Wall Street Journal
April 25, 2003
MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
At 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 1973 Chilean President Salvador Allende made a radio announcement that the Chilean navy had "isolated" the port city of Valparaíso against his command. Within a half-hour there came another broadcast, this one from inside the defense ministry building in Santiago but not from inside the government. It instructed Mr. Allende to hand over his office to Chile's Armed Forces and National Police which, it said were "united" to liberate the country.
These were the early hours of the Chilean military coup against the Allende government that would install Army General Augusto Pinochet as the head of the country for the next 17 years. It was not a decision taken by the military without encouragement from civil society. Indeed, less than one month before the coup Chile's Chamber of Deputies passed a resolution calling for the military to intervene.
Allende was elected in September 1970 but by the autumn of 1973 a combination of economic incompetence and arrogant abuse of power had destroyed his legitimacy. The country was polarized, paralyzed, fraught with street violence and on the brink of a bloody civil war.
This truth is of course anathema to international socialists and communists who have been pumping out propaganda for three decades to deny the failure. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is the latest to prove the effectiveness of that campaign by recently advancing the canard -- in an interview on Black Entertainment Television -- that it was the U.S. that staged the 1973 military coup in Chile. To be precise, a 17-year-old in the BET audience told Mr. Powell that "the United States staged a coup in Chile on September 11th, despite the wishes of the Chilean populace against the coup and the populace in support of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende, the CIA, regardless, supported the coup of Augusto Pinochet and that resulted in mass deaths."
Mr. Powell lamely responded: "With respect to your earlier comment about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of."
The secretary might as well have been reading from an Oliver Stone script, blessing Castro's version of world history. Not only did he passively accept utter nonsense but he also suggested that the U.S. should regret its efforts to combat Soviet expansion in Latin America during the Cold War. That is a rather strange viewpoint given what we now know about the cruelty of communist repression.
Here was a chance to set the record straight. It was also a teaching opportunity on freedom, the importance of limited government and the rule of law. It was a lob that the secretary could have hit out of the park, Allende's abuse of power being such a clear violation of classical liberal values and constitutional democracy. It was a chance to explain why even an elected president in Venezuela lacks the moral authority to trample individuals, press freedoms or property rights.
Allende's victory in 1970 came with only 36% of the vote. That meant that congress held power over his win. The Christian Democrats who despised Chile's right but clearly distrusted the radicalized leftist agreed to clear his way only if he accepted a "Statute of Guarantees" to ensure the democracy and the rule of law.
Allende consented so as to get into office but he had no intention of containing his militant constituents, backed by Fidel Castro, and their appetite for power. It is true that the U.S. disliked Allende immensely and considered his victory a big defeat. It is also true that the CIA was lurking about in Latin America during those Cold War years and that the U.S. funded Allende's political opposition. But in the succeeding three years Allende would ruin himself by destroying the country. Chileans would drive him from power. The military had the idea to send him into exile but instead, according the Journal's crack reporter, Everett Martin, who interviewed Allende's doctor, he committed suicide. This has been disputed by Allende supporters but put to rest by reliable testimony.
There is no lack of historical data to back this up. One useful compilation is "Out of the Ashes," by James R. Whelan, a history of Chile from 1833 to 1988. Sharp political divisions helped Allende get and hold power for three years despite his radicalism and his reckless economics. He cleverly used the law to shield himself while he consolidated that power. There were assaults on the press, extensive nationalization of businesses and a methodical effort to build a shadow army, which produced mounting violence throughout the period. The weapons for his informal army were coming from Cuba, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In the end there were enough to "equip a division of 15,000 men," according to Mr. Whelan.
By 1973 the country was in shambles and housewives were banging empty pots to protest Allende economics. Early that year the government announced rationing. Former President Eduardo Frei, no friend of Chile's right, called it "a clear and definitive action toward totalitarian control of the country . . . The people of Chile cannot tolerate that they be submitted to a dictatorship without escape." That opinion gained adherents as the year wore on.
On May 26 all 14 Supreme Court justices signed a document complaining that "an open and willful contempt of judicial decisions [by the executive]" threatened an "imminent breakdown of legality." On Aug. 22 came the resolution from the Lower House declaring a "grave breakdown of the legal and constitutional order" and placing the responsibility for restoring "legal paths" with the military. On August 25 the Medical Association asked the president to resign and the Bar Association followed suit on Aug. 31. Yet experts say that more than any one single event it was Allende's proposal for a national education curriculum, a lá East Germany, that drove the military to its final decision.
The Pinochet dictatorship was difficult for everyone. Yet as Cuba shows it could have been far worse. Chileans went with the lesser of two evils, broadly supporting an unprecedented military coup to save their country, not only from economic ruin but also from the shackles of communist repression. That took courage. It doesn't seem very fair for Mr. Powell to suggest that the U.S. deserves the credit.
