Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Fifty years ago tomorrow, General Pinochet and almost the entire Chilean military broke their constitutional oath and staged a coup d’état against the legally elected government of Salvador Allende. The few military commanders who opposed the coup were eliminated. Thus, Chile aligned itself with other South American countries with military governments, such as Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru.
It was a culminating moment in the extreme expressions of the global Cold War. The leftist forces promoted the dictatorship of the proletariat and the disappearance of private property, while the military presumed to be the last dike of contention in the defense of the market economy model and liberal democracy.
The characteristic sign of these regimes was, obviously, repressive authoritarianism. And with militarism sheltering the economic and political model, extreme state violence inevitably followed. The disappearances and murders of thousands of people, the large-scale violation of human rights, the theft and looting of the property of members, or not, of leftist organizations, the kidnapping of children and murder of journalists, the takeover or closure of media dissenting from militarism and contempt for the rule of law were the shared characteristics of these authoritarian regimes throughout the South American continent.
The heroic mythology of the Cuban revolution in 1959, the death in combat of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, the death throes of the Bolivian revolution itself in 1952, and something of the remembrance of the Mexican revolution of 1910 served as a backdrop for the forces of the left to assume that the time had come for the feasibility of a socialist revolution throughout Latin America.
All those armed uprisings and deaths ended when the military seized power, gunned down the armed militants, and destroyed their organizations. Later on, the military were defeated politically, one by one, by the societies that said enough is enough! to so much violence and the excessive authoritarianism, abuses, and corruption of the armed forces themselves. The military arrived with the mission of imposing peace and order and ended up filling their personal saddlebags with public and private gold.
Fifty years after that bloody experience, societies still debate the real meanings of those events. There are governments of various leftist signs throughout Latin America, and the discontent against them is high. Sectors of these same societies refuse to disown the coup perpetrators, as in Chile and Argentina. Hard and ultra-liberal right-wingers have raised their heads with the prospect of building new majorities in societies where justice and the bodies of the disappeared are still being sought.
In some notorious cases, the methods used now by leftist governments are not very different from the methods used by the military of those years. They now deploy the armed forces in the same way that privileged civilian groups did: by giving “economic incentives” to commanders to protect the current status quo with blood and fire if necessary. Today, one hears leftist leaders glorify the military for being “the last dike of containment” against neoliberalism.
Three militarized Latin American dictatorships exist: Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. All three present themselves as “leftist”. Obviously, the label “left” has lost all credible meaning with them. They are repressive governments that have enslaved their populations and are among the Latin American countries contributing most to the desperate migrant flows seeking life in other latitudes. People flee these countries, terrified by hunger and lack of freedom.
It is good to take advantage of the 50th commemoration of the coup d’état in Chile and the assassination of Salvador Allende to sign a declaration in defense of democracy. But many of its signatories, like the Mexican, will have to look at themselves in the mirror and ask the hard questions that arise from their failures as rulers. Their methods of government are not very different from those employed by the military coup leaders in those years. Times that seem to be remote but are not so remote. Pinochet appears to be a contemporary of several of them.
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