Salvador Allende’s Last Hurrah?

James Reston of the Times famously said: “Americans will do anything for Latin America — but read about it.” It’s a shame, too, but could it owe to the fact that the left monopolizes the conversation? The case in point is today’s 50th anniversary of the military coup against Chile’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende. New York’s liberal foghorns are marking the date as if the coup happened yesterday.The Times resurrects as its “Critic’s Pick” this week a 1971 documentary of Allende’s first year in office that it calls a “portrait of hope and incipient change.” The New Yorker runs a 2,600-word review of the writer Ariel Dorfman’s “The Suicide Museum” under a headline “Salvador Allende is still speaking to us.” It says Allende gives the world “reason to believe there might be an alternative to the rapacious, greed-based way we have always run things.”The New York Review of Books offers “Defending Allende,” 5,000 words by Mr. Dorfman himself. The tone and content of the piece show that Mr. Dorfman’s views have not evolved since September 1973, when he was a press attache to the Allende government and schmoozed visiting American reporters. While New York’s press has slumbered like Rip van Winkle, though, Chile moved on. The population has doubled since 1973, to 20 million.Attitudes have evolved, our James Brooke has reported. Unbeknownst to New York readers, the party that dominates Chile’s ongoing constitutional convention wants to dig a 585-mile ditch to stop illegal immigration from Bolivia. Far from a fringe movement, Chile’s rightist Republican Party won 45 percent of seats in the assembly. In December, voters are to vote on the draft drawn up by the conservative-dominated assembly.Two years ago, in a presidential runoff, Republican candidate José Antonio Kast won 44 percent of votes nationwide, losing to leftist candidate Gabriel Boric. Supporting neoliberalism, cutting taxes and a market economy, the Republicans openly consider themselves the ideological heirs of the Army general Augusto Pinochet. After toppling Allende in the coup, Pinochet served as president of Chile between 1973 and 1990.That 1990 date is seen by many Chileans as a watershed. The right notes that street crime has hit the highest rate since 1990. With the high economic growth era of the late Pinochet years a fading memory, Chileans glumly digest the news that the Central Bank forecasts zero economic growth this year. Production of copper, Chile’s mainstay, has hit a 25-year low. In 18 months, the approval ratings of President Boric lurk below 30 percent.The passage of time coupled with the economic and social troubles of today prompt some attitude shifts. More and more Chileans are either mellowing on the coup or to coming out as “Pinochetistas.” In one decade, according to the Mori Chile polling firm, the portion of poll respondents saying the military was right to act in 1973 more than doubled to hit 36 percent this year from 16 percent of 2013.Much foreign press coverage of the coup anniversary focuses on the 3,000 people killed by the military or on the 19,000 tortured by the military. These figures come from a post-Pinochet civilian inquiry. Survivors often say things like “my parents joined the resistance.” Reporters rarely ask: what kind of resistance? It is all too often a euphemism for joining the Revolutionary Left Movement or the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front.Both were Marxist-Leninist urban guerilla groups that specialized in bombings and shootings of policemen and soldiers. This was no salon de thé. The American Government classified both groups as terrorist organizations. According to a Revolutionary Left Movement commander, Andrés Pascal Allende, a nephew of President Allende, as many as 2,000 of the movement’s militants were killed under the Chilean military regime.Foreign reporters all too often ignore a “silent majority” that backed at least the initial stage of military rule. Fifty years ago, as strikes, food lines, and factory occupations made life difficult, passersby screamed “cobarde,” meaning “coward,” at soldiers — for not moving against Allende. Last month, Communist deputies in the National Congress sought to revoke a pre-coup condemnation of Allende by Chile’s 1973 congress. The congress rejected the step.

Salvador Allende’s Last Hurrah?

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