Reflecting on the 40th anniversary of the Chilean coup, David Heap reminds us (Four decades later, coup in Chile offers lessons, Sept. 5) “historical memory matters.”
After 40 years of silence, the association of Chilean judges has asked for public forgiveness for their “failure to protect the fundamental rights and protect those who were victims of state abuse.”
Between 1973-79, Pinochet’s dictatorship killed 3,095 people and “disappeared” another 1,000, according to Chile’s Turth and Justice Commission. The government has amended this figure by recognizing an additional 9,800 victims, bringing the total of those who were killed, tortured or imprisoned for political reasons to 40,018.
Forty years after the coup, Chileans are being forced to remember. The dictatorship confabulated a “fictitious cold war Chilean style” with civilian allies, support from the United States and, as a recently document from the papal nuncio at the time reveals, the approval of the Vatican. The country’s “return to democracy” was legitimized by an illegal constitution approved in 1980. The neoliberal development model celebrated by many, based on exports of primary commodities, low wages and minimally regulated labour, and characterized as an “oligarchic laissez-faire” by the Financial Times, has generated immense wealth for some and rendered the life of Chile’s majority precarious. It is not by accident that Chile continues to be among the most unequal countries in the world.
The Wall Street Journal wishes Egypt its own Pinochet.
As a Canadian, and member of a Chilean-German community that has yet to acknowledge the murderous underside of Hitler’s modernization strategy, I have to wonder why recognizing Hitler’s economic achievements is, rightly, a taboo for those who value human rights and democracy, but justifying the brutality and bloodshed of military dictatorships like Pinochet trips off the tongue so easily. Hernán Larraín, Chilean senator and member of the right-wing party UDI, issued his own apology for ignoring the brutality of the regime, and reminded us that minimizing a dictatorship by calling it a military regime won’t do.
The lesson for all of us is that the moral and ethical standards we uphold for ourselves in the West, should count for everyone; anything else is but an unjustified colonial urge.
Verónica Schild
Political Science professor