Two dictators, Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet, both brought tremendous suffering upon the Chilean people — one through his socialist policies and nationalization of industry, and the other through systematic campaigns of terror.
Salvador Allende (1908-1973) won the 1970 presidential elections in Chile, though only marginally. Allende’s coalition, Popular Unity (UP), consisting of Socialists and Communists, did not carry a majority, but was the party which had obtained the largest percentage of votes (36.2%).
Allende was one of the founders and leaders of the Socialist Party from 1933 onward and later became its Secretary General. He also served as Member of Chamber of Deputies (1937) and Minister of Health (1938-1942). Allende was strongly in favor of socialized medicine, government-distributed pensions, and gender-based affirmative action. He did not wish to undermine Chile’s constitutional democracy, and sought a “legal” transition to statist rule, which he termed “the Chilean road to Socialism”.
As part of his program, Allende advocated nationalization of major private companies and banks. He further instigated agrarian reforms and worker management of government-controlled firms, a variation of the Marxist “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Allende intensified the paternalistic state reforms begun under the previous Eduardo Frei administration and sought to create a nationalistic Socialist party instead of an international one, oriented toward domestic affairs.
Allende committed suicide or was shot during the September 11, 1973, military coup which overthrew his regime. The suicide scenario is more likely, as validated by numerous CIA sources and encyclopedia entries. The socialist dictator was replaced by a military dictator: Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006).
Pinochet became Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces following the resignation of Allende supporter General Prats in 1972. After the 1973 coup, he was named President of Chile. Pinochet temporarily suspended civil rights, arrested Allende supporters, banned Marxist parties, and imposed strict political censorship. He declared himself dictator in March 1974 and began the denationalization process of the economy.
Pinochet promised “democratic normalcy” through a gradual transition. However, many claim that 3000 Chileans had “disappeared” during his rule, and thousands were imprisoned and tortured for alleged “anti-government” activities. Pinochet called this a period of “repressive pacification” aimed at stabilizing the turmoil, after which the military would relinquish its absolute hold on government.
In 1976 Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean diplomat, Allende supporter, and exiled opposition leader, was assassinated in Washington along with an American colleague. It is likely that Pinochet had commissioned the murder. It was his fascist, police-state advocating Intelligence Chief, Manuel Contreras, who fell out of favor during the exposure of the incident, clearing the political stage for the ascent of free-market reformers opposed to Contreras’s terror policies.
Pinochet drafted a new Constitution in 1981, which called for a plebiscite in 1988 to decide whether he would remain in office. He failed to gain a sufficient quantity of votes and therefore stepped down in 1990 after granting himself lifetime immunity as a Senator and Chief of Staff in the armed forces.
The ex-dictator was arrested in 1998 in London to the order of a Spanish judge who had charged him with “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.” But Pinochet was declared medically unfit to stand trial in January 2000. Five months later, the Chilean Supreme Court stripped him of his immunity. Pinochet died on December 10, 2006.
