Who was Salvador Allende, really II

Among other things, he was a KGB asset; By far the most important of the KGB's confidential contacts in South America ....

Which we know thanks to former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, who spent over a decade taking notes (and secretly taking them home with him) on what was in those archives.  After the implosion of the Soviet Union, he was eventually able to leave Russia for the United Kingdom with those notes.  Much of which information has been published in two books written by historian Christopher Andrew.  One of which, The World Was Going Our Way (2005), contains quite a bit on Chile and Allende (from which the quote in the first sentence of this post is taken).  More of what the KGB archives tell us about Allende is as follows;

He'd been well disposed to the Soviet Union since the early 1950s when, as leader of the Chilean Socialist Party, he formed an alliance with (the then illegal) Communist Party of Chile.  Not that that was much help to his ambitions then, as in 1952 Allende only attracted 6% of his nation's vote.  But, it was enough to get the notice of the KGB which had one of its agents (Svyatoslav Fyodorovich Kuznetsov--codename; LEONID), operating as a journalist, make contact with Allende.

A Soviet trade mission in 1961 made for yet more opportunitiy to cultivate Allende, whose electoral performance in the 1958 Presidential elections was much improved--3rd place.  The KGB archives give Allende's friendship some credit for the breakthrough establishment of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Chile in 1964.  Now the Soviets have an embassy from which their KGB agents can operate. In the '64 election Allende garnered 39% of the vote. Ironically, more than he'd get in 1970 when, with a 3-way split of the vote, he was declared President by the Chilean legislature.

Also ironically, the Chilean Communist Party had their problems with him as an ally, as the KGB was told that he was 'a demagogue' and a' weak and inconsistent politician' who had Maoist sympathies--anathema to the Soviet dominated Chilean party.  That his most conspicuous character traits were 'arrogance, vanity, desire for glorification and a longing to be in the spotlight at any price.' Which was prescient; those traits led to his eventually downfall by military coup.

Fidel Castro and his entourage also shared the Chilean Communists' disdain for Allende, noting his womanizing, tastes for fine wines, art, and well tailored clothing during Allende's trips to Cuba in the 1960s--when he would also become better known to Georgie Anne Geyer, with whom he would frequently swim at a Havana club.

But Allende's undeniable personal charm was an obvious political asset--even the U.S. Ambassador in Santiago found him appealing.  So, when the 1970 election rolled around Moscow was ready to support his campaign, sending KGB personnel to Santiago to help him, and donating money to both his campaign and Allende personally.  The archives show that probably over a half a million (1970s) dollars from the Soviet Union found its way to Allende. They even bribed a left-wing Chilean Senator not to run, and split the 'progressive' vote.

Which tactic may have been crucial, as Allende got only 36.3% of the vote. But it was more than either of his two opponents, Nationalist and Christian Democrat, got (35% and 27.8%).  The Soviet Union's boy was then the first Marxist ever, anywhere, to 'win' a Presidential election. According to reports in the KGB archives, they wasted no time in controlling him; '...Allende was made to understand the necessity of reorganizing Chile's army and intelligence services, and of setting up a relationship between Chile's and the USSR's intelligence services.  Allende reacted to this positively.'

The KGB didn't limit itself to Allende Señor either.  It established separate lines of communication with Allende's wife and daughter Beatriz (who married a Cuban intelligence officer) too. Money from the Soviet Union continued to be funneled to Allende and his family. KGB head Yuri Andropov's reports to the Politburo left no doubt as to why; 'The KGB...is planning to use its capabilities to carry out a series of active measures in Latin American and other countries....'

In a later report spelling it out; '...establishing contact between Chile's and the USSR's armed forces, consulting on the use of Chilean atomic raw materials, organizing co-operation between the Chilean and Soviet security services, and other matters....'  All under the noses of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger who were busily promoting detente with the Russians at this time.

It turned out to be money wasted, as Allende's grandstanding undermined his usefulness to Moscow, finally provoking the Chilean military to depose him.  Which did leave the Soviets with another martyr for the cause, after Allende killed himself rather than take Augusto Pinochet's offer of safe conduct out of the country.  True to form, the KGB exploited his death through gullible Western journalists like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times. That evil lives on to this day.

Who was Salvador Allende, really?

Continuing from the immediately preceding post, Georgie Anne Geyer begins to realize that there's something rotten in the state of Chile.  Particularly in the southern parts, around the city of Concepcion.  She tells the results of her investigation in Buying the Night Flight;

 ...there was the question of who was supporting and abetting a far leftist activist group called the MIR....This was a group of fanatic leftist guerrillas and activists in the South....In sharp and total contradiction to everything that President Allende...was saying about obeying Chilean law, the MIR in the South was ruthlessly taking over small farms, terrorizing people, and driving out the small middle class and small farmer class that was the backbone of Chile....Allende was angrily denying over and over in Santiago that he was a dangerous Marxist.

Geyer goes to Concepcion and informally meets with the leadership of Allende's Socialist party there.  She asks, directly, of Rafael Merino, if they are behind the tomas (the illegal land takeovers).  Merino, the local party head as well as a professor of philosophy at the university there, freely admits they are. I.e., Allende is lying when he denies it in Santiago.

She then travels all over the province and uncovers more evidence that Allende's Socialist party is indeed behind everything happening.  She talks her way into a prison in the city of Nuble to interview a leader of the MIR named Ugarte.  He tells her, 'We have to exterminate the patrones....Soon the fight is not going to be only for land. Now we are preparing for war. Civil war. The type in Spain or Indonesia.'

She talks to their victims too. They are clearly fearful, willing to meet with her only in secret and looking over their shoulders to see who might be listening.  She visits small--10-12 acre--farms and sees the 'lines of hostile-looking men'.  There is always one spokesman, 'the Socialist organizer'.  She asks rhetorically, 'This was a spontaneous revolution?'

She also says that she saw something else; the Chilean army wasn't ignoring what was going on.  They were hanging back, as long as Chile was still a democracy, but they wouldn't wait forever; 'As awful and as reprehensible as was the rightist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which was to come, anyone who could not see that Allende's policies were leading directly to that certainly knew nothing of political dynamics.'

Noting that, 'Ironically' the traditional Communist Party of Chile wanted nothing to do with Allende's tactics.  They knew what the dynamics would be. 'In the winter of 1972' she's told by Volodie Teitelboim, the 'ideologue and thinker' of the CP of Chile that if Allende continues on his road, there will be a military coup, 'About eighteen months from now'.

That coup came in September 1973. And it happened because the country had completely broken down, it was in the 40th day of a nationwide strike by transport workers who were objecting to Allende's attempted takeover of their small businesses--trucking, taxis.  In addition to the truckers, over 200,000 small shopkeepers, the nation's doctors and dentists, and the housewives were also striking and demonstrating.  Allende was defiant, claiming the only way to get rid of him was 'impeachment'.  Well, not exactly.

One reason Allende might have been so confident was that he'd created a private army 10,000-12,000 strong of foreign Marxists, heavily armed with weapons from Cuba and the Soviet Union.  Those foreign troops were the people Pinochet's forces were after in the wake of the coup.  Jamie Galbraith's  'socialists, communists, poets and musicians.'

[more to come]

Una historia verdadera

Accepting Cicero's challenge (via Paul David), and to counter a decidedly untrue story from Jamie Galbraith (via Anthony Lewis of the NY Times) we visit an old PBS interview with Arnold Harberger for some facts about Chile and the Chicago Boys;

[The story of the University of Chicago Economics Dept's involvement with Latin American students] began with Theodore W. Schultz, who was a very great economist, won the Nobel Prize, was president of the American Association and so on, and he, in the early '50s...

I.e., long before either Salvador Allende or Augusto Pinochet had any power in Chile.

...he had a major project entitled Technical Assistance to Latin America.... On a visit to Santiago, he had dinner with the then-AID [Agency for International Developlment] director, Albion Patterson...and when Patterson heard Schultz talk, he said, "This is the kind of idea that Chile needs,"....so Patterson got the idea of a university-to-university link between a Chilean university and the University of Chicago....we trained under that program itself around 30 Chileans, many who became later ministers and Central Bank presidents and things like that. But that set in motion a whole tradition of Chilean students coming to Chicago.... Meantime, we had a similar program started by the same Albion Patterson in Argentina. ...afterwards we had a continuing flow of Argentines, and by this time Mexicans, Brazilians, and so on were mingling in so that Chicago, in its heyday, had 40 to 50 Latin American graduate students out of a total stock of, say, 150 to 180, so they made up a very important part of the program. ... Now Latin American students can get in almost anywhere because they have shown how good they are, but in those days, they were viewed with such suspicion that it was lucky if you could find three or four at Harvard at any one time or five or six in MIT, when you could find 40 or 50 in Chicago. That is what gave Chicago such importance in the Latin American scene. 

Gee, the name Milton Friedman hasn't even come up yet.  So let's skip to the entrance from stage left of the Castro-dolator Salvador Allende;

INTERVIEWER: Tell me a bit about Chile.... Allende gets elected....

AL HARBERGER: Well, Allende...as a politician of the Socialist Party, and he ran as the candidate of a left-wing coalition. Many people were surprised at the degree to which his policies, once in power, were policies that might have been explainable if he'd had a 65 percent majority, but [not when he only got a little over a third of the vote in a three way contest]....

That's how 'democratic' Allende's election was.  The Chilean people split the majority of their vote nearly equally between two non-socialist parties, and the socialist (actually Castroite Communist) snuck in to office.

 What happened [after Allende was in office] was a huge move toward socialization of the economy. There were many actual expropriations of enterprises, including the major mines, but in addition to that, there was a thing that they call intervention, which is a little bit like what we have as receivership for a bankrupt firm [where] the court appoints a person to run the firm and it isn't the owner. Well, in the Allende system, you could do that on any firm, whether it was bankrupt or not. (laughs) And by the time the Allende period was halfway through, about 90 to 95 percent of the main Chilean industrial sector had been either nationalized or intervened.

I.e., Allende expropriated the property of ordinary Chileans and, though Harberger doesn't say this, when he couldn't legally accomplish the abolition of private property he encouraged mobs to rampage throughout Chile to intimidate landowners into abandoning their property (source; Georgie Anne Geyer's Buying the Night Flight).

INTERVIEWER: ... And what was happening to the huge inflation?

AL HARBERGER: All the things got way out of hand. I don't know how things would have been if the Allende government had had decent economic advice, but they did kind of silly things. They put controls on all the prices while mounting a monetary policy that led to enormous inflationary forces. There was a point in time when there were 13, I believe, official exchange rates to the dollar. The cheapest dollar was 25 escudos, and the most expensive official dollar was 1,300 escudos, but the black market was like 1,800 at that time. You see, it was just a crazy world. The black-market prices of goods, which are usually quoted about a 20 percent premium or a 10 percent premium over the official price, they never talked that way, six times the official price, seven times, 10 times, five times. That's how it worked, and so the market was just out of function, you see. It was not working at all.

INTERVIEWER: So one other question: The CIA intervened, particularly with the [strikes].... Would you say that the economy was sabotaged by the U.S.?

AL HARBERGER: The U.S. was on that side, [and] I don't think there can be any doubt that the majority of Chileans were on that side at that moment in time.

Which means that Augusto Pinochet came to the rescue of the majority of Chileans--and after being invited to do so by Chile's Chamber of Deputies. But we're still not finding Milton Friedman playing any role here, so let's skip ahead;

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about that time Milton Friedman made his famous visit to Chile?

AL HARBERGER: Oh, Milton Friedman's visit took place in March, I believe, of 1975, and his judgment about the economy was not in any sense unique. I mean, it was what any good economist, looking at the Chilean economy at that time and seeing that kind of a mess, would say. But I think that Milton's presence probably helped to maybe stiffen the spine of people who were trying to insist on better economic policies. Maybe his remarks convinced some people that would otherwise not be convinced that this kind of change was needed.

Pinochet's coup deposing Allende took place in September 1973. So, the needed change Harberger is talking about is away from the policies of the Pinochet military government. Harberger's description of the status quo at that time being;

...inflation...was like 400 percent in 1974-'75, and it got down under 100 percent, I think for the first time, by '78 or '79, and it got down to 10 percent only in '81.....

INTERVIEWER: Of course Milton Friedman especially then became a kind of a kind of hated figure, didn't he? ....Why do you think people [hated] him?

AL HARBERGER: Well, it's a hard story there. The left wing of the world loved Allende. Allende was the first socialist elected in a Latin American country as I remember, that actually took office anyway, and he was the darling more of the European left than the American left, but we always in the United States had what we call radical student groups like SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] who took their cues from the European left, so these are the people for whom Milton Friedman then became a figure of hate. They organized demonstrations against him wherever he went, and this went on for a period of years, and I see nothing that he did to deserve that. (laughs) And he [faced it] with such courage and such strength of character, I marvel to this day at the way he took that.

Again, Harberger doesn't mention this (he may not be aware of it) but most of the demonstrations against Friedman were instigated by Yuri Andropov's KGB; it was disinformation swallowed, hook, line and sinker, by the likes of Anthony Lewis and Jack Anderson back then (and still, now, by Jamie Galbraith).

INTERVIEWER: But going back to those demonstrators, still [there's a sort of] question on Milton Friedman, because of this association. I'm not saying that it's right or wrong, but just why do you think their people are so horrified?

AL HARBERGER: Well, as I say, I think that the whole response picture to Chile has to be linked to somebody loving Allende and somebody being terribly disappointed when Allende was put out of office. Now I think if you look at human rights violations or political violations, you will find them in any Asian country almost at that time, in multiples of whatever was happening in Chile and in Latin America. You would find many other countries in which the same sort of thing was happening and was not getting that treatment, so my question, and the reason for my answer in connection with Allende, is... Allende is what distinguishes the Chilean case from all these others. I mean, Milton Friedman went to Chile for one week. You can take the top 100 economists in the country of that time, and probably 85 of them had been working seriously in places like Korea, Taiwan, Pakistan, Bolivia, Paraguay -- you name it -- and were not getting any demonstrations.

INTERVIEWER: One of the points Friedman was making was that these kind of free-market policies ultimately lead to a freer political system. In other words, was he sort of suggesting that the free-market policies would ultimately undermine Pinochet's [regime]?

AL HARBERGER: Oh, I think he always said that. He said that that you cannot have a repressive government for long within a genuinely free economic system and that the freedom is going to have to pass over to the political side, and that of course, is exactly what did happen in Chile. The evolution took quite a number of years to make, but it happened, and in that sense, Chile is an example of a peaceful transition from [authoritarianism] to a civilian democratic government.

So, the only role Friedman played with regard to Chile was to first briefly advise the government (about a year and a half after it took power) how to control a virulent inflation, and to argue that Chile needed freedom and democracy. Chile should put up a statue of Friedman in their most prominent plaza.

With amigos like this...

Chile is still haunted by its Marxist past (short though it was);

Police arrested Luis Ríos, a member of a small political organization called the Committee of Friends of Salvador Allende, for throwing an egg at [Pablo] Longueira as the presidential candidate [Independent Democratic Union] attempted to flee from demonstrators.

Although not a fisherman, Ríos has a history of political activity. Running unsuccessfully as a mayoral candidate in 2012, he went on to lead protests after claims that votes in his favor had been lost or were dismissed by authorities.

Throwing eggs is certainly an improvement over what Allende's friends used to do to people they didn't like. From a story in the Seattle Times in June of 1971--Allende's first year as President:

Three men with submachine guns killed an outspoken anti-leftist politician today....

The killing ...was the second assassination in Chile since Salvador Allende was elected....

Turns out that one of the assassins had been recently pardoned, and set free on the streets, by...Salvador Allende. The man was a member of the Organized Vanguard of the People.  Just another of Jamie Galbraith's poets, we presume.

Also in the Seattle Times in June of that same year, there was a three part series by Richard K. Pryne detailing the actions of President Salvador Allende (who got all of 36.5% of Chile's vote).  From which, about his land reform;

...farmers fearing their lands will be taken are investing little or nothing in the future.  New construction is avoided, quick-cash crops are favored over rotation, wise management policies for long-term use of lands are discarded in favor of immediate returns.

All these negative factors are running counter to President Salvador Allende's government's determination to increase agricultural production....

The amount of land plowed...was less....

The sale of pesticides had dropped 25 per cent.

Fertilizer sales were down 15 per cent.

The sale of pesticides had dropped 10 per cent.

No farmer really knows if his land will be expropriated....

The Allende government has said it will expropriate 1,000 farms per year for three years; that would be all of Chile's large or moderately large farms. Few farmers are making long term plans.

That's known to economists--one of whom Jamie Galbraith claims to be--as getting the incentives wrong. Which wasn't the worst of it, as Allende also secretly set mobs (turbas) on farmers in Southern Chile for some entrepreneurial expropriations.  These were carried out at night, violently, by the Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario (MRI).  Pryne described how it worked in one particularly sad case;

...such an incident...caused [Rolando] Matus death.  Matus, the owner of a 70-acre farm...went to the assistance of a neighbor, Otto Gruner, whose 200-acre farm had come under attack by night riders. Shots were exchanged and Matus and five others were wounded. Matus died two days later.

....He was an orphan who had begun with nothing and by hard work supported his aged adoptive grandparents.

Pryne wrote from the funeral of Matus;

Otto Gruner was not there. He was in jail, charged with illegal use of firearms.

.... And the next night, another group of invaders had taken over Gruner's farm. 

Allende, back in Santiago, denied having anything to do with these armed groups, 'I can't control the MIR.' But Georgie Anne Geyer, working on her own, found out that was untrue.  Which we will see in a later post.

La Barba Roja

In the 1969 Alfred Hitchcock movie Topaz, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the actor John Vernon played a villainous character named Rico Parra.  Who, somewhat disconcertingly to viewers who didn't know the reason for it, has a reddish beard. Which characteristic identified 'Parra' as, in real life, Manuel Pineiro.  From the New York Times in 1998;

Manuel Pineiro, the ruthless but urbane spymaster who for more than 30 years led Cuba's intelligence apparatus and directed its efforts to export revolution to the third world, died in a car crash in Havana early today, the Cuban state news agency Prensa Latina reported. He was 63.

Known as ''Barba Roja,'' or ''Red Beard,'' because of his chief identifying feature as a young man, Mr. Pineiro served as Cuba's main liaison and dispenser of weapons and cash to grateful and admiring Latin American guerrilla groups. His adversaries at the Central Intelligence Agency, however, regarded him as a cunning and dangerous foe, the Cuban equivalent of the East German espionage wizard Markus Wolf.

''This is the man who knew all the secrets of the Cuban Revolution and was on a first-name basis with two generations of Latin American revolutionaries and leaders,'' Jon Lee Anderson, the author of ''Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,'' said in a telephone interview from Spain today. ''In conversing with him, you were very much aware that he was intimate with and an important part of the whole nether world of the cold war.''

He was someone also well known to Georgie Anne Geyer when she lived in Cuba in the 1960s.  Someone who wanted to know her even better, and when she rejected his advances, found out that he had ways to retaliate, as he was probably the third most powerful person in revolutionary Cuba behind Fidel and Raul Castro.  She tells the story in Buying the Night Flight; he was a former lecturer in literature at Columbia University, married to an American ballerina, comrade in arms with Fidel in the Sierra Maestra, and who directed all the Cuban training of guerrilla movements in Latin America...and who later godfathered the entire Cuban adventure in Africa and in Central America.

Another who had his run-ins with Pineiro was the Chilean diplomat Jorge Edwards. He mentions him several times in his Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment With the Cuban Revolution. They meet the first night Edwards is in Havana as Chile's Charge d'Affaires, sent by Salvador Allende to re-open the Chilean embassy in December 1970. That same night he meets Fidel Castro, who tells him to tell Allende that whenever he needs help, just ask.  He'd sent an entire ship filled with troops and weapons to Algeria for their war of liberation with the French; We may not be much good at production, but we really know about fighting!

Edwards has that reinforced three months later, on his last night in Cuba, March 1971.  Fidel summons him to the Foreign Ministry to browbeat him and tell him he's persona non grata, apparently because he's insufficiently militant in his support of revolution.  He warns that Allende will have to fight for his revolution in Chile. Edwards, diplomatically, tells him that in Chile they intend to avoid the 'errors' (the failures) obvious to anyone who looks around in Cuba. That Chile will be different.

Not too surprisingly this greatly annoys Fidel.  ...you know nothing about the difficulties Cuba has had! Don't you know we have been subjected to an implacable blockade with the most ferocious imperialism in the whole of history eighty miles away from our coast?

Fidel says it will be the same in Chile; Up to now Allende has only taken control of the Government, but that only means approaching the outer ramparts of power. When it come to seizing power, then the confrontation will be inevitable...

It was La Barba Roja whose job it was to see that Allende succeeded. To that end, he was already sending arms and men to Chile to set up a parallel military force that would be needed to establish a Marxist state there.  The man who eventually had to confront that force was Augusto Pinochet, begining on September 11, 1973.

Was Augusto Pinochet a Villain or Hero for Chile?

For the PanAm Post, it is still unresolved, apparently. Some even denying that Pinochet and Chile had any real enemies;

I was born in Chile, and lived under Allende and Pinochet. So according to you, then I saw things all wrong and I never saw anyone get arrested or killed, and the truth commissions currently being held in Chile now are all lies and communist propaganda.

Next you will quote me from the NY Times that Victor Jara was never murdered by Pinochet-he staged his death so he could move into a house with Elvis in the Bahamas, and that Contreras is innocent and that DINA was not a murderous secret police, but really just a late night food delivery service. Next you will tell me no prisoners were ever held by Pinochet at the National Stadium in Santiago and show me the FIFA report to confirm this. Villa Grimaldi was just a country club and that elections were held every year when Pinochet was in power and that he never tried to stage another dictatorship the night he lost the plebiscite.  You are truly delusional.

 Javier (the author of the above comment) seems determined to miss the point that no one disputes that people get killed during wars. And did in the civil war in Chile after the overthrow of Salvador Allende's Wanna-be-like-Fidel regime. One wonders who Javier thinks the people fighting Pinochet were, peaceful demonstrators petitioning for redress of grievance?

No, in most cases they were armed and dangerous Marxist guerillas. Whether they called themselves MIR, ERP, Tupamaros or Montoneros, they were armed and trained in Cuba or by Cubans to destabilize not only Chile, but Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and several other countries. There were thousands of them in Chile before and after the military overthrew Allende in 1973.

Back in October of 1970, just after Salvador Allende was named as the winner of the Presidency in Chile, there was this exchange on William F. Buckley's Firing Line, among the host and his guests Selden Rodman and Georgie Anne Geyer--who knew Allende so well that she used to go swimming with him and his Cuban girlfriend at the Veradero Beach Club in Havanna almost every day when the both lived in Cuba in 1966 (transcript from the Hoover Institution);

Mr. Buckley: But does Allende, himself, allude to the Cuban situation -- does he say, I want to make things the way they have them in Cuba?
Miss Geyer: Very often.
Mr. Buckley: Yes.
Miss Geyer: When I was there in June, he gave a speech and said very clearly -- I was there -- he said, when I'm elected, we will have the revolutionary axis between Havana and Santiago. And, whenever I have talked to him, which is a half-dozen times over the years, he has always made it very, very clear -- that I don't think there is any --well, his admiration for Fidel is almost worshipful. And, at times....
Mr. Rodman: When the exiles from Che's adventure in Bolivia escaped into Chile, Allende took them personally by plane to Havana, because he thought that they were the heroes of his movement.

And those heroes returned to fight Pinochet again and again. Even into the 1980s, as they almost succeeded in killing Pinochet with a rocket attack on his motorcade in 1986.

Hey, Augusto, take it like a man!, says Javier.

She bought the night flight, but not the bill of goods

One might think it would be good riddance to Allende-ism, but Chile is flirting with disaster once again;

Former President Michelle Bachelet gained more support in this year’s presidential elections after the Communist Party (PC) officially endorsed her campaign Saturday.

The agreement came after weeks of negotiations between Bachelet’s Socialist Party (PS) and the PC. In return, the Communists hope to influence the Concertación coalition’s agenda in key areas such as education and labor reform, and may even land a ministerial position in a future Bachelet government.

Bachelet must be pretty desperate to align herself with the Communists who are only about 5% of Chile's electorate.  She also must be counting on Chileans having very short memories. Though her opponents won't let them forget the horrors of the recent past;

Both Pablo Longueira and Andrés Allamand, Bachelet’s conservative opponents in the Nov. 17 election, quickly pounced on the pact. 

Longueira, of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI), called it a “step backward” for the country, likening the PC to its “chavista” counterpart in Venezuela. National Renewal (RN) candidate Allamand, keen to position himself as a centrist candidate, lamented that the Concertación had distanced itself from the coalition that led Chile out of dictatorship. 

And the election laws have been changed since 1970, when Salvador Allende Gossens took the Presidency in a three way race, with a mere 37% of the vote.  Today that result would mean a run-off between the top two candidates, and to win you need a majority. If we were in Chile, we'd round up a few copies of Georgie Anne Geyer's 1983 Buying the Night Flight for distribution in the country.  At least the chapters that deal with Geyer's experiences with Allende, Castro and Che Guevara.

Geyer first met Salvador Allende in 1964, the day he lost the Presidential election to Eduardo Frei.  Six years later, with Frei unable to run again under Chile's law, Allende had a better chance.  In fact, he was so sure he'd win that Geyer, at that time, asked him, 'If you are elected, will there be elections again?'

His response, according to her notes, was, 'You must understand...that by the next elections [in 1976] everything will have changed.' Then he continued, 'We have different groups with us. Large groups of priests have clearly delineated a Christian-Marxist point of view. A large group feels that if you respect our belief, there is no problem. In '64, all the church was for the Christian Democrats [Frei's party]'

Geyer says he continued, 'We are going to win within the electoral system, but we'll build new institutions, make a new constitution. We are not going to live under the capitalist system. If we nationalize all this...mess of American companies, if we control imports and exports and carry through a real agrarian reform, what other things can you do?'

Unfortunately for Chile, when no one got a majority of the vote that year, the election was thrown to the Chilean legislature.  There not enough members took Allende's talk seriously, and voted to give him the Presidency since he'd won a plurality of the vote. It's hard to imagine that Chile will make such a mistake again.

In the years between the '64 and '70 elections, Geyer often visited Chile and got to know Allende and several other politicians well.  She not only interviewed them, but socialized with them; 'It was a refined conversation with them, and they agreed on the rules of the game: then.'

But there was something else going on back then in Latin America; Liberation Theology.  Geyer knew some of its adherents.  Of one, she wrote, '...impatient and driven by whatever devils or saints inhabited him (his friends insist there were quite enough of both), he joined the Marxist guerrillas. On February 15, 1966, the government announced that Father Camilo Torres had been killed in an encounter with Columbian troops.

Finally, in 1970 Chile gets an actual Marxist President, and Geyer writes, 'Now the legendary free air of Chile hung with new fears. Now the two sides no longer sat and drank and laughed and loved together, for one side no longer respected the rules of the game.  Whereas before I had always been on the friendliest of terms with Allende, now he refused to see most American journalists. The minute he became president, he was a different man; now he was in public the true Marxist the had always been inside himself.  Worse, it was the same with Augusto Olivares [Allende's closest adviser, and once, she thought,  a personal friend of hers].'

She has to admit that Chile was now different, and she was the enemy.

[to be continued]

Is Jamie Galbraith Humane

Of all the economists behaving badly at the Milton Friedman symposium at Econ Journal Watch, surely none exceeds the poor form of the one who titles his contribution Mistah Friedman? He Dead.

Whatever would possess anyone with scholarly pretensions to begin that way--implying Friedman was a slave master?--when discussing the man who is arguably the greatest economist of the 20th century can't be admirable. Then to recycle an easily refuted slander is even worse;

We may surmise that Friedman’s affinity for first principles were behind his support for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a man who granted freedom—and life itself—only to those who dared not oppose him. Here was a grisly contradiction between “economic freedom” and the real thing. My impression is that Friedman did his best to ignore Pinochet’s crimes, and then made up excuses when he had to. This is perhaps harsh. But it’s a more generous view than the alternative, which is to believe that he thought the socialists, communists, poets and musicians in the National Stadium got what they had coming.

First, Friedman was not in any way a supporter of Augusto Pinochet.  The charge of him being so is made up  almost out of whole cloth. Friedman, while in Chile for a speech at Catholic University in Santiago which was not sponsored, nor even associated with the Chilean government, agreed to meet with the General to discuss with him, for approximately forty minutes, the options he had for controlling the virulent inflation in his country.

Inflation (running to around 700% per year in mid 1974) bequeathed to Chile by the man Pinochet deposed, Salvador Allende Gossens.  By taking Friedman's advice Chile's economists managed to cut that to 10% in about a year three years. Truly a good deed done for the citizens of that country. This history is easily ascertainable; it's related in the Friedmans' memoir, Two Lucky People, including a copy of the letter Friedman wrote to Pinochet as a follow up to his meeting with him.  So Galbraith has no excuse whatsoever for his claims.

Nor should we excuse Galbraith's attempt to pretend that Pinochet didn't have real (and deadly serious) enemies; socialists, communists, poets and musicians. That phrasing is designed to obscure that the people who had been in power before Pinochet's coup were attempting to transform Chile from a republic into a Castroite dictatorship. They weren't really making much of an attempt to hide what they were doing, so Galbraith should know that fact as well.

If he doesn't, he could find out by reading the chapters in Georgie Anne Geyer's Buying the Night Flight, that concern her dealings with both Castro and Allende when she lived in Cuba. He'd see that when asked by Geyer if, when after he was in office there would be any more elections (as there weren't after Castro took power in Cuba) Allende told her;  'You don't understand. Everything will be different then.'

Which brings us to the real reason Galbraith probably feels the need to slander Friedman; it can be found in the essay Is Capitalism Humane, written in 1978 and included in Bright Promises, Dismal Performance: An Economist's Protest:

When you hear people objecting to the market or to capitalism and you examine their objections, you will find that most of those objections are objections to freedom itself.  What most people are objecting to is that the market gives people what the people want instead of what the person talking thinks the people ought to want.  That is true whether you are talking of the objections of a Galbraith to the market, whether you are talking of the objections of a Nader to the market, whether you are talking of the objections of a Marx or an Engels or a Lenin to the market.

The Galbraith referred to in the above being Jamie's more famous father J. Kenneth.  But the apple didn't fall far from the tree.  It's the same arrogance that allows him to ignore what the common people of Chile were suffering under Salvador Allende, because Allende was a socialist, a communist, maybe even a poet or musician.  The Galbraiths' kind of people.  There are never too many excuses to be made in the name of class solidarity. As for the riff raff, they should just suffer what they had coming.

DeLong's Law

I would like to propose DeLong's Law, a corollary of Godwin's Law: In any blog thread mentioning Hayek or Friedman, the probability of Chile/Pinochet being cited approaches one, as time passes.

Posted by: George Zachar on July 10, 2003 05:08 AM

The above was posted, as a reminder, to Brad DeLong's 'obituary' of Milton Friedman of January 2012.  One of the odd aspects of DeLong's personality being that, at the same time that he censors opinions that contradict his on his blog, he is capable of an objective analysis of Friedman's work.  Even though he and Friedman voted differently--DeLong served under Lloyd Bentsen in Bill Clinton's Treasury Dept.--he admired Friedman both as an economist and as a man:

Thinking as hard as he could until he got to the root of the issues was his most powerful skill. ....

His world-view began with a bedrock faith in people, in their ability to make judgments for themselves, and thus an imperative to maximize individual freedom. On top of that was layered a deep faith and conviction that free markets were almost always the best and most magical way of coordinating every conceivable task. On top of that was layered a powerful conviction that a look at the empirical facts--a marking-to-market of your beliefs to reality--would generate the right conclusions. And on top of that was layered a fear and suspicion of government as an easily-captured tool for the enrichment of cynical and selfish interests that sought to grab whatever they could. Suffusing all was a faith in the power of argument and the utility of reason. He was an optimist: people could be taught the truths of economics, and if they were properly taught then institutions could be built to protect all against the corruption and overreach of the government.

Which many of DeLong's acolytes absolutely can't stand to see.  For example:

thomas said...

Meanwhile, to Chileans, he represents privatization, dismantlement of social safety nets and grinding poverty. Friedman may have been smart, but he was a useful idiot for not only for dictators and their public relations but more importantly for multinational corporations. 

Which is pretty much what Jamie Galbraith had to say, just weeks ago. 'thomas' doesn't give a source for what he says 'Chileans' think about Friedman, nor why, but with the recent publication of James Rolph Edwards' Painful Birth: How Chile Became a Free and Prosperous Society, it's getting increasingly silly for such sentiments to be expressed in supposedly respectable intellectual venues. Not that that will prevent it continuing.

What Prof. Edwards has managed to do, in a mere 69 pages, is destroy the argument that Augusto Pinochet was, in any way, a net negative for the overwhelming majority of Chileans.  Whatever role Milton Friedman played in Pinochet's thinking--they once met for 40 minutes in Santiago, and Friedman wrote him a follow-up letter on his advice, given through interpreters, about how to control the savage inflation devastating Chile in 1975.  Advice that Friedman also gave to Communists in Yugoslavia, Russia and China.

As has been related on this blog in several earlier posts, Chile, in 1973, was in chaos.  A Castro-ite ideologue, Salvador Allende, was attempting to, with no legal justification whatsoever, transform the country into a Marxist dictatorship.  Understandably, the people of Chile objected, and when Allende defied them, the military acted. Rock...hard place.

Either a permanent Marxist dictatorship supported by Fidel Castro--who'd sent his agent Manuel Piñeiro to Chile to help Allende organize his security and intelligence services--or the military junta headed by Pinochet, were the stark choices. Constitutional democracy was no longer available--in fact Allende had a plan to abolish the Chilean legislature and replace it with "a people's assembly". He'd already created torture chambers to be used against his enemies (that later were used against his supporters). The Chamber of Deputies in Santiago had voted to censure President Allende in August of '73 for acting unconstitutionally, and called for the military to act against him.

They got Pinochet...and...eventually a free and prosperous society. By the standards of Latin America, at a very low cost.  Yes, there was some excess brutality as the Pinochet regime fought the armed militias left behind by the suicide Allende, but since over 700 military and policemen lost their lives in the firefights that occurred, it's hard to show that any other tactics would have worked as well.  Allende had established a guerrilla warfare training camp in southern Chile stocked with weapons from Cuba and the Soviet Union. Pinochet's forces fought to defeat those forces for years (in 1976 1,200 guerrillas attempted to infiltrate from Argentina.  In 1986 they killed 5 of Pinochet's bodyguards and almost killed Pinochet, with a rocket attack on his motorcade).

Yet, Pinochet allowed a plebiscite on his regime to go forward in 1988, and when he lost that vote, he voluntarily stepped down. Unlike any other dictator in Latin American history.  Fidel and Raul Castro still rule Cuba as dictators.

More will follow (from Prof. Edwards) about just how Pinochet accomplished the transformation, in a later posting.

'Christmas will not be celebrated this year.'

Is what Jorge Edwards hears Fidel Castro telling Cuba in a speech in December of 1970.  A speech Edwards, newly arrived in Havana as Chile's chargé d'affaires, watches on a Bulgarian television set in his hotel room.  Castro gives as the reason, that Christmas is a European holiday, a colonial celebration that new Cuban man no longer needs.  Oh yeah, it will also interfere with the harvesting of sugar cane, which Castro needs to deliver to the Soviet Union to pay for the petroleum imports.

Edwards was a minor diplomat in Chile's service, who, for some reason, was recommended to Chile's President Salvador Allende, as the best qualified man to re-open the embassy in Havana (closed during the 1960s because of Castro's outrageous behavior toward his fellow Latin Americans; like dispatching Che Guevara to Bolivia to foment revolution).  His mission was necessitated by Allende's first act after inauguration in November 1970, being to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Ironically, Castro sends a turkey to Edwards hotel room on Christmas Eve as a gift.  Which he enjoys with several of Cuba's literati--Edwards was a writer, and a socialist, himself--while the commoners are out in the fields working.  Edwards sees a few other ironies during his stay too.

For one thing, money has no value in Cuba--Cuban money, anyway--since there is nothing to buy with it, as the stores are empty of goods.  People leave Cuban banknotes lying around on table tops, indifferent to them, they're restricted by the ration book system to spending 20-30 pesos per month.

I began to notice the effects of this state of affairs on the economy.  Why bother to work....

A cane-cutter who under this system saved a thousand pesos in notes under his mattress might ask himself if it was worth continuing to cut cane....The official reply was that moral incentives should determine the work done by the new man created by the revolution. But the new man was taking a long time to make his appearance, and the predominance of moral incentives led, paradoxically enough, by way of absenteeism to demoralisation.  The innumerable loafers, the vagrants, sometime had better access than anybody to the black market....

And those vagrants had learned that one way to exist was to indulge in a life of crime.  Havana's streets were not safe at night. 

As Edwards is working toward getting an embassy prepared, other foreign diplomats point out the shortcomings of Cuba to him, the deprivation, the inefficiencies, the crime, and warn him that Chile should be cautious.  That Chile should avoid Castro's mistakes; 'follow a less harsh course'.  Unfortunately for Chile, Allende was driven to emulate Castro...his idol.

Edwards recounts this in Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, published in 1973--the year Allende was deposed in a coup.  A coup that would have been avoided if Allende had taken the advice Edwards had been given.

'No' es una tontería

Preguntas they forgot to ask before this historia was written;

Chile is getting its first shot at an Oscar for best foreign-language film, along with global attention and a boost to its thriving film industry with the nomination of “No.”

....“No” revisits a publicity campaign that helped oust Gen. Augusto Pinochet from power after 16 years as a dictator.

Gael Garcia Bernal plays Rene Saavedra, a formerly exiled advertising hot shot drawn into a 1988 referendum TV campaign who tries to persuade people to vote “No” to eight more years of Pinochet.

would be, 'Could this have happened if Salvador Allende had not first been over thrown by Pinochet?'

Because Allende didn't make any apologies to journalists (such as Georgie Anne Geyer) who asked Allende about there being any more elections once he was in office:  'You don't understand.  Everything will be different then.'

There certainly weren't any elections on whether or not Allende's idol Fidel Castro would continue in office in Cuba, and still aren't.  So Chileans owe a big debt to Augusto Pinochet, who peacefully left the country to its destiny--which seems to be to continue to prosper as it had when he was 'dictator'-- when he saw he wasn't popular.

But, a story of how Pinochet had to fight to rid his country of a petty tyrant who was destroying Chile (one of the most prosperous South American countries until Allende took power); it's economy as well as its democracy, wouldn't get anywhere with Hollywood, and its fervent leftish denizens.

Deja Coup

We seem to remember something like this happening in 1973 in Chile;

Mr [Muhammed] Morsi, Egypt's first freely elected leader, is under house arrest after what he says was a military coup.

The [Egyptian] army said he had "failed to meet the demands of the people".

As in Chile, the President's supporters have fought with the army, with several killed. Hundreds of those supporters--members of the Muslim Brotherhood--have also been arrested. Mr. Morsi had a much stronger claim to democratic legitimacy (51% of the vote last year) than Chile's Salvador Allende Gossens in 1970 (36.8%). Also Mr. Allende had barely survived a vote of impeachment in the Chilean legislature. That went 81-47 against him; just short of the 2/3 needed to constitutionally oust him.

But, as in Chile, the Egyptian army, fearing civil war, stepped in to remove a defiant President who was ruling against the popular will. Only time will tell if Egypt will get a second chance at democracy. Chile did get that, and just last week-end had their presidential primaries. In which, a member of the late Salvador Allende's Socialist Party, Michelle Bachelet, won the right to run for a second term as Chile's President.

For the sake of the Egyptian people, we hope things work out as well as they did in Chile.

Chile in the 80s, and beyond

When last we left our continuing review of James Rolph Edwards' Painful Birth: How Chile Became a Free and Prosperous Society, Chile had recovered from a serious recession in the mid 1970s and was enjoying annual real GDP growth of almost 7%. As we mentioned, Chile's path wasn't always smoothly upward, and a mistaken monetary policy tactic--pegging the Chilean currency to the US dollar in 1979--was a disaster waiting to happen.  Which it did after Paul Volcker slammed on the monetary brakes in the United States in 1981 in order to break the inflationary spiral that had developed in the U.S.

The side effect of the cure for inflation being recession. The higher the inflation, the worse that recessionary side effect. With Chilean monetary policy being determined by the Federal Reserve in the USA, and Chile's inflation rate being much higher than that in Volcker's country, Chile's recession was much more severe than America's. It hit in 1982-83, and was brutal.  GDP dropped over 13%, as once again demand for Chilean copper dropped drastically, as it had in 1975.

The Chilean public was understandably outraged, and Pinochet had to make some changes in his economic team, including sacking the Minister responsible for the currency peg. The Chilean peso was freed from the U.S. dollar, tariffs were again lowered, more corporations were privatized,  double taxation of corporate profits was eliminated and rates were lowered.  Maybe most importantly, the law requiring wages to be indexed to the prior year's inflation was eliminated.

Even more innovative--Chile, like many Latin American nations had borrowed heavily in foreign markets, and many firms were on the brink of default--the Chicago Boys instituted a program of  equity (stock) swaps of that debt.  As Prof. Edwards tells it:

As a policy, it worked extremely well, contrary to the predictions of the critics. In 1982, Chile had a foreign debt burden equivalent to $17.4 billion in U.S. dollars, one of the highest per-capita in the world.  Yet in only four years, 1985-1989, $10.5 billion of this debt was retired, mostly thought various forms of debt-equity swap, and the country had built up $9 billion in foreign exchange reserves. Exports expanded and the country prospered.

Chilean productivity boomed and real GDP grew at a compound rate over 6% for the rest of that decade. In stark contrast to what was happening to all other Latin American nations during this time. Nor, contrary to left wing spin, was the increased prosperity confined to the better off in Chile.

Finally, the last gift from Pinochet to his nation was the restoration of democracy.  Losing a plebiscite in 1988 that would have given him another decade in power, Pinochet stepped down.  Even though in doing so he knew he was going to be opening himself to retaliation by disaffected socialists.  And not just in his own country.  When, elderly, he traveled to the United Kingdom for medical treatment in 1998, a Spanish court issued a warrant for his arrest on the dubious grounds that Spanish citizens had been murdered in Chile when he had been president. Pinochet's last years were spent defending himself from that, and other charges.

But, as it says on the plain marble slab that covers the remains of the architect Christopher Wren in the basement of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, If you need a monument, look around. Chile has been a functioning democracy for about a quarter century now. Even when Socialist governments were elected they didn't attempt to undo the free market reforms of Pinochet and his Chicago Boys--one such Socialist, Ricardo Lagos, still brags that he privatized the Pan American highway!

Chile has a sound (privatized) social security system, school choice for even its poorest students, freedom from the fear of the midnight knock at the door that was the fate of most people who suffered the kind of nightmare that Salvador Allende wanted to impose. Quite a monument if one isn't afraid to look around...and see.

Alto las prensas

The Santiago Times comes out against freedom of the press!

Agustín Edwards, founder of Santiago’s El Mercurio and owner of the newspaper network bearing the same name, is to be investigated for his involvement in the overthrow President Salvador Allende in 1973.

....As the country marks the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Sept. 11 military coup, Judge Mario Carroza ordered the Human Rights Brigade of the investigative police (PDI) “to find and interview” the newspaper owner to evaluate his potential illegal involvement in the lead up to the coup.

That's what Salvador Allende wanted to do back in the days when the friend of Fidel was riding high; silence the opposition press.  The Chilean Supreme Court ruled that Allende was acting unconstitutionally, and the Chamber of Deputies voted 81-47 to remove Allende from office less than a month before the coup that finally put Chile back on the path to democracy and economic sanity.

That bit of historical fact seems to be regularly ignored by the Santiago Times.  Maybe they should interview Agustín's cousin Jorge Edwards. Or read his book--Persona non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution--detailing his first hand discovery of just what Allende and Castro had in mind for the future of Chile.

He who does not learn from the past, is destined to write vapid newspaper pieces--for one thing, this Edwards (Agustín Edwards Eastman) is the great grandson of the founder of the paper. And is in his eighties and probably incapable of defending himself against this despicable act of political retaliation.

Because Chileans are smarter than Venezuelans

Venezuelanalysis.com asks, What's the matter with Caracas (anyhow);

...according to the criteria of the United Nations, freedom of information in Venezuela is, without a doubt, greater and better than in Chile, as in the Caribbean country the diversity of property, the diversity of types of media (public, commercial, community) and of discourse – which are the three main criteria that UNESCO measures – is superior to Chile. Anyone who objectively compares, that is, with data (indicators, measurements, scales, etc), the Chilean media reality with the Venezuelan one, will see that our country [Chile] is in a much more precarious situation and not very democratic.

Of course Chileans can buy cooking oil and toilet paper any time they want. Nor does the Chilean government control foreign exchange and travel in and out of the country. What could explain that, we wonder.

It’s about a similar situation that the Christian Democratic Party faced during the government of Salvador Allende. On the inside, the positions in favour of dialogue with president Allende (lead by Tomic and Leigthon) clashed with those who openly supported a coup style exit (lead by Aylwin and Frei).

What's not mentioned in the above is that, in 1973 the Chilean legislature voted 81-47 to remove the socialist Allende from office, because the Chilean people were demonstrating in the streets against him.

In that sense, what we are seeing today is largely the manifestation of an internal problem of the Venezuelan opposition whose most extreme wing, with the clear support of the United States and the media chains, is trying to make any attempt to build a new relationship between the opposition and the government fail. Because in a year like this, which, unusually, is a year without elections, the scenario for this new relationship was very favourable.

Very favourable to whom?

Anti-government demonstrations turned deadly again today, following yesterday's arrest of far right leader Leopoldo Lopez.

Lopez heads the right-wing Voluntad Popular (VP) party, and was arrested yesterday on charges including inciting crime and homicide. Earlier today the attorney general Luisa Ortega stated that whether or not Lopez will remain in custody is yet to be determined. However Ortega stated that the government “guarantees and respects the human rights” of Lopez.

Around one hundred supporters rallied today outside a court in Caracas, where his hearing was expected to take place. However, the hearing was moved to a military jail at the last moment due to government concerns for Lopez's safety. Lopez's lawyer has claimed the move is illegal.

Living the dream

Carlos Sabino has a take on Venezuela that won't surprise long-time readers of HSIB;

I’ve had the dubious fortune to experience life in two countries that claimed to be marching towards socialism. I was in Chile between 1971 and 1972 when President Salvador Allende led a government attempting to create a socialist state of freedom. I lived in Venezuela from 1974 until President Hugo Chávez set course towards the “sea of happiness” that was nothing other than the Cuban socialist model. [our bold]

In both cases I had to put up with lines outside stores provoked by shortages, government-backed violence, and a harsh daily existence in which every instant was dedicated to hunting down basic products and food.

Which the authorities blame on capitalists;

A few days ago, Jorge Giordani, who was hailed for years as the “czar” of the Venezuelan economy, said that the country had lost its wealth, and that the “bureaucracy, ignorance, and incompetence” of the regime had brought it to the brink of catastrophe.

However, Giordani took care to add that these evils belonged to “the capitalist system” itself. I wasn’t surprised: I knew Giordani when we both lectured at Venezuela’s Central University. He was a sorry sight: a firm defender of the regime in North Korea, he repeated insipid doctrines to deceive his students instead of educating them.

Socialism is el opio del pueblo.

Jack said it

Some people just can't handle the truth;

There are calls for a senior New South Wales Liberal MP to be reprimanded over a speech defending the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The State Government's Upper House whip, Peter Phelps spoke in State Parliament to mark the 40th anniversary of Pinochet's overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende.

"There are many who believe that General Pinochet was a reluctant hero, a morally courageous man," Dr Phelps told Parliament.

"We have to accept that sometimes it's necessary to do bad things to prevent terrible things.

"It's all too easy to say we believe we should never sanction dictatorship or that we should have no truck with evil, but such principles are foolish and self defeating in the real world.

"Yes, Pinochet killed people and if you know of any way to overthrow a government other than military force then let me hear about it."

In the aftermath of the 1973 coup d'état several thousand of Pinochet's political opponents were killed and tens of thousands more tortured and imprisoned.

The torture chambers had actually been constructed by Allende to be used against his opponents. After his overthrow some elements in the army turned them against the Marxists (many of them foreigners inserted into Chile after being trained by Fidel Castro's men). Which may have been unnecessary, un-Christian, or worse, but Chile didn't have any good options open to it in 1973.

What is indisputable is that Chile is incomparably better off today than it would have been had Allende remained in power. And, it is a democracy, which it wouldn't be if Pinochet hadn't acted, as Allende had plans to abolish the Chilean legislature.

Unfortunately, Mr. Phelps, can't handle the whole truth himself, as he was forced to backtrack;

"At no time did I defend the regime and indicated my disgust at the number of people who'd been killed by him."

There's a lot to defend, and, as we've pointed out before, the best defense is in James Rolph Edwards little book, Painful Birth; How Chile Became a Free and Prosperous Socierty

¡Mira: La etiqueta de la unión!

President Michelle Bachelet wants the richest country in Latin America to be more like its failed neighbors. That is, according to the PanAm Post's Hana Fischer, who says she's into the future of Chile (Uruguay) right now;

Chile’s history is not much different from that of Uruguay. We had the same misguided policies during an era of prevailing populism: from the 1930s to 1950s, both countries applied foreign-exchange controls with a multiple-rate system and an import-substitution model.

But the Uruguayan government went further, enacting mandatory collective bargaining for all sectors. The move disrupted the country’s social harmony, increasing the power of unions and dooming companies to financial disaster.

The governments of Uruguay and Chile claimed to be “defending the working class” with their interventionist policies, but it was workers who paid the price for those policies with their jobs. This then led to social unrest and violent clashes in these countries. In short, they became radicalized, agitated, and traumatized societies.

But in Chile, the people got fed up and supported the military coup that ended the Castroite experiment of Salvador Allende in 1973. And prospered...which sticks in the craw of the left wing of Chilean society. As this Bloomberg story from May makes clear;

Chile is one of only four countries in the 34-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including the U.S., that allows companies to replace striking workers, thanks to labor laws drawn up during the 1980s when dictator Augusto Pinochet was still in power.

Thirty-five years later, President Michelle Bachelet says it’s time for Chile to repay an historic debt to workers and is backing a bill to ban the practice and boost the power of labor unions.

 .... Under the government’s proposal, unions will become the only organizations allowed to conduct collective bargaining, while companies will be barred from automatically extending benefits obtained through a collective contract to non-unionized employees. It also stops companies from replacing striking workers.

Wanna be like Uruguay? Back to Hana Fischer, who has lived it;

When Marxists take power, the unavoidable result is a society of wealthy politicians and their cronies, while the rest of the public becomes poorer and poorer, both financially and in spirit. 

Here's how she sees Chile's labor market 'reforms';

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who supports the bill, said that “the experience in countries with higher levels of union membership and collective bargaining shows that it is possible to arrive at agreements for mutual benefit on a wide range of topics.”

However, the Uruguayan experience refutes Bachelet’s statement. The privileges awarded to unions have resulted in nearly dictatorial power over private companies, and business owners feel they are losing control. Unions have frequently adopted disproportionate and arbitrary measures, in some cases even running afoul of the law.

 Recent polling shows that a majority of Chileans oppose the proposed bill.

Nos debes

Granma reports that a Castro never forgets to remind;

Raúl in heroic Algeria

Cuban President Raúl Castro is making an official three-day visit to this North African country, his third since assuming the Presidency. His first stop in Algiers, yesterday May 3, was at the Martyrs’ Memorial Cemetery, to honor those who died in the country’s independence struggle.

In his 1973 book, Persona Non Grata: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution, Jorge Edwards explained the connection. In December 1970, he'd just been dispatched, by President Salvador Allende, to Cuba to re-open the Chilean embassy there. At 2:00 AM on the day of his arrival he finds himself face to face with Fidel Castro, who tells him that sooner or later Chile will have to fight the Yankees. Just like the Vietnamese were then doing in Southeast Asia.

Suddenly, in one of the outbursts so typical of him, Fidel assured me that we should not hesitate to ask his aid if we had any problem of armed intervention. After all, he said, his aid to the Algerians had been decisive in their war of liberation. He had sent them a ship with guns and soldiers! He added the following phrase, as we clinked our glasses (now filled with the white wine that had at last appeared on the table): "We may not be  very good at producing, but we're great at fighting!" [our bold]

Edwards also says (in a footnote) that when the Chilean people overthrew Allende three years later, Castro encouraged the leader of Peru, Velasco Alvarado, to take the opportunity to attack Chile and recover lands lost to that country during the Pacific War of the 19th century. Castro offered not only Cuban military advisers, but support from the Soviet Union.

Velasco, however, was gravely ill and didn't take the bait. Shortly thereafter, Castro decided to adventure in Angola instead. Fighting, it's what Cuba does best.

9-11-73

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the military coup that ended the attempt to turn Chile into a Castro-ite dictatorship that Salvador Allende Gossens preferred. As Alberto Fuguet said, Pinochet changed Chile for the better, and that's the dirty little secret; the right wing won, and they turned out to be not so bad.

Unfortunately, some Chileans have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing;

Chile is a country divided, one whose citizens often disagree on the best way to deal with their past. There are those who want to move on and look forward, and others who think society cannot reconstruct itself until it acknowledges what happened on Sept. 11, 1973.

Which was that an overwhelming majority of Chileans wanted Allende removed from office. The Chilean Chamber of Deputies had voted, 81-47, to remove him as President. When Allende made a defiant radio broadcast saying, over my dead body, the military, led by Augusto Pinochet, gave him his wish--he ended his life with an AK-47 he'd received as a gift from Fidel Castro. Today, Chile is one of South America's happiest places.

Cuenta tus bendiciones, amigos.