John Dinges on the Leonard Lopate Show

John Dinges, the author of several books on Latin America including his most recent book, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents, which I have nearly finished and highly recommend, was on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC yesterday discussing Operation Condor, the cooperative mission among military governments in South America during the 1970's to torture, disappear and murder dissidents and leftists.

You can listen to the archive of the show here (Real Audio required).

Comments

[Anthony O'Donnell]

Randy,

Thanks for posting the link to the Lopate interview, which I found on my way to looking up something else.

I love your site, and share your love for Latin America, but from a Spanish-speaking perspective.

I would just like to express an opinion contrary to the received wisdom such as that propagated by authors like Dinges and journalists like Lenny Lopate. While we certainly ought to examine the record of both Chilean and American misdeeds in South America (and elsewhere), I found Dinges' account typical in its exhaustive approach to the abuses of the right while treating the abuses of the left very superficially. By focusing on the behavior of one side--as bad as it was--a very distorted picture of that chapter emerges.

No one listening to Dinges, or Peter Kornbluh who appeared on Lopate's show last August, would be able to account for the following quote from Eduardo Frei in 1974. This excerpt is a tiny fragment of a letter by Frei to the World Union of Christian Democrats. The whole is worth reading. (http://www.pensionreform.org/eys/cartaarumor_frei.htm)

"El fondo del problema es que este gobierno minoritario, presentándose como una vía legal y pacífica hacia el socialismo -que fue el slogan de su propaganda nacional y mundial- estaba absolutamente decidido a instaurar en el país una dictadura totalitaria y se estaban dando los pasos progresivos para llegar a esta situación, de tal manera que ya en el año 1973 no cabía duda de que estábamos viviendo un régimen absolutamente anormal, y que eran pocos los pasos que quedaban por dar para instaurar en plenitud en Chile una dictadura totalitaria."

[Randy Paul]

Anthony,

I disagree, especially in the case of Dinges. Dinges devotes an entire chapter to the joining together of the MIR, the Montoneros and the Tupamoros into the JCR along with other leftist movements in the Southern Cone countries.

The Tupamoros were brutal and it's worth noting that much of Jacobo Timmermann's writing in the 1970's Argentina was critical of brutality by both left and right, resulting in his life being targeted by both the Junta and the Tupamoros.

As for Frei, it's worth noting that a year after Pinochet came to power, he clandestinely wrote a book bitterly critical of Pinochet called The Mandate of History which had to be published secretly.

Finally, it's worth noting that in my experience only the extremist fringe of the left still show any support for groups like MIR, the Tupamoros and the Montoneros. There are many on the non-fringe wing of the political right who still speak highly of Pinochet despite the record of brutality, and the acts of terrorism that his secret police committed in Italy, Argentina and the USA, among other questionable aspects of Pinochet's leadership.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments and please come back and comment again.

[Anthony O'Donnell]

Randy,

I’d like to make clear that my impressions were based on what I heard said on the radio show you linked to. I have not read Dinges’ book, though I was impressed that he commented at al on the dark side of the left during the period in question.

That said, the implicit challenge of what I wrote still stands. No one listening to Dinges on Lopate’s show would get the sense of what was at stake, as expressed by Frei in the quote I posted. Perhaps such an impression does emerge in Dinges’ book.

I hope I’m not misunderstood: this is not an attempt to justify atrocities committed by the Chilean or Argentine rightists of the time. Thus it’s not particularly relevant to my point that Frei later attacked Pinochet in print. If that lends credibility to the passage I quote, so much the better.

What bothers me is that the account I hear again and again about Chile falsifies what happened. It exaggerates the role of the U.S. and diminishes – usually to the vanishing point – the culpability of Allende and his more unsavory allies. My motivation in talking about the issue comes in strong measure from the surprise I felt when I finally came across challenges to those accounts which I had until then taken for granted.

Perhaps I travel in the wrong circles, but the shorthand account of the period I most often hear is that the U.S. toppled a democratically elected leader in Chile. That is partly false, partly half-truth. That some more sober and fair-minded people of the left will occasionally acknowledge things that show that characterization to be wanting is encouraging, but it does little to counteract the prevailing mythology.

I think it is eminently fair to say that Frei’s letter to the World Union of Christian Democrats gives a vastly different impression of the events of that time than the account generally heard in the U.S.A., and indeed of the account as it emerged during Lopate’s interview with Dinges.

I’m confident that if I were to ask ten of my acquaintances about the 1973 coup (i.e., ten of my acquaintances who had any familiarity with the episode at all), their account would differ remarkably from Frei’s account. I’m confident that if you repeated the experiment, you’d get the same results.

[Randy Paul]

I still think that Frei's position after the coup is worth considering. It is a matter of public record that Frei regretted his support of the coup. One of the best books I have read on the subject is A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet. The author's commented that in an interview with them, Frei told them that shortly after the coup, he refused to shake Pinochet's hand at a public mass. His family tried to prevent Pinochet from attending Frei's funeral and the general feeling one gets from Frei's reaction is that the quote you detailed above (your link didn't work, by the way) could easily apply to Pinochet's plebiscite in 1980 with a few small adjustments.

The authors of A Nation of Enemies had this to say about the UP in the preface:

We found that many sins had been committed by the Marxist left, when doctrinaire fervor and arrogance undermined the ideals of a generation inspired by the Cuban revolution.

Ariel Dorfman said much the same to say in his autobiography, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey. He expressed a great deal of regret about some of the behavior of the UP.

As for US involvement, I really urge you to review the declassified documents on the Chile Project of the National Security Archives.

The argument that I will not accept that is regularly put forth by those who opposed Allende is this one: as bad as Pinochet was, Allende would have been worse. Aside from the tendentious and purely speculative nature of the question, consider this: in the three years under Allende torture and disappearances were not institutionalized, an organization like La DINA was not created, Allende's enemies were not assassinated and bodies of those arrested by the authorities were not found later floating in the Mapocho. All of this happened under Pinochet in his first three years.

[Anthony O'Donnell]

Randy,

I’m not in the least arguing that Frei’s post-coup position not be considered. It’s certainly not my position that human rights violations were not committed under Pinochet. It is my position that his activity, and the U.S. Government’s are treated with scorching scrutiny, while the context in which they acted is all but ignored.

Not having read the books you mention I obviously can’t comment on their overall content. But I find the quote from the authors of “A Nation of Enemies” interesting.

First, to merely acknowledge that “many sins had been committed by the Marxist left” is not to accord those “sins” their proper weight. At worst that kind of allusion can serve as a rhetorical “concessio” that establishes the appearance of fairness before moving on to an unbalanced account.

Second, I find revealing the comment that “doctrinaire fervor and arrogance undermined the ideals of a generation inspired by the Cuban revolution.” It’s hard to know where to begin with such a quote. Specifically what “ideals” were inspired by that violent revolution? The best I could say about those who say such things is that they ingenuously misinterpreted that event, as they misinterpret what the Allende government was up to. Eduardo Frei’s letter certainly gives a very different impression than that a few bad eggs undermined the chances of an idealistic, and presumably worthwhile, project.

And speaking of Frei’s letter, sorry about the broken link before. Try these:

http://www.udi.cl/prensa/noticias2003/junio/2006longueira/carta_frei_rumor.htm
http://www.economiaysociedad.com/cartaarumor_frei.htm

Again, not having read the book, I can’t blame the authors of “A Nation of Enemies” for the synopsis that appears on the Amazon.com page that features the book, but I find it typical of the way this story is told:

“This history…tells how Chile, once South America’s most stable democracy, gave way to a culture of fear. The authors explain and illuminate the rift in Chilean society that widened dramatically during the Pinochet era.”

See anything missing in that account of the nation’s history? “Before Pinochet, good; after Pinochet, bad. Perhaps if pressed that author of that blurb might say, “Well, yes, there were some bad leftists but… Pinochet… dictatorship… right wing… human rights abuses.”

The general story that emerges is that evil forces on the right, including the U.S., slaughtered a lamb, in taking down the Allende government. Frei’s letter, by contrast, shows the Allende government to have been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, which the Chileans, not the U.S., took down. There is certainly no hint in the above blurb that the Allende government was methodically picking apart the institutions that made Chile “South America’s most stable democracy,” to the point where even an Eduardo Frei Montalvo – whose party enabled the inauguration of the Allende government – would make common cause with the right. No one reading it, or a hundred thousand similar treatments of the period, would have any sense of the extent to which the left was armed, what proportion of those arms remained in leftist hands after September 11, 1973, and how that might have widened a “rift in Chilean society,” which according to Frei was a yawning chasm before that date. What happened under Pinochet “in his first three years” can’t be properly understood without appreciating that situation.

Obviously arguing that Allende would have been worse than Pinochet is, as you say, purely speculative. But is it more “tendentious” than arguing the opposite? For many, it seems enough to dwell on the bogeyman Pinochet and consider the question answered. But looking at Frei’s account of affairs alone, what could be expected from what was emerging in Chile under Allende? It’s proper to criticize and punish those associated with the institutionalized torture and disappearances you mention. But what engines of state coercion would likely have been institutionalized in Chile, if we look at what happened under other successful Marxist revolutions for examples? What do the facts Frei alleges suggest? And should we look for a reliable answer to that question from people who were inspired by the Cuban revolution, or are sympathetic to those who were?

The revolution succeeded in Cuba, itself a prosperous country prior to the event. How are the Cubans doing now? What kind of institutionalized imprisonment, torture and disappearance has taken place there, and for how long? How has Chile fared by comparison?

I hope you can link to Frei's letter without any difficulty. It seems to me an extremely important document from this period, which everyone interested in it should read. Why it isn't more widely read or even known about is an interesting question.

Regrettably, the links above are only to a Spanish version. If I find an English one I'll post it for the benefit of your readers. I gather your Spanish is equal to the task. I hope so, because I'm very interested in your reaction to the letter.

[Randy Paul]

Anthony,

Sorry for the delay in responding.

The quote I gave from A Nation of Enemies was from the preface, so it was obviously a very brief mention. The book does account for the state of affairs pre-coup and is fairly judicious in my opinion.

Obviously arguing that Allende would have been worse than Pinochet is, as you say, purely speculative. But is it more “tendentious” than arguing the opposite?

Well consider this article in The Economist from January 28, 1999 and the following excerpt:

For further evidence, go to a source of the time: The Economist, non-Chilean but firmly critical of Allende and what its then Chile specialist was later to entitle his savagely critical book, “Chile’s Marxist Experiment”. That title was in fact overblown. Allende’s economics were, approximately, Marxist and certainly disastrous. Not so the political system he ran. The opposition press and parties carried on. So did elections, and even in March 1973 the regime could win only 44% of the vote for Congress. Still, this paper was deeply suspicious, and the more so—in those days of raging cold war—because of Allende’s friendship with Fidel Castro.

Twice it sent its specialist for long visits. He wrote a six-page report in March 1972, one of five pages in October 1973, a month after the coup. The second time, our man clearly had free access to the regime and its evidence against Allende. But even in 1972 he talked widely to enemies of the Allende government. Both his reports damned it. Both produced mild versions of some charges now laid against Allende: for instance (1973), of Cubans training his personal guard, or guerrillas “tolerated” by the government, (though the actual ones our reporter met were a fairly hopeless, partly Amerindian group, more like Mexico’s Zapatists than the strike force of revolution). But what did this ferocious critic of Allende’s regime say of its now alleged political tortures or killings? Not a word. [my emphasis]

For me the italicized section is game, set and match. Pinochet dissolved congress and banned legitimate opposition. Allende did not. Does this mean I embrace Allende? No, but I find the arguments set forth in The Economist article to be compelling, and I'm sure you'll agree that The Economist certainly doesn't lean left.

It's also worth noting that some within the junta, General Leigh in particular favored a swifter return to civilian rule. Pinochet was far more power hungry than Allende was in my opinion. Consider what current President Lagos said about Pinochet shortly before the 1988 plebiscite:

"You [pointing his finger at the camera as if pointing at Pinochet] promise the nation eight more years of torture, assassination and human rights violations. to me it seems inadmissible that a Chilean would be so ambitious for power as to pretend to hold on to it for twenty-five years. I speak for fifteen years of silence."

[I also find it interesting that Pinochet never privatized CODELCO, the state-owned copper company and I think the reasons are obvious: 10% of the earnings go to the military.] Lagos, the socialist said in an interview about a year ago in Latin Trade wants to privatize CODELCO. Go figure.]

Finally, it's worth noting the following in this paper (Adobe Acrobat Reader required) from the Aspen Institute:

On October 5, 1988, a yes-no plebiscite was held to decide on the continued rule of Augusto Pinochet for another 8 years. He lost, but late into that day's night, his spokesman was still issuing misleading interim reports about the vote counting. Following an after-midnight meeting of Pinochet with the Junta members, the government finally conceded its defeat. In October of 2000, the Chilean television broadcast an interview with former Air Force General Fernando Matthei, one of the participants in that meeting [and the Air Force's representative on the junta]. General Matthei confirmed what had been widely suspected up to that time: that Pinochet had refused to accept the results and had wanted to pull out the troops but the other commanders-in-chief did not support him.

So, I have to respectfully disagree with you. The weight of the historical facts in my mind clearly show that Chile under Allende was far more democratic than Pinochet. Does it mean that I embrace Allende? Of course not, but while one can debate whether or not Allende had secret plans to impose a Marxist dictatorship, I honestly do not see how anyone can argue that Pinochet, who held power for 17 years and hoped to do so for 25 was better.

[Anthony O'Donnell]

Randy,

I guess it’s my turn to apologize for a delay in responding. I’m trying to squeeze this in amid crowding deadlines.

The Economist article you cite is interesting, but it attempts to prove something that I never set out to dispute, namely that Pinochet was worse in certain respects than Allende. My contention—which was subordinate to my main point that the story of Chile is generally told in a highly misleading way—was that Chile would have been worse off in the long run, whether under Allende himself, or a Marxist successor.

Though I don’t dispute the limited claims of The Economist article, I would like to make a couple of points about the piece. First, while The Economist is not the Workers’ World, its quite likely that any number of its writers have the kinds of biases that have made Pinochet a pariah and Castro a hero to many otherwise intelligent and fair-minded liberal democrats in the field of journalism. Also, the article is a polemic piece aimed at attacking some particular claims, not at searching for the overall truth of the question. The writer’s forensic style makes the most of very limited facts and reports, and quite justifiably—as long as one bears in mind the piece’s purpose—declines to adduce information unhelpful to its objective.

It’s hard for me to accept characterizations of Allende as ultimately “more democratic” than Pinochet, having read Frei’s letter and the August 23, 1973 resolution of the Chilean Chamber of Deputies, which I’ll quote in part below. An account clearly emerges from these sources of a deliberate erosion of the democratic institutions of Chile, along with other abuses, including the toleration of emerging extra-legal bodies that would have facilitated a final consolidation of socialist totalitarian power. Allende had a very close relationship with Castro, himself a violent revolutionary and client of the Soviet Union. Frei alleges the presence of impressive military resources and ties to other Soviet clients. We agree that there were organized military/paramilitary leftist organizations in the Southern Cone, and it seems pretty clear that these regarded the Allende project favorably, if perhaps in some measure for their own opportunistic purposes. I believe John Dinges made the point that the failure of the “vía pacífica” led the Soviet Union, along with its affiliates and emulators to incline toward more violent approaches. That seems to me not a demonstration of historical irony, but rather that the hard left was caught out in its attempt to slowly build up the coercive apparatus of totalitarian government and so reverted the more straightforward approach. In other words, if Latin American (and other) countries didn’t simply lay supine while their institutions of government were dismantled, then blunter instruments would have to be used. But even if Allende’s government did succeed in getting further down the road, that would hardly mean that the potential of the left for violent conflict would have been diminished. Would a permanent socialist government, such as was taking shape in Chile, have discouraged or encouraged the likes of the MIR in their project?

It may be that Pinochet was a nastier sort of person than Allende. My impression of the latter is that he was not representative of the nastier sorts of leftists, though he was fatally tied to them. That may be the lynchpin in the tragedy of Allende's life. But it also seems clear that Allende was personally responsible for wrecking the country’s economy and enabling an increasing degree of civil strife. Perhaps he unleashed forces he was unable himself to control. Whatever the case, the future was not looking good for Chile as a result of his government, and the present was already dreadful. If the Allende government was perpetually seeking to “buy more time,” as Frei (more left leaning than The Economist) alleges, then it makes sense that there wasn’t political torture and murder on “anything like the scale proven against the military regime,” as The Economist notes. It is certainly no “game, set, and match” that the Allende regime wouldn’t have made Chile a much more miserable place than it had already become under Allende by 9/11/73.

I find it interesting to reflect that Marx had planned on the “immiseration” of countries as an inevitable result of capitalism, when one reflects on the economic disaster of socialist countries. However much Pinochet may have exceeded Allende in human rights abuses, Allende’s economic policies clearly inflicted far greater general misery on the populace as a whole—and which could have led to greater misery and disorder still, were it given the chance. To get an idea of how bad things were perceived to be before the Allende government was overthrown, I think one ought to look at Frei’s letter (which I still haven’t found in English), and one should certainly consider the August 23 resolution. Here are some highlights:

…
[http://members.aol.com/jdhenchman/papers/allende.html]
“Considering…

10. That among the administration’s constant assaults on the guarantees and fundamental rights established in the Constitution, the following stand out:

a) It has violated the principle of equality before the law through sectarian and hateful discrimination in the protection authorities are required to give to the life, rights, and property of all inhabitants, through activities related to food and subsistence, as well as numerous other instances. It is to note that the President of the Republic himself has made these discriminations part of the normal course of his government by proclaiming from the beginning that he does not consider himself the president of all Chileans;

b) It has grievously attacked freedom of speech, applying all manner of economic pressure against those media organizations that are not unconditional supporters of the government, illegally closing newspapers and radio networks; imposing illegal shackles on the latter; unconstitutionally jailing opposition journalists; resorting to cunning maneuvers to acquire a monopoly on newsprint; and openly violating the legal mandates to which the National Television Network is subject by handing over the post of executive director to a public official not named by the Senate, as is required by law, and by turning the network into an instrument for partisan propaganda and defamation of political adversaries;

c) It has violated the principle of university autonomy and the constitutionally recognized right of universities to establish and maintain television networks, by encouraging the takeover of the University of Chile’s Channel 9, by assaulting that university’s new Channel 6 through violence and illegal detentions, and by obstructing the expansion to the provinces of the channel owned by Catholic University of Chile;

d) It has obstructed, impeded, and sometimes violently suppressed citizens who do not favor the regime in the exercise of their right to freedom of association. Meanwhile, it has constantly allowed groups—frequently armed—to gather and take over streets and highways, in disregard of pertinent regulation, in order to intimidate the populace;

e) It has attacked educational freedom by illegally and surreptitiously implementing the so-called Decree of the Democratization of Learning, an educational plan whose goal is Marxist indoctrination;

f) It has systematically violated the constitutional guarantee of property rights by allowing and supporting more than 1,500 illegal "takings" of farms, and by encouraging the "taking" of hundreds of industrial and commercial establishments in order to later seize them or illegally place them in receivership and thereby, through looting, establish state control over the economy; this has been one of the determining causes of the unprecedented decline in production, the scarcity of goods, the black market and suffocating rise in the cost of living, the bankruptcy of the national treasury, and generally of the economic crisis that is sweeping the country and threatening basic household welfare, and very seriously compromising national security;

g) It has made frequent politically motivated and illegal arrests, in addition to those already mentioned of journalists, and it has tolerated the whipping and torture of the victims;

h) It has ignored the rights of workers and their unions, subjecting them, as in the cases of El Teniente [one of the largest copper mines] and the transportation union, to illegal means of repression;

i) It has broken its commitment to make amends to workers who have been unjustly persecuted, such as those from Sumar, Helvetia, Banco Central, El Teniente and Chuquicamata; it has followed an arbitrary policy in the turning over of state-owned farms to peasants, expressly contravening the Agrarian Reform Law; it has denied workers meaningful participation, as guaranteed them by the Constitution; it has given rise to the end to union freedom by setting up parallel political organizations of workers.

j) It has gravely breached the constitutional guarantee to freely leave the country, establishing requirements to do so not covered by any law.”

…

As I noted, this is only an excerpt. The full document ought to be read. I’m still interested to hear your opinion of Frei’s letter, and would be interested to hear exactly how in the work he later wrote he may have modified his views.

[Randy Paul]

Anthony,

Unfortunately, Frei's book is out of print, although I have found a copy through a used book service and will probably order it.

Given the fact that he turned against Pinochet not long after the coup and that his book was published not long after the coup, given the fact that DINA attempted to assassinate Bernardo Leighton, Frei's interior minister (and one of the co-founders of the Christian Democrats in Chile) in Rome in October 1975 wounding him and his wife and crippling them for life, that they attempted to kill Gabriel Valdes, Frei's foreign minister in New York that same year (only this plot didn't get very far), that they forcibly exiled other prominent Christian Democrats like Jaime Castillo and Andrés Zaldivar (Zaldivar was then CD party president) and that in a conversation with Henry Kissinger in June 1976, Pinochet sad that the Christian Democrats were being the most difficult, I think that it's a safe bet that Frei quickly realized that the cure was worse than the disease.

As for Allende seizing total power in Chile, how could he have done so? The military clearly turned against him. Here's a quote from an interview that the authors of A Nation of Enemies conducted with a retired colonel:

"We were very surprised there was not more resistance. Our casualties were very low. The left could not confront the power of the army; their weapons were laughably crude."

It's worth noting that by the end of December 1973, the military had lost fifty-two soldiers, seventeen policemen and twelve sailors to armed attacks or confrontations. Chile's military was developed and trained by Prussians and may have been the most efficient and professional in Latin America at the time of the coup (and perhaps now as well).

As for the armed leftists (including the "17,000 Cubans" Margaret Thatcher spoke of), they are like the WMD's in Iraq: no one has been able to find them, at least in this numbers, although I have no doubt that there were some there. If they were there in those numbers and captured, why would Pinochet not have put them on public display. Surely it would have shut up some of his harshest critics.

It’s hard for me to accept characterizations of Allende as ultimately “more democratic” than Pinochet, having read Frei’s letter and the August 23, 1973 resolution of the Chilean Chamber of Deputies, which I’ll quote in part below.

I have no doubt that Allende had numerous faults and probably was not good for Chile, although in my opinion, Pinochet was much worse and given the fact that the military is not answerable to civilian authority, left a far worse imprint on Chile. But, please let's deal in facts here: legislative elections took place in Chile six months before the coup (with the UP capturing 44%) and the Aspen Institute paper I quoted above clearly shows that Pinochet wanted to hold on to power for up to 25 years against the wishes of the other junta members after he had clearly lost the plebiscite. I just don't see anything to refute that record of disdain for democracy.

[John Dinges]

I greatly appreciate the dialogue Randy Paul and Anthony O'Donnell, especially since it was initated as commentary on my new book, The Condor Years. Please allow me to provide several perspectives from the book itself. First, I was somewhat frustrated by the interview on Leonard Lopate's show because he raised the subject of the leftist guerrilla organizations, then dropped it. It is one of the most original parts of my investigation, and I wish reviewers and interviewers would focus more evenhandedly on what I say about the left's international organization, the Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria. It is a story almost completely absent from other accounts of the period. For example, Nation of Enemies barely mentions the activities of the left after 1973. A recent book on Argentina, Generals and Guerrillas, by Paul Lewis--hardly a pro-leftist screed--criticizes the left's terrorist tactics in Argentina but the author seems completely ignorant of the fact that the four principal revolutionary organizations (MIR, ERP of Argentina, ELN of Bolivia, and the Tupamaros) had joined in a well-financed, well-organized multi-country strategy to defeat the military governments using armed struggle.

Indeed, it was the JCR alliance that provided the rationale (or at least the pretext) for the military's own terrorist alliance, Operation Condor. I draw a parallel between this 1970s "War on Terror" and the current antiterrorist war, with careful mutatis mutandi. I warn that the US involvement in the 1970s war led us to de facto complicity in the mass murder tactics of Chile and Argentina. (I hope we can agree that the secret killing of 3,000 people in Chile and 22,000 in Argentina objectively merits the description "mass murder." The book also has new information from the military's own files about the number of killings in Argentina--thus the figure 22,000.)

So I have looked to the left and looked to the right, and it is impossible for me to entertain the moral equivalency argument about Allende's and Pinochet's governments. I lived in Chile during the last year of Allende and was a correspondent for the first five years of Pinochet. I've spent more time than most studying the violent underground history of the period. It is not to justify the Allende era's disorder, rhetorical excesses (including ambiguous signals that democracy might be dispensed with)and occasional violence to conclude that Pinochet is guilty of crimes against humanity that merit for him a place among the great dictators of the 20th Century. Nor is it to diminish Pinochet's crimes to document, as I do, that Argentina's military junta was even more monsterous than Pinochet's government. These are questions of what I call the strange moral calculus of mass murder.
I try to bring new facts to the historical record so that we can rise above (finally) the left-right arguments that have been going on for so many years. The discussion of Allende's failure will go on, and it is only getting started (after so many years of hagiograpy). But, for my part, I can only hope that the revelations in my book will persuade at least a few serious conservatives that they do NOT share values, democratic or otherwise, with the man who set up an international murder machine and even went so far as to commit a terrorist assassination in the capital of his main ally and friend, the United States. (You can find a summary of my main revelations at www.johndinges.com/condor)

[Randy Paul]

John,

First of all, thank you for reading my weblog and for contributing to the discussion. Assassination on Embassy Row was probably my primary motivation for exploring the history of Chile under Pinochet and I also enjoyed your book Our Man in Panama. I'm but an amateur, but I truly hope that I can motivate others to explore some of the issues that interest me.

I'm sure that I didn't emphasize it enough, but as you note, your book does bring up the issue of the JCR, wehreas, A Nation of Enemies (which in fairness, had a different focus) only seemed to mention the assassination attempt on Pinochet in 1986, the assassination attempt on General Leigh and the murder of Jaime Guzmán.

even went so far as to commit a terrorist assassination in the capital of his main ally and friend, the United States

Indeed, this may be one of the prime reasons why I regard Pinochet as my own bete noire rather than, perhaps the Argentine junta. Letelier, Prats and Leighton were only a threat to Pinochet in the realm of world opinion. It is an absolutely
horrifying type of megalomaniac that will send his agents around the world to kill his non-violent enemies, violating the sovereignty of other nations (which makes a particularly rank hypocrisy for Pinochet's supporters to claim that his arrest in London was a violation of Chile's sovereignty) and making jokes about the economy of burying two to a grave in secret graves discovered after Pincohet lost the 1988 plebiscite.

If conservatives can defend Pinochet still, they should focus on this image: a 25 year old newlywed named Ronni Moffitt staggering out of a bombed out car and dying moments later. An act of terrorism for which the lead perpetrator still has avoided justice.

As for conservatives, the closest I have come to a prominent one making any statement about this was from this George Will column:

Some conservatives reasonably argue that prosecuting Pinochet might deter other dictators from surrendering power. However, those conservatives are conceding a deterrent effect: such prosecutions might stay torturers' hands. If the peril in which Pinochet finds himself prevents electrodes from being attached to the genitals of political prisoners, Pinochet's hour of fear has served justice.

Thanks again for your visit and I hope you'll come back and offer your insight and experience again.