[Rodney King]

That sounds awful. Thank goodness Pinochet prevented that by performing a bloody military coup that totally subverted the Chilean constitution and turned Chile into a dictatorship. If not for Pinochet, there might have been decades of political repression, torture, secret police, disappearances, and government-sponsored terror. Chile really dodged a bullet.

That's right. Faced with the horrors of a stalinist state, Chile wound up with a vibrant economy and a level of oppression and deaths that pales in comparison to anything the marxists would have done.

[RightCenter]

You're talking as if the only two choices could have been a nightmare Marxist state under Allende or the sort of military dictatorship Pinochet created.

[Professor Kill]

Chile wound up with a vibrant economy and a level of oppression and deaths that pales in comparison to anything the marxists would have done.

That really sums up why we won't agree about Pinochet's legacy: in you view, anything Pinochet did is excused by the hypothetical danger of Allende. Rapes, torture, disappearances, repression, all the horrors can be waved aside with an "it could have been worse".

Maybe Allende was going to go beyond socialism and embrace Communism. Maybe Chile would have turned into a brutal Marxist state. We don't know, because Pinochet beat him to the punch and turned Chile into a brutal military dictatorship instead.

I believe Chile is a relative success today in spite of Pinochet's inhumanity, not because of it.