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Title 50 Years After “The Other 9/11”: Remembering the Chilean Coup Author Ariel Dorfman Original Link https://www.thenation.com/article/world/the-other-9-11-chile-coup/ Date Last Highlighted 17/09/2023 Date Published 11/09/2023 Type article Source reader Generated Summary Ariel Dorfman Some personal reflections on history, memory, and the survival of democracies. The post 50 Years After “the Other 9/11”: Remembering the Chilean Coup appeared first on The Nation.
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Highlights
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how our downfall forced left-wing and progressive forces abroad to rethink their strategy for taking power—particularly in Europe. By early 1974, Enrico Berlinguer, the head of the mighty Italian Communist Party, declared that that the lethal outcome of the Chilean peaceful revolution proved that radical reforms required a vast majority behind them, which meant alliances with the middle classes and their representatives. This analysis was later adopted by the Spanish and French Communist parties, leading to Spain’s transition to democracy after Franco and the socialist François Mitterrand’s tenure as president of France. Others on the left, like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the guerrillas in Colombia, reached the opposite conclusion: Only by engaging in protracted armed struggle could real change be guaranteed.
✏️ The quite divergent lessons that other countries drew from the socialist experiment and outsized coup that happened to Chile.
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shaped American foreign policy. Washington had, under Nixon and Kissinger, destabilized the economy of Chile and conspired to overthrow a legitimately elected head of state, fearful that if Allende succeeded, other nations would follow his stirring example of trying to effect radical transformation through the ballot box. A series of amendments in Congress restricted security and military aid to the Pinochet dictatorship. And then came the bombshell investigation by the Church Committee in 1975 that revealed the dirty tactics of the CIA in Chile and led to laws that disallowed aid to governments with appalling human rights abuses. Public consciousness about the atrocities in Chile was a significant factor in making support for human rights—or at least giving lip service to it—one of the cornerstones of American foreign policy.
✏️ Chile coup and the US involvement in it also shaped future American foreign policy
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turn Chile into a laboratory for neoliberalism: a series of measures that privatized the economy, imposed austerity on an unwilling populace, and trusted an unbridled free market to magically solve all the ills of society. The experiments in Chile were soon exported to other countries like Ronald Reagan’s United States (though Margaret Thatcher came first).
✏️ In what feels to me an incredibly despicable action and personalized punishment, they take a country that was successfully experimenting with socialism and turned it into a testing ground for neoliberalism and rampant capitalism
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We defeated Pinochet and the fear he had instilled in every inhabitant of the country in a 1988 referendum that he was supposed to win, given his overwhelming control of the main levers of the economy, the loyalty of dreaded security forces, and the complaisance of the mainstream media. This victory was possible because we Allendistas were able to recognize and criticize our own shortcomings and mistakes—a key step if we were to forge a wide coalition in favor of democracy, joining together with the Christian Democrats who had opposed our president and had welcomed, however reluctantly, the coup.
✏️ This needs more info and followup. The people managed to overthrow a dictator who had all the levers of power and economy and media in his favor. How?