Wanted: A Strong Wooden Stake and Several Garlic Bulbs

Those are some of the tools that are necessary to ensure that a vampire is really dead. As one has died today and his truly vile regime was responsible for the deaths of thousands, the torture of many more thousands, international acts of terrorism over three continents and in his final years, the revelation of illegal enrichment, possibly through the violation of an arms embargo against Croatia during the Balkan War, clearly we must be certain that he is dead. News reports indicate as much:

Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the brutal dictator who repressed and reshaped Chile for nearly two decades and became a notorious symbol of human rights abuse and corruption, died today at the Military Hospital of Santiago. He was 91.

The Times also gives a rather facile listing of key dates in Pinochet's career. I'll take the liberty of adding a few in  a career filled with many abonimable acts:

• September 1974: Has DINA, his secret police organization plant a bomb in the car of General Carlos Prats, his predecessor in Buenos Aires. The bomb kills General Prats and his wife, Sofia. Debris from the explosion is found on the ninth floor of a building across the street.
• October 1975: Has DINA, through Italian fascist terrorist Stefano Della Chiae, attempt to murder Christian Democrat politician and regime opponent, Bernardo Leighton in Rome Italy. Leighton and his wife survive, but live in constant pain for the rest of their lives.
• September 1976: Has DINA blow up the car of Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC, killing Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt.
• November 1978: The bodies of fifteen men who were "disappeared" are found in an abandoned limestone mine in Lonquen.
• June 1990: The bodies of 19 men who disappeared in the 1970's are discovered in a mass grave in Pisagua.
• September 1991: The bodies of 127 victims of Pinochet's regime are found buried secretly, two to a grave in some cases. Pinochet responds to television reporters by praising the economy of burying two to a grave.

I could go on and on, but that would be overkill. There is a delicious coincidence that Pinochet breathed his last on Human Rights Day. While I'm sorry to see him cheat the metaphorical hangman, I 'm glad that his last years were spent defending himself against criminal charges. It will also be good to see Chile to continue to move away both politically and socially from his era.

As for Satan, in dealing with Pinochet he probably doesn't know what he's in for.

UPDATE: As expected, Marc Cooper has the big picture covered.

Comments

[Anna Fagundes]

I often say "may the devil keep him" in such situations, but in this particular case I doubt that Satan would actually WANT Pinochet in his territory!

May he NOT rest in peace.

[mick arran]

The saddest part of this is that even as we on the left recount his atrocities, our friends on the right are mourning the loss of their spiritual father. Pinochet was the source for much of the neocon/Bush agenda, including the privatization of Social Security, the usefulness of torture and secret prisons, and the way to "govern" through simple executive fiats. To us, he was a butcher. To the right, he was a hero.

Kind of puts the left/right split into a different perspective.

[Idler]

The previous post must refer to the right on planet Mick, since I can't find anybody on the American right that takes the position Mr. Arran describes. "Spiritual father"? Good grief.

[mick arran]

Whether you like it or not, Idler, the President went out of his way to get advice from former Pinochet ministers and advisers, and right up to the time of his arrest our military maintained contacts with people from his govt and consulted with a number of his generals. One of Bush's first moves upon being sworn in was to have a series of meetings with the man who was the architect of Pinochet's privatization of Chilean social security (which, btw, was an unqualified disaster).

All that happened on this planet, alright. Maybe I'm not the one living in LaLaLand....

[Idler]

Oh, I see, Mick. That definitely amounts to Pinochet being the spiritual father to the right. That will explain all the president's critics disappearing too. Well, perhaps that will happen any day now.

[mick arran]

Ah, I see. You think that even if he could get away with it, he wouldn't do it. I dunno, maybe you're right. OTOH, during the campaign he did have people arrested for wearing t-shirts critical of him, and he had people handcuffed and arrested for "disturbing the peace" when they tried to enter a supposedly public arena to hear one of his speeches without first signing a card avowing as how they were devotees of the Pres, but as far as we know he hasn't actually had anybody killed for wearing a critical t-shirt - yet - so obviously he's not in Pinochet's league. Doesn't mean he wouldn't like to be. Doesn't mean he isn't trying to be in his own dim-witted fashion. Clearly, the fact that he copied so many of Gus' signature moves and tried so hard - and in some memorable case, succeeded - to make them part of his Admin goals means nothing unless he starts killing people the way Gus did.

Still and all, you might want to read ace right-blogger Mark Steyn on the subject. He defends Pinochet on the basis that he killed fewer people than Stalin, so I guess numbers have something to do with it. Then there's Winston who defends Gus by pointing out that he had to kill all those people to protect Chile from Communism and anyway he killed fewer people than Castro. And then there's Jim Rose who opines that Gus just did what he had to do to destroy Marxism and in the face of all reality insists that tho the murders were a bad thing alright, maybe they were worth it because it was Pinochet who saved Chile from the left and that's why it's a thriving democracy today.

Of course, this mini-lovefest doesn't really add up to Gus' being the right's spiritual father despite the fact that they copy his tactics, echo his rationalizations, and defend his murders, so I guess I'll just have to be a surrender-monkey and admit I was wrong - Pinochet was just one of many brutal dictators who together are the Spiritual Fathers of the Right. There was Somoza, for whom conservative-movement-godfather Ronald Reagan professed such affection, for example. What a guy!

[Idler]

Mick,

One of the reasons I come to Beautiful Horizons is that I know I can trust Randy Paul to be a reasonable exponent of the left dedicated to an honest and rigorous approach to issues on both sides of the divide. Now I know I can look to your comments for the most captious, tendentious, gutter-sniping approach.

In that vein, I recommend that anybody reading your comments go directly to the sources you cite and not depend on how you've characterized them. The only one I checked was Steyn, whose message is very different than what you suggest. I didn't bother with the others, who for all I know are utterly obscure people. If this is the best you can do, even given your mendacity, then I guess Pinochet's philosophical paternity isn't so ample after all.

But by your standards, I guess Pinochet is even the “spiritual father” of the editorialists of the Washington Post, who this morning wrote the following:

It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It's leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired. It also has a vibrant democracy. Earlier this year it elected another socialist president, Michelle Bachelet, who suffered persecution during the Pinochet years.

Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle -- and that not even Allende's socialist successors have dared reverse. He also accepted a transition to democracy, stepping down peacefully in 1990 after losing a referendum.

By way of contrast, Fidel Castro -- Mr. Pinochet's nemesis and a hero to many in Latin America and beyond -- will leave behind an economically ruined and freedomless country with his approaching death. Mr. Castro also killed and exiled thousands. But even when it became obvious that his communist economic system had impoverished his country, he refused to abandon that system: He spent the last years of his rule reversing a partial liberalization. To the end he also imprisoned or persecuted anyone who suggested Cubans could benefit from freedom of speech or the right to vote.

[wronski]

Randy, if you can get Folha de Sao Paule wherever you are, check out Marcelo Billi's and Cesar Maia's pieces on Pinochet's legacy.

Pinochet's economic record is not an unmitigated success as is often claimed. His first reforms were disastrous, and led to a recession Chile took years to recover from. Only in the last 5 years of his government the economy really took off.

Allende's economic policies were disastrous, but the thing about democracy is that he could be replaced by a better-performing president. Under Pinochet Chileans had to endure 12 years of economic mismanagement, and growing poverty and inequality, before things started to improve. And it was only when democracy was reestablished that poverty started coming down again.

In any case, I won't insult anyone's inteligence be reiterating that Pinochets murderous rule cannot be justified retroactively by any ammount of good economic results. More to the point, being a murderous dictatorship played little or no part in Chile's economic successes between 82 and 87.

[Idler]

wronski,

Surely the point is not that Pinochet’s economic policies were an unmitigated success (whose in the free world have been?), but that they were a step in the right direction. Of course this is not a justification of the brutality he perpetrated, it's just a commentary on what kind of economic policies tend to bring greater prosperity.

I’m with you in affirming that,

Pinochet’s murderous rule cannot be justified retroactively by any amount of good economic results.

But I don’t see why the disaster of Allende’s rule should be soft-peddled:

... the thing about democracy is that he could be replaced by a better-performing president.

Implying that Allende could calmly have been voted out of office misrepresents the state that Chile was in at the time of the coup. It's impossible to appreciate how Pinochet came into power without seeing what Allende's rule had done to Chile.

[Randinho]

I have avoided entering into this debate as it is so tiresome, but I have to correct a point that Idler is making regarding the possibility of elections replacing Allende.

Elections took place a scant six months before the coup. As I have pointed out to Idler before, in an article in The Economist http://economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=184063”>the following points were made:

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.

So while one may believe that Allende could not have been voted out of office, but the only reason why he could not have been was because he was limited to one term. There is no empirical evidence to support your claims.

Please, before you bring up former President Frei and his opposition to Allende and support for the coup, let me hasten to add that President Frei, less than a year later, published The Mandate of History, a book which excoriated Pinochet’s rule and all accounts I have read indicate that President Frei spent the rest of his life regretting his support for the coup.

One can make an impressive case that Allende mismanaged Chile’s economy. One can make the case that Chile under Allende was not a pleasant place and a nation filled with division. However, the fact that opposition parties existed, congress existed and opposition media existed clearly contradict the idea that elections could not have taken place in Chile under Allende. They did take place.

[Idler]

I hadn’t thought of Frei, but his example how desperate the situation had become, however much he regretted the tyranny that followed.

To say that an election was possible six months isn’t very illuminating. Obviously a lot can happen in six months (from the time the election took place), and in Chile that was certainly the case.

My point here is not to affirm the necessity of a coup but simply to be candid about what was going on in the country. Chile was a disaster under Allende, not according to me but according to large parts of the Chilean polity and according to the Chilean legislature itself at the time, nearly six months after the election.

Why the resistance to a candid appraisal of that chaos?

[Randinho]

But you're not giving a candid assessment of the situation pre-coup. You ignore the role of our own government in aiding the opposition. It's a fact. Here's a good place to get a start in their own words.

Do I believe that the coup might well have happened without the Nixon administration's involvement? Possibly. But there were clear documented-in-their-own-words efforts to destabilize the government.

As for elections happening, you're right of course: elections with actual political parties did not happen again until 1990.

[Idler]

I'm not "candid" because it doesn't occur to me to blame Chile's woes on the United States?

Why is it necessary to deflect consideration from Allende toward the U.S.? By all means study the involvement of the U.S. in Chile. And study what Allende did to the constitution of Chile and what the more extreme elements of his coalition did throughout the country. Check out what the U.S. did, check out what the Chilean right did and don’t shy away from a clinical, un-romanticized consideration of Allende’s misrule.

What effect did an inflation rate over 500% have to do with the U.S., and what impact did it have on social relations? Did the U.S. cause that? What does the United States have to do with the bill of particulars presented by the Chamber of Deputies on August 23, 1973, however malign the intentions of the Americans toward Allende?

Does painting Pinochet properly black entail a whitewashing of Allende?

[Randinho]

The whole truth is important. I'm not whitewashing Allende, nor am I blaming the US entirely, but the Nixon administration did play a role in hurting the economy, including influencing the World Bank from granting Chile credits.

I am certainly willing to place some of the blame on Allende. You seem to be placing all of the blame on Allende. Your comment regarding the elections is illustrative. A lot can happen in six months including elections, but what seems to be the fact that you persistently ignore is the continued existence of an opposition during Allende, the continued functioning of Congress and civil society.

[Idler]

Your insisting on “the continued existence of an opposition during Allende” doesn’t illuminate what happened any more than the observation that six months prior to the coup it was still possible to carry out elections. Nor does your observation about the continued functioning of Chile's legislature, since one aspect of that body’s functioning was its call for the ouster of Allende, based on an indictment that blamed him of, among other things, violating the principle of equality before the law, liberty of expression, right of assembly, academic liberty, and personal property; as well as denying freedom to leave the country, acting against the rights of workers and unions, and using violence and sometimes torture.

I don’t blame Allende for everything, nor do I think my posts suggest that. I’m merely arguing against what I take to be the typically hagiographical treatment of Allende, which was made all the easier by the fact that Pinochet was so brutal and that Allende didn’t have time to wreak further damage. I don't take you to be one of the hagiographers, but I do see you as influenced by their efforts. You would clearly rather think well of him, which is further helped by his personal character, which was in some ways genuinely attractive. In some respects Allende was a victim of circumstances, but he was nevertheless the head of a dreadful government that promised to get worse than it already was.

The great appeal of communism is its promises, which some people continue to believe in even after the promises prove false. How else to explain the continued admiration of Castro by so many otherwise reasonable people on the left, and for that matter the persistence of the notion that Che Guevara is cool? Allende’s ouster by a brutal rightist preserves the promise intact, unsullied by what his government was likely to deliver.

But even that requires finding other explanations for the mess than Allende’s tyrannical and constitutionally destructive policies and actions. Even if Allende’s enemies did help to make things worse in the short term, Allende’s actions and the political forces influential within his coalition promised a totalitarian outcome. One way or another, a sufficient number of Chileans would not allow that to happen, so it’s vain to imagine what Allende’s government might have been like in the long run. Its continued existence was impossible under the circumstances.

The reason for my persistence here is the desire to emphasize what rarely gets across in these discussions: that the situation in Chile prior to the coup was alarming. Not unpleasant, or somehow less than desirable, but alarming and quickly deteriorating. That situation was principally caused by the attempted transformation of the institutions of Chile, and the effects that had politically, economically and socially. That transformation was a natural progression for Allende’s government, especially given the political pressure felt by that government from some of the more extreme elements among its political allies. It also required the violation of the Statute of Guarantees that was a condition of Allende’s being installed by the legislature (since the popular election did not put Allende in power).

[Marc Cooper]

Having lived through all of this in person and having heard the same old crud for 35 years I'm going to keep comments very short.

Idler, you are wrong. Period. During the Allende period, there was NO alteration of the constitutional order. If there were, please list one of them. The congress, the courts, the controller general of the republic, the military, the police and most of the media were controlled by the opposition. So please tell me how Allende altered the institutional order in Chile?

The bogeymen Communists, by the way, were by far the most conservative elements with the Popular Unity and argued,unsuccessfully, for pacting with the center-right Christian Democrats.

Was there a certain level of chaos and disorder under Allende? You bet. The secondary reason was that for the first time in Chile's stiff, class-based history, there was some economic and political empowerment of the "rotos" the despised Chilean workers and countrypeople. This terrified the college educated elite who had long before satanized and demonized the lower class, much the same way the U.S. Southern planter class viewed the negro field hands.

The primary reason for the disorder, however, was the constant, deliberate and organized probing, testing, and crossing of legal boundaries by the right-wing opposition. Sorry to break it to you, but it was the National Party Youth, the CD Youth, and the truck operators and owners who were in the streets, blocking traffic, smashing store fronts, blowing up oleoducts and shooting at cops.

Allende's real crimes weren;t political. Dont come to us with crocodile tears telling us that the political forces behind Pinochet who installed a draconian dictatorship were really defenders of constitutional democracy! Go peddle that in some fish market. What energized the right wing wasn't Allende's threat to democracy, but rather the threat he posed to their narrow economic interests. Now, that's something worth killing people over, isnt it?

The coup was produced when it was for two reasons. 1) After Allende was initially elected with only 35%, and after the two years of turbulence, the opposition was convinced that in the March 73 mid-terms Allende would dip below 1/3 of the vote and he could be impeached.

Fact is, that in the midst of spiraling inflation, food shortages, work stoppages by business and industry, Allende stunned the opposition by wining 45% of the vote in the midterms. By this point, the centrist CD's had sold their souls to the extreme right in an electoral alliance. And yet, the Popular Unity increased its vote by 10% in the balloting.

It was precisely at that point that the Christian Democrats -- not Allende-- threw democracy overside. They moved to a pro-coup position because they realized they could no longer win under democratic conditions. When Allende, in early September decided that -- even though he had three years left in his term-- he would put up his tenure in a plebiscite, the coup was precipitated. Precipitated because the military, the extreme right, and the opportunist CD's thought Allende would win. So much for defense of democracy.

Idler's parroting of the bill of indictment of Allende in the parliament makes great comic reading. This bill was written by the same "democrats" who weeks later would be sucking Pinochet's toes and closing their eyes to (or outright applauding) his torture.

Allende's government is not responsible for a single extra-judicial death. If wrong, please give us the name of that victim. The few people killed during Allende's period were shot dead by the national police which operated outside of any political command. They were usually demonstrators or people involved in land seizures and almost inevitably these victims were on the Left, not the right. If I'm wrong, please list the names of any opposition figures who were jailed, tortured or killed during the Popular Unity. We have a list of 3197 dead under Pinochet, and 29,000 tortured. Would you like to provide a competing list from the Allende period? Ive never seen one.

As to the allegation that torture was used during the Allende period, the answer is yes it was. The most celebrated case was the torture applied by Naval officers against pro-Allende recruits. The recruits had wanted to denounce pro-coup maneuvers by the Navy in July 1973. The whistle-blowers were thrown in the brig and tortured by the same officers who months later would institutionalize the same methods as state policy.

Indeed, one more catalyst of the coup was when Socialist Party leader Carlos Altamirano went on national radio on Sept 9 1973 and denounced the torture by the Navy. For that he was indicted by military justice as a subversive.

The whole theory about Allende heading toward the Cuban model is so much horseshit. That's not how Allende came to power, that was not his model, and that was certainly not where the momentum was heading. Anyway, the debate is rendered sterile by his opponents choosing the Djakarta model.

The amazing part is 30 years later watching the intellectual and verbal acrobatics involved in saying we saved democracy by destroying it. We guaranteed a free society by disembowling pregnant women and throwing their bodies into mine shafts. Bravo.

The closest thing Chile ever saw to Castroite rule was the one man dictatorship imposed by Augusto Pinochet. Isn't that just a bit rich?

Idler, you are free to respond. But this is all I have to say. The rest is in my book. I have listened to temporizers like you for 35 years and man does it grow weary.