Pinochet is dead
December 13, 2006
ALTHOUGH IT was shocking to hear the mourners lining the streets of Santiago to eulogize the achievements of General Augusto Pinochet, who died this week at the grand old age of 91, it seems just as remarkable that the Chilean dictator had become such a cause celebre among the leftist intelligentsia abroad. After all, in the scheme of things, the death toll from his 1973 military coup and subsequent seventeen-year dictatorship - although running into the thousands - seems negligible when compared to many other tainted twentieth-century nations.
Right-wing pundits, of course, point to the presence of a liberal media bias against the ultra-conservative Catholic general. But that doesn't quite explain why Pinochet became such an object of opprobrium, and the subject of numerous lawsuits, while equally odious US-backed right-wing dictators in, say, Paraguay or Guatemala, remained in relative obscurity.
The underlying reason why he became so despised was the way he destroyed all hope in the revolutionary project. After years of repressive Soviet stagnation and dreary social democratic compromises, the world saw its first (and only) democratically-elected Marxist, the good doctor Salvador Allende, and chose to see Chile as the future, with its government leading it down the "democratic path to socialism".
The way the CIA backed the coup, and the way the egregious Henry Kissinger approved it, seemed utterly symbolic of the way the ruling elites and plutocracies seemed to run the place, paying lip service to the idea of popular participation in the process of government, but lashing out violently once that participation threatened their interests.
In this sense, the Pinochet coup was linked - in Britain at least - with those sweaty, subterranean plots against Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and the plans devised by senior establishment figures to overthrow the Labour Government and replace it with an emergency regime led by the Duke of Edinburgh.
It was another spasm of reaction in the face of a popular desire for change stretching from the streets of Paris to the jungles of Indochina. Pinochet, in short, was inextricably linked with the grey, crapulous hopelessness of the Nixon era and the way the radical glee of the late 1960s was dissipated in a dreary worldwide wave of small-mindedness.
And despite all the right-wing revisionism about the way he set the country on the path of liberalism and economic vitality, and the way he ended the chaos of the Allende government, we should not forget that Pinochet was a nasty, philistine brute who personally attended to the torture of representatives from the ancien regime and added that dread phrase, los desaparecidos, to the lexicon of twentieth century cruelty. Torture and assassination were matters of routine. The world is now a better place.
