Wall Street Journal tells the truth about Chile

Thirty years ago this month, the Chilean military smashed Fidel Castro’s experiment to impose totalitarianism abroad through abuses of the democratic system.

Revolutionaries and their supporters twisted the history of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup against the Allende regime, to the point that the circumstances are poorly understood. Professor James R. Whelan, the nation’s most prolific historian of Chile, sets the record straight in the Wall Street Journal.

Whalen’s article is a lesson on what happens when the bad guys dominate public perceptions and the writing of history.

Allende, Whelan recalls, was devoted to the violent overthrow of democratic governments in the hemisphere since the 1960s. “From the beginning, Allende’s Chile became a magnet for revolutionaries from all corners of the globe; eventually their numbers grew to between 10,000 and 15,000” – a veritable Marxist version of the Taliban. Allende’s Socialist Party congresses repeatedly proclaimed that “revolutionary violence is inevitable and legitimate,” calling for the destruction of existing society.

Allende stomped the Chilean constitution, illegally seizing farms and factories, defying judicial orders, and creating a climate of “unchecked street violence” and death threats against Supreme Court justices and others who tried to stand in his way. The Supreme Court warned unanimously that Allende’s Chile faced an “imminent breakdown of legality.” Three months later, the Chilean legislature passed a resolution warning that Allende was “bent on the conquest of total power . . . so as to implant a totalitarian system.”

On September 11, 1973, Allende’s handpicked chief of the army, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, led the rest of the armed forces in a reluctant move to save the country from communism or total collapse. Democratic leaders, including three former presidents, thanked the armed forcesd for liberating the country.

The Chilean military delivered the country from a certain civil war, which Communist Party ideology chief Volodia Teitelboim sayd “probably would signify immense loss of life, between half a million and a million. The death toll of the Pinochet coup, according to Whelan, was “under 200.”

“Out of the wreckage,” Whelan writes, “Gen. Pinochet and his associates erected a sturdy, realistic political system, anchored in the most carefully-crafted constitution in the country’s history, one still in effect today after 13 years of democratic rule by center-left governments.”

And the secret police that the Left whines about? The Chilean military needed help to suppress the new underground terrorist movement, a movement not unlike that directed at US forces in Iraq today. Did they turn to the CIA for secret police training?

Not at all, according to Whelan. History can credit France. “French secret service agents who had waged France’s savage war in the 1950s against Algerian independence forces coached secret police organizations in Chile — and also Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The man who headed Chile’s secret police, Manuel Contreras, said recently that Gen. Paul Aussaresses, former head of the French intelligence service, personally trained Chilean agents in Brazil.”