Issue 226 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published January 1999 Copyright © Socialist Review
As he packed his bags in October 1998 for his stay in a private London hospital, Augusto Pinochet had every reason to feel complacent-- 25 years after the military coup that brought him to power, he was a wealthy man who would never have to face justice for the crimes he had committed. It wasn't as if he had denied them-- in 1995 he told his cheering followers that if he had to do it all again he would not change a single thing. Only one person close to him had ever been brought to trial. Manuel Contreras, head of the secret police (DINA), is his son in law and an intimate adviser-- they met every morning over breakfast throughout his regime.
Over one such breakfast in the early 1980s, they hatched Operation Condor-- a joint programme with the governments of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to pursue opponents and return them to their own country to be tortured and killed. One operation, in Washington, involved blowing up the car in which Orlando Letelier, ex foreign minister of the Allende government, was travelling. This was the only murder committed by Pinochet which the US government actively investigated-- after all, this was their turf and Contreras had broken the rules. Eventually, on US insistence, Contreras was sentenced to seven years imprisonment-- he was immediately transferred to a military hospital by Pinochet, where he was still able to give press conferences. The US's actions told Pinochet that his other crimes would never be discussed.
This same US government late in 1998 'discovered' a series of documents implicating earlier US governments, the CIA and the military in the persecution and murder of left wing Chileans and in the organisation of the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power. I have a pamphlet published by the North American Congress on Latin America in 1973 which contains most of those documents! Pinochet could count on the complicity of the US government which had supported and encouraged the military coup makers well before 1973. They knew well enough how many had been killed, how many tortured. But they kept silent. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was a vigorous exponent of the example set by the Chilean economy, an experiment in a free market economy under ideal conditions-- in which market forces could operate without inhibition or fear of resistance from those who would pay the price of what came to be euphemistically called 'structural adjustment'. It was in that sense that she called him 'a friend to Britain'.
Most importantly, events in Chile itself had given Pinochet every reason to feel secure. In 1988 he organised a plebiscite to win support for his bid to remain in power for a further eight years. A massive campaign to vote no brought together a wide coalition from the Communist and Socialist Parties to the Christian Democrats. It won a majority. The months preceding his eventual departure from the presidency in December 1989 were a period of negotiation and bargaining, but Pinochet was arguing from strength-- his possession of power and control of the armed forces-- and the coalition from weakness.
Internally, there was no agreement on the conditions under which the transition to civilian rule should take place. Its presidential candidate, Patricio Aylwin, was a Christian Democrat who was deeply implicated in the 1973 plot to destroy the Allende government. So the agreement on a no vote concealed bitter internal differences which Pinochet used. The 1980 constitution he had written to protect himself remained intact, guaranteeing that he would remain chief of the armed forces (until 1998) and later be given a lifetime senate seat, adding to the built in majority he already had there-- he retained his right to nominate a third of that chamber directly. His appointees in the army and police would remain in place, the judges he had appointed would not be dismissed, and the 13 percent of the economy under military control would remain intact.
Why did Pinochet surrender so little? The reasons are complex-- but they applied to all the other transfers of power from military to civilian rule that were taking place in Latin America at the time. The military state had not been overthrown by mass action. The leaders of the democratic coalitions were for the most part bourgeois politicians desperate to resume their political careers. The events in Eastern Europe and the collapse of Stalinism had also produced among many organisations of the left a new rhetoric of democracy and compromise. And as the Reagan era ended, the US itself became convinced of the need to leave Latin America to the vagaries of the market and to withdraw from the costly military obligations it had incurred in Central America and elsewhere. The collapse of the Sandinistas was the last act in that drama.
When Aylwin assumed power as president in December 1989, therefore, he had already made a series of crucial concessions to Pinochet. He set out to ensure that Chile's economic growth would not be compromised by the return of democracy-- a promised new labour law never saw the light of day under his government. As in many other countries, a report on the disappeared was immediately commissioned; the Rettig Report of 1992 acknowledged the scale of the atrocities and abuses and provided details and numbers, but it did not name a single perpetrator.
The result of course was that nothing happened-- no one was brought to trial, no one made responsible. The undertaking to Pinochet was honoured. From time to time the general would march his troops up and down, to remind the governments of Aylwin and his successor, Frei, that he was perfectly willing to lead another coup if necessary. In 1993, when his son's involvement in a massive fraud was exposed, he occupied a key UN building in Santiago until the charges were dropped. Around 200 well documented cases came before the Chilean courts implicating Pinochet personally.
The judges were the general's appointees, the statutes passed by his regime, and those in power in Chile believed he remained the power behind the throne. For Aylwin and Frei that was a convenient position to be in-- whenever any more radical forces grew restless, or for example demanded the enactment of the new labour code, their representatives could always glance nervously in the direction of the barracks and shrug their shoulders in explanation. Many members of those governments once belonged to left or oppositional organisations or were political exiles; they agreed a series of compromises with the old regime in exchange for a taste of power.
Nothing was to be expected of them when the general was arrested in London-- and nothing came. They pointed to the instability this might cause in Chile-- yet the army has not seized power. And why should it? The 'democratic' spokesmen are speaking with its voice, for they based their whole political strategy on the constraints placed upon them by an all powerful military which, it now turns out, is not powerful enough to bring Pinochet home. They will certainly make threats-- but neither the neo-fascists nor the children of the rich screaming their support for Pinochet represent anything. The ruling class is not willing to see its successful experiment destroyed or the spectre of popular resistance back on the streets of Chile.
Events have moved with astonishing speed since Judge Baltazar Garzon of the Spanish Ministry of Justice applied for extradition. The original decision of the Law Lords to uphold the extradition request was headline news in almost every newspaper in the world.
But it was certainly not Straw or Blair or Spanish prime minister José Maria Aznar who set this tide of protest in motion. They may hold no brief for Pinochet, but they are compromised with his look-alikes in Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Iraq or Malaysia. Pinochet has been lifted to public notice by a wave of moral outrage, and he has come to stand for all those who abused and murdered thousands and have never faced justice. Perhaps it is because this is the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; perhaps it is because it is ten years since the 'end of history' was announced. Then we were told that civilisation and democracy would guarantee an end to the abuse of power, to inequality, to poverty, to torture, to discrimination. Yet on every side reality exposes the lie.
When the political ideas that could begin to explain the violence typical of a class society at war with itself were marginalised, people fixed on other ways of explaining the problem-- environmental, ethnic, nationalist. The meeting point between them all was the issue of human rights-- the simplest and clearest expression of the demand for a decent, just and genuinely democratic society. The extradition of Augusto Pinochet has, in my view, become the test of society's commitment to this most elementary of principles.
Those who govern Chile have already renounced all their rights and responsibilities over Pinochet. Sending him back to Chile is a way of freeing him and allowing him to escape from justice. For Spain, perhaps, this is a way of laying the ghosts of the Franco regime, which also ended in a series of compromises in 1976 and after. Judge Garzon, after all, pursued the Socialist government of Felipe González for its involvement with the illegal counter-terrorist groups created to destroy the Basque nationalist ETA-- its interior minister is now serving an 11 year jail sentence. Yet Garzon also closed down the Basque nationalist newspaper Egin and jailed its entire editorial board. Jack Straw has been brought kicking and screaming to the bar of human rights-- and there is still a real possibility that he will find a way of removing Britain from the battle for Pinochet before it forces the Blair government to act against the governments of Indonesia or Malaysia or Kuwait.
Pinochet was not a psychopath or a madman. He was a functionary of a political project to which he gave loyal service and for which he was duly (and considerably) rewarded. In 1970 a government came to power in Chile under Salvador Allende. It was not a revolutionary government, but it did promise reforms and modernisation which threatened a small but very powerful landowning class, on the one hand, and the two multinational companies which dominated Chile's major export earning industry-- copper-- on the other. Between 1970 and 1973 Allende proved time and again that he was unwilling to confront the ruling class in Chile.
When his own supporters-- the workers, peasants and students-- began to push changes through directly in the face of ruling class resistance, another option appeared on the historical stage. If reforms could not be won from the bourgeois state, then they would be won despite the bourgeois state. That was the point the class struggle reached in Chile between October 1972 and August 1973. The coup of 11 September 1973 was a calculated act designed not just to block change but to root out both the organisational experience and the political understanding that had made such advances of working class organisation possible. The violence of Pinochet came not during the coup itself, which was brief, but afterwards. It was considered and deliberate-- a plan to behead and disarm the working class movement.
As the trials of Pinochet continue, it is not only particular judicial decisions that will determine their significance. The retired military dictators of the world and their many powerful friends will only really begin to tremble when the massive audience truly understands why Pinochet did what he did. When Marxists speak of the moment when the choice is starkly between 'socialism or barbarism', we are not speaking in abstractions, but thinking of what even a supposedly very democratic ruling class will do when its interests are threatened from below-- and that forewarned is forearmed!