Augusto Pinochet

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Much is going to be — and deserves to be — said in the next few days about the crimes of Augusto Pinochet, but the way things are going in Latin America, the death of the ex-dictator also invites reflection on what he achieved after seizing power in 1973. He acted at the behest of generals and navy commanders worried about the way the Marxist president, Salvadore Allende, though elected, was destroying the economy and preparing to replace its institutions with a socialist regime. A civilian militia was being organized, with Castro’s help, to become a revolutionary force to replace the traditional military.

Pinochet himself never gave any evidence that he knew anything about economics and the development of a poor country. Yet in his nearly two decades in power he presided over radical changes in the economy that set a new philosophy for how to develop a country, an example that has been followed by reform governments all over the world. Chile achieved what could be called the soundest economy in Latin America. A group of civilian economists, educated in America and under the influence of Milton Friedman, laid down the vision. Many of them were taught by Friedman himself at the University of Chicago and immediately after the coup were being called the Chicago Boys in Chile.

It seemed to be the navy authorities who decided on the Chicago Boys to run the economy. Pinochet’s contribution was to accept them. With little of his own knowledge of how to develop a country, Pinochet bought into them completely. He used the force of his dictatorship to make way for them. This was no small thing in a country whose politicians were wedded to a variety of ideologies, all of them socialist, ranging from the German Christian Democrats to the Soviet and Chinese Communists.

Everett G. Martin, who as a Wall Street Journal correspondent won an Inter-American Press Association Award for his coverage of Pinochet’s coup and the rise of Chile, sent us a wire yesterday. “I think that time has demonstrated that it [would have been] very hard to make such reforms through a democratic government,” he said. “So the Chileans could be said to have lucked out with a dictatorship that was in all other ways as bad as claimed regarding human rights violations, torturing of prisoners and murders of opponents carried out by pervasive secret police.”

The reforms consisted of, for starters, opening up the economy by ending protective tariffs, a move that forced many of Chile’s inefficient industries out of business but ended up with Chilean businessmen learning how to compete and become exporters. They opened up the economy to foreign investors in all kinds of things from copper mining to agriculture. Chile became the first Third World country in which buyers for big American stores set up offices. Chile jumped on the end of the world’s production line.

One of the biggest reforms was of social security, which was privatized, creating a savings program that provides funds for local investment spurring economic growth. It also gave workers schooled in socialism a real stake in the economy that so far, at least, looks to insulate Chile against the appeal of leftist populism. Pinochet was responsible for all the horror stories of his dictatorship, but he forced the country to run the course of reforms that makes it one of the world’s soundest economies today.

We carry no brief for Pinochet himself. Not only are his hands stained with the blood of thousands, but he was himself corrupt and venal. Yet neither are we inclined to credit the leftist critique of his years in power. Today Latin America is again hearing, this time from Venezuela, the siren song of Marxism. Hugo Chavez is using methods every bit as foul as Pinochet did, but the result of his accession is going to be not a better life for Venezuelans but a tragedy, while the people of Chile are, because of the very reforms brought about by Pinochet, contemplating, after their terrible travail, a relatively happy future.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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