As the world remembers the brutal coup against Salvador Allende in Chile 50 years ago today, Gavin O’Toole considers its complex legacies
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the bloody military coup in Chile that ousted the democratically elected leftwing president Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet as the country’s illegitimate leader. Pinochet’s 17-year rule was characterised by extreme repression: thousands of Chileans were detained, tortured, and killed, leaving enduring scars on the country’s politics and society. It is hard to believe but it was only last month that the government, under the new president Gabriel Boric, assumed leadership of the search for the 1,162 victims of the junta who have still not been accounted for—a role that had hitherto been left to victims’ relatives. The trauma that the coup visited upon this small South American country that at the time had a population of just 10 million has been the obvious focus of scholarship and remembrance. But the legacy of the 1973 coup can be felt far beyond Chile for a host of reasons that made this singular event one of global significance.
Here, I offer a few bullet points by which we can unpick this legacy and why what happened 50 years ago is still of such importance.
Political legacies of the coup
In Chile itself, the coup dismantled democratic institutions, suspended the constitution, and dissolved political parties. It also emasculated a vibrant, progressive left and confined it to the margins of politics for a generation. Pinochet rounded up opponents, social activists and students in Santiago’s national stadium and other detention centres: 30,000 were tortured and more than 2,200 were executed. Most of Allende’s staff were executed in the early days after the coup. Fear born of this repression discouraged all forms of political activism and nurtured a culture of silence. While democracy returned to Chile in 1990, it was severely limited by an in-built rightwing bias and fear on the left, which took years to regain its political voice.
One result has been a need for the left to forge broad coalitions in order to effect structural change—a problem, ironically, that was at the heart of the Allende government’s weakness. Another result has been the build-up of severe social tensions over decades that help to explain the scale of the 2019 social uprising in which millions of Chileans took to the streets in revolt against endemic inequality. It is no exaggeration to say that what happened in 2019 was a direct legacy of what happened in 1973.
The 1980 constitution imposed by Pinochet’s government concentrated power in the executive branch and was a blatant mechanism to favour right-wing parties and marginalise the left. While it has been amended, and the left has revived, the country has still not replaced this charter, whose many critics argue that it continues to hinder Chile’s ability to address social inequalities. Following the 2019 revolt, efforts began to rewrite the constitution in order to expand citizenship rights—yet these have so far failed to bear fruit, and the far-right shows signs of sabotaging them.
The international left was split asunder about the causes of the 1973 coup. Attention focused on mistakes by Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, and many argued that a peaceful road to socialism was, self-evidently, doomed, and social democratic constitutionalism was the only way forward. Chilean communists generally accepted that a key failure of Allende’s government was its inability to woo the middle-classes into a revolutionary project, but they also argued that this revolution was never given a chance to flourish. In Chile itself, a shrunken core of urban guerrillas persisted to mount a violent challenge to the military, but with little effect.
On the right, Pinochet led the coordination of fellow military-run governments in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to eliminate leftwing cadres and social activists through Operation Condor, a transnational strategy that enjoyed active US support in the name of fighting communism. Washington’s support for Pinochet in its Cold War search for anti-communist allies greatly tarnished the image of the US in Latin America and raised serious doubts about its commitment to democracy. This stark contradiction between America’s professed ideological obligation to democracy and its role in backing authoritarian regimes everywhere in the name of anti-communism would become the central critique of US foreign policy on the left. Moreover, the support for Pinochet from Washington and other Western governments during the Cold War would prolong efforts to bring about democratic change throughout Latin America more broadly.
Elsewhere, Pinochet was admired on the right as something of a role model. While Margaret Thatcher was one of the most notable acolytes of the Chilean general—regarding him as a personal friend—it must not be forgotten that in the Britain of the late 1970s an empowered far-right talked openly about a coup and, some evidence suggests, may have even plotted one.
Another key international outcome of the 1973 coup that would have important political ramifications was the establishment of a broad and influential solidarity network supporting the victims of repression in the country. The coup became a rallying point for leftwing activists and organisations globally and protests and demonstrations took place in many countries. This international solidarity would play critically important role in raising awareness about human rights abuses in Chile itself. More significantly, it is fair to say the coup undoubtedly gave considerable impulse to the growth in human rights consciousness internationally, providing common cause and even a shared language for transnational activists across diverse backgrounds. Amnesty International’s 1973 investigative mission, for example, set the terms of global debate about human rights in Chile and beyond. In a similar vein, when Pinochet was eventually arrested for his crimes in October 1998 in London, the case set important precedents in international law, paving the way for the establishment of the International Criminal Court. Pinochet, of course, was never held to account for his crimes: he was returned to Chile where he was indicted and charged, but died in December 2006 without ever having been convicted. Nonetheless, the Chilean experience has inspired other social movements in Latin America to persevere in their quest for justice.
Economic legacies of the coup
There has been extensive attention to the aftermath of the coup in terms of the economic policies pursued under Pinochet, namely as the first coherent national experiment in neoliberalism inspired by the ideology of the Chicago School of thinkers. Milton Friedman and other Chicago economists trained many of the dictatorship’s ultra-free-market advisers, who became known as the “Chicago Boys”, a moniker that would be used elsewhere for advocates of a new species of unregulated capitalism. Indeed, the very term neoliberalism was coined in Latin America. Their positions represented an explicit challenge to the preferred vision of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) of a strong state, protectionism, and “inward” development that prioritised industrialisation to overcome underdevelopment.
The Pinochet reforms during the 1970s and 1980s in essence boiled down to a comprehensive effort to roll back the economic role of the state through tough monetary and fiscal policies (i.e., limited state expenditure), privatisation and deregulation, the reduction of trade barriers, and the encouragement of foreign investment.
The complex story of outcomes has never generated a consensus.
Fans of Pinochet’s reforms were by the 1990s, when the language of neoliberalism had been assumed globally, hailing Chile’s “economic miracle”. It is without doubt that economic growth was exceptional compared with the rest of Latin America when viewed over a long period. Yet a closer look at the policy setbacks during the 17-year dictatorship offers only ambivalent signs of success for apologists: the initial experiment in extreme monetarism was by 1982 deemed to have failed, GDP grew at a generally lower rate than under previous governments, inflation remained stubbornly high, unemployment was at record levels, and public spending on education and health fell. By 1997, after democratisation, the boom was turning to stagnation with slow growth in per capita income, persistent unemployment, and export growth in the doldrums. Indeed, if the miracle happened at all it was later, during democracy, when the foundations imposed on Chile by force—economic liberalisation, promotion of private investment, and autonomy for the Central Bank—could be complemented by free trade agreements and tax increases to finance social spending.
The unequivocal outcome of neoliberalism in Chile is much more uncomfortable for its champions, and it is one of growing social inequality and poverty. Chile may enjoy a relatively high GDP per capita of $25,000 on paper, but the reality is that 50 per cent of its workers earn less than $6,500 per year. It is one of the most unequal countries in the world, comparable with the Central African Republic and Mozambique. A small number of fabulously wealthy families dominate the economy in cahoots with international finance.
Moreover, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which some of the Pinochet dictatorship’s policies were, in fact, neoliberal at all. It is probably fair to say that despite the hype of free market disciple, Chile’s economic performance has been mixed, with its successes owing as much to state intervention than to the market’s so-called “invisible hand”. Very few sectors did not owe their existence and, ultimately survival, to state intervention of some kind, even if this was disguised by rhetoric.
The most important legacy of Chile’s experiment has arguably been not only in the country itself and relates to how neoliberalism became the “common-sense” position of reforming politicians everywhere. In Chile, such was the hegemonic grip of neoliberalism, that no government until now has broken in any meaningful way with what is known locally simply as “el modelo”. All eyes are now on Boric, who said during his victory speech in 2021: “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it would also be its grave. We no longer will permit the poor to keep paying the price of Chile’s inequality.” Elsewhere, neoliberal ideas have profoundly reshaped postwar states, not least in the UK where even the left under Tony Blair and his contemporary incarnation in Keir Starmer continue to swallow the hype.
One reason for this might reside in memories of the 1970s. Any detailed observation about the economic policies that were embraced by Pinochet has to be put in its Cold War context: the main enemy of Western capitalism at that time was the growing power of organised labour, and a plausible argument is that neoliberal reform was an experiment by global capital in curbing this. The main target of the Chicago Boys, the military dictatorship and Chile’s business class was not state intervention but organised labour. Unions were vigorous and powerful in every sector, something the 1973 coup unceremoniously ended. Such an experiment, could, clearly never be conducted fully in a democracy. If anything, the Chilean coup was a triumph of anti-communist hysteria both in the United States and Latin America itself. This antipathy to the organised working classes helps to explain Margaret Thatcher’s admiration for Pinochet at a time when the UK was also buckling under divisive industrial relations. Thatcher restored Chile’s export credits and dropped an arms embargo on Pinochet’s regime, and a trail of slathering Conservative ministers visited Chile to laud its progress.
Social legacies of the coup
Finally, and in conclusion, the social legacies of the coup can be assessed in terms of the political and economic factors we have already discussed, and they amount mostly to a tale of many divisions: a divided society both victimised and seduced by the fascist right; a divided left unable to address its errors or heal its many fractures; classes divided by extreme wealth and poverty; international opinion divided by the stains bequeathed by past flirtations with a murderous regime; political actors still deeply divided over the threat to democracy that the far-right continues to pose; and a population divided over the best way forward to seek accountability and closure for victims of a collective trauma.
What is without doubt about these divisions is that they hold up a mirror for us all—for this tragic story does not just tell us about Chile, but about ourselves.
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Categories: Chile, North America, South America, United States