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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Chile
Index
The armed forces justified the coup as necessary to
stamp out
Marxism, avert class warfare, restore order, and salvage
the
economy. They enshrined the National Security Doctrine,
which
defined their primary task as the defeat of domestic
enemies who
had infiltrated national institutions, including schools,
churches,
political parties, unions, and the media. Although
civilians filled
prominent economic posts, military officers took most
government
positions at the national and local levels. Immediately on
seizing
power, the military junta--composed of the commanders in
chief of
the army, navy, air force, and national police--issued a
barrage of
decrees to restore order on its own terms.
The first phase of the dictatorship (1973-75) was
mainly
destructive, aimed at rapid demobilization,
depoliticization, and
stabilization. The armed forces treated the members of the
UP as an
enemy to be obliterated, not just as an errant political
movement
to be booted from office. The military commanders closed
Congress,
censored the media, purged the universities, burned books,
declared
political parties outlawed if Marxist or in recess
otherwise, and
banned union activities.
The worst human rights abuses occurred in the first
four years
of the junta, when thousands of civilians were murdered,
jailed,
tortured, brutalized, or exiled, especially those linked
with the
Popular Unity parties. The secret police, reporting to
Pinochet
through the National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección
Nacional
de Inteligencia--DINA), replaced in 1977 by the National
Information Center (Centro Nacional de Información--CNI),
kept
dissidents living in fear of arrest, torture, murder, or
"disappearance."
Throughout the second half of the 1970s, the Roman
Catholic
Church and international organizations concerned with
human rights
denounced the widespread violations of decency in Chile.
Although
officially neutral, the Roman Catholic Church became the
primary
sanctuary for the persecuted in Chile from 1975 to 1985
and so came
into increasing conflict with the junta.
The former members of Popular Unity went underground or
into
exile. In the early years of the dictatorship, their main
goal was
simply to survive. Although the Communists suffered brutal
persecution, they managed to preserve their organization
fairly
intact. The Socialists splintered so badly that their
party nearly
disappeared by the end of the 1970s. Draconian repression
left the
Marxists with no capacity to resist or counterattack. They
did,
however, manage to rally world opinion against the regime
and keep
it diplomatically isolated. By the end of the 1970s, most
Christian
Democrats, after initially cooperating with the junta, had
also
joined the opposition, although not in any formal
coalition with
any coherent strategy for restoring democracy.
Pinochet soon emerged as the dominant figure and very
shortly
afterward as president. After a brief flirtation with
corporatist
ideas, the government evolved into a one-man dictatorship,
with the
rest of the junta acting as a sort of legislature. In 1977
Pinochet
dashed the hopes of those Chileans still dreaming of an
early
return to democracy when he announced his intention to
institutionalize an authoritarian regime to preside over a
protracted return to civilian rule in a "protected"
democracy.
Pinochet established iron control over the armed forces
as well
as the government, although insisting that they were
separate
entities. He made himself not only the chief executive of
the state
but also the commander in chief of the military. He
shuffled
commands to ensure that loyalists controlled all the key
posts. He
appointed many new generals and had others retire, so that
by the
1980s all active-duty generals owed their rank to
Pinochet. He also
improved the pay and benefits of the services. The
isolation of the
armed forces from civil society had been a virtue under
the
democracy, inhibiting their involvement in political
disputes; now
that erstwhile virtue became an impediment to
redemocratization, as
the military remained loyal to Pinochet and resisted
politicization
by civilians.
Although aid and loans from the United States increased
spectacularly during the first three years of the regime,
while
presidents Nixon and Gerald R. Ford were in office,
relations
soured after Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 on
a
platform promising vigorous pursuit of human rights as a
major
component of his foreign policy. During the Carter
administration,
a significant source of contention was the 1976
assassination in
Washington of the former Chilean ambassador to the United
States by
agents of Pinochet's secret police. The victim, Orlando
Letelier,
had served under Allende. In response to United States
criticism,
General Pinochet held his first national plebiscite in
1978,
calling for a yes or no vote on his defense of Chile's
sovereignty
and the institutionalization of his regime. The government
claimed
that more than 75 percent of the voters in the tightly
controlled
referendum endorsed Pinochet's rule.
Data as of March 1994
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