One would have to be blind and deaf not to notice the acceleration of media attacks on General Augusto Pinochet of Chile. Easy access to network newscasts is given to anyone in any part of the world who demands or predicts Pinochet’s overthrow or resignation.
Police scuffles and student disorders of the sort that take place in other countries almost every day are transformed into major headlines to create the appearance of civil war and the impression that Pinochet is just holding his head above water in a week-to-week struggle for survival.
Let’s be blunt about it: Pinochet’s main “crime” is that he overthrew his Communist predecessor, Salvador Allende, on September 11, 1973. For that, Pinochet is doomed forever to endure the scorn of the liberal press all over the world.
However, Pinochet did not come to power in an ordinary run-of-the-mill Latin American coup. Allende was toppled by a true uprising of the people, led by the women who marched in the streets clanging their pots and pans until they gave the army enough courage to act.
The most “liberal” and “progressive” of Chile’s non-Communist leaders, Eduardo Frei (who was Chile’s president from 1964 to 1970 and voted for Allende), justified the overthrow of Allende in rhetoric reminiscent of our own Declaration of Independence: “When a government like Mr. Allende’s refuses to carry out laws; defies and insults the Supreme Court; takes no account of a huge majority in Congress; provokes economic chaos; arrests and kills striking workers; scorns and tramples on personal and political liberties; starves the people in order to hand over the country’s products to the leftist and Communist monopolists of the black market — when a government commits all these abuses and crimes, then rebellion becomes a duty.”
Pointing out that Allende’s weapons came from Russia and Castro (Allende’s own suicide rifle had been a gift from Castro), Frei concluded: “The Army saved Chile. The soldiers were called on by the nation, and the task they accomplished was a legal one.”
The best account of what Allende did to Chile was written by a brilliant French historian, Suzanne Labin. Her book, “Chile: The Crime of Resistance,” has recently become available in English and would be a good textbook to keep on the desks of reporters who cannot remember the chaos from which General Pinochet saved Chile.
Marxism’s phoniest promise is that it will bring about a more just and efficient distribution of economic resources (supposedly in contrast to private enterprise, which is alleged to exploit the workers through waste and the profit motive). Mme Labin provides immense historical detail to prove that Allende’s regime devastated Chile’s economy like a plague of locusts. Industrial production declined 12%, agricultural production declined 30%, livestock production declined 20%, prices (including the black market) increased ten times over, and the legal currency was devalued four times within two years.
The Allende regime is just one more unhappy example of how Communism brings economic ruin in addition to the loss of political and religious liberty. Of course, the real aim of Marxism is not to enable everyone to eat well or to own a color TV, but to enforce Marxist discipline on the minds and actions of all.
Just as Armando Valladares, the Cuban who spent 20 years in Castro’s prisons, tells about the affluent life enjoyed in secret by Communist officials, Mme Labin shows how Allende and his henchmen lived in opulent luxury at the expense of the Chileans who were deprived of the necessities.
Allende would spend weekends with his mistress and other favorites at El Canaveral (which Mme Labin describes as his “Versailles”), a lavish castle furnished with old masters and period furniture, nestled in 250 wooded acres, and stocked with freezers of meats and cellars of fine wines plus Allende’s favorite drink, Chivas Regal.
El Canaveral was not merely a hideout for rich living financed by black-market profits and drug peddling. It also had an arsenal of weapons and a military training camp; it even had a theater-cum-cinema for the staging of nude dancing girls and pornographic films.
General Pinochet isn’t perfect and his government isn’t an American-style democracy. But he saved his country from the worst fate that can befall any country, and he lives in a very ordinary house which he is buying with a mortgage paid for out of his general’s pay. The world needs to be reminded about how bad his predecessor was.
