Augusto Pinochet saved Chile from the certain fate of a communist dictartoship similar to Cuba's, which was the model that Salvador Allende was following. The Left makes a great deal of Allende being democratically elected, but they forget that Adolph Hitler was also democratically elected. It's what happens after you get elected that determines your democratic credentials not the way you come to power.
On that balance, Allende was a dictator taking Chile down the Cuban communist totalitarian model. Fidel Castro himself went to Chile and stayed there for a month after Allende's election to instruct him in the techniques of communist repression. He left thousands of "advisors" behind when he left.
I don't think the ideology of Allende is in dispute though what may have happened is of course by definition hypothetical. It's also irrelevent in the context of what Pinochet did or didn't do, saying he was the lesser of two evils is not an argument or an excuse for his actions.
Pinochet willingly gave up power and turned Chile into a democracy and made way for an elected government after he stabilized the country and the economy. Today, Chile has a gross domestic product of $11,596 per capita, that's 4 times as much as Cuba, which has a gross domestic per capita income of only $3,441. (
http://www.mrdowling.com/800nations.html). Pinochet was in power 17 years, Castro has been in power nearly 50.
Well, yes technically, but only because it was mandated by the constitution and he was voted out. He didn't just wake up one day and announce that for the good of Chile he would step down. Again the comparison to cuba. Well in the economic arena Germany did rather well out of Hitler in the 1930's are you suggesting he was just misunderstood and was actually a nice chap?
I think that all this is merely a craven attempt to deflect from the realities of almost two decades of political repression by using economic arguments. Thre reason is clear, that's all you have because that's all there is, and even those are tenuous claims.
The first 10 years was an almost total economic disaster, the boom of the mid to late 80s was worldwide, the Junta largely rode it's coat tails and gambled on this fooling the people into voting Pinochet in for another eight years. The gamble didn't pay off. Does this very simple fact; that despite (in your view) that such glorious economic prosperity was still not enough to buy off 56% of Chileans? He had their blood on his hands. Can you not see that?
Much is made by the Left about the $3,000 people that died during those 17 years, which comes to 176 people per year. And these were leftists fighting the government with every trick in the communist arsenal to get back the power they lost. Yes, sometimes you have to crack some eggs to make an omelette. Compare this to the millions who died of famine in N. Korea, the tens of thousands executed by Castro and two million Cubans--out of a population of 10 million--that had to escape the island. The list of atrocities by communist regimes like Allende's is too long for this space. Three-thousand people was tea time for Pol Pot and Stalin. And for all those deaths the communists had nothing to show for it, they left their countries more miserable than when they took power.
Such a fascile statement barely merits a response. Yes, as has been said in the context of Lefties Stalin and Pol Pot. Let's not forget Hitler who is notably absent in your league table of mass killers, presumably as a fellow right winger? Pinochet was little league, I said that already. Yes I know you mentioned Hitler in another context.
This isn't a critical analysis of ideology which is what you're trying to make it (Fasicsm v Communism), they're both as bad as each other, this is about what Pinochet did or didn't do, not the ideology behind his actions.
"Yes, sometimes you have to crack some eggs to make an omelette.". Very astute. The thing about breaking eggs; it's irreversible.
The international Left will never forgive Pinochet for snatching Chile from their claws, but in the final analisys, Pinochet accomplished everything he set out to do and he died with his family at his side in the best military hospital in Chile at the age of 91. Sixty-thousand people walked past his body lying in repose in the Great Hall of the Military Academy where the Cardinal Archbishop of Santiago officiated Mass. Yes, he had the last laugh, and the Left will continue to seethe in impotence for it.
I don't really know what that's meant to say? The international left? Who are they then?
If Pinochet intended to brutally kill thousands, intended to blight the lives of thousands more, intended to bring the country to the brink of collapse then intended to die reviled by the majority of his countrymen and much of the world, then I'd say he did. If that
wasn't his intention then I'd say he failed, quite spectacularly.