Pinochet Common Misconceptions

[Synobun]

Thanks to those economic reforms, Chile has one of the best and most stable economies in Latin America. So, yes, Pinochet should be condemned for his human rights violations but his economic policies had a positive effect on Chilean economy. If it wasn't for those economic reforms, Chile would be another Marxist failed state like Venezuela.

Is this true, though? Why did his economic reforms only start to have positive effect after Pinochet stepped down and revisions were made?

 

[christos200]

Is this true, though? Why did his economic reforms only start to have positive effect after Pinochet stepped down and revisions were made?

1) Allende had left the economy in ruins and thus the economic situation in Chile during Pinochet's first years was not his fault.

When the military government of Augusto Pinochet assumed power in 1973, it inherited an economy that was experiencing a hyperinflationary rate of 600% and severe contractions throughout all industries.

Also, during the first two years of the regime, there was not clear economic plan. In 1975 the economic reforms began. Do note that economic reforms take some time to produce results; economic reforms do not have an immediate effect.

2) Even during Pinochet's rule, there was economic growth:

From 1810 to 1983, Chile experienced a measly 0.9% per capita GDP growth rate. Thanks to the free-market reforms, Chile experienced a sustained growth rate of 4.3% from 1983 and onwards. Even under the administration of numerous Center-Left governments during the 90s up until 2010, the foundation of Chile’s free market system was left relatively untouched.

Citations:

http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/how-free-market-capitalism-saved-an-entire-nation-from-collapse/

 

[Hygro]

Let's be real, that is a super misleading graph.

 

[Ajidica]

Hey, is this a thread about the Chilean economy in the 70s that doesn't mention the free fall of copper prices as part of the global collapse of commodity prices?

Yeah, I think I know how much value to give the opinions expressed by the OP.

 

[Bootstoots]

If his opening gambit is going to be "Fascists: Great or Super-Great?", you should temper your expectations.

Fun little semantic question: does being authoritarian and right-wing automatically make someone a fascist? Did Pinochet have any special qualities that set him apart from all the other right-wing dictators of his time?

 

[christos200]

Fun little semantic question: does being authoritarian and right-wing automatically make someone a fascist? Did Pinochet have any special qualities that set him apart from all the other right-wing dictators of his time?

I do not believe he was Fascist. He was certainly an authoritarian dictator, but not Fascist if we take the literal definition of it. He had no popular movement or party backing him (he was military dictator), his regime was not imperialist and not xenophobic/genocidal towards foreigners. This does not make him morally 'good' but it is a distinction that should be noted.

 

[RomanKing]

Wow. None of you have been very welcoming or accommodating to RomanKing have you? I mean, the guy comes here to discuss his point of view on a subject and you all immediately just start right in with the mockery and attacks without even hearing what he has to say.

RomanKing, first off welcome to CFCOT. Second, let's start over with a more civil discussion. I'll start by asking: What misconceptions of Pinochet are you aiming to clear up?

Thank you for politely asking a civil question and not calling for my death, or the deaths of my family members for having survived a military junta.

The biggest misconception I hear is that General was a blood-thirsty fascist who just wanted to seize power for the sake of power and was a puppet of the CIA. This is an infantile viewpoint that is most often repeated by middle-class university educated Westerners and wanna-be communists while they simultaneously enjoy all of the freedoms and wealth that a free market and representative democracy provides them. They have been taught a fiction about what communism is and it is truly sickening.

Communism is a form totalitarianism. Period. It is also one of the worst forms because it denies people the ability to amass wealth and holds them hostage for all of their basic needs. That is of course if the Communists decide you are worthy enough to live in the hell they have created for you.

The biggest lie that I often hear is that the Communists were peaceful and Allende had created a utopia and because he was elected he had a mandate to implement dogmatic radical far-left reforms. The truth is that Allende was only elected with 36% of the vote and needed to govern in a moderate center-left manner to carry the +60% who had voted for center and right-wing parties. Instead he sided with radical communist agitators and subversives to instigate civil unrest to usurp power. I should really do an entire post later on about exactly how communists subvert nation states in order to instigate violence and revolution.

Your question is actually quite broad, so I will answer some other questions first and come back to this one

Judging from your OP they probably had it coming.

My Aunt, Uncle, and their 4 year old daughter were hauled off of a bus with 15 or so other people and shot in back of the head at close range by communist guerillas. My grandmother had to arrange to have closed caskets for all of them.

Oh, but praising Pinochet and thus implicitly saying his victims had it coming isn't?
At least I'm open and lucid about my opinion here. I'm on the side of the Communist guerrillas. I support armed struggle against figures like Pinochet.

You disgust me.

So how many people actually died as a result of communist repression in Chile before or during Allende's presidency? I've never read anything credible to point to anything serious going on there. Although a disorganized resistance movement did make a few bombings and killed a few people while Pinochet was in power, the vast majority of the left-wing violence in the Southern Cone at the time was in Argentina and Uruguay, where actual left-wing terrorism did happen although the right-wing military response was of course wildly disproportionate.

It's really not well known, as the so-called "scholars" and liberal critics like to sympathize with the communists for political reasons, while ignoring the context of the situation and the covert nature of soviet-style subversion which was going on. The Soviets and Cuba were both directly involved in the internal affairs of the country as well as the USA. Even in terms of how many people disappeared after General Pinochet took power is not well known. We could discuss numbers, but everyone here is going to disagree.

What I can tell you with certainty is the economy was stable before the Allende regime took power. Within months of taking power armed gangs of leftists invaded homes and took over factories and farms, which was actively encouraged by Castro. This lead to food shortages and food strikes. Many of the farms taken over by the communists failed. Allende began confiscating property, seizing business, debasing the currency and at one point Inflation reached 1,000%. He also intimidated his opposition and bankrupted newspapers that criticized him. Allende put tanks into the streets and shoehorned members of his military into civilian cabinet positions.

That is not what I said. My questions still stand. Why are you willing to ignore these crimes simply because your familial circle benefited from the regime?

It is embarrassing how facilely simple-minded and agenda driven Western academia is to presume that functioning democracy is always an option, no matter the conditions prevailing in a country. In Chile it probably wasn't.

If it wasn't for the 3000 deaths caused directly or indirectly by General Pinochet, Chile would be a third world country like its neighbors Peru and Bolivia, where thousands die every year from poverty. 3,000 deaths over 17 years is approximately 200 per year and most of these people were actively fighting against the government. They were really bad people.

 

[Ajidica]

It is just worth pointing out that Robert Service (a guy who has called Communists "bacteria") had a relatively positive opinion of Allende. He noted that it was at least admirable Allende was trying to do something to address long running inequality and poverty in Chile that successive conservative and Christian Democrat governments proved unwilling or uninterested in. While the effectiveness of his economic programs is unclear - Service compares them to more liberal Yugoslavia or a particularly hard-line Scandinavia- it is obvious the collapse of export commodity prices would have sunk any government. Allende's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to expand the economy (and inflationary policies) was exacerbated by the collapse of export prices.

 

[Hygro]

...(something Pinochet never fixed—to think otherwise would require magical thinking)

 

[Synobun]

It is embarrassing how facilely simple-minded and agenda driven Western academia is to presume that functioning democracy is always an option, no matter the conditions prevailing in a country. In Chile it probably wasn't.

I have not seen anyone make this claim.

If it wasn't for the 3000 deaths caused directly or indirectly by General Pinochet, Chile would be a third world country like its neighbors Peru and Bolivia, where thousands die every year from poverty. 3,000 deaths over 17 years is approximately 200 per year and most of these people were actively fighting against the government. They were really bad people.

Ah, so here we have it. Those who were oppressed under Pinochet deserve it. Your family is made up of good people which is why they benefited and these 'bad people' didn't.

Makes sense.

 

[Berzerker]

Fascists dont believe in free markets

 

[Traitorfish]

Hey, is this a thread about the Chilean economy in the 70s that doesn't mention the free fall of copper prices as part of the global collapse of commodity prices?

"Commodity"? That sounds like Marxism to me, buddy.

Instead he sided with radical communist agitators and subversives to instigate civil unrest to usurp power.

Allende disarmed the workers' militias and appointed Pinochet, a known hard-liner, head of the military.

It is embarrassing how facilely simple-minded and agenda driven Western academia is to presume that functioning democracy is always an option, no matter the conditions prevailing in a country. In Chile it probably wasn't.

Why is it facile to insist on democracy, but to insist on laissez faire capitalism? It seems an awful coincidence that thinks you regard suspicion are a luxury, but you thinks you regard highly are a necessity.

 

[warpus]

Misconceptions right off the bat, this thread is on theme

 

[Bootstoots]

Let's be real, that is a super misleading graph.

Yeah, the red part of rapid growth mostly occurred after its transition back to democracy in 1990. The Chicago Boy period of 1975-82 involved a crash as "shock therapy" crushed Chilean industry with cheap imports in 1975-7, followed by a bubble largely fueled by a commodity (copper, mostly) boom and a high influx of foreign capital in the 1977-81 period, followed by the horrible 1982 crash that hit all of Latin America as a follow-on to the Volcker Shock, but which was exacerbated by the foreign capital fleeing even faster than it went in. Luckily, Pinochet had enough sense to fire the Chicago Boys, replacing them with right-leaning pragmatists instead of the dogmatic Friedmanites. Ultimately, he nationalized more of the economy than Allende ever did at the bottom of the 1982 depression, eventually reprivatizing things in an ad hoc manner after that but leaving the copper monopoly in government hands.

I don't actually think that Allende was great for Chile's economy, but I do know that US economic intervention beginning right after the election to "make Chile's economy scream" (to paraphrase Nixon) was not helpful, causing things to go downhill faster than they otherwise would. I suspect that what would have happened had there been no coup is that he would have mismanaged the economy in the usual Latin American left-wing populist way, then been voted out of office after his first term.

My Aunt, Uncle, and their 4 year old daughter were hauled off of a bus with 15 or so other people and shot in back of the head at close range by communist guerillas. My grandmother had to arrange to have closed caskets for all of them.

It's really not well known, as the so-called "scholars" and liberal critics like to sympathize with the communists for political reasons, while ignoring the context of the situation and the covert nature of soviet-style subversion which was going on. The Soviets and Cuba were both directly involved in the internal affairs of the country as well as the USA. Even in terms of how many people disappeared after General Pinochet took power is not well known. We could discuss numbers, but everyone here is going to disagree.

What I can tell you with certainty is the economy was stable before the Allende regime took power. Within months of taking power armed gangs of leftists invaded homes and took over factories and farms, which was actively encouraged by Castro. This lead to food shortages and food strikes. Many of the farms taken over by the communists failed. Allende began confiscating property, seizing business, debasing the currency and at one point Inflation reached 1,000%. He also intimidated his opposition and bankrupted newspapers that criticized him. Allende put tanks into the streets and shoehorned members of his military into civilian cabinet positions.

Are there any English-language sources that discuss left-wing violence in Chile before and during Allende's presidency? I'd like to find out how widespread this was. If you don't know of any, you can link to Spanish-language sources too and some combination of Google Translate and hazy recollections of high-school Spanish might tell me something.

 

[Ajidica]

"Commodity"? That sounds like Marxism to me, buddy.

That would confirm my suspicions that a branch of the US Government has been taken over by Marxists.

 

[Kyriakos]

 

[Ajidica]

I love that, and not only because I Need a Hero is one of my favorite songs.

I see Pinochet more like this though:

 

[Takhisis]

General made Chile the strongest economy in South America.

To this day it is exactly where it was 44 years ago: completely dependent on the extraction and sale of copper.

He offers no insight, his family was just one of those privileged by the regime. Who cares. Of course there are winners when a dictator is in power, the Kims were good to some families, Qaddafi was good to some tribes, Mobute was good to some families, Saddam was good to some tribes, Assad was good to some tribes. You can find dictator apologists anywhere.

Ah, but Qaddafi is hailed by Venezuela's Telesur. It's not the same.

Poors starved to death and still voted for Allende. So they needed to be subjugated, tortured and murdered to be saved from themselves.

Standard USSR operating procedure! Witnessed throughout the continent during the era.

Is this true, though? Why did his economic reforms only start to have positive effect after Pinochet stepped down and revisions were made?

It's the glorious invisible hand of the market.

1) Allende had left the economy in ruins and thus the economic situation in Chile during Pinochet's first years was not his fault.

He ruled for 17 years, come on.

Hey, is this a thread about the Chilean economy in the 70s that doesn't mention the free fall of copper prices as part of the global collapse of commodity prices?

Yeah, I think I know how much value to give the opinions expressed by the OP.

But it's the strongest economy in South America™ (see above).

Fascists dont believe in free markets

They do believe in what amounts to crony capitalism.

But yes, I do agree with the sentiment that just because somebody is a corrupt murderer who seizes power by force of arms that doesn't make him (or her!) a fascist. Salot Sar would certainly count then.

 

[RomanKing]

Glory to the Savior of our Nation.

Allende left Chile's economy in ruins and trampled the rule of law so badly he brought the country to the brink of civil war. He was stopped only when the legislature charged him with 22 constitutional violations and ordered Chile's military to oust him.

As Chilean jets strafed La Moneda presidential palace Sept. 11, 1973, Allende shot himself with a gold-plated submachine gun given to him by Castro.

 

[REDY]

This is quite ideological thing. I would totally love to have Pinochet in my country at 1945. But not after fall of iron curtain. Some countries got right wing dictator and it didnt turn well.