Here is an interesting article about Chile
-- -- -- excerpt from "Who killed Latin democracy" -- -- --
The harsh truth is that without Salvador Allende there would have been no Pinochet. The former was elected in 1970 with a bare plurality - slightly more than a third of the popular vote. Only Chile's firm tradition of recognizing the winner in its first-past-the-post electoral system assured his inauguration. Even so, to win the votes of Christian Democrats in Congress, he was forced to agree to a Statute of Democratic Guarantees that obliged him to recognize such liberties as freedom of the press and unfettered access to the electronic media.
Allende was a likeable man -- but remarkably ignorant, fatuous and weak. He thought of himself as both a democrat and a Marxist, and professed to see no particular contradiction between the two. Unfortunately, within his own government coalition (four parties, two of them formally Marxist), the lines were far more sharply drawn. Ironically, the Communists were the moderates of the piece, since they were carrying water for Moscow, which had other fish to fry in more central theatres of political conflict. (The great concern of the Soviets in Chile -- apart from not wanting to pay for another Cuba -- was not to scare off Christian Democrats and Socialists in Western Europe who might be toying with similar coalitions in the future). Allende's Socialists -- a somewhat sui generis party made up of social democrats, anarchists and Trotskyites -- were far closer ideologically to Fidel Castro's Cuba, which, by the way, maintained a remarkably outsized diplomatic and military mission in Santiago, and also the principal source of illegal weaponry that poured into Chile during these years. Intoxicated by their own rhetoric and ideology, and also deluded by the apparent proximity of total power, the Socialists and their allies on the farthest left (the so-called MIR) were impatient to move to a final confrontation with the "bourgeoisie".
During 1972 and 1973 they actively took the initiative, seizing factories and farms, far exceeding the government's own program of reform and forcing the president to recognize their audacious strokes as faits accomplis. Unfortunately, the nationalized sector of the economy lost money so quickly that the only way to pay its workers was to print unbacked currency in massive quantities; the result was a hyperinflation hitherto unknown to Chile -- 600% in 1973. In the countryside, improvised expropriations -- some of the farms rather smaller than those marked for division by the existing agrarian reform law -- polarized opinion, produced a mini-civil war and greatly dislocated the provision of food to Chile's cities. The result was drastic shortages and a flourishing black market.
Meanwhile, the pell-mell expropriations of factories and the intentional bankrupting of large enterprises had another consequence, one not entirely unwelcome to the Allende government -- independent newspapers and radio stations lost a principal source of financing (advertising). Indeed, it is an inconvenient but incontrovertible fact that Chile would have had no independent press at all in the last days of the regime were it not for clandestine financing by the hated CIA.
Economic chaos and political polarization propelled Chile's middle class, many of whose members had voted for Allende in 1970, toward the right. The result was a new political coalition between Christian Democrats and Conservatives that obtained 56% in the March, 1973, parliamentary by-elections -- a decisive vote against the government but short of the two-thirds needed to impeach Allende. What the new congress could do, however, was to declare the regime "outside the law", which it surely was. At the same time, many members of the opposition were knocking on the doors of the barracks, virtually imploring the military to break the political stalemate.
As it happens, I was in Chile in August, 1973, which is to say, about 30 days before Allende's fall. A coup of some sort was almost universally expected, though no one was quite certain what form it would take or in what direction it would move. For his part, President Allende, from the very beginning, had assiduously courted the high command. He had invited several generals into his cabinet during 1972 and again in 1973. He even managed to seduce politically General Carlos Prats, the commander-in-chief of the army. A "left wing" military government was by no means unimaginable; one already existed in near-by Peru (with economic policies which were remarkably similar to those of Allende), another in Bolivia. Across the Andes in Argentina General Juan Peron was about to return to power with leftist support.
What many of us failed to see was that General Prats was increasingly isolated from his own officers, who shared the concerns and anger of the middle class. A little more than a week before the coup, he was forced to retire, replaced by his chief of staff, General Augusto Pinochet. On the day of the coup, the new army commander was a personality virtually unknown to all but a handful of Chileans. Small wonder that no one saw what was coming. Most Christian Democrats imagined that after a brief interlude, new elections would be called in which Allende's predecessor, Eduardo Frei Montalva, the former president, would be the inevitable victor. Instead, all politics came to an end, and many politicians, labour leaders, and intellectuals ended up in prison or exile. More than a thousand ended up in graves whose precise location remains to be revealed. Even General Prats, Pinochet's closest professional friend, failed to take the full measure of his successor. Permitted to emigrate to Argentina, he and his wife were murdered there a year after the coup, apparently on orders from Pinochet himself.
