Military dictatorship of Chile
An authoritarian military dictatorship ruled Chile for almost seventeen years, between 11 September 1973 and 11 March 1990. The dictatorship was established after the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup d'état backed by the United States on 11 September 1973. During this time, the country was ruled by a military junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet. The military used the breakdown of democracy and the economic crisis that took place during Allende's presidency to justify its seizure of power. The dictatorship presented its mission as a "national reconstruction". The coup was the result of multiple forces, including pressure from conservative groups, certain political parties, union strikes and other domestic unrest, as well as international factors.
The regime was characterized by the systematic suppression of political parties and the persecution of dissidents to an extent unprecedented in the history of Chile. Overall, the regime left over 3,000 dead or missing, tortured tens of thousands of prisoners, and drove an estimated 200,000 Chileans into exile. The dictatorship's effects on Chilean political and economic life continue to be felt. Two years after its ascension, neoliberal economic reforms were implemented in sharp contrast to Allende's leftist policies. The government was advised by the Chicago Boys, a team of free-market economists educated in the United States. Later, in 1980, the regime replaced the 1925 Constitution with a new constitution in a controversial referendum. This established a series of provisions that would eventually lead to the 1988 Chilean national plebiscite on October 5 of that year.
In that plebiscite, 55% of voters rejected the proposal of extending Pinochet's presidency for another eight years. Consequently, democratic presidential and parliamentary elections were held the following year. The military dictatorship ended in 1990 with the election of Christian Democrat candidate Patricio Aylwin. However, the military remained out of civilian control for several years after the junta itself had lost power.
Rise to power
There has been a large amount of debate over the extent of US government involvement in destabilising the Allende government. Recently declassified documents show evidence of communication between the Chilean military and United States officials, suggesting covert US involvement in assisting the military's rise to power indirectly. According to the historian Sebastián Hurtado, there isn't documentary evidence to support that the United States Government acted actively in the coordination and execution of the September 11 coup actions by the Chilean Armed Forces, however, Richard Nixon's interest from the beginning was that the Allende government would not be consolidated and acted actively and decisively in the campaign to destabilize his government. Some key figures in the Nixon administration, such as Henry Kissinger, used the Central Intelligence Agency to mount a major destabilization campaign.As the CIA revealed in 2000, "In the 1960s and the early 1970s, as part of the US Government policy to try to influence events in Chile, the CIA undertook specific covert action projects in Chile... to discredit Marxist-leaning political leaders, especially Dr. Salvador Allende, and to strengthen and encourage their civilian and military opponents to prevent them from assuming power". The CIA worked with right-wing Chilean politicians, military personnel, and journalists to undermine socialism in Chile. One reason for this was financial, as many US businesses had investments in Chile, and Allende's socialist policies included the nationalization of Chile's major industries. Another reason was the propagandized fear of the spread of communism, which was particularly important in the context of the Cold War. The rationale was that US feared that Allende would promote the spreading of Soviet influence in their 'backyard'. As early as 1963, the U.S. via the CIA and U.S. multinationals such as ITT intervened in Chilean politics using a variety of tactics and millions of dollars to interfere with elections, ultimately helping plan the coup against Allende.
On 15 April 1973, workers from the El Teniente mining camp had ceased working, demanding higher wages. The strike lasted 76 days and cost the government severely in lost revenues. One of the strikers, Luis Bravo Morales, was shot dead in Rancagua city. On June 29, the Blindados No. 2 tank regiment under the command of Colonel Roberto Souper, attacked La Moneda, Chile's presidential palace. Instigated by the neo-fascist organization Fatherland and Liberty, the armoured cavalry soldiers hoped other units would be inspired to join them. Instead, armed units led by generals Carlos Prats and Augusto Pinochet quickly put down the coup attempt. In late July, 40,000 truckers, squeezed by price controls and rising costs, tied up transportation in a nationwide strike that lasted 37 days, costing the government US$6 million a day. Two weeks before the coup, public dissatisfaction with rising prices and food shortages led to protests like the one at the Plaza de la Constitución which had been dispersed with tear gas. Allende also clashed with Chile's largest circulation newspaper, the CIA-funded El Mercurio. The newspaper was investigated for tax evasion and its director arrested and interviewed. The Allende government found it impossible to control inflation, which grew to more than 300 percent by September, further dividing Chileans over the Allende government and its policies.
Upper- and middle-class right-wing women also played a role in the opposition against the Allende government. They co-ordinated two prominent opposition groups called El Poder Feminino, and Solidaridad, Orden y Libertad. The women carried out the ‘’ in December 1971.
On August 22, 1973, the Chamber of Deputies passed, by a vote of 81 to 47, a resolution calling for President Allende to respect the constitution. The measure failed to obtain the two-thirds majority in the Senate constitutionally required to convict the president of abuse of power, but the resolution still represented a challenge to Allende's legitimacy. The military viewed themselves as guarantors of the constitution and elements within the armed forces considered that Allende had lost legitimacy as Chile's leader. As a result, reacting to demand for intervention from opponents of the government, the military began planning for a military coup which would ultimately take place on September 11, 1973. Contrary to popular belief, Pinochet was not the mastermind behind the coup. It was, in fact, naval officers who first decided that military intervention was necessary to remove President Allende from power. Army generals were unsure of Pinochet's allegiances, as he had given no prior indication of disloyalty to Allende, and thus was only informed of these plans on the evening of 8 September, just three days before the coup took place. On 11 September 1973, the military launched a coup, with troops surrounding La Moneda Palace. Allende died that day of suspected suicide.
The military installed themselves in power as a Military Government Junta, composed of the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Carabineros. Once the Junta was in power, General Augusto Pinochet soon consolidated his control over the government. Since he was the commander-in-chief of the oldest branch of the military forces, he was made the titular head of the junta, and soon after President of Chile. Once the junta had taken over, the United States immediately recognized the new regime and helped it consolidate power.
Dictatorship's crimes against humanity
Suppression of political activity
On September 13, the junta dissolved the Congress and outlawed or suspended all political activities in addition to suspending the 1925 constitution. All political activity was declared "in recess". The Government Junta immediately banned the socialist, Marxist and other leftist parties that had constituted former President Allende's Popular Unity coalition and began a systemic campaign of imprisonment, torture, harassment and/or murder against the perceived opposition. Eduardo Frei, Allende's predecessor as president, initially supported the coup along with his Christian Democratic colleagues. However, they later assumed the role of a loyal opposition to the military rulers. During 1976–77, this repression even reached independent and Christian Democrat labour leaders who had supported the coup, several were exiled. Christian Democrats like Radomiro Tomic were jailed or forced into exile. Retired military personnel were named rectors of universities and they carried out vast purges of suspected left-wing sympathisers. With such strong repression, the Catholic church became the only public voice allowed within Chile. By 1974, the Commission of Peace had established a large network to provide information to numerous organisations regarding human rights abuses in Chile. As a result of this, Manuel Contreras, Director of DINA, threatened Cardinal Silva Henriquez that his safety could be at risk if the Church continued to interfere which in turn resulted in death threats and intimidation from agents of the regime.A key provision of the new constitution of 1980 aimed at eliminating leftist factions, “outlawed the propagation of doctrines that attack the family or put forward a concept of society based on the class struggle”. Pinochet maintained strict command over the armed forces and could depend on them to help him censor the media, arrest opposition leaders and repress demonstrations. This was accompanied by a complete shutting down of civil society with curfews, prohibition of public assembly, press blackouts, draconian censorship and university purges.
Human rights violations
The military rule was characterized by systematic suppression of all political dissidence. Scholars later described this as a "politicide". Steve J. Stern spoke of a politicide to describe "a systematic project to destroy an entire way of doing and understanding politics and governance".Estimates of figures for victims of state violence vary. Rudolph Rummel cited early figures of up to 30,000 people killed. However, these high estimates have not held to later scrutiny.
In 1996, human rights activists announced they had presented another 899 cases of people who had disappeared or been killed during the dictatorship, taking the total of known victims to 3,197, of whom 2,095 were reported killed and 1,102 missing. Following the return to democracy with the Concertacion government, the Rettig Commission, a multipartisan effort by the Aylwin administration to discover the truth about the human-rights violations, listed a number of torture and detention centers, and found that at least 3,200 people were killed or disappeared by the regime. Later, the 2004 Valech Report confirmed the figure of 3,200 deaths but reduced the estimated number of disappearances. It tells of some 28,000 arrests in which the majority of those detained were incarcerated and in a great many cases tortured. In 2011, the Chilean government officially recognized 36,948 survivors of torture and political imprisonment, as well as 3,095 people killed or disappeared at the hands of the military government.
The worst violence occurred within the first three months of the coup, with the number of suspected leftists killed or "disappeared" reaching several thousand. In the days immediately following the coup, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs informed Henry Kissinger that the National Stadium was being used to hold 5,000 prisoners. Between the day of the coup and November 1973, as many as 40,000 political prisoners were held there and as late as 1975, the CIA was still reporting that up to 3,811 were imprisoned there. 1,850 of them were killed, another 1,300 are still missing to this day. Some of the most famous cases of desaparecidos are Charles Horman, a U.S. citizen who was killed during the coup itself, Chilean songwriter Víctor Jara, and the October 1973 Caravan of Death wherein at least 70 people were killed.
Leftist guerrilla groups and their sympathizers were also hit hard during the military regime. The MIR commander, Andrés Pascal Allende, has stated that the Marxist guerrillas lost 1,500–2,000 fighters that were either killed or had simply disappeared. Among the people that were killed or had disappeared during the military regime were at least 663 MIR guerrillas. The Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front stated that 49 FPMR guerrillas were killed, and hundreds tortured.
According to the Latin American Institute on Mental Health and Human Rights, 200,000 people were affected by "extreme trauma"; this figure includes individuals executed, tortured, forcibly exiled, or having their immediate relatives put under detention. 316 women have reported to having been subjected to rape by soldiers and agents of the dictatorship, however the number is believed to be much larger due to the preference of many women to avoid talking about this. Twenty pregnant women have declared to have suffered abortion due to torture. In the words of Alejandra Matus detained women were doubly punished, first for being "leftists" and second for not conforming to their ideal of women usually being called "perra".
In addition to the violence experienced within Chile, many people fled from the regime, while others have been forcibly exiled, with some 30,000 Chileans being deported from the country. particularly to Argentina, however, Operation Condor, which linked South American dictatorships together against political opponents, meant that even these exiles could be subject to violence. Some 20,000–40,000 Chilean exiles were holders of passports stamped with the letter "L", identifying them as persona non grata and had to seek permission before entering the country. According to a study in Latin American Perspectives, at least 200,000 Chileans were forced into exile. Additionally, hundreds of thousands left the country in the wake of the economic crises that followed the military coup during the 1970s and 1980s. In 2003, an article published by the International Committee of the Fourth International claimed that "Of a population of barely 11 million, more than 4,000 were executed or 'disappeared', hundreds of thousands were detained and tortured, and almost a million fled the country".
There were also internal exiles who due to a lack of resources could not escape abroad. In the 1980s a few left-wing sympathisers hid in Puerto Gala and Puerto Gaviota, Patagonian fishing communities with a reputation of lawlessness. There they were joined by delinquents who feared torture or death by the authorities.
Several scholars including Paul Zwier, Peter Winn and human rights organizations have characterized the dictatorship as a police state exhibiting "repression of public liberties, the elimination of political exchange, limiting freedom of speech, abolishing the right to strike, freezing wages".