The Pan-American Dream: Do Latin America's Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership With the United States and Canada? by Lawrence E. Harrison

Author:Lawrence E. Harrison [Harrison, Lawrence E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, History, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429975660
Google: dzlMDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 2005800
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1997-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Allende Debacle

There are several parallels between Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s. Both societies were highly inequitable, a condition that nurtured a strong and militant left. Chile had developed and benefited from a civic culture, but its institutions were unable to withstand a revolutionary program promoted by a government that saw itself responsible only to its own partisans, not to the broader society—much as did Spain's leftist government during the Red Biennium (1931-33) and again in 1936. The Chilean military, strongly influenced by Prussian traditions, were supposed to be among the most professional in Latin America. But when they saw their institution threatened, they behaved like the Spanish military, who had traditionally viewed themselves as above the law, as the ultimate arbiter of politics. In Spain, the consequence was a raging civil war, culminating in the Franco dictatorship that lasted almost forty years. In Chile, the consequence was what Mamalakis describes as "the disguised but relentless 1970-73 civil war,"22 culminating in the Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted sixteen years.

The civil wars (if the reader will accept Mamalakis's characterization) and the ensuing dictatorships, as I argued in chapter 3, traumatized both societies and ultimately facilitated a healing process that attenuated the tendencies toward polarization, confrontation, and intolerance common to most Hispanic countries, a healing that in turn facilitated Spain's rapid transition to democracy after Franco's death in 1975 and Chile's return to democracy after the 1988 plebiscite.

The alienation of the right and the failure of the Frei program to coopt significant elements of the left led to Allende's victory with 36.6 percent of the vote. Conservative ex-president Jorge Alessandri ran second, with 35.2 percent, the left-wing Christian Democrat Radomiro Tomic third, with 28.1 percent. Of Allende's three years in power, Mark Falcoff observes: "Most of the issues which arose during the Allende years had long been debated in Chile, and were the object of comprehensive and far-reaching reforms. What was new after 1970 was the notion that the mere act of electing a Marxist president suddenly and magically released the country from the political and economic [and I would add cultural] constraints which had shaped policy outcomes in the past."23

The Allende government quickly became the darling of the academic/foundation community in the United States, much as Nicaragua's Sandinistas would nine years later. Here was a government committed to a revolutionary program of social justice, a redistributing of wealth and opportunity from the rich to the poor, in a patently unjust society. Here was a government that thumbed its nose at the United States (Allende's people, as well as many more moderate Chileans, were totally committed to dependency theory), among other measures by completing the expropriation of the American copper companies. And here was a government that was on the receiving end of some nasty policies contrived by the cold war paranoids, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and U.S. business interests in Chile (a criticism not without foundation).*

The Allende socialist revolution combined a sweeping agrarian reform and nationalization of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.