Was Pinochet justified?

[Latias]

Did his actions including the disappearance of dissident necessary or desirable in preventing a supposedly worse outcome?

How far should we respect the “dignity” and “sanctity of life”? Does it apply to the victims?

 

[PaulfromIowa]

Killing civilians with no trials, no criminal charges? What do you think?

 

[Viki63]

“Over-all, the regime left over 3,000 dead or missing, tortured thousands of prisoners,[1] and forced 200,000 Chileans into exile.”

You’re kidding, right? Was Hitler justified?

.

 

[Seamus_L]

He was certainly justified in toppling the Marxist Allende regime, which was violating the constitution and attacking political opponents. Perhaps if he had called free elections within a year or two with the stipulation that no one from Popular Unity coalition could run for office, he might have been remembered more positively.

 

[Latias]

He was certainly justified in toppling the Marxist Allende regime, which was violating the constitution and attacking political opponents. Perhaps if he had called free elections within a year or two with the stipulation that no one from Popular Unity coalition could run for office, he might have been remembered more positively.

What? Pinochet is nothing more than an murderous thug and coward.

You forgot to mention the torture and disappearances which happened immediately after the coup.

The coup was also a violation of the Constitution, and René Schneider and Carlos Prats were murdered due to his adherence to the Constitution.

 

[Regular_Atheist]

What? Pinochet is nothing more than an murderous thug and coward.

Yeah but commies aren’t people, and even then if you murder people in defense of capitalism it’s okay.

Sure, Allende won a free and open election, but is it really democracy if you’ve elected a Marxist?

Perhaps if he had called free elections within a year or two with the stipulation that no one from Popular Unity coalition could run for office, he might have been remembered more positively.

Democracy is great, but only if it ensures that people I don’t agree with can’t be elected!

 

[Seamus_L]

If you can read the Agreement of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile Resolution of August 22 1973 and still maintain that Allende did not pose a major threat to Chile, then in it’s pretty obvious that you condone the use of force by a Marxist government to achieve the complete control of a nation.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I don’t think we can ever know, because we don’t know for sure what the alternative would have been.

 

[RCinMT]

If you can read the Agreement of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile Resolution of August 22 1973 and still maintain that Allende did not pose a major threat to Chile, then in it’s pretty obvious that you condone the use of force by a Marxist government to achieve the complete control of a nation.

Read some other threads–that’s exactly what the OP condones. He excused former East German Prime Minister Erich Honecker’s murders of people trying to escape over the Berlin Walls as simply “deterring” those trying to leave.

 

[jtav]

Torture and murder are intrinsic evils. Therefore, Pinochet wasn’t justified even if the alternative would have been worse. We may not do evil so that good may come of it.

 

[Regular_Atheist]

If you can read the Agreement of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile Resolution of August 22 1973 and still maintain that Allende did not pose a major threat to Chile, then in it’s pretty obvious that you condone the use of force by a Marxist government to achieve the complete control of a nation.

You won’t like my answer because of stark political differences, but I just want to ask why you think Allende’s supposed dictatorship is worse than that of Pinochet? All of the reasons that you seem to oppose Allende are also true of Pinochet, and yet you are definitely less hostile to him. Is it because one is a capitalist dictator, while one is a nominally Marxist “dictator”? Pro-American capitalist dictatorship is better than “Marxist” dictatorship? Capitalist totalitarianism is more preferable? I am opposed to all dictatorships and all forms of totalitarianism. The fact is that Pinochet was guilty of all the things you criticize Allende for, and to a much greater degree. He ruled over an economically disastrous, totalitarian nation that was in many ways an American puppet, and did much more to harm the Chilean people than Allende did. I don’t have a strong love for Allende, but if I had to pick between the two I’d undoubtedly pick Allende. The only good thing about Pinochet’s Chile is that it was a “free market” capitalist country which saw economic failure under a global capitalist crisis, and only managed to recover once it reversed its “free market” policies.

I am not too sure the Resolution of 1973 shows that Allende posed a risk to Chile so much as he posed a risk to the Chilean ruling classes. I am certainly not bothered by the violation of property rights, only I’d rather that all property were placed into the democratic control of the working class rather than simply nationalized. I am also not bothered by the violations of the constitution or the threat to the Chilean government that Allende posed. Socialism requires the destruction of capitalist property relations through the abolition of private property and the seizing of the state apparatus by the working class, and it would be impossible to do this without violating the constitution or the normal structure of the government because it was a capitalist government that served a capitalist class. Allende’s weakness was in the fact that he never established any sort of actual workers’ control of the economy and society, and the fact that he sought to build socialism through reformist means, something which the Chilean coup proves does not work. I don’t have a particularly strong love for Allende, and while he may have been a Marxist I don’t think what occurred under him is a good example of the Marxist view of how socialism should be achieved. Socialism should be established through the working class itself, not by reformist politicians or some overbearing bureaucratic state. Still, he was a million times better than Pinochet.

 

[M-Dent]

The summary executions whether order by Augusto Pinochet or Saddam Hussein will always be anathema to Catholic thought.

 

[esieffe]

So your really into shock value right?

 

[Seamus_L]

If you go back and read what I wrote, I didn’t go much further than to say that toppling Allende was justifiable.

 

[Latias]

I don’t think we can ever know, because we don’t know for sure what the alternative would have been.

Interesting that you think mass murder and torture can be justified.

Read some other threads–that’s exactly what the OP condones. He excused former East German Prime Minister Erich Honecker’s murders of people trying to escape over the Berlin Walls as simply “deterring” those trying to leave.

I am Latias. Look that up.

There is a difference between people being wounded trying to escape, especially if there are signs telling people not to go over. They went on their own agency. It is far different than using the secret police to engage in torture and mass murder of suspected opposition.

That form of repression cannot be considered “murder” unless you think the deaths of Alton Sterling, Michael Brown, and Eric Gardner are murder.

The point was, and this is undisputable, that Erich Honecker was far more gentler than Pinochet. People don’t even want to acknowledge that.

As for “dictators”, I think Erich Honecker is probably comparable in brutality to Paul Kagame. I haven’t heard many bad things about him, but the latter probably killed tens or hundreds of people (excluding wars). I haven’t heard anything about torture, but he likely had a few jobs done that involved killing people outside of Rwanda, like Pinochet did to Orlando Leitier and others. Patrick Karegeya is an example.

To lionise dictators like Paul Kagame is to mock those they persecuted.

Rwanda’s Dissident Murder Machine

Kagame claims to stand up to western imperialism, though he is himself a stark example of it. Elected in rigged polls applauded by the west, his government relies on western funding and military support to maintain power – the very definition of imperialism. Such ironies are lost in popular narratives of Kagame.

Those who support Rwanda’s leader are responding to a genuine need in our world for postcolonial leaders who will help the so-called “third world” break free of the debilitating imperial discourses so eloquently described by scholars such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. And the crimes of these authoritarian regimes are no secret: Rwanda’s history textbooks also position Kagame in such terms, placing him among alleged good military leaders such as Castro and Muammar Gaddafi. However, in choosing as our postcolonial symbols oppressive leaders such as Kagame, we do ourselves and all colonised nations a disservice. We make a mockery of lives and families laid waste by these leaders, and we deepen the very inequalities that we seek to redress.

This page gives three more examples who Kagame is suspected of killing.

Again, extrajudicial murders are far different than shooting people at the Berlin wall; the former requires a decision to target a particular individual by the state while the latter involves individuals putting themselves at risk on their own volition without the state going after you.

I am not justifying what they did, but it is clear that Kagame and Honecker, however repressive they are, are not in the league of Pinochet and other Latin American dictators.