No Apologies
Train, John
No Apologies BY JOHN TRAIN 0 n July 6, 1973, at 6:30 P.M., a group of prominent citizens called on the president of Chile's Senate, Eduardo Frei, to bewail the country's impending collapse into a...
...The trigger for their actual intervention came when Chile's generals became convinced that they were going to be removed and placed in custody, and far-left substitutes installed...
...The following month Chile's Chamber of Deputies passed a resolution listing violations of the country's constitution by the government of President Salvador Allende...
...It concluded the contrary: compared to spy fiction, the CIA is very controlled indeed...
...Was it worth it to forestall a Marxist takeover, another Cuba or Bulgaria, with the misery that would have entailed for the subject people...
...intervention against Allende too rough...
...Tragically, this problem can only be solved with guns...
...Some people may actually enjoy living in Cuba, although it scarcely has an immigration problem...
...It's not something you boast about, but neither need we apologize...
...Obviously, the ultimate problem in Chile was Allende's foolhardy attempt, with 36 percent of the popular vote, to take Chile down the path of Cuba...
...Frei, listened, head lowered...
...But perhaps another basis is the same one that inspires some of the antiAmericanism in today's world: resentment of success...
...The Chilean success is maddening...
...Was the covert part of the U.S...
...Indeed, it almost didn't...
...Letelier was a former Allende official who became an antiPinochet operative...
...The government would simultaneously grant salary increases to industrial workers and impose price controls on the products...
...Bit by bit they came around to what we would consider a reasonable way to run a country: private enterprise modified by state regulation and intervention...
...Tough luck...
...The United States, of course, deplored any such idea and gave large subsidies to the Christian Democrats and other centrists who resisted him...
...First, one sympathizes with the poor and unfortunate whom Allende was supposed to empower...
...If, however, you like a U.S.-style government, then today's Chile is for you, although it's a pity it had to get there the way it did...
...Ask the Bulgarians, who love us dearly...
...The U.S...
...Either way, though, the United States has little to regret—certainly nothing to justify Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent comment that the Allende coup was "not a part of American history that we are proud of...
...The new military government installed the famous "Chicago boys" free-enterprise economic program, which, with the inevitable missteps, has performed brilliantly...
...For that he had no mandate, and, luckily for everybody except the Soviets, he was stopped...
...And after Allende was elected, there were extensive—and open—restrictions on trade and credit...
...involvement is "absurd...
...But who knows what could have ensued had the military not forestalled full-scale civil war...
...government thought that it all looked very sinister indeed and pitched in heavily with cash and propaganda, overt and covert, to halt the rot...
...One horrible act committed by Gen...
...Was all this too much...
...By some standards, perhaps...
...Thousands of agents were imported from Cuba to help take over the political institutions and the economy...
...Neither I nor Congress nor any civilian can do anything," he responded...
...In 1975, the Church Commission took this subject apart, trying to establish whether the CIA was an uncontrollable "rogue elephant...
...I saw these things...
...Our policy was probably the mildest that could have done the job...
...You almost never hear this line of reasoning from businessmen and diplomats who were there...
...To be sure, as compared to the million dead in the Spanish Civil War, the Rettig Commission in the 1990s set the total fatalities in military-ruled Chile at 2,000, in over seventeen years...
...Iran-contra, misguided although patriotic, was not a CIA operation...
...If you are a socialist, or perhaps a liberal academic, you will say that it's a pity Allende failed...
...The Chilean military viewed this with rising concern...
...I stayed away from Chile during the Pinochet period, but American Ambassador George Landau, who served there from 1977 to 1981, recently wrote, "I saw firsthand how this group of committed free-market economists transformed Chile into a free society, fighting for freedom and individual rights under the most difficult internal and external circumstances...
...Things came out well...
...USIA did this openly...
...On the other hand, it's preferable to armed intervention, as in Iraq, or civil war, a nightmare...
...Washington was furious, and Pinochet dissolved the DINA, whose head later went to jail for seven years...
...To sum up, intervening in the affairs of another country is a ticklish business, even if you're fighting a foreign-supported Communist takeover...
...How well it worked is illustrated by the current center-left administration's decision to let stand the labor and other laws passed by its center-right predecessor...
...And after Chile's Marxist government went, its neighbors one by one threw out what they call their "dinosaur" regimes, devoted to state control, and usually corrupt...
...Land armies" were seizing large farms by the hundreds without legal process...
...when management resisted, the resulting strikes were used as a justification for seizing the whole company...
...And let us not forget that Pinochet stepped down from office when he said he would, unlike any Communist ruler...
...A dictator like Castro can be forgiven because his bloody and costly failure is noble in motive—as seen by the far left—while the conservative evolution of Chile is intolerable because it worked...
...The result was the coup of September 11, 1973...
...But we did not run Allende's ouster: that was the Chilean military's show...
...Pas d'ennemi d gauche...
...Still, one must be troubled by the excesses used in suppressing Marxist or other takeovers...
...Augusto Pinochet's secret service, the DINA, was blowing up Orlando Letelier and his assistant with a car bomb right in Washington, three years after the coup...
...And a massive dose of propaganda was disseminated...
...Why did they have to kill so many people and so ruthlessly...
...No Apologies BY JOHN TRAIN 0 n July 6, 1973, at 6:30 P.M., a group of prominent citizens called on the president of Chile's Senate, Eduardo Frei, to bewail the country's impending collapse into a Cuban-style Marxist dictatorship...
...Indeed today, Chile stands out as the most successful country in all of Central and South America...
...Why did our friends on the left and in academia detest the Pinochet regime so vehemently, compared with similar situations in Argentina and elsewhere...
...I was there...
...He was also the head of the semi-clandestine foreign side of the very far-left Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, and at the same time was on salary from the Soviet-controlled Cuban secret service, the DGI...
...To cite the Economist, to claim that there was a significant U.S...
...He gets credit for that...
...There were contracts with the Chilean military over the years, as with every military in the world, including those that we dislike...
...I advise you to express your fears, which I share, to the leaders of the armed forces...
Vol. 36 • March 2003 • No. 2
