Augusto Pinochet and the Conservative Threat to Americaby
Jacob G. Hornberger, January 12, 2005
The so-called commitment to democracy that U.S. officials have used to justify their invasion and war of aggression against the people of Iraq is hogwash. Federal officials no more have a commitment to democracy than did, well, Augusto Pinochet, whose installation into office U.S. officials and U.S. conservatives enthusiastically embraced. After all, what better example than the U.S. attitude toward democracy than what happened in Chile?
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Upon Allende's election, Republican President Richard Nixon immediately issued an order to his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, to do whatever was necessary to oust the democratically elected Allende from office, even if that meant violating the democratic will of the Chilean people by installing an unelected military regime in Chile. The CIA’s unsuccessful attempt to prevent Allende from taking office resulted in the murder of a high Chilean general, not that that bothered many people within the U.S. government.
While it is still impossible to know all the things that the CIA did to oust Allende from office three years later (the CIA still refuses to open all its files in the matter — “national security,” of course), there is no doubt that U.S. officials from the president on down, along with their U.S. conservative supporters, enthusiastically embraced Allende’s violent ouster from office and his replacement by Pinochet’s brutal military regime. (By the end of the coup, Allende and many others were dead.)
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Harking back to Hitler’s Gestapo and Stalin’s KGB, Pinochet set up one of the most frightening organizations of state-sponsored terror ever devised. Called the DINA, it was a secret organization consisting of torturers and executioners who, like their German and Soviet counterparts, honestly believed that they were patriotic government officials who were serving their country, as they tortured and executed their victims.
Over the succeeding years, DINA and the CIA would maintain a close working relationship, not only because the head of DINA had received training from the U.S. military but also because the CIA liked receiving the information that was being extracted by the DINA torturers. Unfortunately, DINA’s torture and execution chambers were not limited to Chile. Given that military regimes were ruling in such nearby South American countries as Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, DINA became a cross-border cooperative venture in which the military regimes would track down and arrest each other’s “terrorists.”
Once arrested, the DINA agents from the captive’s home country would be invited to enter the country to torture and execute their own citizens or the victim would be “renditioned” to his home country for torture and execution.Who was a Chilean “terrorist”? At first, it was anyone who took up arms against the Pinochet military regime — that is, those who didn’t meekly submit to a violent military takeover of their country — those who were violently resisting Pinochet’s military dictatorship, including communist terrorists.
It wasn’t long, however, before the paranoia that customarily afflicts military regimes led to the arrest, torture, and execution of thousands of people who
peacefully opposed military regimes and
peacefully promoted the restoration of democracy and civil liberties to Chile, including officials who had served in the Allende administration.
U.S. conservatives have long justified the Pinochet regime on the ground that Allende’s socialist economic policies (and, conservatives claimed, Allende’s communist aims) were anti-freedom and threatened the economic well-being of the Chilean people. Therefore, to avoid a socialist president and possibly another communist regime in this hemisphere (Cuba, of course, being the other), conservatives claimed that it was entirely proper for the Chilean military (and the U.S. government) to disregard the democratic electoral results and violently oust Allende from office, installing a military regime that might even bring “free enterprise” policies to Chile.
Yet, for the past several decades,
the American people have democratically elected people to public office who believe in the same socialist policies that Allende believed in: Social Security (which originated among pre-Hitler German socialists), Medicare, Medicaid, public (i.e., government) schooling, welfare, public works, income taxation, coercive redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, business subsidies, foreign aid, and the like. For that matter, all these U.S. socialist programs (which U.S. conservatives today embrace) are also primary features of Fidel Castro’s socialist and communist system.
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As harmful and destructive as socialist economic policies are, they pale in comparison to the omnipotent power to kill, torture, and disappear people that come with military rule. Seeing your wealth taxed and given to others is bad. Seeing your economic activities regulated is bad. But when military officials have the unfettered power to take you into custody, torture you, and execute you, it’s the end of the story for freedom in that society. As Chileans under Pinochet discovered — indeed as Russians under Stalin and Germans under Hitler discovered — there is no peaceful way to change the system once you’re dead.
