Sharwood
Rich, doctor nephew
luiz, some of what you've said in your posts I agree with, some I don't, and some I don't know enough about to have more than a gut opinion of, so I won't get into that. But I can't leave your appraisal of Allende alone.
As for him being racist, I don't know and won't comment. I can say that I've never heard anyone refer to him as a racist besides you, and I've never come across any evidence to suggest that he was.
Now, as for his reforms setting Chile on fire; that is nothing but a crock of sh*t. What set Chile on fire was absolutely massive amounts of CIA funding, culminating in paying off Pinochet to launch a military coup.
Allende was a democratically elected head-of-state. He did not gain power through a coup, a revolution, or outside intervention. He was democratically elected to run his country under the laws of his country by the people of his country. Henry Kissinger resonded to this by stating, publicly: "these issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves" and "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people."
You're South American, so you should know that unlike just about every other Latin American nation, Chile did not have a history of military interference in government. There had been a few occasions where the military stepped in, but they always relinquished their power to democratic governments. So why the change?
Are you aware that a short time before Pinochet's coup, the Chilean ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated in Washington D.C., with the assassins never found? Nor indeed, was any investigation conducted. Why? Because the assassination was almost certainly conducted by the CIA at the direct instruction of Henry Kissinger.
Letelier was Pinochet's predecessor as commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army. He was highly respected, and if he gave an order, the military was likely to obey it, regardless of whether he was still in uniform or not. This removed anyone that could contradict Pinochet's orders.
The economic dislocation in Chile was caused, not by Allende's reforms, but by a plummet in the worldwide price of copper, Chile's primary export. The reason? Because the United States bought a tonne of copper from sources other than Chile, then flooded the market with it. In addition, there were economic and transportation problems caused by striking truck drivers outside of Chile's major cities. Many of these truck drivers were paid by CIA agents operating in Chile to do so, in much the same way that the term "rent-a-crowd" came into the vocabulary to describe the rioters in Tehran that helped remove Mossadegh from power, most of whom were hired by the CIA.
With the economy and transportation in shambles, Allende was forced to take austerity measures to ensure Chile's populace was fed. Austerity measures, in the absence of war, never work. People are short-sighted, and stupid. They think; "before Allende I could buy consumer goods, and grow fat on imported food. Now I cannot do these things," and they make the connection that Allende is responsible, when it is actually outside forces at work. These people then began to riot. Pinochet, prepared by the US, moved in.
Thousands of Chileans were killed in the subsequent purges. The book Rapanui, by an anthropologist studying the people of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) details how one army unit drove to a university, found a group of Rapanui students, none of who were even twenty years old, one of whom was an attractive girl. They forced all of them, male and female, to strip naked, then took the attractive girl into the next room, and raped her one by one, over and over, for hours. She permananetly damaged her vocal cords, she screamed so loud and for so long. This pattern was repeated all over Chile.
How, in your twisted mind, Allende did all this to Chile, is beyond me.
