Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Read online

  The other U.S. motive for concern about Chile was that Chile’s copper-mining companies, which are the biggest sector of the Chilean economy, were U.S.-owned and developed by U.S.-invested capital, because Chile in the 19th century lacked the capital and the technology to develop copper mines by itself. Under President Frei, Chile had already expropriated (and paid for) a 51% interest in the companies; the U.S. feared (correctly, as it turned out) that Allende might expropriate the remaining 49% without paying. Hence, from the 1960’s onwards, through a program called the Alliance for Progress, the U.S. government supported Latin American (including Chilean) centrist reform parties and poured foreign aid money into Latin American countries governed by such parties, in order to pre-empt support for leftist revolutions. Under President Frei, Chile became the leading recipient of U.S. development money in Latin America.

  Given those realities, what policies did Allende adopt upon becoming president? Even though he knew that his candidacy had been supported by only 36% of Chilean voters and had been opposed by the Chilean armed forces and the U.S. government, he rejected moderation, caution, and compromise, and instead pursued policies guaranteed to be anathema to those opposing forces. His first measure, with the unanimous support of Chile’s Congress, was to nationalize the U.S.-owned copper companies without paying compensation; that’s a recipe for making powerful international enemies. (Allende’s pretext for not paying compensation was to label company profits already earned above a certain rate of return as “excess profits,” to be counted against compensation and cancelling out the compensation owed.) He nationalized other big international businesses. He horrified the Chilean armed forces by bringing large numbers of Cubans into Chile, by carrying a personal machine gun given to him by Fidel Castro, and by inviting Castro to Chile for a visit that stretched out to five weeks. He froze prices (even of small consumer items like shoe-laces), replaced free-market elements of Chile’s economy with socialist-style state planning, granted big wage increases, greatly increased government spending, and printed paper money to cover the resulting government deficits. He extended President Frei’s agrarian reform by expropriating large estates and turning them over to peasant cooperatives. While that agrarian reform and others of Allende’s goals were well-intentioned, they were carried out incompetently. For instance, one Chilean friend of mine, at that time still a 19-year-old not-yet-graduated student economist, was given major responsibility for setting Chilean prices of consumer goods. Another Chilean friend described Allende’s policies as follows: “Allende had good ideas, but he executed them poorly. Although he correctly recognized Chile’s problems, he adopted wrong solutions to those problems.”

  The result of Allende’s policies was the spread of economic chaos, violence, and opposition to him. Government deficits covered by just printing money caused hyperinflation, such that real wages (i.e., wages adjusted for inflation) dropped below 1970 levels, even though wages not corrected for inflation nominally increased. Foreign and domestic investment, and foreign aid, dried up. Chile’s trade deficit grew. Consumer goods, including even toilet paper, became scarce in markets, which were increasingly characterized by empty shelves and long queues. Rationing of food and even of water became severe. Workers, who had been Allende’s natural supporters, joined the opposition and mounted nation-wide strikes; especially damaging to Chile’s economy were strikes by copper miners and truckers. Street violence and predictions of a coup grew. On the left, Allende’s radical supporters armed themselves; on the right, street posters went up proclaiming “Yakarta viene.” Literally, that means “Jakarta is coming,” a reference to Indonesian right-wing massacres of communists in 1965, to be discussed in the next chapter. That was an open threat by the Chilean right-wing to do the same to Chilean leftists, as it turned out that they actually did. Even Chile’s powerful Catholic Church turned against Allende when he proposed mandatory educational curriculum reforms at private Catholic schools as well as at government schools, aimed at creating a generation of cooperative and unselfish Chilean “New Men” by sending students into the fields as manual laborers.

  The outcome of all those developments was the 1973 coup that many of my Chilean friends characterize as inevitable, even though the form that the coup took was not inevitable. An economist friend summed up for me Allende’s fall as follows: “Allende fell because his economic policies depended on populist measures that had failed again and again in other countries. They produced short-term benefits, at the cost of mortgaging Chile’s future and creating runaway inflation.” Many Chileans admired Allende and viewed him almost as a saint. But saintly virtues don’t necessarily translate themselves into political success.

  I introduced my account of Allende by saying that it remains unclear why he acted as he did. I keep asking myself: why on earth did Allende, an experienced politician and a moderate, pursue extremist policies that he knew were unacceptable to most Chileans, as well as to Chile’s armed forces? My Chilean friends have suggested a couple of possible answers, but no one can be sure which answer, if any, truly explains Allende’s reasoning. One possibility is that Allende’s previous political successes misled him into thinking that he could defuse the opposition. He had already been successful as minister of health; he had initially assuaged congressional doubts over his election by constitutional amendments that didn’t tie his hands about economic policies; and Congress had unanimously approved his expropriation of the copper companies without compensation. He now hoped to placate the armed forces by bringing all three of their commanders into his cabinet. The other possibility is that Allende was pushed to extreme measures, against his better judgment, by his most radical supporters, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Spanish acronym MIR), who wanted a quick revolution to overthrow Chile’s capitalist state. They were accumulating weapons, adopted the slogan “Arm the people,” complained about Allende being too weak, and refused to listen to his entreaties, “Just wait patiently for a few more years.”

  Even if either or both of these possible explanations constituted Allende’s motives, I find them unsatisfying. It seems to me that, even at the time, and not just with the wisdom of hindsight, Allende’s policies were based on unrealistic appraisals.

  The long-expected coup took place on September 11, 1973, after all three branches of the Chilean armed forces—army, navy, and air force—had agreed on a plan 10 days previously. Although the CIA had been constantly supporting opposition to Allende and seeking to undermine him, even Americans who exposed CIA meddling in Chilean affairs agree that the coup was executed by Chileans themselves, not by the CIA. The Chilean air force bombed the president’s palace in Santiago, while Chilean army tanks shelled it (Plate 4.3). Recognizing his situation to be hopeless, Allende killed himself with the machine gun presented to him by Fidel Castro. I confess that I had been skeptical about that claim, and had suspected that Allende had actually been killed by coup soldiers. But an investigative commission set up by Chile’s restored democratic government after the end of military government concluded that Allende really did die alone, by suicide. That conclusion was confirmed for me by a Chilean friend who knew a fireman of the fire brigade that went to the burning palace and met Allende’s surviving final companions, including the last person to see Allende alive.

  The coup was welcomed with relief and broad support from centrist and rightist Chileans, much of the middle class, and of course the oligarchs. By then, Chile’s economic chaos, foolish governmental economic policies, and street violence under Allende had become intolerable. Coup supporters regarded the junta merely as an unavoidable transition stage towards restoring the previous status quo of middle-and upper-class civilian political domination that had prevailed before 1970. One Chilean friend recounted to me the story of a dinner party of 18 people that he had attended in December 1973, just three months after the coup. When the subject of conversation turned to the question how long the guests present expected the junta to remain in power, 17 of the 18 guests predicted j
ust two years. The 18th guest’s prediction of seven years was considered absurd by the other guests; they said that that couldn’t happen in Chile, where all previous military governments had quickly returned power to a civilian government. No one at that dinner party foresaw that the junta would remain in power for almost 17 years. It suspended all political activity, closed Congress, banned left-wing political parties and even the centrist Christian Democrats (to the great surprise of those centrists), took over Chile’s universities, and appointed military commanders as university rectors.

  The junta member who became its leader, essentially by accident, had joined it at the last minute and had not led the coup planning: General Augusto Pinochet (Plate 4.4). Just a couple of weeks before the coup, the Chilean army had pressured its previous chief of staff into resigning, because he was opposed to a military intervention. By default, the new army chief of staff became Pinochet, who had commanded the army units in the Santiago area. Even at that time, Pinochet was considered relatively old (58 years). Chile’s other army generals and armed forces commanders thought that they understood their colleague, as did the CIA, which had gathered extensive information about him. The CIA’s appraisal of Pinochet was: quiet, mild-mannered, honest, harmless, friendly, hard-working, businesslike, religious, modest in lifestyle, a devoted tolerant husband and father, with no known interests outside the military and the Catholic Church and his family—in short, not a person likely to lead a coup. The junta expected itself to be a committee of equals, with rotating leadership. They chose Pinochet as their initial leader mainly because he was its oldest member, because he was chief of staff of the largest branch of the Chilean armed forces (the army itself), and perhaps because they shared the CIA’s view of Pinochet as unthreatening. When the junta took power, Pinochet himself announced that its leadership would rotate.

  But when it came time for Pinochet to rotate off and to step down as leader, he didn’t do so. Instead, he succeeded in intimidating his fellow junta members by a secret service that he set up. Hundreds of incidents unfolded that involved dissent within the junta, but Pinochet usually succeeded in getting his way. Neither his fellow junta members, nor the CIA, nor anyone else anticipated Pinochet’s ruthlessness, his strong leadership, and his ability to cling to power—at the same time as he continued to project an image of himself as a benign old man and devout Catholic, depicted by the state-controlled media with his children and going to church.

  The barbaric deeds that happened in Chile after September 11, 1973 cannot be understood without recognizing the role of Pinochet. Like Hitler in the Germany of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Pinochet, while part of a broader context, was a leader who imposed his stamp on the course of history. He was even more of an enigma than was Allende. Whereas I mentioned two interpretations that have been offered for Allende’s actions, I haven’t heard any plausible explanation for the sadism managed by Pinochet. As one Chilean friend expressed it to me, “I didn’t understand Pinochet’s psychology.”

  As soon as the junta took power, it rounded up leaders of Allende’s Popular Unity Party and other perceived leftists (such as university students and the famous Chilean folk singer Victor Jara; Plate 4.5), with the goal of literally exterminating the Chilean left-wing. Within the first 10 days, thousands of Chilean leftists were taken to two sports stadiums in Santiago, interrogated, tortured, and killed. (For instance, Jara’s body was found in a dirty canal with 44 bullet holes, all of his fingers chopped off, and his face disfigured.) Five weeks after the coup, Pinochet personally ordered a general to go around Chilean cities in what became known as the “Caravan of Death,” killing political prisoners and Popular Unity politicians whom the army had been too slow at killing. The junta banned all political activities, closed Congress, and took over universities.

  Two months after the coup, Pinochet founded an organization that evolved into DINA, a national intelligence organization and secret police force. Its chief reported directly to Pinochet, and it became Chile’s main agent of repression. It was notorious for its brutality, even judged by the standards of brutality of the other intelligence units of the Chilean armed forces. It set up networks of secret detention camps, devised new methods of torture, and made Chileans “disappear” (i.e., murdered them without a trace). One center called La Venda Sexy specialized in sexual abuse to extract information—for example, by rounding up a prisoner’s family members and sexually abusing them in front of the prisoner, by methods too revolting to describe in print and utilizing rodents and trained dogs. If you visit Santiago, have a strong stomach, and aren’t susceptible to nightmares, you can tour one such detention center at Villa Grimaldi, now transformed into a museum.

  In 1974 DINA began to operate outside Chile. It started in Argentina by planting a car bomb that killed Chile’s former army commander-in-chief General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofia, because Prats had refused to join the coup and was feared by Pinochet as a potential threat. DINA then launched an international campaign of government terrorism, called Operation Condor, by convening a meeting of the heads of the secret police of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and eventually Brazil, in order to cooperate on cross-border manhunts of exiles, leftists, and political figures. Hundreds of Chileans were tracked down and killed in other South American countries, Europe, and even one in the U.S. The U.S. case occurred in 1976, in Washington, DC, only 14 blocks from the White House, when a car bomb killed the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier (minister of defense under Allende), plus an American colleague. As I mentioned previously, that was the only known case of a foreign terrorist killing an American citizen on American soil—until the World Trade Towers attack of 2001.

  By 1976, Pinochet’s government had arrested 130,000 Chileans, or 1% of Chile’s population. While the majority of them were eventually released, DINA and other junta agents killed or “disappeared” thousands of Chileans (most of them under the age of 35), plus four American citizens and various citizens of other countries. The killings were often preceded by torture, aimed at least partly at extracting information. It isn’t clear, though, to what extent the torture was also motivated by pure sadism; Chilean students with whom I have discussed the matter have suggested both motives to me. About 100,000 Chileans fled into exile, many of them never to return.

  One has to wonder how a previously democratic country could descend to such depths of behavior, which far exceeded the previous military interventions of Chilean history in duration, number of killings, and sadism. Partly, the answer involves Chile’s increasing polarization, violence, and breakdown of political compromise, culminating under Allende in the arming of the Chilean far left and in the “Yakarta viene” warnings of impending massacres by the far right. Allende’s Marxist designs and Cuban connections, much more than previous Chilean leftist programs, had made the armed forces fearful and prepared to take preventive actions. The other part of the answer, according to Chileans with whom I’ve talked, involves Pinochet himself, who was an unusual person, even though he seemed so ordinary and sought to project an image of himself as a benign, devoutly Catholic old man. Few documents link Pinochet directly to atrocities; perhaps the closest thing to a smoking gun was his order to the general whom he sent to carry out the Caravan of Death. Many Chilean rightists believe to this day that Pinochet didn’t order the tortures and killings himself, and that the carnage was instead ordered by other generals and leaders. But I find it impossible to believe that Pinochet could meet every week or every day with the head of his secret service (DINA), or that many other Chilean military officials could routinely perform torture, without Pinochet’s explicit orders.

  Pinochet, like Hitler, thus seems to be an example of an evil leader who did make a difference to the course of history. Yet Chilean military crimes can’t be blamed on Pinochet alone, because no one has ever suggested that he personally shot or tortured anyone. At its peak, DINA had over 4,000 employees, whose job it was to interrogate, torture, and kill. I don’t interpret that
to mean that most Chileans are uniquely evil: every country has thousands of sociopaths who would commit evil if ordered or even just permitted to do it. For example, any of you who has been imprisoned even in generally non-evil countries like Britain and the U.S., and who has had the misfortune to experience there the sadism of jailers and law enforcement officers who have not been specifically ordered to be sadistic, can imagine how those jailers and officers would have behaved if they had indeed received explicit orders to be sadistic.

  The other main effort of Pinochet’s dictatorship, besides exterminating the Chilean left, was to reconstruct the Chilean economy on a free-market basis, reversing Chile’s prior norm of extensive government intervention. That reversal did not happen during Pinochet’s first year-and-a-half in power, when the economy continued to contract, inflation persisted, and unemployment rose. But from 1975 onwards, Pinochet turned over economic management to a group of neo-liberal economic advisors who became known as the Chicago Boys, because many of them had trained at the University of Chicago in association with the economist Milton Friedman. Their policies emphasized free enterprise, free trade, market orientation, balanced budget, low inflation, modernization of Chilean businesses, and reduced government intervention.