Chile

"The persistence into the twentieth century of a specific institutional pattern inimical to growth in Mexico and Latin America is well illustrated by the fact that, just as in the nineteenth century, the pattern generated economic stagnation and political instability, civil wars and coups, as groups struggled for the benefits of power. Díaz finally lost power to revolutionary forces in 1910. The Mexican Revolution was followed by others in Bolivia in 1952, Cuba in 1959, and Nicaragua in 1979. Meanwhile, sustained civil wars raged in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru. Expropriation or the threat of expropriation of assets continued apace, with mass agrarian reforms (or attempted reforms) in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela. Revolutions, expropriations, and political instability came along with military governments and various types of dictatorships. Though there was also a gradual drift toward greater political rights, it was only in the 1990s that most Latin American countries became democracies, and even then they remain mired in instability."

"This instability was accompanied by mass repression and murder. The 1991 National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report in Chile determined that 2,279 persons were killed for political reasons during the Pinochet dictatorship between 1973 and 1990. Possibly 50,000 were imprisoned and tortured, and hundreds of thousands of people were fired from their jobs. The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification Report in 1999 identified a total of 42,275 named victims, though others have claimed that as many as 200,000 were murdered in Guatemala between 1962 and 1996, 70,000 during the regime of General Efrain Ríos Montt, who was able to commit these crimes with such impunity that he could run for president in 2003; fortunately he did not win. The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in Argentina put the number of people murdered by the military there at 9,000 persons from 1976 to 1983, although it noted that the actual number could be higher. (Estimates by human rights organizations usually place it at 30,000.)"

"Those shops are popular, and there is a lot of anti-Semitism in Chile, very strong, especially in the South which became a refuge for Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, so these images of Hitler are on sale and people buy them."

"The political future of Chile is a democracy, without a doubt."

"Every time I felt the need to recover my country, I read Neruda because he is Chile, he is the voice of Chile. It is a beautiful metaphor that he died following the military coup. With his death, the voice of the people and the voice of freedom grew silent."

"I come before the United Nations General Assembly as the first woman to be elected President of Chile. A country that has learned from its history. We Chileans lived through difficult times; the Assembly knows this. The learning curve was difficult, but fertile. From pain, hope was born. Major dissent gave way to major consensus. I come from a country where today the rule of law prevails, where the rights of persons are respected and promoted. A democracy that is experiencing economic growth and that in the past 16 years has helped millions of Chileans out of poverty. Chile is integrated with its neighbors and in the region looking at the world. My presence before this Assembly is symbolic of this Chile; the Chile that is unafraid to look back at the past and united in building its own future. We can say with pride that today, Chile is more free and more fair. As a society we have granted the basic dignity and respect that every citizen deserves."

"Nothing justifies the violation of human rights. Chile rejects impunity. I assure you all of our commitment and enthusiasm in the initiatives designed to promote human rights and democracy. We therefore welcome the launching of the United Nations Democracy Fund and the creation of the Human Rights Council. We especially value the adoption by consensus of the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Forced Disappearance. The promotion of human rights does not contradict the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of States. Chile has been and will be on the front line of the diplomatic trenches in the defense of human rights."

"If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave. Do not be afraid of the youth changing this country... We are a generation that emerged in public life demanding our rights be respected as rights and not treated like consumer goods or a business... We no longer will permit that the poor keep paying the price of Chile's inequality."

"Since I was a child I've been hearing the word de-centralization, and I agree that one of the impediments for Chile's development is the excessive centralization we have, and it is the job, a new president to address firmly the issue....Let me tell you that patronage, cronyism and quotas are definitively over."

"As I say, we have all seen photographs of the stone figures, the moai; the pictures show single statues and groups of three or four, but I discovered that there are hundreds: the island [Easter Island] is strewn with them."

"For a start, who were they, these long-dead hewers of stone? Did they come from Polynesia on the west, or South America on the east? Or both? No one knows. And when? The experts offer dates from the 7th century to the 16th, a more than ample leeway. No one knows. But the further we go into the mystery, the darker becomes our ignorance. What were the statues? Were they gods to be worshipped? Or tutelary deities? Or a strange form of lares et penates? Or monuments to their ancestors? Or stylized portraits of historic figures? Or art? No one knows. And when they were finally standing on their massive pedestals, what rituals, what ceremonies, what offerings did the islanders provide? No one knows. Boards, inscribed with an ideographic script, have been found, and there are beautiful and elaborate petroglyphs strewn about the island; scholars have pored over them for decades, trying to decipher the signs and thus learn the language. What did those people want to say to us? No one knows."

"When I look back... I am embarrassed by the sense of superiority I often felt...I could not discuss my private meetings with men like Torrijos, or the things I knew about the ways we were manipulating countries on every continent.... When we talked about the power of the little guys, I had to exercise a great deal of restraint. I knew what none of them could possibly know, that the corporatocracy, its band of EHMs [economic hitmen), and the jackals waiting in the background would never allow the little guys to gain control. I only had to draw upon the examples of Arbenz and Mossadegh — and more recently, upon the 1973 CIA overthrow of Chile's democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. In fact, I understood that the stranglehold of global empire was growing stronger, despite OPEC — or, as I suspected at the time but did not confirm until later, with OPEC's help."

"In Chile, a CIA-supported coup helped put Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power from 1973 to 1990."

"The nation is trying to make Chile a country of proprietors, not of proletarians."

"We practically wiped this nation clean of Marxists."

"I have lived with my conscience and my own memories for over quarter of a century since the events of 1973.… These are not easy reflections for me. But I am at peace with myself, and with the Chilean people, about what happened. I am clear in my mind that the return to Chile of true democracy, and from that the true freedom to which all individual people are entitled, could not have been achieved without the removal of the Marxist government."

"I want equal marriage rights for Chile"

"By right or might."

"How pure, Chile, is your blue sky"

"Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on the 11th of September 1973, General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup. “Chile should not be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible,” said Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Laureate, then the U.S. Secretary of State... Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico and Colombia – they’ve all been the playground for covert – and overt – operations by the CIA. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed, tortured or have simply disappeared under the despotic regimes that were propped up in their countries."

"Ten years ago, Gabriel Boric was a 25 year-old student protester... leading tens of thousands of young people through the streets of Santiago. As head of a major student union, he shook Chile’s establishment by leading rallies that brought reforms to Chile’s privatized education system. Today... Boric is within striking distance of Chile’s presidency. Chile’s Dec. 19 election, where Boric holds a narrow lead, is the most high-stakes moment yet in a tumultuous two year national debate over the market-centered economic model established by military dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s. With deregulated business and privatized public services and natural resources, the system helped make Chile a haven for foreign investors and one of the richest countries in South America. But it has also generated the highest rate of inequality in the OECD group of developed nations and untenable living costs for poorer Chileans, with six in ten households earning too little to cover monthly expenses..."

"Starting in October 2019, hundreds of thousands of people participated in months of anti-government protests—a so-called “social explosion” — which culminated in a national vote in 2020 to rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution. If elected, Boric, who has spent the past seven years as a congressman arguing for the ideals expressed in the social explosion, promises to kill off the old model for good. A Boric - led leftwing coalition would hike taxes on major industries, ramp up public spending to overhaul services, and scrap the private pension system that has underpinned Chile’s capital markets. “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave,” he told a rally in July after winning the primary for leftist bloc Approve Dignity."

"At last. The specter of Pinochet is removed from Chile... Congratulations to fellow Progressive International member Gabriel Boric... The hard work to redistribute wealth in Chile begins now."

"Socialist Gabriel Boric's victory in Chile's high-stakes presidential election Sunday was hailed by progressives worldwide as an inspiring example of how a democratic groundswell can overcome deeply entrenched forces of reaction and chart a path toward a more just, equal, and sustainable future. Riding a massive wave of anger at Chile's neoliberal political establishment and the economic inequities it has perpetuated... Boric, who ran on the promise to undo the lingering vestiges of Pinochet's regime, will become the youngest president in Chile's history when he takes office in March.... Boric, who has vowed to cancel student debt, impose higher taxes on the wealthy, oppose environmentally destructive mining initiatives, and scrap Chile's private pension system—another leftover from the Pinochet regime."

"As had been the case during Nixon's last years in office, the nation again faced the question of whether the United States should, or even could, maintain separate standards in fighting the Cold War from what it was prepared to accept at home. Events in Chile posed the dilemma most clearly. A successful military coup had finally taken place in Santiago in September, 1973. It left Allende dead—probably by suicide—and a reliably anti-communist government in power headed by General Augusto Pinochet. Direct C.I.A. complicity was never established, but Nixon and Kissinger openly welcomed the outcome and sought to cooperate with the new Chilean leader. By the time the C.I.A. investigations got under way in 1975, however, Pinochet's government had imprisoned, tortured, and executed thousands of Allende supporters—some of them American citizens. Chile, for many years a democracy, now had one of the most repressive dictatorships Latin America had ever seen. What the United States did in Chile differed little from what it had done, two decades earlier, in Iran and Guatemala. But the 1970s were not the 1950s: once the information got out that the Nixon administration had tried to keep Allende from the office to which he had been elected and had sought to remove him once there, "plausible denial" became impossible. That made questions about responsibility unavoidable. Could Allende have remained in power if there had been no American campaign against him? Would he have retained democratic procedures had he done so? Should the United States have refrained, to the extent that it did, from condemning Pinochet's abuses? Had it made a greater effort, might it have stopped them? There are, even today, no clear answers: Washington's role in Chile's horrors remains a hotly contested issue among both historians of these events and participants in them. What was clear at the time, though, was that the C.I.A.'s license to operate without constraints had produced actions in Chile that, by its own admission, failed the "daylight" test. They could not be justified when exposed to public view."

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

"At midday on September 11, 1973, after months of mounting tensions in the streets of Santiago, Chile, British-made Hawker Hunter jets swooped overhead, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the neoclassical presidential palace in the center of the city. As the bombs continued to fall, La Moneda burned. President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier at the head of a leftist coalition, was barricaded inside. During his term, Chile had been wracked by social unrest, economic crisis, and political paralysis. Allende had said he would not leave his post until he had finished his job—but now the moment of truth had arrived. Under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s armed forces were seizing control of the country. Early in the morning on that fateful day, Allende offered defiant words on a national radio broadcast, hoping that his 8 many supporters would take to the streets in defense of democracy. But the resistance never materialized. The military police who guarded the palace had abandoned him; his broadcast was met with silence. Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was Chilean democracy. This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Democracies in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion. But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps."

"Chile had known class struggle within a bourgeois democratic framework for many decades: that was its tradition. With the coming to the presidency of Allende, the conservative forces progressively turned class struggle into class war — and here too, it is worth stressing that it was the conservative forces which turned the one into the other."

"1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,000 available, more if necessary; full-time job — best men we have; game plan; make the economy scream; 48 hours for plan of action."

"The United States... supported authoritarian regimes throughout Central and South America during and after the Cold War in defense of its economic and political interests. In tiny Guatemala, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted a coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1954, and it backed subsequent rightwing governments against small leftist rebel groups for four decades. Roughly 200,000 civilians died. In Chile, a CIA-supported coup helped put Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power from 1973 to 1990. In Peru, a fragile democratic government is still unraveling the agency's role in a decade of support for the now-deposed and disgraced president, Alberto K. Fujimori, and his disreputable spy chief, Vladimiro L. Montesinos."

"The armed forces have acted today solely from the patriotic inspiration of saving the country from the tremendous chaos into which it was being plunged by the Marxist government of Salvador Allende.… The Junta will maintain judicial power and consultantship of the Comptroller. The Chambers will remain in recess until further orders. That is all."

"For ever gaze they at the sea and sky, For ever hear the thunder of the main, For ever watch the ages die away; And ever round them rings the phantom cry Of some lost race that died in human pain, Looking toward heaven, yet seeing no more than they."

"The statues remained quiescent, the natives did not."

"Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase."