CHILE FROM ALLENDE TO PINOCHET – AND BACK AGAIN!

By Adrian J English

THE CHILEAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1970 WAS INCONCLUSIVE, NONE OF THE THREE CANDIDATES ACHIEVING AN OVERALL MAJORITY ALTHOUGH DR. SALVADOR ALLENDE, A WEALTHY, LIFE-LONG, LEFT-WING ACTIVIST, WHOSE THREE PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS TO BE ELECTED PRESIDENT HAD FAILED, RECEIVED 36.2% OF THE VOTES CAST (1.2% MORE THAN HIS RIGHT-WING ADVERSARY, ALESSANDRI AND 8.4% MORE THAN THE CENTRE-LEFT CANDIDATE, TOMIC) AND WAS SUBSEQUENTLY RATIFIED AS PRESIDENT BY CONGRESS, AS REQUIRED IN SUCH CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER THE CHILEAN CONSTITUTION.

Although his mandate to govern had been endorsed by little more than one third of the electorate and representation in the Chilean Legislature was still in almost complete inverse ratio, at over 63% of the political right and centre against 37% of the moderate and extreme left, Allende immediately began to  convert Chile into a Marxist “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

Generous wage increases were granted to industrial workers, with no corresponding increase in productivity, which in fact decreased rapidly, resulting in rampant inflation and a consequent erosion of real purchasing power and living standards.

The self-styled “Popular Unity” government, the title of which was especially ironic in the case of an administration which fostered the “class struggle”, also embarked on a programme of indiscriminate nationalization of business undertakings and the expropriation of agricultural land, 80% of industry being state controlled by September 1973.

The rate of inflation rose to 163% by 1972 and had reached 323% in August 1973. Declining production and an escalating adverse credit balance (The foreign trade deficit stood at US$440m by mid 1972 and the total foreign debt had risen to US$3.5bn) caused shortages of most commodities, including the most basic consumer goods, such as aspirin, toothpaste and toilet paper.

Most notably, domestic food production fell with the widespread expropriation of agricultural land whilst the spiralling decrease in value of the Chilean currency militated against compensatory imports. Food queues lengthened as demand increased over supply, requiring the introduction of rationing in January 1973. For the first time in their history the Chilean people were faced with a real prospect of starvation.

After the first 18 months of criminally irresponsible government, both the Congress and the Supreme Court had condemned the Allende regime as unconstitutional, calling on the Armed Forces to overthrow a President whose contempt for the process of democratic government was already almost total. In this they were backed by a constitutional provision which permitted Congress to order the military to remove a President who had exceeded his constitutional powers, a precedent for this procedure having been exercised already in the overthrow of the dictatorial President Balmaceda, 80 years earlier.

From the outset, Allende had however sought an accommodation with the Chilean military, who have been historically amongst the least politicised in a region where changes of government are more frequently effected by a coup d’etat than by democratic elections and who despite the assassination of the Commander-In-Chief of the Army, General Schneider, by left-wing extremists, shortly after Allende’s election as President, not only continued to  serve his regime loyally but for a time even participated in its Cabinet.

As the catastrophic failure of his policies became ever more obvious, Allende began to rule even more dictatorially, ignoring the attempts of the opposition majority in Congress to curb his more outrageous economic policies and even over-ruling the judgements of the Courts when these clashed with his single-minded efforts to impose Marxist socio-economic dogma on a population 80% of which regarded itself as “middle class”.

Widespread popular unrest manifested itself in a series of crippling strikes, notably by self-employed truck drivers who were threatened with enforced collectivization and financial ruin and including even the workers in the copper mining industry, who had traditionally been Allende’s staunchest supporters, whilst the armed supporters of the extreme right and left took to the streets in acts of terror and counter-terror. By the middle of 1973 Chile was in a state of social anarchy and the economy was in ruins.

Although he had been warned by no less an authority than Cuba’s Fidel Castro that his process of socio-economic revolution was proceeding too rapidly, the extreme left, dissatisfied even with Allende’s headlong progress towards the conversion of Chile into a totalitarian Marxist state, was now planning a coup d’etat involving the subversion of the lower ranks of the Armed Forces and the massacre of their officers and of hundreds of leading opposition figures. An estimated 10,000 to 14,000 hard-core foreign Marxists, most of them from Cuba and North Korea, had assembled in Chile and together with local leftist militants had stockpiled vast quantities of arms in preparation for an uprising on Independence Day, September 18th, 1973.

On August 22nd, 1973, the Chilean Congress, in which the opposition parties still maintained a majority and which Allende had long sought to abolish illegally and replace with a “People’s Assembly”, issued an extraordinary  declaration to the effect that [sic] “The present government, since its inauguration, has sought to achieve total power, with the evident purpose of subjecting all persons to the most strict economic and political control by the State and to achieve by this means a totalitarian system absolutely opposed to the democratic, representative system established by the Constitution” adding that “to achieve this end, the Government has not only indulged in isolated violations of the Constitution and the Law but has made of them a permanent system of conduct, reaching the extreme of systematically ignoring and trampling underfoot the attributes and other powers of the State; of habitually violating the guarantees which the Constitution extends to all the inhabitants of the Republic; and permitting and supporting the creation of illegitimate parallel powers which constitute a most grave peril for the nation”. What must be a unique condemnation of the conduct of an elected head of state by an equally democratically elected national parliament, concluded by stating that the administration had “destroyed the essential elements of the institutionalized rule of law“.

On September 11th, 1973, after wavering for almost three weeks and then only under the threat of unilateral action by the Navy, the Armed Forces finally acted, overthrowing Allende who committed suicide in the smoking ruins of the presidential palace after it had been bombed by the Air Force and assaulted by armoured units of the Army. It should be noted that whilst the overthrow of a second incipient Stalinist regime in the western hemisphere (after Cuba) was undoubtedly welcomed by the United States, the Chilean coup was entirely a home-grown affair, it’s very success being ample proof of the absence of outside intervention as in the case of the disastrous CIA organized “Bay of Pigs” attempt to overthrow Cuba’s Marxist Revolutionary Government in 1961.

A ruling junta, composed of the leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force and National Police, was formed under the presidency of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Augusto Pinochet.

An unquantifiable number of Allende supporters and members of the even more extreme political left died during the coup or in the reprisals which followed and thousands fled the country. Undoubted human rights abuses in the wake of the coup have however been grossly exaggerated by apologists for the political left which unfortunately included most of the international press and other news media.

Inheriting a country on the verge of social and economic collapse, the military regime initiated harsh but effective treatment to restore stability. Over the next seven years, the economic decline was arrested by the single-minded application of monetarist policies and annual economic growth, which had stood at 2.7% before Allende’s election in 1970 and declined to a minus figure under the Popular Unity regime, rose to a respectable 8% per annum. During the same period, annual inflation was also reduced from almost 350% to less than 30% and continued to fall to reach single figures by the late 1980s.

After the chaos, misery and political uncertainty of the three disastrous years in which Allende had held power, the remedial measures of the military government were accepted as a necessary evil by a majority of Chileans and 67.5% of the electorate supported a proposal for the introduction of a new interim Constitution in a referendum held in 980. This placed the military government on an even firmer legal basis than that which it already enjoyed; reintroduced legislative and judicial checks and balances; and provided for a further plebiscite on the continuation of General Pinochet’s mandate as President, to be held in 1988; and the holding of elections a year later should the electorate reject this proposal.

In 1988, the promised plebiscite was duly held and following the rejection by the voters of Pinochet’s intention to keep the presidency until 1998, a “Concertation for Democracy” Coalition was formed by 17 centrist and centre left parties.

Patricio Aylwin, a compromise candidate, proved victorious in the election of the following year, defeating both Pinochet himself and a right-wing independent. Interestingly enough, although Pinochet lost the election, he gained 44% of the total vote, or almost 125% of the proportion of the vote which had resulted in the election of Allende, 19 years earlier.

Confounding their detractors, the Armed Forces obediently returned a political power which they had never wanted to civilian politicians and loyally supported the new Aylwin administration and its successors, even in the face of the current vendetta against those even peripherally involved in the military government of 1973-89 by the administration of Michelle Bachelet, a former activist in the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, the major Marxist terrorist group,  who was elected as Chile’s first female President in 2006.

Adrian J. English was born in Tipperary, Ireland in 1939 and qualified as architect in 1964. Whilst continuing to work as an architect he developed a parallel career as a writer and journalist on defence and military history from the early 1970s onwards being the author of many magazine articles on these subjects. He was also a major contributor to many reference books and part-works. With a primary interest in Latin America and particularly its history and military affairs, he has visited most countries in the region to which he continues to travel frequently. In addition to the present work he is the author of ARMED FORCES OF LATIN AMERICA (Jane’s, London 1984/New York 1985); REGIONAL DEFENCE PROFILE: LATIN AMERICA (Jane’s, London 1988); Jane’s Special Report SOUTH AMERICAN DEFENCE MARKETS (2000); IRISH ARMY ORBATS (Tiger Lilly Publications.Takoma Park, Maryland, USA, 2004) and of THE GREEN HELL – A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE CHACO WAR BETWEEN BOLIVIA and Paraguay 1932-35. He is also co-author, with Anthony J. Watts, of BATTLE FOR THE FALKLANDS; NAVAL FORCES (Osprey, London 1982) and Editor of the first Editions of Jane’s Sentinel CENTRAL AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN (1995) and Jane’s Sentinel SOUTH AMERICA (1996)