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 concord was evanescent: Allende's ruthless extra-constitutional tactics (e.g...
...the military acted to "save the Constitution" in response to the Congressional resolution and to the revolutionary machinations and rhetoric of the Left...
...the foreign demons "blockaded" credit to the happy realm of Allende and fomented domestic discord...
...Only the World Bank could be accused of slightly aberrant behavior...
...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...
...Please don't inquire for someone else, or if you can't entertain the possibility of this being your thing for life...
...where civil courts and constitutional protections do not extend to political prisoners...
...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...
...The honesty to publish a truly balanced view of post-Allende Chile would be a step in the right direction...
...in Chile today...
...and (4) a mildly interesting "Firing Line" interview with Ambassador Edward Korry, who served in Chile from 1970 through 1971...
...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...
...The contents vere variously described as works of art a- mango ice cream...
...It's easy to collect scholarly and respectable analysis hostile to Allende...
...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...
...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...
...We are instead offered: (1) economic prospectuses delivered before a subcommittee of the Inter-American Committee of the Alliance for Progress...
...The Chilean military was traditionally aloof, by Latin American standards, from the political process...
...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...
...Chile could join Israel and South Africa as the only countries in the world which violate human rights...
...It is true that the CIA supported the truckers' strike and financed opposition newspapers threatened by government intrigue...
...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...
...For a while everything was bread and roses...
...Chile's Coup and After," by Robert Moss (Encounter, March 1974...
...Allende admitted in a 1971 interview with Regis Debray that his commitment to legality was only a temporary "tactic" to assuage bourgeois sensibilities...
...In any case, the lack of credit from these institutions was more than compensated by loans from the socialist bloc and sympathetic Western nations...
...3) outdated testimony by Ernest Lefever and Riorden Roett before the House Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs...
...But the dark forces would not acquiesce...
...The view is not really "balanced," for the book is published by the state-controlled University of Chile...
...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...
...Neither can the failure of Allende's economy be traced to an ideologically inspired credit blockade...
...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...
...Food shortages developed at the end of 1971 because of price controls, counterproductive expropriation, and the general economic decline...
...I am not the President of all the Chileans," the Marxist ominously warned...
...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...
...Care to have a speaker that sets the blood boiling and the mind's wheels turning...
...He presented an exceedingly broad target...
...Liven up your next meeting with one of the following: Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...But the Unidad Popular received slightly less than half the vote in the municipal elections, and its popularity declined thereafter...
...The Christian Democrats began to move into opposition, for constitutional reasons, in mid-1971, and the economy started to disintegrate quickly in mid-1972...
...Perhaps it's not so easy for the regime to find "balanced views" which would not be embarrassing to the generals...
...But Allende was compelled to draw the generals into the government to prevent collapse of the Unidad Popular...
...When the crates vere opened after the coup, they werefound to contain enough art and ice cream to arm a small army...
...Latin Americans, as someone observed, are perfectly capable of conducting their own counter-revolutions...
...Allende had disrupted the Chilean republic so greatly that the generals apparently assumed control with widespread popular approbation...
...The peasants often grew disillusioned...
...The Communists were patient and "conservative" revolutionaries...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...This bubble was bound to burst, however...
...By March 1973 the regime had received a billion dollars in long- and short-term loans and credits from various countries...
...Pinochet once offered to release Chilean political prisoners man for man with the release of political prisoners by Russia and China...
...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...
...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...
...We discover that Allende was crippled not so much by reactionary conspirators as by his own tactics and his narrow political base...
...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...
...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...
...First temporary vows, then life vows much later if we're still into it...
...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...
...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...
...Box 10267, El Paso, TX 79993...
...so the Christian Democrats followed constitutional tradition and ratified the plurality in Congress upon securing from Allende a pledge to uphold various constitutional freedoms...
...There are no miracle remedies for a society wasted by triple-digit inflation, capital destruction, grinding debt, and class antagonism...
...middle-class housewives paraded through the streets banging pots in protest...
...Make your next meeting a memorable occasion...
...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...
...the TomiUstas celebrated Allende's victory...
...where torture has occurred, for which there is no excuse...
...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...
...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...
...Care for a Good Old-Fashioned Harangue...
...The pop-left history of the matter runs as follows...
...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...
...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 the country, extreme leftists violently and illegally expropriated land with the acquiescence of the authorities...
...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...
...Another progressive government could be tallied on the roster of victims of American infamy...
...The Radicals split and a faction defected from the coalition...
...The military scotched a renegade coup in June 1973...
...Men of any age...
...Allende's fate was sealed...
...The golpe is best detailed by Robert Moss' contribution...
...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...
...Help me start one...
...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...
...One would have certain difficulties executing consistent policy within this context...
...At one Joint, Allende invoked Presidential impunity to convey _several curious crates rom Cuba past customs...
...The collection, though uneven, includes several excellent articles which have appeared previously—"Allende in Retrospect," by Paul Sigmund (Problems of Communism, May-June 1974...
...A. Lawrence Chickering Christopher DeMuth Leslie Lenkowsky Peter J. Rusthoven Benjamin Stein R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The Christian Democrats had waged a leftist campaign under the banner of Radomiro Tomi...
...But the generals will require more than black humor to defend their conduct before intelligent and respectable critics in the world community...
...By the end of 1971, production had increased by over 10 percent and unemployment had fallen to 3.8 percent...
...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...
...On the left flank Senator Carlos Altamirano and the violent MlRistas declared bourgeois democracy a sham and demanded immediate revolution...
...But it was not the CIA that brought down the Allende regime...
...Allende's own Socialists were fire-eaters...
...The last third of the book, which deals principally with Chile after Allende, is extremely disappointing...
...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...
...Very clever...
...but neither is it unadulterated propaganda...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
