Posted on 12/14/2006 8:02:01 AM PST by 13Sisters76
Allende: The Untold Story By Humberto Fontova FrontPageMagazine.com | December 14, 2006
To read the mainstream media lately you'd think Augusto Pinochet's villainous henchmen, while twirling their pointy black moustaches and snickering maliciously, overthrew a Chilean "President" (Salvador Allende) somewhere on the order of Jimmy Carter. Then they lined up 3000 harmless sociology professors and innocent leftist parliamentarians and shot them, for the sheer heck of it.
The real story, as you might imagine, is a tad more complicated—despite the media/academia Black Legend regarding Chile.
Upon Stalin's death in 1953, Chilean Communists held a "Homage to Stalin" in Santiago's Baquedano theatre where Salvador Allende could hardly contain himself: "Stalin was a banner of creativity, of humanism and an edifying picture of peace and heroism!" he gushed while choking back the tears. "Everything he did, he did in service of the people. Our father Stalin has died but in remembering his example our affection for him will cause our arms to grow strong towards building a grand tomorrow-- to insure a future in memory of his grand example!" *
After assuming power in 1970 (with roughly the same percentage of votes that Hitler garnered in Germany in 1933), the Allende regime's true colors soon manifested. In January 1971, Allende's minister Carlos Altamirano boasted: "We're following the example of the Cuban Revolution and counting on the support of her militant internationalism....represented by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Armed conflict in continental terms remains as relevant today as ever!"
"Hear me loud and clear!" Salvador Allende himself boasted the following month. "We will employ revolutionary violence!"
This was more than an idle boast by Allende. Among the myriad unreported aspects of the Chilean coup were the dozens of "guerrilla" schools being set up throughout Chile by Soviet bloc agents shortly before that coup. Marxist death squads were also roaming Chile, murdering "bourgeois elements" with impunity or with the tacit support of the regime. When Salvador Allende visited Moscow in December 1972, his longest meetings was with Boris Ponomariev, the Kremlin's head of "Irregular Warfare" for the Western Hemisphere.
By 1973, 60 percent of Chile's arable land had been confiscated by the government, often with the aid of these death squads. Rolando Matus and Jacinto Huilipan were among the many farmers who protested Allende's "Agrarian Reform" and wound up kidnapped and murdered.
"In the final analysis only armed conflict will decide who is the victor!" added Allende's governmental ally, Oscar Guillermo Garreton. "Without the complete destruction of the bourgeois character of the state we cannot march on the path of Socialism! The class struggle always entails armed conflict. Understand me, the global strategy is always accomplished through arms!"
Allende's deputy Economic Minister, Sergio Ramos, didn't mince words either: "It's evident," he proclaimed in mid-1973, "that the transition to socialism will first require a dictatorship of the proletariat." "We have no choice," declared Chilean Communist Volodia Teitelboim, "but to act with resolution and a civil war is not a careful affair. It draws targets on both the political and the apolitical." His Communist comrade Luis Corvolan followed up with: "We have never considered the path of the Chilean Revolution to be exclusively an electoral one."
By the time of Pinochet's coup an estimated 31,000 Cuban, Soviet Bloc and Communist operatives infested Chile, including Castro's top terrorist spymasters, Antonio De La Guardia and his (nominal) boss Manuel "Barbarroja" Pineiro. Among the hundreds of Soviet personnel were KGB luminaries, Viktor Efremov, Vasili Stepanov and Nikolai Kotchanov.
The Chilean military had kept scrupulously to their barracks through several leftist -- Democratic Socialist -- regimes. But they recognized Allende's regime as a completely different animal. Pinochet himself, while serving as an instructor at Chile's military academy, had specialized in "geopolitics." What Brezhnev, Castro and their Chilean proxies had lined up for his nation must have struck him as obvious. In light of the proceedings in Poland's Katyn Forest in 1940 and those in Cuba's La Cabana prison in 1959, the prospects for the Chilean military must have struck him as equally obvious.
While conservative pundits have been lauding post-Allende Chile's free-market economic reforms and what in time became a scrupulously democratic government and the freest, most prosperous economy in Latin America, there's been much hand-wringing by these same pundits about the brutal advance work that made it all possible.
From a cushy media pulpit in 2006, this is all too easy. But in September of 1973 Pinochet's men weren't out to score debating points on some fatuous think-thank panel or to win applause on some asinine chat show. They knew their nation was looking up the locked and loaded muzzle of a Stalinist takeover. So they marched into the Chilean OK Corral loaded for (Soviet) Bear. That they managed the messy business with just 3,000 dead, including all collateral damage, will amaze anyone fully informed of what they went up against.
In 1973, Chilean Communists and their Soviet and Castroite proxies were no more inclined to surrender power than Iraqi Baathists are today. The cost of persuading them to do so, as we learn daily in the news, can be onerous--collateral damage and all.
It is comforting to believe that placing daisies into the muzzles of the arms that the Soviets and Castro were pouring into Chile at the time would have persuaded Chile's Marxist death squads and the tens of thousands of foreign communists and terrorists to take up Swedish Socialism and hold hands in a circle while chanting the Beatles' "All You Need is Love." But 20th Centruy history teaches that Communists are extremely jealous of their power and privilege and extremely pitiless against those who would challenge it, or even question it. The millions who wound up in mass graves and Gulags offer stark and ready proof.
From Pilsudski's victory over Communists in Poland to Horthy's in Hungary to Franco's in Spain, history also teaches that when Communists get even a small taste of their own medicine their moaning and whinning and sniveling becomes a worldwide cause celebre. The current anti-Pinochet media orgy shows that nothing has changed.
*(All above quotes and incidents are fully documented in La Agresion Del Oso; Intervencion Sovietica y Cubana en Chile by Gonzalo Rojas Sanches, a Fullbright Scholar and visiting professor at Notre Dame who heads the History Department at Chile's Catholic University.)
Human nature is what it is, and it (sometimes) ain't pretty.
I don't care what anybody says, Pinochet was a hero.
Good info.
Thanks for the post.
Very good piece. Thanks for posting.
Well said - thanks.
We may have an analogous situation developing with Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Who will support the opposition there?
I learned something from this article. I didn't know Allende and his crew had made such calls to violence. Still, I have questions.
How many of the 3000+ suffered death after a trial, without a trial, or during armed resistance? How many more suffered torture? What were the criteria for torture or execution?
Why kill any enemy once you have them under control?
How many got killed by mistake, or for reasons of personal feud?
Did Pinochet steal millions, indicating a character different from "liberator"?
Pinochet was a hero who defeated communism. Your whining can't change that.
Fontova bump!
BTTT
I learned something from this article. I didn't know Allende and his crew had made such calls to violence.You've got so, so much to learn.
Chile was a Cold War battlefield. Period.
The failed battles over communism in Asia cost 100,000+ American lives and millions of Asian lives. And you want to complain about Pinochet's Swiss accounts?
Just bloody measure the destruction of communism against the very worst Pinochet did, and he's an angel in comparison. He was a very, very useful weapon against the spread of mankind's most deadly political virus, communism.
BTTT
Exact details are sketchy and many of the anecdotal accounts of deaths that were reported by the commission that looked into the deaths came from highly suspect sources. For example, somewhere on the order of 400 out of 2,300 recognized deaths were members of the MIR - a marxist terror cell that specialized in car bombs and bank robberies.
What they did report though is interesting. 101 of the "victims" were shot attempting to escape from prison. 59 were convicted in military tribunals and sentenced to death. 93 were killed in "protests" (read: marxist thugs hurling rocks at Pinochet's troops). 90 were killed by private vigilante citizens. 39 were killed in gun battles with the police or military. 815 were allegedly executed in captivity. All of these people were deemed "victims of human rights abuses" by the pro-socialist commission that investigated them, even though many were clearly not (i.e. marxist thugs who were killed attacking the police) and some weren't even done by the Pinochet regime (i.e. the vigilantes).
Another thing to note - over half of the "victims" died during the coup and its 3 month aftermath in 1973.
Why kill any enemy once you have them under control?
Mostly because it was much more complicated than simply arresting them. Some of the "victims" died during the fighting of the coup, and in later gun battles with the police. Many of the "victims" were arrested first and ordered to leave Chile and never return, or else they would be executed. Pinochet followed through on his promise, and as late as the early 1980's they were still capturing marxist guerilla fighters in the jungles who turned out to be ex-Allendist officials who had returned from exile to agitate.
The stats suggest relatively few. Over half of the "victims" came from the three largest marxist political and terrorist organizations. There were dozens of smaller marxist guerilla groups that Pinochet put down on top of that. Only 7 "victims" came from the mainstream left political party, the CDP.
Great post
I don't think ANY leader, "dictator" or otherwise, is so shortsighted as to turn his back on leftist enemies. Whether they are defeated or not, they remain your chief problem and endanger any attempts you make to change your system- which Chile, arguably, desperately needed.
I really don't care if they were tried or tortured- the only good leftist is a dead one.
Nice run-down- Thanks.
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