Since the tyrant Pinochet is dead, I thought I'd revisit the myth of how he came to power since the left has distorted the record for so many years.
Val e-diction: The Allende Myth
Its long, so I'll post the most important excerpts for those who don't have the patience:
In the presidential elections of 1970, Salvador Allende (Popular Unity) got 36.2% of the vote, Jorge Alessandri (National Party) 34.9% and Radomiro Tomic (Christian Democratic Party) 27.8%. According to the constitution, the Chilean congress had to choose the president between the first and second finishers. The only way Christian Democrats could vote for Allende was to assure themselves of the continuity of democracy, and in this regard they negotiated a political document, the Statute of Democratic Guarantees, that became one of the keys to understand how the drama ended. This document drew two lines that Allende could not cross and still remain in power.
The first was the continuation of democratic institutions, basically meaning that any deep change had to be approved by Congress. The second was to ensure that the military was untouchable and that it remained the final guarantor of the democratic institutions of the country. (Sigmund, p. 120)
“The [official] political strategy of the Popular Unity stemmed from a central assumption, that the transition to socialism proceeded by a series of stages, the first of which was winning an electoral majority.” The second stage in the transition was to repeat that majority in a plebiscite that was key to the transformation because it would destroy the fundamental balance of the three government powers: it would have approved a single-chamber Congress and Supreme Court based on the East German model, who would be a rubber-stamp for the executive, plus neighborhood popular tribunals modeled after Cuba’s. The plebiscite, however, was never called by Allende because he knew the Popular Unity could not win it.
After all, Allende himself had confided to Regis Debray “that his differences with apostles of violence like Guevara were only ‘tactical,’ plus his admission that he was observing legality ‘for the time being,’ and his assertion that he had agreed to the Statute of Democratic Guarantees as a ‘tactical necessity’.” (Sigmund, p. 140). And his own Socialist Party, at its Congress in January 1971, had stated that “the special conditions under which Popular Unity came to power oblige it to observe the limits of a bourgeois state for now” and had warned its members to prepare for “the decisive confrontation with the bourgeoisie and imperialism.” (Sigmund, footnote 7/12)
Since Congress was dominated by the opposition majority, the Popular Unity unearthed old legislation from the short-lived Socialist Republic of 1932 —legislation which had never been repealed but that allowed only temporary requisition of firms that had gone bankrupt. Using this legislation in a not-so-legal way during his first year in power, Allende “gained almost complete control of the production of nitrates, iodine, copper, coal, iron, steel; about 90% of the financial and banking sector; about 90% of the financial and banking sector; almost 80% of exports and 55% of imports; as well as a substantial part of the textile, cement, metal, fishing, soft drink, electronics, and part of the distribution industries.” (Roxborough, pp. 89-90
In March 1972, thirteen large wooden crates that came from Cuba contained more than a ton of armaments for the Popular Unity (they were stored even in Allende’s own presidential residence) and the arm searches enforced by the military in 1973 revealed stockpiling of arms by both the government and the opposition. This was one of the main factors in the military decision to organize a coup later in the year. On May 23, 1973, eight air force generals protested to Allende his inaction against the MIR. The armed forces began thinking about intervention as far back as April 1972, when Pinochet himself acknowledged “that a peaceful solution to the political impasse was impossible.” (Sigmund, p. 226)
The Chamber of Deputies, by a vote of 81 to 45, had resolved
“to present to the President of the Republic and to the Ministers of State, members of the Armed Forces and of the Corps of Carabineros, the grave breakdown of constitutional and legal order in the Republic … and to indicate to them, furthermore, that in view of their functions, of their oath of loyalty to the Constitution and the laws, and in the case of the Ministers, of the nature of the institutions of which they are high members, and the name of which they invoked upon becoming Ministers, it behooves them to put an immediate end to all of the de facto situations which infringe the Constitution and the laws, so as to conduct government action in legal channels and assure the constitutional order of our fatherland and the essential bases of democratic coexistence among Chileans.” (Alexander, p. 318)
“It was later debated whether in any sense it provided a legal basis for military intervention. It did not have the force of law … The important thing about the 22 August resolution was that it could be interpreted as a moral basis for military intervention, so long as it was intended to ‘re-establish the rule of the constitution and the law.’ This marked a major turning-point in the relationship between Congress and the armed forces.” (Moss, pp. 197-198)
The most important thing to remember, and which the lefty revisionist don't want you to know, is that Allende tore up his nation's Constitution, spoke openly of establishing a Marxist dictatorship, and after a few years of economic disaster and misrule, the ELECTED Congress called for the military to restore order.
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