Pinochet’s friends still alive

The brutal dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile through murder and police terror from 1973 to 1990—killing tens of thousands of workers, organizers and progressives and opening his country to the plunder of imperialist corporations—died on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day.

Many Chileans remember all too clearly his cruel regime. They celebrated his death in Chile’s streets. And when some now in office in Chile dared to lower flags to half-mast, crowds clashed with the police and authorities.

What’s missing from most big-business media accounts of Pinochet, particularly the monopolized media here in the United States, is the role of the CIA in the bloody coup that brought the military dictatorship into power.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, while in the Nixon White House, plotted with the CIA, the Pentagon and the Chilean military to destabilize Chile’s democratically elected pro-socialist government of Salvador Allende and replace it with a bloody dictatorship.

To the rich and powerful transnational corporations, and big business media, Pinochet was a weapon against the workers and poor who dared to organize to take charge of society. Britain’s former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was among the first to express her “sadness” at Pinochet’s death.

Kissinger and Thatcher are world-class criminals, outranking Pinochet in the scope of their crimes.

The current Bush administration prattles on about “extending democracy” to the Middle East and the rest of the world. This is talk. Washington’s deeds have been installing and/or backing dictatorships: Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Philippines, Duvalier in Haiti, Somoza in Nicaragua, Suharto in Indonesia and Mobutu in Congo (Zaire), to name just a few of Washington’s Cold War clients.

The U.S.-engineered coup in Chile offers a valuable lesson to those struggling for socialism—it’s a Leninist lesson regarding the class character of the capitalist state. Simply being elected to office doesn’t allow the working class or its parties to rule society—not as long as the army, police, courts, prisons and media are in the hands of the capitalist ruling class.

Pinochet has earned the hatred of the Chilean workers—who suffered so greatly in the bloody counter-revolution. But without support from U.S. imperialism—and its allies—Pinochet would never have been successful in his murderous coup on Sept. 11, 1973.