Editorial: The lucky country (December 25, 2006)

Part of Chile rioted in joy, and the rest rioted in rage earlier this month.

Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, once president of Chile, had died, more quietly than many Chileans and, seemingly, almost everyone else everywhere, would have liked. It’s interesting to look through the same prisms as the old dictator’s defenders and detractors, to see just what he left behind.

History is a subtle thing, sometimes hard to nail down and impossible to simplify. But simplifying is what the two sides in this dispute have always done best, the political left spouting vulgar platitudes and the right donning its blinders so it can ignore the whole story.

The vulgar version of Chile’s history has Salvador Allende Gossens as a freely elected democratic socialist, deposed and murdered by a clique of generals anxious to please their puppet-masters in the United States State Department and Central Intelligence Agency. Allende had begun the Chilean nation’s rightful repossession of its copper resources, and Anaconda and Kennecott — who, everyone knows, controlled Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon — wanted Allende’s head.

Well, in any event, Allende blew his head off before the Copper Barons got it, and Pinochet, unusually for a guy whose very existence is said to have depended on delivering Chuquicamata and El Teniente back to the Yanquis, kept the copper industry state-owned in the best Antonio Salazar tradition. Oh, and the nationalization, allegedly begun by Allende, was started in the 1950s by Eduardo Frei Montalva.

There are other holes in that story, notably Allende’s status — revealed in the archives of former Soviet agent Vasily Mitrokhin — as an informant for the KGB, the Soviet Committee for State Security. There was his caudillo-style disregard for representative democracy and constitutional law, and his government’s own taste for torture and political murders. There was his violent assault on property rights, pointed at ordinary Chileans, not plutocrats, and his own party’s plans for a coup d’tat and state of siege.

In short, the man Pinochet deposed was not a democrat, he was a monster who happened to believe in socialism. When Allende died, a nightmare for Chile died with him, even if another one began.

But at least Chile awoke from that one. And — irritatingly to the political left — it was that nasty Reagan government in the United States that undermined Pinochet in the 1980s, forcing him to a referendum that he lost and to resignation in 1989. Chile has been a democracy ever since, and has purged the last institutional remnants of the military dictatorship from its constitution.

So the biggest irony of modern democratic Chile is that, while the centre-left Concertacion government of Christian Democrats and Socialists governs the country, and very well, they have that opportunity only because Pinochet got rid of Allende and later got out of the way. That doesn’t excuse 3,200 deaths, torture, political repression, and the piles of burning books; but it does put it into slightly better historical perspective.

A case in point: president Michele Bachelet’s father, an air force officer, died from the effects of torture. She has said she entered politics because of what Pinochet’s regime did to her father. True, but without Pinochet, there would have been no politics to enter, and her father’s death, while perhaps less lingering, would have been just as inevitable under Allende.

The Concertacion is nothing like its 1970s incarnation, either, not least because all its leaders leave the totalitarians and thugs of the vestigial Marxist left severely alone. Chile hews to a free-market economy even with a left-of-centre government, and Codelco, which supposedly started the whole trouble, is one of the most advanced and professionally managed mining companies in the world. (It’s history’s vindication of Eduardo Frei’s policy and an open rebuke to Allende and forced collectivism.)

Which brings us to the right-wing myths about Pinochet, acolyte of Milton Friedman and economic saviour of Chile. One we have disposed of already: he kept Codelco as a state enterprise and (to all appearances) thought nothing more about his predecessor’s 1971 asset seizure. Another is that the economy was turned over to the technocrats, not run by the junta, and Pinochet’s sole apparent involvement was to enrich his family, which Latin American dictators of left and right have done since the Spanish Viceroyalties. He was not Friedman’s man, he was Pinochet’s man, and did rather well for himself. (Not as well as another Latin American dictator, by all accounts; Fidel Castro is reputed to be worth about US$500 million, but had to kill a lot more people to get there.)

It is often complained that Chile’s modern economy was built on political repression, but that is insufficiently general. Chile’s modern political freedom was built on it too. Can anyone reasonably or decently advocate turning the clock back to land seizures — no different from those committed in Zimbabwe over the last few years — and Worker’s Committees? Chileans with the good fortune to be alive today aren’t guilty of the dark acts of the junta, even as they benefit, three decades later, from the defeat of Allende’s revolution.

It is the freedom, not the prosperity, that justifies the 1973 coup. Nothing justifies the repression, nor would anything have justified the revolution.

The political right harbours a fondness for Pinochet, the inadvertent economic reformer, but with their blinders they get it wrong; it was the post-Pinochet democrats who did the most work to create a strong Chilean economy. But their work was only made possible by strong institutions and the rule of law, made by Chileans, but made possible by the overthrow of Allende. There, you find Pinochet’s legacy, whether you — or he — would like it to be or not.