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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Chile
Index
The military authorities took power in a violent coup
on
September 11, 1973, accusing Allende, who committed
suicide during
the takeover, of having violated the constitution. Within
months,
however, it became apparent that the new regime blamed the
breakdown of democracy not only on the parties of the left
and the
Marxist president but also on the institutional framework
embodied
in the constitution of 1925. In the military's view,
Chile's
constitution had encouraged the rise of venal parties and
politicians preoccupied not with the broader welfare of
the country
but with their own interests and hunger for power. The
military
blamed what they viewed as self-serving politicians for
allowing
foreign ideologies to penetrate the nation, thereby
creating an
internal threat that the armed forces felt obliged to
confront.
Within days of the coup, the new government appointed a
commission of conservative scholars to begin crafting a
new
constitutional order. However, after initial enthusiasm
for their
work, commission members soon discovered that
institutional reform
was not a top priority of the authorities and that the
junta was in
no hurry to set a timetable for its own departure. The
military's
primary goal was to revitalize the economy, while
destroying the
parties of the left and rendering obsolete the parties and
leaders
of other stripes.
In 1978, however, a power struggle within the junta
between
Pinochet, commander of the Army of Chile (Ejército de
Chile), and
Gustavo Leigh Guzmán, the FACh commander, forced the
military
government to come to terms with its blueprint for the
future of
the country. Leigh resented the growing power and
influence of
Pinochet, his putative equal in the junta, and sought to
force an
early conclusion to the transition back to civilian rule
in a form
similar to the constitutional framework of the immediate
past.
Pinochet, basking in the power and authority of an
executive with
access to a powerful secret police network, the National
Information Center (Centro Nacional de Información--CNI),
which
replaced the National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección
Nacional
de Inteligencia--DINA) in 1977, had no enthusiasm for an
early
return to civilian rule; rather, he hoped to institute
more farreaching transformations of Chile's institutions. The
junta
president was an admirer of long-time Spanish dictator
Francisco
Franco, whose 1975 funeral he had attended in one of his
few trips
abroad. Pinochet also viewed Franco's political system as
a model
for Chile, one in which the armed forces could play a
permanent
guiding role. When Leigh was forcibly dismissed from the
junta in
April 1978, in a veritable coup within a coup, Pinochet's
position
became unassailable. Within months, Pinochet instructed
the
constitutional commission, which had languished with no
clear
purpose, to produce a new constitution with a time frame
more to
his liking. When the Council of State (Consejo de Estado),
headed
by former president Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez (1958-64),
softened
some of the provisions of the draft and proposed a return
to
civilian rule by 1985, Pinochet balked and demanded a new,
tougher
version.
The "permanent" articles of the draft were designed to
go into
effect a decade after promulgation, and Pinochet was
specifically
named to preside over the country's fortunes for an
eight-year
"transition" period. Pinochet further insisted that he be
named to
fill the first eight-year term of the "constitutional
period" that
followed, which would begin in 1990. The president's
advisers,
however, were able to persuade him that ratification of
the
constitution in a plebiscite could be seriously
jeopardized if it
were too apparent that Pinochet would obtain an additional
sixteenyear mandate.
To satisfy Pinochet's ambitions, the designers of the
constitution provided for a plebiscite to be held in late
1988 or
1989 on a single candidate to be designated by the four
commanders
of the armed forces (army commander Pinochet included) to
lead the
country in the next eight-year term. In an obscure
provision, the
text specifically exempted Pinochet from the article
barring
presidents from reelection, a clear sign that the general
had every
intention of perpetuating himself in power.
With the ratification of the constitution of 1980, in a
highly
irregular and undemocratic plebiscite characterized by the
absence
of registration lists, Pinochet achieved his objectives.
Chile's
democratic parties had proved incapable of challenging the
power of
the military to impose its own blueprint for the future.
After
seven years of constitutional ambiguity and questionable
political
legitimacy, the military's sweeping control over virtually
every
aspect of public life had become codified and sanctioned
in an
elaborate "democratic" ritual, which the authorities
believed
finally conferred on them the legitimacy of the popular
will. With
the economy at last on the upswing and a majority of
voters
resigned to accepting military rule as the only means of
ensuring
order and prosperity, Pinochet seemed invincible. As if to
signal
the government's renewed confidence and continuing
contempt for its
political opponents, Andrés Zaldívar, the highly respected
president of the Christian Democratic Party (Partido
Demócrata
Cristiano--PDC), was exiled for daring to question the
plebiscite's
results.
Data as of March 1994
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