No Buts: Pinochet Was a Tyrant

By Luis Eduardo Barrueto

With the September 11, 1973, coup orchestrated by a Chilean military junta, Salvador Allende’s Marxist administration wasn’t the only thing to disappear. With it went Chile’s long tradition of democracy.

Once in power, the regime banned all political activities and cracked down on dissenting voices, particularly during the first months following Allende’s death. Army chief Augusto Pinochet rose to supreme power within a year.

Chile’s National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture estimates that over 40,000 people fell victim to the ensuing dictatorship, 3,000 of which — at the very least — died or disappeared. In addition, around 200,000 Chileans left their country between 1973 and 1990, forced to seek political asylum abroad.

Pinochet defenders usually evoke the free-market policies implemented during his administration as his main redeeming strength.

Allende had indeed brought Chile to the brink of economic collapse and ignited nationwide political conflict, but the military’s only goal was to terminate with the Marxist government, not to inaugurate a liberal experiment.

The free-market reforms that made the later “Chilean miracle” possible were never among Pinochet nor the junta’s goals. Instead, their usual preference was for economic nationalism and a planned economy.

It was only in an attempt to legitimize his excesses with a good track record of economic progress that Pinochet gave in and let the “Chicago Boys” bring their brand of free-market capitalism to the opposite end of the hemisphere.

Not only was a dictatorship unnecessary to put those reforms in place — the rest of Latin America headed in that direction under democratic governments — but they also proved insufficient to secure economic progress for Chile.

The nation lacked the legitimacy needed to attract significant foreign backing. It was only the return to democracy that led to an investment boom, in turn reducing poverty and turning the country into an example heralded throughout the region today.

Pinochet was forced to step down because Chileans realized that economic freedom is insufficient without political freedom.

Those who call themselves advocates for a free society should know better than to defend him by now.