Fifty years ago today (yesterday in the Americas), Chile’s Marxist president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup that ushered in the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, which lasted until 1990.
Last week, discussing the recent coup in Gabon, I remarked that “the lack of genuine democracy is an essential part of the background” to such events, while pointing out that this did not justify military rule and that “Even where military intervention is justified, there is a serious risk of it being prolonged unnecessarily.” Chile was not quite the sort of example I had in mind, but it’s not far off.
As readers may be sick of hearing, the trouble started with a bad electoral system. Allende won 36.6% of the vote at the 1970 presidential election, as against 35.3% for the conservative and 28.1% for the centrist. There was no second round; instead the constitution at the time required the congress to choose between the top two vote-getters, with a convention that they would choose the plurality winner. With the support of the centrist Christian Democrats, Allende was duly chosen and inaugurated.
He then proceeded to govern as if he had a popular mandate for his socialist program, and Chile soon descended into constitutional chaos. Covert intervention by the United States – which feared socialism and was none too enthusiastic about democracy – made things worse, but the main problems were domestic. In March 1973 the opposition alliance (now including the Christian Democrats as well as the right) won a clear majority in congressional elections with 55.5% of the vote, although they failed to win the two-thirds majority that would have been required for impeachment.
With president and legislature at loggerheads and the economy in free-fall, it was no great surprise when the military (backed by the CIA) stepped in. And if military intervention came with a guarantee that it would be strictly temporary and be followed by a return to constitutional order, this would certainly be an arguable occasion for it. Of course it doesn’t: generals who get a taste of power are reluctant to give it up.
Yet we should be able to hold two things in mind simultaneously: both that a military takeover is a great evil, and that the misgovernment that provoked it is not blameless. To stress the latter point in the face of a dictatorship that tortured and killed thousands would be morally blind, but it should not be allowed to slip from view entirely.
It often does. Andy Beckett in the Guardian, for example, sees Allende as “attempt[ing] to create a socialist country with plentiful consumer pleasures and modern technology,” and goes no further than to concede that his “government’s popularity [was] never overwhelming.” The fact that socialism was never going to bring plenty (as it never has), and that the majority of Chileans seemed to recognise this, has quite passed him by.
And in Chile itself, when a centre-right senator, Manuel José Ossandón, remarks that “there would have been no Pinochet if there had been no Allende,” he is stating a simple truth – albeit one that needs to be placed in context. And the response from government spokeswoman Camila Vallejo, that “you can’t lay the responsibility of the coup on Allende when it was Augusto Pinochet who carried it out,” is also entirely correct.
Victim-balming is never a good look; if your friend has just been mugged, it’s at best insensitive to tell them that walking alone across the park at night was a bad idea, even if that’s true. The primary blame rests with the mugger. But walking across the park, although pragmatically unwise, is morally innocent; the same cannot be said for Allende’s misgovernment, or for Ali Bongo’s authoritarianism in Gabon.
We don’t like moral complexity; we prefer a simple tale of heroes and villains. But the world often fails to oblige.
(For more, you can read my thoughts here from ten years ago on the fortieth anniversary, with more emphasis on the Chilean perspective.)
The World is Not Enough 
I can’t find anything in this post (or in the one from ten years ago) about any specific government actions (whether assessed as good or bad) by either the Salvador Allende government or the Augusto Pinochet government. Is it safe to assume a general familiarity with (what you consider to be) the misdeeds of either?
For what it’s worth, I think I can make a pretty good guess at what you would consider (and I would agree) to be the misdeeds of the post-coup government, but not so for the pre-coup government. Am I unusual in this respect?
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Allende never had majority popular support. In the 1970 presidential election he polled 36% of the vote in what was then a one-round system, to the Nationalist’s 35% and the Christian Democrat’s 28%. The leftist parties never had a majority in the Congress. At the March 1973 congressional elections, the right-wing parties won by 57% to 42%.
Despite this, radical leftists began seizing land and property. The Communists, having read their Lenin, warned that it was not possible to expropriate the bourgeoisie or the landowners without first gaining control of the state, but the left-wing of the Socialist Party and the ultra-leftists of MIR behaved as though they had already carried through the revolution. The September coup was thus both inevitable and widely predicted.
None of that is true today and I will be surprised if the left repeats the left-adventurist errors of 1970-73.
But even if they do, there will be no support from Washington for a coup.
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I don’t know whether this is supposed to be a response to my question about what the government did. If this is a reference to the government seizing land and property, then that’s not enough information to tell whether it was good or bad: sometimes governments seize property and it’s a bad thing, sometimes governments seize property and it’s a good thing.
Something can be inevitable, widely predicted, and also an indefensible atrocity.
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Most of those in the then Australian Labour Party who were expelled for opposing the incredibly stupid adoption of the Socialist Objective in 1905 did not live long enough to see the outcome of Russia’s “redistributive plan in which the economic bases of the society were to be changed,” but they might well have predicted that it would end as it did – in a regime more despotic than that of the Tsars and the eventual economic and social ruination of a great country.
This in practice has been what “socialism” has meant wherever it has been seriously attempted. the unreconstructed inside – and outside – our party (Such as Lee Rhiannon – she and her parents giving aid and comfort to a known and declared enemy of their country (the Eastern bloc) is objectively treason if anyone cares – and Lee never giving up those beliefs prove that nits make lice) have quietly forgotten the second part: “Cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community.” It was to be several decades before the Australian labour movement, even its socialist wing, could break with the doctrine of White Australia.
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True or false, none of this has any relevance to the coup in Chile.
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You seemed to be defending Allende’s socialism. Like Arbenz, 19 years earlier, he had a very misguided view of how he could go in being able to upset Washington. The Soviets were willing to protect Cuba but even they were not suicidal enough to try to protect South American socialists.
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I don’t know what could possibly have given you that impression, as I didn’t even mention socialism.
I don’t know enough to comment one way or the other on whether that is true, but even if it’s true, it tells nothing about what his government actually did (whether assessed as bad or as good).
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