THE LATEST CHILEAN MYTH: Far from a friend to the United States, Michelle Bachelet is the latest in a long line of far left leaders in the tradition of Castro and Chavez.
Whelan, James R.
The Latest Chilean Myth The Latest Chilean Myth THERE IS AN OLD ADAGE IN STATECRAFT which instructs that the height of stupidity is the inability to distinguish between friend and foe....
...Although baptized in a Catholic church (at the insistence of a staunchly Catholic paternal grandmother), Michelle—like her parents—has been a lifelong agnostic...
...The party no longer either preaches or practices violence, MAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25 THE LAST CHILEAN MYTH but Michelle Bachelet continues to identify strongly with those for whom revolutionary violence was a way of life...
...Though he had suffered a massive heart attack in 1968 that very nearly killed him—after playing basketball— he insisted on doing the same thing while in prison, despite medical advice to the contrary...
...Briefly, who is this person we are talking about...
...She undoubtedly is smart—she graduated (in 1983) from Chile’s leading medical school, later specializing in pediatrics and public health medicine...
...Her closest friends and advisers all come out of the hard left of Chilean politics...
...They even managed to hornswoggle into their minuet old Daddy Warbucks himself, Donald Rumsfeld, a few weeks before he was sent packing...
...Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile represented one of the most difficult periods in that nation’s history,” the statement said...
...Her father, long left-leaning, strongly backed the MarxistLeninist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973), and was up to his epaulets in subversive scheming...
...Ever since girlhood, she has been an admirer of Fidel Castro, the longest-serving dictator in the history of the hemisphere (and the only totalitarian dictator...
...He has reported on the country since 1958, and served 1992-1995 as visiting professor at the University of Chile...
...She frequently fudges in the stories she tells...
...They gave us much material support...
...We commend the people of Chile for building a society based on freedom, the rule of law, and respect for human rights...
...The problem, he said, is that Bachelet came to the presidency “without clear ideas, or welldefined programs, nor qualified people...
...There are four or five keys to understanding Michelle Bachelet: • She is a hardcore, lifelong socialist, but a brand of socialism which, during the years in which she was growing up in the party, had nothing in common with the parliamentary socialists of Europe and far more in common with the murderous Maoists of China...
...Gravitating to the Soviet orbit was, in fact, doing what came naturally for a woman who, from her earliest days, was immersed in propaganda portraying the U.S...
...Inasmuch as she also claims to be a champion of human rights, her support for the hemisphere’s worst abuser of human rights requires fancy footwork...
...After their release Michelle decided to leave the country, traveling with her mother to Australia, where Beto awaited them...
...Contrast the White House’s fawning over far left gun-slingers and bomb-throwers with the judgment of Margaret Thatcher...
...She had prepped for that job: She graduated at the top of her class in 1996 from Chile’s National Academy of Political and Strategic Studies...
...Her father was an air force general, and in 19621963, he was assigned to Washington...
...She was abroad much of the time last year when Chile suffered the worst outbreak of public disturbances in three decades—a strike of 600,000 high school students, aided and abetted by former terrorists and Communists...
...Although in neither post did she distinguish herself, in the second in particular she did attract media atten tion, including a famous photo where she posed aboard a half-track...
...Bill Clinton, gladhanding around Santiago a year ago, described Bachelet as a “particularly well-qualified candidate, because of her experience...
...She herself was heavily involved with the radical wing of her party—a wing so radical, to quote two puffpiece biographers, “it had no real problem with the policies of the armed wing of the Communist Party...
...That entitled her to a one-year scholarship at the U.S...
...The nincompoop who wrote those lines obviously had overdosed on leftist propaganda...
...Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families...
...Bachelet later let on that she liked the actress—but not the program...
...There, she was again deeply involved in the party’s conspiratorial, underground activities...
...Until her Christian Democrat partners gave her a tough ultimatum, she leaned toward throwing Chile’s support behind Hugo Chavez in the Venezuelan’s highpowered campaign last fall for the Latin American seat on the UN Security Council...
...Some of that venom was bound to stick...
...Free-market policies transformed Chile into the most successful economy in Latin America...
...Sebastian Piñera, leader of the opposition, called Bachelet’s first year “a comedy of errors, omissions and improvisations...
...She was forced recently to jettison that idea in re-shaping her cabinet to meet the transit crisis...
...and all it stood for...
...Pinochet, she said, has been reviled and vilified by the international left not for anything he had done, but because he stopped cold Communist expansionism into Latin America...
...Let’s lay it on the line: Michelle Bachelet is not a friend of the United States...
...Fully half those surveyed BY JAMES R. WHELAN 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007 Far from a friend to the United States, Michelle Bachelet is the latest in a long line of far left leaders in the tradition of Castro and Chavez...
...as evil and predatory, and who spent years in terrorist organizations dedicated to hating the U.S...
...ASITIS, THE CHILEAN ECONOMY SLID in 2006, its growth rate falling from 5.7 percent in 2005 to 4 percent...
...in 2001, at age 54...
...That, despite sky-high prices for Chile’s principal export product, copper...
...Bachelet did not mention that at that same time, life for East Germans was very hard—for those who escaped prison or death...
...Until President Ricardo Lagos plucked her from virtual anonymity in 2000, naming her his minister of health, she had never held a significant job...
...Until 1995, when she was elected a member of the party’s Central Committee, at no time was she ever given an executive post of any kind (in other words, taken seriously...
...In surveys of business leaders, confidence in her declined for four straight months, reaching a record low midway through her first year...
...His only son, Alberto, died of a heart attack in the U.S...
...Many, many other “Red” refugees—discovering the harsh reality of Communism—bailed out from the Iron Curtain countries...
...JRW Pinochet’s Legacy 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2007 JAMES R. WHELAN likes to say that she resumed the medical studies interrupted by the 1973 revolution in Chile, but in point of fact, what she did was start (but not finish) a Germanlanguage course that was a prerequisite to medical school...
...But friend...
...Michelle Bachelet is, since March 11, 2006, the first woman president of Chile: In a recent Barometer of Governability in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal, Bachelet topped the list of 15 presidents, polling an 87 percent approval rating of her performance...
...Though forced to back off, Bachelet continues to make plain her affection for Chavez...
...Indeed, her very leftist mother, Angela, in another interview, was candid enough to observe that the Chilean revolutionaries in general fared better there than ordinary Germans...
...She also married a would-be revolutionary like herself, and gave birth to the first of her three children...
...Not surprisingly, Bachelet has wowed the Beautiful People...
...So it is, too, with her international outlook...
...There is not a scrap of evidence to support such tomfoolery...
...Superficial: From the time in 1970 when she joined the Young Socialists, Michelle was a “gopher,” delivering messages, writing manifestoes, running errands, even at one point, serving as “bag-man”: delivering money from the Socialist high command to the very embattled terrorists of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR...
...But then the White House itself came out of the closet and, in a mind-boggling statement, proclaimed its fealty to Chile’s Socialist government on the occasion of the death of former President Augusto Pinochet...
...By early March, support for her had fallen from 65.3 percent to 47.5 percent...
...She was held for two weeks, later insinuating that she was tortured...
...For those of us who left Chile during difficult times, there we were welcomed and supported...
...Indeed, Bachelet insisted on a cabinet evenly divided between men and women—whatever their qualifications...
...Yet, no one—in the U.S...
...50.8 percent) said her government was less than what they had expected...
...He presently lives in Santiago...
...MAY 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27...
...Michelle evidently had no such qualms...
...Indeed, in 1977, she traveled—obviously on party business—to Vietnam, a fact she let drop during her official visit to Hanoi for the Asian-Pacific Cooperation conference in November 2006...
...I thanked her,” Bachelet said, “because while I was in East Germany, I had the chance to work in a hospital and study and form a family...
...Her mother, arrested with her, was held a month, and later said she was not tortured, but submitted to a brutalizing “softening-up” procedure...
...There is, in fact, no doubt that many other countries would have welcomed her—Canada, Sweden, Spain, France—as they did thousands of other Chilean revolutionaries...
...The White House celebrated the event by issuing a gratuitously offensive statement commending Chile for establishing a free society...
...While it may be true that his 17year rule was a difficult period in the nation’s history, it was so largely because of the need to root out well-armed and well-trained national and foreign left-wing terrorists...
...government, in the media, in other governments, in public affairs in general—ever speaks ill of Michelle Bachelet, as though to do so would be like spitting on the sidewalk or blowing smoke in someone’s face—simply not done, old top...
...In her only other try for public office before winning election as president last year, she ran for the city council of a suburban community in 1995 and won all of 2.35 percent of the vote...
...She continued as an underground operative when she returned to Chile in 1979, moving in for a time with a high official of the Communist-sponsored, Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) terrorist organization...
...On a scale of one to seven, her government got a poor 3.9 rating...
...VERÓNICA MICHELLE BACHELET made her debut in this world on September 29, 1951, after only seven months in her mother Angela’s womb...
...Angela toughed it out in Germany for only two years, before leaping at an opportunity in Washington...
...Chile, when Pinochet and the three other armed forces commanders intervened to rescue their devastated country in 1973, was on the verge of becoming another Cuban-style Soviet satellite state...
...What, then, are we to think of the White House of George W. Bush and the State Department of Condoleezza Rice, as they and their minions fawn and fuss over the Chilean president, Michelle Bachelet, as though she were some sort of Tony Blair in drag...
...No wonder...
...Later, in 2002, he named her his defense minister—first woman in Chile or Latin America ever to hold that job...
...But, then, she chose to live in East Germany—the ugliest of the Soviet satellite states—and has never been heard to utter a single criticism of that ghastly regime—nor, for that matter, of the savage North Vietnamese regime...
...When Pinochet lost a plebiscite in 1988 on his continuation in office, he voluntarily stepped down and turned over the presidency to civilian rule...
...James R. Whelan’sbooks include Out of the Ashes: Life, Death and Transfiguration of Democracy in Chile, 1833-1988...
...That would lead to her arrest...
...But she is neither brilliant nor a strong leader...
...That second massive attack did kill him...
...True, she is not a declared enemy of the United States...
...In part this may be because there is so little there, there—there is much more form than substance about Michelle Bachelet, much more appearance than reality...
...One wonders what experience Clinton had in mind...
...As indicated, the party waited 25 years before naming her to a leadership role...
...When Allende was ousted in the 1973 coup, General Bachelet was one of two air force generals (along with a passel of lower officers and enlisted men) arrested and tried for treason...
...run Inter-American Defense College at Ft...
...More recently, the government implanted a new public transportation system—a total and unmitigated disaster...
...By contrast, though she never met the longtime dictator of East Germany— Erich Honecker, who lived in Chile the last two years (1992-1994) of his ghoulish life—she did meet his widow...
...She came to the presidency with strong public support...
...He died in prison before coming to trial...
...The White House observed no such nicety...
...There, at a Prince George’s grammar school, she mastered English...
...It was also the most fruitful period in the nation’s history, taking a country that was in a state of collapse thanks to the MarxistLeninist government which Pinochet and his military colleagues ousted, and converting Chile into the most envied country in South America...
...president in the now-discontinued TV series, Commander in Chief...
...McNair in Washington, D.C., along with 46 civilian and military officers from around the Americas...
...On her first visit to Washington last year, Hillary Clinton gave a party in her honor, with a host of glitterati in attendance (including the actress who plays the U.S...
...To begin with, when someone dies, it is customary to express condolences to the family of the deceased...
...Chavez has, of course, made U.S.-bashing the centerpiece of his oil-funded international style...
...So, too, do her predilections: She recently sent shock-waves through the economy when she wondered aloud whether maybe the time had not come to “humanize” the market economy model that has made this country the envy of all of Latin America—indeed, of much of the world...
...After only a few months there, at the behest of a boyfriend, Michelle traveled to East Germany, joined by her mother shortly afterwards...
...It needs be remembered—although she waffles on this, as she does on so many other subjects—that Michelle did not have to live there...
...Nor a commanding presence: How could she be when she measures a mere 5 feet 2 inches—and is decidedly pudgy (indeed, a former finance minister raised her dander when he referred to her as “my fatso...
...The other two would be born out of wedlock in Chile, one of them fathered by a right-wing doctor...
...She continued in that “gopher” role during the four years she spent in East Germany, the nerve center of rebellion for Chile’s far-left parties...
...She weighed but 3.9 pounds, but then she was lucky: Her mother had lost four babies before giving birth to Michelle (though she had managed to bring into the world a son, Alberto—Beto...
...Humanize,” in socialist parlance, means enlarge the role of the state, and shrink that of the private sector...
...As for that society based on freedom and the rule of law, obviously the White House flak didn’t know that the constitution still in force in Chile was methodically and carefully crafted by the military government, as were the basic laws flowing from it...
...See sidebar on page 26...
...Increasingly, questions are being raised about her ability to govern, her competence...
...She has a first-class economic team, and mainly defers to them, but in general has a reputation for leaning far more on her palace inner sanctum, a group that features two hard-core women Communists, bypassing her cabinet...
...There is some real question as to how much of a leader, period, she is...
...The Latest Chilean Myth The Latest Chilean Myth THERE IS AN OLD ADAGE IN STATECRAFT which instructs that the height of stupidity is the inability to distinguish between friend and foe...
...She had already settled in Australia, and Belgium had also offered her a visa...
...While in the outskirts of Berlin, she AUGUSTO PINOCHET DIED last December 10...
Vol. 40 • May 2007 • No. 4
