From Democracy to Dictatorship in Chile

[AProgressiveThinker]

Watch a short documentary outlining the history of how the Marxist Popular Unity Party of Chile, led by Allende, sought out to and successfully transformed Chile to make wealth distribution more equitable to the working class and to give more economic rights, freedom, and political power to the working class, but ultimately failed because of US imperialism's devastation over democracy in Chile, and decision to back a right-wing military general turned ruthless dictator, Pinochet.

[forest444]

1. A scholarly work - and above all a cautionary tale for our times.

Interestingly, the stock footage used in the first 30 seconds was taken in Buenos Aires, c. 1960 - which is actually fitting since Argentina went through something similar (but much more brutal) from 1976 until 2003.

[AProgressiveThinker]

2. Videla was more brutal?

Interesting, I was not aware that Videla's regime was more brutal than Pinochet's, although I was aware that it was a brutal regime. I guess Pinochet's just seems more brutal since it is more well-known of the infamous right-wing dictatorships in South America and was the laboratory for neo-liberalism before it was implemented on a worldwide scale.

[forest444]

3. Sadly, yes. More brutal - and far more damaging to the economy.

Human rights groups put Chile's death toll under Pinochet at as much as 10,000 (3,200 officially); but Argentina's toll was as much as 30,000 (13,000 officially). The Chilean deaths moreover took place fairly evenly over a 16-year span, while in Argentina's case the killing spree was largely limited to a 3-year period between 1975 (during the last year of Isabel Perón's calamitous right-wing presidency) and 1978. Pressure from the Carter administration helped cause a drastic curtailment of abuses in Argentina by then, and to a lesser extent in Chile.

But there was more to it than the atrocities, as bad as those were: Videla's legacy of "free trade" industrial collapse, wage erosion, and tens of billions in banking fraud and other bad debts burdened Argentina for a whole generation afterward - and far more so than in Chile under Pinochet.

Both countries saw a steep drop in real wages in the early days of their respective dictatorships - but in Argentina's case living standards continued to slide for another 20+ years. Consider also that Chile's GDP actually grew by a fairly decent 3% a year under Pinochet (although with wild fluctuations); but it literally remained flat in Argentina during the same 1973 to 1990 period (a 25% fall in per capita terms - with the predictable consequences: http://articles.latimes.com/1990-11-20/news/mn-4943_1_middle-class).

It certainly didn't help that, on the advice of free-marketeers, Argentina then reacted by selling off its state enterprises (which generated over 40% of GDP) to pirates for the most part, and for worthless Brady Bonds. It was a classic bait-and-switch: the economy recovered at first, but promises of private-sector productivity miracles and massive U.S. investment never materialized, and by 2002 they lost virtually all their earlier gains.

It wasn't until Néstor Kirchner and his widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, repurchased many of those firms and brought labor and social policy back to the forefront that the economy truly began recovering for good. A few mistakes were made (raising taxes on the vindictive agro-export sector in 2008; and shutting down tax cheats and money laundries in 2012 by limiting their access to dollars, which also led to costly reprisals against national coffers).

Even so, just as Chile boomed once Pinochet and his Chicago boys left in 1990, the recovery in living standards in Argentina since 2003 has been truly remarkable (http://buenosairesherald.com/article/194579/argentinas-middle-class-doubled-in-ten-years-us-report-shows).