Thursday, December 21, 2006
Pinochet's Legacy
Augusto Pinochet died recently. He was an immensely important figure in western history, though not merely because of his career. He was, in the end, just another South American strongman who ruled for eighteen years in Chile. In that sense he was very ordinary.
What was special about Pinochet was how bitterly he divided his fascist American supporters from the remainder of people who have not yet bartered their souls to Moloch. Pinochet was brought into power via a CIA-supported coup in 1973, after years of the Nixon Administration attempting to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Chile both through covert (and illegal) efforts to arm, fund, and encourage elements of the army in Chile and through overt efforts to wage economic war on Chile and ruin its economy. Chile’s economy did go south, and the army did stage a coup, and Pinochet quickly asserted his supremacy.
Judging by the preponderance of dictators in Central and South America I might normally dismiss the rise of a Pinochet in Chile as just more evidence that Latins are so poor and violent their governments devolve into dictatorships like the manifestation some kind of congenital birth defect in the Spanish-speaking world or the will of God. But Pinochet was different. America was largely responsible for his creation.
Pinochet’s regime proceeded to slaughter several thousand dissidents and suspected leftists. Tens of thousands more were tortured over his 18 year reign. The Right in America was quick to embrace Pinochet, however, because he had overthrown a leftist President, enacted free market reforms for the economy, and was a staunch anti-Communist. The Ford Administration and Henry Kissinger were quick to send aid to the budding dictator, even to the extent that Ford violated Ted Kennedy’s bill capping aid to Chile at around 40 million. Ford doubled that and sent it anyway, in a move that would foreshadow Reagan’s illegal funding of some similarly unsavory Latin murderers. Kissinger perjured himself in front of Congress when reporting on how the Nixon Administration had aided Pinochet as part of Congress’s hearing in the mid seventies on the abuses of the CIA. The Ford Administration and the CIA in general quickly established operational relations with that of Pinochet’s dictatorship and his secret police. William F Buckley and the conservative establishment were quick to defend Pinochet, as they defended and celebrated the likes of D’Aubuisson of El Salvador, or the Contras, or, Hell, any dictatorship or motley band of cutthroats who were willing to defend property rights and fight Marxists in this hemisphere. Even, by the 1980s, as it became painfully obvious how many people Pinochet had killed and tortured and how uninterested he was in “restoring democracy” after he had run the country as his personal fiefdom for seven years and more the Right still sang his praises and defended him. Elliott Abrams, the smirking, venomous assistant Secretary of State who was the Reagan Administration’s triggerman for Iran Contra also was instrumental in justifying and arranging for Reagan’s financial assistance and trade relations with Pinochet’s government. Abrams wrote many assessments of Pinochet’s Orwellian police state that were ugly brutalizations of the truth as a defense of the Administration’s financial aid and trade relations. He would write ten paragraphs discussing what a visionary leader Pinochet was because of his Chicago-style free-market reforms, and then he might spare a paragraph at the end with an oh-so-gentle mention that Pinochet was “working towards” restoring democracy. Yeah, he was getting around to it. The Pinochet government’s human rights record was “improving”—that was Elliott’s favorite. He said that for years about El Salvador’s military government in the eighties as they slaughtered 70,000 of their own people in their counterinsurgency effort. He said that about the Contras, too. He loved that one. The ever-improving human rights record, using cooked statistics and witnesses that were the butcherers’ cousins and friends. The Reagan Administration sent massive aid to them all. Margaret Thatcher was right there by his side.
The rest of the world was not so pleased. Because of his role in overthrowing Chile’s democratically-elected government Kissinger can not travel to Chile or Spain, and I doubt he would roll the dice in England, either, where British authorities arrested Pinochet at the request of a Spanish judge. If he were to travel abroad to these countries he would be arrested. International pressure mounted on Chile through the 1980s. Even Elliott started sounding peevish in his State Department reports late in the Reagan Administration. Pinochet agreed to hold a referendum on his dictatorship in 1988. He lost. As it became clear from election returns that he was going to lose the referendum he gave an order to the Chilean Army to close the voting sites and annul the referendum. For once the other generals of the ruling junta refused. He was allowed to declare himself head of the military and “Senator for Life” in a pathetic and transparent effort to shield himself legally from prosecution for his crimes. It never worked. Neither Spain nor England recognized his diplomatic status as protecting him from charges. Eventually Spanish and Chilean courts declined to prosecute him for crimes in the last 8 years of his life because of his poor health and dementia.
As an unimportant afterward, Pinochet was later found to have secreted $27 million away that he siphoned off the government of Chile when he ruled it.
Pinochet was a murderer, a poor student who became a colorless bureaucrat of a general who devolved into a tyrant. His family has said they would not raise a tomb that could be defiled. They, at least, know where Pinochet stands in the estimation of his people and the World.
Since Pinochet left power the Right no longer had a use for him, and dictators that are no longer useful to their American masters do not meet good ends: just ask Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noreiga, Haji Suharto, or Rafael Trujillo. Thus the positive press the fiend used to enjoy in America in the 1980s began to get more critical over the last sixteen years. What was tacitly admitted in the 1980s became the entire subject of articles in newspapers and periodicals: Pinochet had been a bloody tyrant. Bravely left defending the ramparts of Castle Apologia was William F Buckley, who continued to pen apologias for Pinochet as of 1998, when Pinochet was arrested in England.
Well the worm has finally turned. The Economist, a bastion of conservative establishment thought, wrote a eulogy for Pinochet that was less than complimentary. It was pathetic in that they actually framed it as somewhat controversial that they were asserting that Pinochet was a monster when it was only controversial in the craziest 10% of America or Chile, but that’s OK. They came around, after all…33 years after he started his reign of terror, true, but they came around.
Even WFB, in a sullen, miserly way, grudgingly conceded that in some ways Pinochet had been bad. Of course, Buckley can’t admit that without lying about what Pinochet did seven times and mischaracterizing what Chile was like five more times, but one of Buckely’s ass-licking manservants over at the National Review finally tapped the vile bastard on the shoulder and informed him that defending Pinochet had become unacceptable sometime around the time Punky Brewster went off the air.
I take little pleasure in the fact that Pinochet died, as he left power years ago and was never punished for his crimes. And don’t say like The Economist that that’s a small point; tell that to the Mossad who hunted Eichmann down in Argentina decades after the Holocaust and kidnapped him to stand trial in Israel.
What is left is to ensure that Pinochet’s lackeys, enablers, and defenders suffer the fate he should have. Chile has a long way to go before justice is achieved, but there’s no statue of limitations for murder, in Chile or the United States.
We have a long way to go in America, too. The WFBs of America are free to say whatever they like, but it is a sad fact that defenders of people like Pinochet aren’t shunned and derided like Holocaust deniers and white supremacists. Anyone who aided Pinochet should be brought to justice, whether American or Chilean. In 1998 Salon published a far more fitting summary of Pinochet’s significance: “He became an object of adoration for William Buckley, the editors of the Wall Street Journal, the reporters of the New York Times, the claque of conservatives at Heritage and Cato and the Baroness Maggie Thatcher… Chileans no longer need to hold tight to the faint, fading words of Salvador Allende. They are now free to publicly remember Pinochet. To recoil in horror and disgust. To scorn and despise him. And with a bit of luck -- to see him judged and condemned.”
Indeed. I wish that the criminals who supported Pinochet could face the same fate Pinochet was willing to offer Salvador Allende as the coup was completed. Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, trapped and under fire with his bodyguard in the presidential palace, was clearly on the verge of either surrender or extermination. Carvajal, another coup plotter, suggested that Allende be guaranteed passage out of the country if he surrendered. "He can be flown out of the country," Pinochet said, "but then, old boy, while he's flying, the airplane falls out of the sky."
That’s the Right’s hero. The same General who, in the months following the coup, ordered suspected supporters of the former president rounded up in a soccer stadium, interrogated, shot in the head, and buried in unmarked graves.
RIP, Augusto. If you had a grave I would spit on it, exhume your body, feed it to dogs, and return the coffin to the people of Chile to save “the Chilean government the price of more nails,” as you said of the people you thought should be “congratulated” for burying the disappeared two to a grave.
And Fuck you, too, William Fucking Buckley.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 11:25 PM 
