2023-09-10 22:00:00
Half a century ago, a general with a puffed chest and dark glasses broke Chilean democracy in one bloody blow. He had thousands of people tortured, disappeared and executed, but far from unanimous condemnation the figure of Augusto Pinochet has re-emerged strongly in Chile.
The soldier, who died in 2006 without setting foot in prison or on a judicial bench, is the symbol of the ultra-conservative right that dominates the Chilean electoral landscape, when paradoxically the left heir to Salvador Allende, the Marxist president that Pinochet overthrew half a century ago in full Cold War, with the approval of the United States.
“He is the only Western dictator in contemporary history who, 50 years after carrying out a coup d’état, has more than a third of the population in his favor,” says sociologist Marta Lagos, director of the Mori pollster.
Survey 50 years after Pinochet’s coup: 36 percent of Chileans miss the military dictatorship
Indeed, never before has Pinochet been as popular in democracy as he is now: 36% of the population believes that he “liberated Chile from Marxism,” according to the Cerc-Mori pollsters.
A decade ago, Pinochet obtained his lowest support: 18%.
A “statesman”, the lawyer Luis Silva, of the Republican Party and the most voted in May in the election of the council that drafts a new Constitution that, in theory, should replace the one promulgated by the dictatorship (1973-1990), recently called him. ).
Chile will commemorate the 50th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s coup against Salvador Allende
The Republican Party, which controls that council, gained strength amid the nostalgia of the Pinochet supporters and the concern of a majority of Chileans about insecurity (54% consider it the main problem) and the arrival of migrants.
“Never a statesman,” replied President Gabriel Boric37 years old and who was not born when the 1973 coup d’état took place. “He was a dictator, corrupt and a thief,” added the only one of the five post-dictatorship presidents who has publicly condemned him.
On December 10, 2006, Augusto Pinochet died.
Soft transition
On March 11, 1990, Pinochet handed over power after losing a referendum, but remained at the head of the Army for another eight years. He was a “life” senator until 2002, when he resigned.
He died at the age of 91 while under house arrest for three cases of human rights violations and one of embezzlement of public funds.. His 17-year dictatorship left 3,200 victims dead or missing.
The Democratic Concertation, a coalition of center-left parties, governed for 20 years after the end of the dictatorship without ever messing with the figure of Pinochet. That “soft” transition ended up giving him “validity,” explains sociologist Lagos.
“It is not only the reproduction of what is happening in much of the world with a resurgence of the most radical right, but in Chile the center-left governments sinned by omission,” the analyst agrees University of Santiago Marcelo Mella.
Inspired by the free market theory of the ‘Chicago Boys’, Pinochet applied the privatization model under which Chile experienced years of prosperity and economic stability.
Former Concertación minister Jorge Arrate believes that the figure of the dictator has remained in force – with periods of greater or lesser popularity – while “the basic institutions of neoliberalism” were never reformed.
In 2019, popular discontent erupted with massive and often violent protests against the social inequality that Pinochet’s model engendered. The left rose to power with Boric, but lost the referendum on his proposed new Constitution.
After that leftist “drunkenness” came a revaluation of the opposite: Pinochet and “the figure of order” championed by the Republican Party, says historian Patricia Arancibia.
Silence in the classrooms
Pinochet was never tried for the crimes of the dictatorship, so he did not receive unanimous social sanction either. There was not enough time to convict him, says the former president of the Supreme Court between 2010 and 2012, Milton Juica. During the military regime, that court was “completely compatible with the regime“he points out.
Only in 2000 did complaints of kidnappings, rapes, murders and torture begin to be investigated in depth. Some 250 soldiers are imprisoned for human rights violations.
Only this year did the Supreme Court issue final rulings in emblematic cases such as the “Caravan of death” or the murder of the singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, in 1973.
“Many of those who said they would never go to jail began to go”says Juica.
Also in schools they began to talk late about the dictatorship, which school books described as a military government. “There was a silence of almost 20 years,” criticizes History professor Francisco Hevia.
Since 2009 “there was a change and it was realized that it was an authoritarian regime imposed by force,” adds this professor, who was born the year democracy returned to Chile.
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