The Lessons of Chile

...Five years ago, however, Peru's military, which is largely middle-class or working-class in origin, overthrew Fernando Belaunde Terry, the first genuine democrat ever to become president of that nation, in order to impose socialism...

...Despite its popular appeal throughout the Hemisphere, the accusation And the broader myth that Washington determines who rules thereis baseless...

...He was elected president in September 1970 with only 36 per cent of the vote, and the Leftist parties that united to give him his plurality in that three-man race represented mainly urban workers, intellectuals and students...

...No sooner had the military launched its attack on the Presidential Palace than the Allendistas charged that the United States was financing and masterminding the takeover...

...Companies that failed as a result of these steps were expropriated by the state to prevent unemployment...

...Does it mean that the United States ultimately determines who rules in Latin America...

...At first resigned to the new regime, Chile's middle class eventually responded to this continual economic harassment with strikes and protests...

...The more he fell back upon the Armed Forces for support in the end imploring them to save his tottering regime the more he incited their contempt and aroused their appetite for power...

...What has capitalism ever done for us...

...Once in power, Allende and his intolerant followers did everything they could to antagonize the less radical elements of the population...

...True, they support capitalist states more often than not, but they do so because capitalism works (or seems to work) in developed countries, and also because the officer corps in most underdeveloped countries is allied by caste or economic interest with the oligarchy...

...If, on the other hand, the measures are temporary and the reports exaggerated if, that is, Chilean generals are behaving the way Chilean generals are supposed to behave perhaps one need not begin yet to despair about that nation's future...

...Finally, their patience worn thin, they simply moved in...

...Still, when I was in Santiago two years ago, our government was taking a hands-off position so rigorous that expropriated or threatened American companies were accusing it of everything from indifference and cowardice to outright treason...

...The charge has been made, too, that the United States intervened indirectly, aggravating last year's 300 per cent inflation in Chile by refusing Allende access to loans from various international lending agencies controlled by Washington...

...So where will the generals, led by strongman Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, go from here...

...Chile's Army, like Peru's, is middle-class, and in 1971 anti-Allen-distas complained to me that the Armed Forces were supporting the Socialist regime because capitalist governments had never treated them handsomely...

...No one, of course, can honestly maintain that the Nixon Administration was unhappy about Allende's downfall, or did anything to prevent it...

...And community councils called populares - set up by Allende's Christian Democratic predecessor, Eduardo Frei, to air grievances were transformed into tribunates vecinales, where personal enemies on the Right and in the Center were publicly denounced and eliminated from positions of control in local or state governments...

...Moreover, should the stories coming out of Santiago about mass arrests and executions, house-to-house searches, book burning, xenophobia, and the like prove true, Chile may be in the grip of a military regime as absolutist and efficient as that governing Brazil...

...Certainly, such recent measures as the outlawing of all political parties and the abolition of the nation's largest labor federation are ominous signs...

...Even so, Allende might have survived and effected at least part of his program, had he not openly flouted the Chileans' almost religious devotion to legality and fair play...

...A year before, an abortive military mutiny had been motivated entirely by grievances over pay and pensions...

...Their words were quickly echoed by the Mexican and Cuban governments, and even by Argentina's aging leader, the former fascist dictator Juan Peron...

...Does it indicate that military establishments will always intercede to protect capitalism...

...Perspectives THE LESSONS OF CHILE BY SELDEN RODMAN The violent overthrow of President Salvador Allende Gossens' Marxist government by Chile's Armed Forces raises three significant questions: Does it prove that socialism can never be instituted through democratic procedures...

...By January 1971, the time of my last visit to Chile, a pattern of legal deception had been established throughout the country...

...Allende's case, however, met neither of these conditions...

...In many instances, investigators arrested businessmen for tax offenses, invoking legal technicalities, or they called strikes that resulted in bankruptcies...

...Middle-class citizens were scornfully labeled momios (mummies), bourgeois pigs, jackals of American imperialism, and greedy reactionaries...

...Monuments were erected honoring Che Guevara...

...When, for example, "enraged" campesinos, inspired by far Left groups, "spontaneously" seized farms in the south, the government responded either by taking the land away from the peasants (but not returning it to the original owners), or by issuing strong verbal protests and declining to act...

...Nothing, in fact, would have more surely influenced the Chilean military to refrain from acting than evidence of CIA meddling in its country's affairs...

...Unfortunately, Allende made one of his biggest mistakes by bringing the traditionally nonpolitical military into his government...

...By the time of the coup, the gap that existed between the Allende government and the embattled bourgeoisie had probably become unbridgeable...

...and they seemed quite prepared to accept a change to socialism as long as Allende kept his promise to achieve it by gradual and legal means...

...It supported the National and Christian Democratic parties...

...Elsewhere, officials forced small businesses and factories to run up expenses, yet refused them the authorization to raise prices...

...Non-Marxist newspapers, publishing houses and radio stations had already been brought to heel by similar meansor by the simpler process of withholding paper or broadcasting licenses...

...Selden Rodman's forthcoming books include Tongues of Fallen Angels, which contains a conversation with the late Pablo Neruda, and The Miracle of Haitian Art...

...The new President publicly hobnobbed with Fidel Castro and Regis Debray...

...The middle class was ranged solidly against him (and with the possible exception of Venezuela, Chile has the most affluent and articulate middle class in South America...

...To all three questions the answer is No...

...Gunboat diplomacy,' " said two Latin America experts, "has been replaced by 'credit diplomacy.'" But Castro has survived economic blockades more stringent, primarily with the help of the Soviet Union, and if the USSR did not come to Allende's aid financially, it was in large part because the millions that Moscow has poured into the bottomless pit of economically stagnant Cuba has proved a vast drain of resources, with very little in the way of return...

...Though some observers have suggested that South America's military establishments are unalterably opposed to socialism, this, too, is nonsense...

...There remains the possibility that within the coming year elections will be held, a government headed by Eduardo Frei will be installed, and a second, more decisive, effort will be made to achieve socialism by democratic means...

...No matter how nonpolitical Chile's officers have been in the past, their new taste of power may well have given them an insatiable appetite...

...Chile's generals allegedly were asking...

...Socialism can indeed be achieved through the ballot box, provided that it is favored by a majority of the population and not opposed by a strong middle class...