costareeker wrote:
MM3 wrote:
Pinochet's coup was neither desired or supported by the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_ ... hile_(1973–1990)
Wikipedia has a different story.
CostaReeker
Wikipedia is a useful resource if (1) you are up-to-speed on a subject and need a quick memory refresh and (2) the article wasn't edited / written to promulgate a certain perspective.
Pinochet is a boogieman to the progressives (there's another name I normally use) and Allende is their martyred hero. The objective fact truth, like the truth about the 1948 Costa Rican 'civil war' and the hero-founder of the Second Republic José María Hipólito Figueres Ferrer (Figueres) and the Calderonistas (President Teodoro Picado Michalski), is far more complex.
And people remold these figures (especially Figueres) to meet their popular ideology. For example, Figueres is cast as a leftist progressive and the Calderonistas as fascists - when it was Figueres that had US support because he cast himself as the anti-communist because the Costa Rican communist party* supported Calderon and Picado. And Figueres' "revolution" resurrected and cemented the power of the oligarchs.
And so it is with Pinochet. Yes, the US wanted Allende gone. Having another Cuba in South America was not seen as a good thing. And yes, the US supported Allende's opposition (Jorge Alessandri) in the 1970 election. But the Nixon Administration never sanctioned Chile and the CIA was unaware of the coup until just before it kicked off.
Most apologists for Allende ignore the fact that Chile's Supreme Court had unanimously found the Allende government had violated the legality of the nation by ignoring the courts and the extrajudical actions of Allende's secret police. This was a constitutional crisis.
Pinochet, who had been hand-picked by Allende because he was non-political, was devoted to the ideal of Chile's institutions. To Pinochet, as a patriot, he could not allow the conversion of the Chilean constitutional order into a communist dictatorship (which is where Chileans saw Allende going, as did Cuba and the USSR).
Even Wikipedia, quoting and
paraphrasing the Church Report (and the Church Committee is another bag of agenda worms) says:
Quote:
Although CIA did not instigate the coup that ended Allende's government on 11 September 1973, it was aware of coup-plotting by the military, had ongoing intelligence collection relationships with some plotters, and—because CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970—probably appeared to condone it.
The report stated that the CIA "actively supported the military Junta after the overthrow of Allende but did not assist Pinochet to assume the Presidency."
As to whether Pinochet was the savior of Chile or not, he voluntarily left power and pragmatically instituted economic and legal reforms to unfuck the country. And his free market economic reforms were pragmatic, because, like 99% of Latin American leaders, Pinochet had always been somewhat of a 'center left' guy by South American standards.
And if you really deep dive into Figueres, the Costa Rican election of 1948, and the "civil war' or "revolution", you discover that Figueres set out to deliberately destabilize Costa Rica through actual political terrorism (assassinations, car bombs, instigated riots, etc.) to bring about a civil war / revolution that he'd been plotting and stockpiling arms for since the early '40s and that his supporters ("Democratic Action" made up of oligarchs) wanted to undo Calderon's reforms (the CCSS, the national university, and so on) because they viscerally hated that Calderon had done these reforms instead of them!
*At this time the Costa RIcan communist party was actually estranged from Moscow as Manuel Mora basically told Stalin to take a piss and was 'independent'. The party supported Picado's government because they saw Figueres and his oligarchical supporters as trying to return the poor to their pre-Calderon position of political peonage, which is what happened. Just because Costa Rica is a socialist democracy doesn't mean it isn't an oligarchy run for the exclusive benefit of a few powerful families.
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