Monday, December 11, 2006
No Tears for Pinochet
No question, the election of Salvador Allende in 1970 posed a threat to Chile's 40-year-old constitutional democracy. Very likely, the hard Marxists behind Allende were plotting a coup of their own in 1973. But the armed forces of Chile could have acted in many ways to prevent such an attack without staging a coup of their own. More shocking by far than the coup was the bloody repression that followed: murder by the thousands, torture and exile. Before 1973, Chile had enjoyed a remarkably mild political history, even under its occasional dictators. Pinochet and his generals unleashed a spasm of cruelty and violence unprecedented in the country's history.
As it happened, they also instituted some sensible economic policies. For that reason, many conservatives hesitate today to criticize Pinochet personally or the Pinochet regime. Some of the older among us too remember with irritation the role of the Soviet Union and its apologists in singling out the Pinochet regime for international criticism at a time when the Soviet Union and its clients were engaged in even more horrible atrocities: Even in its darkest hours, Pinochet's Chile never plumbed the totalitarian depths in the way that East Germany or North Vietnam did.
But for the many victims of Pinochet's rule, the depths the regime did plumb were more than low enough.
Precisely how much responsibility the US bears for Pinochet's coup remains something of a historical mystery. The fairest reading of the record, however, leaves little doubt that the coup was at a minimum welcomed by the Nixon administration. And certainly it solved a very immediate problem for the US: defeating the threat of communism in one of the major natios of Latin America. But at what a price! - first to the Chileans, then to the United States.
For even if there were no US fingerprint on the gun that killed Allende, the episode left behind an enduring resentment and mistrust, a not easily effaced blot on American advocacy of democracy and freedom. The suspicion generated by Chile lingers in Latin America - and through the world - to this day. The US helped Italy and France to beat back even more virulent communist parties in the 1940s and 1950s without violence and dictatorship. Was there really no hope of doing the same in Latin America in the 1970s?
All credit to the Reagan administration for rethinking its axiomatic anticommunism and working to oust Pinochet after 1984. Credit above all to Elliott Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for Latin America and the leading advocate of the anti-Pinochet policy.
Second thoughts about the Chilean experience led many conservatives to support a more activist approach to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. One of Abrams' principal allies in the Reagan administration was Paul Wolfowitz, who brought a similar determination to the campaigns against dictatorships in South Korea and Indonesia - again with very positive results.
That success led some to hope that something similar could be done even in the region of the planet most inhospitable to democracy, the greater Middle East. Perhaps that was a very great error. Perhaps it was a good idea badly executed. Perhaps it is an as yet unfinished story. Whatever the verdict on that chapter of American history, it is certainly strange to see those ideological corners that once bitterly denounced Pinochet now bitterly denouncing the idea that the US has any stake in the promotion of democracy beyond its borders.
But the fact that liberals cannot keep their lines straight is no excuse for fluffing ours on the right. Pinochet was one of the very worst tyrants in modern South American history. Perhaps only the Argentine generals of the 1970s were worse. If the US had any role in his coup or in prolonging his 16-year dictatorship, that role should be a source of national self-criticism and self-reproach. These days Wolfowitz and Abrams are out of fashion, and Kissinger and Nixon are back in vogue. But if those who thought like the first two had exerted more sway in the 1970s and 1980s, and those who thought like the latter less, America's reputation would shine more brightly today.
In the years since 1989, Chileans have found a reconciliation and unity that must once have seemed unimaginable. The return of democratic political stability to Chile must rank as one of the great political achievements of Latin American history. The American role in that transition ought to be a source of pride and inspiration to US policymakers. I have no doubt that it will guide the US again, and perhaps very soon.
Unlike, say, Fidel Castro's, Pinochet's record was not wholly destructive. He left behind a much richer country, one economically well adapted to the modern world. That counts for something. How much? If there is any truth to the Christian faith Pinochet claimed to live by, that question is being answered right now before the most impartial of all tribunals, in a courtroom thronged with the spirits of his victims.
12/11 11:41 PM
