Chile: The Balanced View
Quist, Terry
Book Review/Terry Quist Exposing Doctor Allende's Quackery • The coup which overthrew the Marxist regime of Salvador Allende in September of 1973 was a lucrative boon for international...
...But Allende was compelled to draw the generals into the government to prevent collapse of the Unidad Popular...
...Latin Americans, as someone observed, are perfectly capable of conducting their own counter-revolutions...
...In any case, the lack of credit from these institutions was more than compensated by loans from the socialist bloc and sympathetic Western nations...
...Chile could join Israel and South Africa as the only countries in the world which violate human rights...
...Allende's fate was sealed...
...At one Joint, Allende invoked Presidential impunity to convey _several curious crates rom Cuba past customs...
...One would have certain difficulties executing consistent policy within this context...
...Allende admitted in a 1971 interview with Regis Debray that his commitment to legality was only a temporary "tactic" to assuage bourgeois sensibilities...
...Although he was indeed "democratically elected," he was elected by a very small plurality over Jorge AlesChile: The Balanced View edited by Francisco Orrego Vicuffa University of Chile sandri, the right-wing National Party candidate...
...Finally, the CIA engineered the September gape with the aid of a handful of Chilean running dogs and their dupes, and Allende shot himself (with a gun which was a gift from Castro) while the golpists assaulted the Presidential palace...
...the illegal seizure of property and business, the flouting of Congressional directives, the attempts to subvert the opposition press) and his incitements to class warfare eventually drove the Christian Democrats into the arms of the party conservatives...
...For a while everything was bread and roses...
...Instead the government intended to create state farms for which the peasant would continue to work much as he had done for the old patron...
...Allende's popularity increased in the first year after his election, as the regime turned on the printing presses and produced a minor economic boom...
...but neither is it unadulterated propaganda...
...as Glab remarks: "Peasants also became rapidly disenchanted with the Unidad Popular's agrarian reform program as they began to realize that the government had no intention of giving them title to the land that they hac: been promised...
...Allende's own Socialists were fire-eaters...
...It's easy to collect scholarly and respectable analysis hostile to Allende...
...Men of any age...
...Baron Von Kannon Dale Vree If your campus, club, business, social, or civic group could use a good speaker, we can find one appropriate for you...
...If Allende could not control the Christian Democrats, neither could he manage the fragile and volatile Unidad Popular,the governing coalition of left-wing and Marxist parties...
...But in August, the Congress passed a resolution condemning Allende's unconstitutional conduct and the admirals discovered a well-documented leftist plot for mutiny in the lower ranks...
...Care to have a speaker that sets the blood boiling and the mind's wheels turning...
...Only the World Bank could be accused of slightly aberrant behavior...
...We discover that Allende was crippled not so much by reactionary conspirators as by his own tactics and his narrow political base...
...Food shortages developed at the end of 1971 because of price controls, counterproductive expropriation, and the general economic decline...
...First temporary vows, then life vows much later if we're still into it...
...The military scotched a renegade coup in June 1973...
...Very clever...
...On the left flank Senator Carlos Altamirano and the violent MlRistas declared bourgeois democracy a sham and demanded immediate revolution...
...Care for a Good Old-Fashioned Harangue...
...The Christian Democrats began to move into opposition, for constitutional reasons, in mid-1971, and the economy started to disintegrate quickly in mid-1972...
...We would weigh against the generals the terror in a society in which people have disappeared without trace in the hands of the dread DINA (the Chilean secret police...
...The "Chicago Boys," the young Chicago-trained economic advisers to the generals, should in fact be congratulated for attempting to create a free market in a nation with a long legacy of statist economics...
...Multilateral lending authorities did restrict or deny credit to the Allende regime, but the loan decisions were demonstrably founded on consistent and standard business judgment...
...A book published more than a year after the coup should have had ample time to contain an intelligent assessment of the first year or so of the military regime, at least if the editor truly wished to encourage a "balanced view" of the generals...
...The Christian Democrats had waged a leftist campaign under the banner of Radomiro Tomi...
...where civil courts and constitutional protections do not extend to political prisoners...
...The honesty to publish a truly balanced view of post-Allende Chile would be a step in the right direction...
...In the other scale we would place the terrible poverty of the squatter-towns, the twenty percent unemployment, the continuing (though decelerating) inflation PROTESTANT BENEDICTINE MONASTERY...
...I am not the President of all the Chileans," the Marxist ominously warned...
...3) outdated testimony by Ernest Lefever and Riorden Roett before the House Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs...
...The pop-left history of the matter runs as follows...
...The contents vere variously described as works of art a- mango ice cream...
...Inflation and money creation reached extravagant levels the following winter, so that by September 1973 consumer prices rose to nine times 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 their level when Allende took office...
...Make your next meeting a memorable occasion...
...He presented an exceedingly broad target...
...and (4) a mildly interesting "Firing Line" interview with Ambassador Edward Korry, who served in Chile from 1970 through 1971...
...Many of these reserves were consumed by food importation rather than capital importation, and indeed Castro was said to have remarked that Chile was undergoing a revolution in consumption rather than a Marxist revolution in production...
...In October 1972 the famous truckers' strike (over threatened nationalization) spread to the professions and paralyzed the economy for nearly a month until the military agreed to enter the cabinet...
...The view is not really "balanced," for the book is published by the state-controlled University of Chile...
...Help me start one...
...It is true that the CIA supported the truckers' strike and financed opposition newspapers threatened by government intrigue...
...For a balanced assessment of the new government, we would place in one scale consideration for the destruction worked upon the Chilean economy by the Unidad Popular...
...The Radicals split and a faction defected from the coalition...
...the military acted to "save the Constitution" in response to the Congressional resolution and to the revolutionary machinations and rhetoric of the Left...
...But the Unidad Popular received slightly less than half the vote in the municipal elections, and its popularity declined thereafter...
...In the cities, the quasi-legal methods used to bypass the legislature and expropriate business incited the Congress to struggle to define limits on government activity...
...The collection, though uneven, includes several excellent articles which have appeared previously—"Allende in Retrospect," by Paul Sigmund (Problems of Communism, May-June 1974...
...Pinochet once offered to release Chilean political prisoners man for man with the release of political prisoners by Russia and China...
...Furthermore, American involvement in Chile was minor when compared with the massive shipment of Cuban and Communist-bloc arms to radials in Chile, or with the direct participation of the Cuban intelligence service, the )GI, in the Allende regime...
...the foreign demons "blockaded" credit to the happy realm of Allende and fomented domestic discord...
...This bubble was bound to burst, however...
...The Communists were patient and "conservative" revolutionaries...
...Perhaps it's not so easy for the regime to find "balanced views" which would not be embarrassing to the generals...
...Allende had disrupted the Chilean republic so greatly that the generals apparently assumed control with widespread popular approbation...
...Another progressive government could be tallied on the roster of victims of American infamy...
...But the generals will require more than black humor to defend their conduct before intelligent and respectable critics in the world community...
...Book Review/Terry Quist Exposing Doctor Allende's Quackery • The coup which overthrew the Marxist regime of Salvador Allende in September of 1973 was a lucrative boon for international myth-makers and domestic intellectualoids...
...Neither can the failure of Allende's economy be traced to an ideologically inspired credit blockade...
...There are no miracle remedies for a society wasted by triple-digit inflation, capital destruction, grinding debt, and class antagonism...
...Foreign reserves declined from a surplus of $343.2 million at the beginning of the regime to a deficit of $605.6 million the month of the coup...
...Liven up your next meeting with one of the following: Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...The golpe is best detailed by Robert Moss' contribution...
...Chile's Coup and After," by Robert Moss (Encounter, March 1974...
...In the country, extreme leftists violently and illegally expropriated land with the acquiescence of the authorities...
...But the dark forces would not acquiesce...
...Chile: The Balanced View presents a compilation of articles calculated to advance the notion that the Allende regime was the victim of political and economic suicide rather than foreign demons...
...in Chile today...
...Please don't inquire for someone else, or if you can't entertain the possibility of this being your thing for life...
...When the crates vere opened after the coup, they werefound to contain enough art and ice cream to arm a small army...
...The last third of the book, which deals principally with Chile after Allende, is extremely disappointing...
...2) a scholarly but largely irrelevant review by the editor, Francisco Orrego Vicuna, of the application of international law to the nationalization of the copper mines...
...A. Lawrence Chickering Christopher DeMuth Leslie Lenkowsky Peter J. Rusthoven Benjamin Stein R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Call or write: The Shore Line Company Post Office Box 553 Bloomington, IN 47401 (812) 334-2761 ['he Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 31...
...By the end of 1971, production had increased by over 10 percent and unemployment had fallen to 3.8 percent...
...Despite the intrigue of sundry dark forces, Allende was democratically elected to office in October of 1970 to lead the nation down the Chilean Road to Socialism...
...The peasants often grew disillusioned...
...so the Christian Democrats followed constitutional tradition and ratified the plurality in Congress upon securing from Allende a pledge to uphold various constitutional freedoms...
...Chile had yet to pay the price for its money creation—at the height of the regime's political popularity, the April 1971 municipal elections, real salaries and wages were up 27 percent, but inflation had only reached 6 percent...
...Box 10267, El Paso, TX 79993...
...Allende had hoped to buy a majority for a national plebiscite to amend the Constitution (he wanted to abolish the existing bicameral Congress and establish a compliant unicameral legislature...
...the TomiUstas celebrated Allende's victory...
...The 'Invisible Blockade' and the Overthrow of Allende," by Paul Sigmund (Foreign Affairs, January 1974);and "The Multilateral Development Banks and the Suspension of Lending to Allende's Chile," by Jonathan Sanford (Congressional Research Service, 1974)—as well as an incisive historical survey of Allende's regime by Edward Glab...
...Chilean officials and their literary spokesmen wrote only a handful of the selections, and most of the accounts are by respected American and British scholars and journalists...
...where torture has occurred, for which there is no excuse...
...We are instead offered: (1) economic prospectuses delivered before a subcommittee of the Inter-American Committee of the Alliance for Progress...
...By March 1973 the regime had received a billion dollars in long- and short-term loans and credits from various countries...
...But concord was evanescent: Allende's ruthless extra-constitutional tactics (e.g...
...But it was not the CIA that brought down the Allende regime...
...middle-class housewives paraded through the streets banging pots in protest...
...The Chilean military was traditionally aloof, by Latin American standards, from the political process...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
