of 1980 was like the election Saddam Hussein supposedly “won” in 1997. This is a really bad comparison. The plebiscite was not to approve or disapprove of Pinochet per se, but to approve or disapprove of a new constituion. Second, of course Pinochet was not challenged directly. The election was a plebscite not a presidential election!
The part about “other frauds” is also not ground for dismissing the whole report. How do you explain the act that in the mesas where irregularities were reported, Allende won?
Blaming the U.S. government is not the same as blaming America.
Blaming the U.S. government is appropriate – and patriotic – in circumstances where it is, in fact, to blame. And it does appear that the U.S. government was at least partly to blame for Chile’s economic woes under Allende’s administration. See post #2. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chile_under_Allende#U.S._role_in_opposing_Allende:
Good start! Now:
What is your cite for all these MIR crimes? (You provided very detailed information without explaining where you found it.)
What, if any, was Allende’s complicity in any of them?
I made a mistake there, some sources described the congressional vote as the runoff, in any case, the support of congress for Allende was huge.
That was not what you implied in your previous post.
What you implied was that the plebiscite was comparable to an election for Pinochet when it was for the constitution, and as it was shown, it was an unfair plebiscite. You were misleading at best.
Sorry to say, it is a cite in Spanish (Not all posters speak Spanish Rini), and unless you can point who is the group posting this (Angelfire is a free web hosting entity) I will have to dismiss it too.
Not really. It was all thanks to a “treaty” with the Christian Democrats, many of whom later opposed Allende. And I don’t believe that the fact that Congress approved Allende meant that the Chilean people supported Allende.
I apologize for being misleading. What I meant was that the 1980 plebiscite is evidence that Chileans supported Pinochet just like Nicaraguans supported Ortega. Hence the use of the phrase per se in my post. However, uou’re still wrong about Pinochet not being challenged directly. Since it was a plebiscite, of course there was no other candidate challenging Pinochet, but voting “no” was equivalent to opposing 10 more years of Pinochet. I have yet to see clear evidence of electoral fraud.
Now you putting words in my mouth, I never said electoral fraud. This was more of the typical militaristic “democratic” elections in Latin America in which the result was preordained. It was a highly irregular and undemocratic plebiscite that among other things had an absence of registration lists. It was the Christian Democratic Party that made the biggest noise questioning the plebiscite’s results; their leader was exiled for daring to question Pinochet.
Of course the site is in Spanish. Chile is a Spanish-speaking country, so the vast majority of sites about Chilean history are bound to be in Spanish.
The site is of a pro-Pinochet organization. Before you dismiss it, I dont think anybody denies the MIR was indeed a Marxist guerrilla organization. Problem is, nobody except pro-Pinochetists cared to investigate the MIR’s crimes. The only neutral evidence of the MIR’s crimes is probably found in the archives of Chilean newspapers.
Yes. Therein lies the hard part, because real life requires acting at the present moment. So, when you have a violent Marxist insurgency in the country, enjoying President’s protection, you look at the history of Marxist takeovers of power. The record is extremely bleak. You don’t want Lenin or Mao in your own country. So you need to fight fire with fire.
Nicaragua example is irrelevant, because by 1990 USSR was defeated in Afghanistan and in speedy retreat on all fronts, so Sandinistas couldn’t rely on any support from other Communist regimes and had to be conciliatory.
In 1973 the situation was exactly opposite. USSR was strong and meddling in internal affairs of other countries everywhere. It was the USA that was weak in 1973, just being defeated in Vietnam and with a huge number of internal problems. USA decided to draw battlelines in Chile and other Latin American countries. Right? Wrong? One thing for sure: if they didn’t, the world might have been a lot different right now.
Which does not mean anything they did was in any way his fault, nor welcomed by him. See post #39. In fact, since, by your own account, the MRI continued its terrorist activities even under the fierce Pinochet regime, it’s hard to see how Allende could have done anything to stop them – except by giving the people what they wanted by nonviolent means, which is what Allende was working on. Had he succeeded, the MRI might simply have disbanded for lack of interest.
Say, this is interesting! Looking over the links at the end of the Wikipedia article on Allende, I found one about something called “Project Cybersyn” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn:
The whole idea – it’s so '70s! I’m flashing on The Prisoner, Logan’s Run . . . Just imagine what might have happened if the Allende regime had survived . . . 3:42 a.m., April 8, 1983 – Cybersyn becomes self-aware . . .