Fifty Years After Augusto Pinochet Seized Power at Santiago, Chile Enjoys the Last Laugh

Fifty years ago on Monday, Latin America’s first elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, was deposed in a military coup in Chile. As Allende’s Cuban-trained presidential guard defended La Moneda Palace from bullets and bombs, the president bade farewell to his ministers. Then, in an ornate second floor salon, the 65-year-old leader placed an AK-47 between his legs and blew his head off. The assault weapon had been given to him by Cuba’s leader. It bore a golden plate: “To my friend and comrade-in-arms — Fidel Castro.”The coup and the violence used to extirpate Marxism root and branch from Chile brought down worldwide condemnation on the coup leader, General Augusto Pinochet. In the northern hemisphere, the coup in Chile convulsed my first week on campus as a freshman at Yale University. The teach-ins and protests pushed me to earn a bachelor of arts degree in Latin American Studies.With the passage of half a century, though, I have long since converted to a heresy: Pinochet’s coup was a mal necesario — a necessary evil. Confounding expectations, Pinochet stayed in power for 17 years, between 1973 and 1990. He radically reversed Chile’s statist course, implementing the free market policies of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys.” After a decade, Allende’s 600 percent annual inflation fell to 9 percent. During the last seven years of Pinochet’s rule, Chile recorded an average annual GDP growth rate of 6 percent — the highest in Latin America.There is no doubt that the crackdown was real and scary. According to a post-Pinochet inquiry by the government, some 3,000 political opponents of the military were killed and more than 19,000 were tortured. During the first three years, 130,000 leftists — real and suspected — were arrested. About 200,000 Chileans fled into exile.Salvador Allende at Santiago with his daughter on election day, September 4, 1970. Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesIn the 1980s, I flew regularly to Santiago to cover for the Miami Herald the anti-Pinochet protests with their signature, the burning of tires. The regime was gray. The police were not to be messed with. Foreign reporters were not welcome. Flying in from Rio, I would write on my entry card “profesion: jornalista.” That’s “reporter” in Portuguese, but close enough to “day worker” in Spanish to fool some passport stamping border guards.Immediately after the coup, Chilean exiles in the US and Europe worked overtime to elevate Pinochet to the West’s top bête noire. The most articulate and consistent campaigner has been Ariel Dorfman, full name of Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman. The Dorfman family left New York in 1954 after his father was targeted as a Communist threat. Back in New York as an exile, the younger Dorfman won carte blanche with the New York-based press.In “Defending Allende,” a 5,000-word piece in this week’s New York Review of Books, the now 81-year-old Mr. Dorfman hews true to his role in 1973 — loyal publicist for Allende’s Marxist government.“The most impressive [reform] was the nationalization of the enormous copper mines, until then owned by predatory US corporations. It had also nationalized the mining of minerals like nitrate and iron, as well as many banks and large factories,” enthuses Mr. Dorfman. “By 1973 almost 60 percent of Chile’s arable land had been expropriated.” The idea of collectivizing farms may sell well to readers at Manhattan, New York. This Latin American “solution,” though, is never pitched to farmers at Manhattan, Kansas.According to a KGB senior archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, personally approved in 1976 “Operation Toucan.” According to documents contained in 25,000 pages of KGB files that Mitrokhin delivered to Britain’s MI-6 when he defected in 1992, Toucan was not a subtropical bird. It was a public relations and disinformation campaign designed to generate negative Western press and human rights attention to the military regime in Chile.Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, salutes from an open vehicle as General Augusto Pinochet rides on horseback at left at Santiago, Chile, May 21, 1972. AP/fileSome successes were scored that year. In December 1976, the Soviet Union traded dissident Vladimir Bukovsky for Luis Corvalán, general secretary of Chile’s Communist Party. Corvalan lived at Moscow until 1990, when he returned to Santiago. On the press front, the New York Times published in 1976 some 66 articles on human rights abuses in Chile. That year, the Times ran four human rights stories on Cambodia. There, the communist Khmer Rouge were in the midst of murdering 1.5 million Cambodians — in 1,000 days.Given the history of Marxism in power in Latin America, Chile’s coup — crude as it was — can be seen as a small price to pay. Again and again, when Latin Americans encounter communism, they vote with their feet.In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas morphed into a leftist version of the Somozas, the oligarchy that ran that Central American nation between 1927 and 1979. During the last 16 years of Daniel Ortega’s presidency, 800,000 Nicaraguans, or 11 percent of the total population, emigrated.Worse off is oil rich, but newly impoverished Venezuela. After 25 years of Cuban-inspired “Chavismo,” some 7 million persons — the equivalent of one quarter of Venezuela’s population — have emigrated.The clearest example is Cuba, the “lighthouse of revolution” run by the Castro brothers for 62 years. In Cold War terms, free-market Miami could be labeled “Cuba North,” and the communist island “Cuba South.” Greater Miami’s 1.2 million Cuban-Americans account for about $100 billion in economic activity. Ninety miles to the south, Cuba has a similar GDP — $107 billion — but produced by almost 10 times the population, 11.2 million people.Often swept under the rug is the fact that Allende was a big fan of Cuba. For a decade, he made annual trips to Havana, with the last one in 1972. On the night of September 4, 1970, when Fidel Castro learned that Allende had narrowly won Chile’s presidential election, he ordered a banner headline for Cuba’s official newspaper Granma: “Defeat of Imperialism in Chile.”Fidel Castro raises his fist for the Communist salute while Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, waves, on the Government House balcony at Santiago, Chile on November 11, 1971. APLater in 1972, it became public that Cuba used its “diplomatic pouch” to send 3,000 AK-47s Chile on the twice weekly Cubana de Aviación flight between Havana and Santiago. The arms apparently were destined for the 20,000 militants of the Revolutionary Left Movement, an urban guerrilla group allied with Allende and run by his nephew, Andrés Pascal Allende.“A lot of weapons were coming in and being distributed to pro-Allende supporters,” Steve Yolen, who covered the coup for UPI, tells the Sun. In the aftermath of the coup, he remembers stepping over “pools of blood” in the lobby of the Ministry of Communication. An Army officer said, “these are my kids.”During the Allende years, the most conspicuous sign of Cuba’s interest in Chile was Fidel Castro’s visit in 1971. Originally planned for a week, it stretched into a month-long, 2,200-mile long national tour. Castro started with a visit with Allende to the El Teniente copper mine, recently nationalized from Kennecott Copper Corporation of Utah. The 10-city tour stretched down to Punta Arenas, Chile’s Patagonian city facing the Antarctic.Oddly, his tour guide for several stops in Santiago was a gruff Army general named Augusto Pinochet. The two evidently sized each other up. In 1986, arms supplied by Cuba to an urban guerrilla group were used in an assassination attempt against Pinochet.With this violence fading into memory, Chile, now a middle class, multi-party democracy has the last laugh. A hot-button political issue in this nation of nearly 20 million people is immigration. A magnet for immigrants, Chile has seen its foreign-born residents swell to nine percent today from one percent in 1992. Half of the immigrants are from Venezuela.

Fifty Years After Augusto Pinochet Seized Power at Santiago, Chile Enjoys the Last Laugh

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