Thursday, December 14, 2006
General Augusto Pinochet – Neither Hero nor Villain
General Augusto Pinochet died on Sunday. He was a dictator and responsible for the death of 3197 people during his 17 years at the helm of Chile. So how cannot he not be a moster?
I am, I hope, both a devout Christian and a political conservative. Some of the times this works without any major difficulty. Other times, it creates deep troubles internally. And other times, it forces me to determine how much my Christian beliefs can be fully implemented in a fallen world.
I am also quite proud to be an American. I am not one of those “We are the Perfect Nation” people, but I think by a large spread we have been a force for good in this world. The one area that my Christian beliefs, conservatism and pro-American feelings always run into conflict is America’s foreign policy during the Cold War.
To say we supported dictators, and brutal ones at that, is an understatement. People over 50 hate us in Iran because they remember the U.S. trained Savak, the Shah’s secret police who murdered and killed without hesitating. We supported the right-wing governments of Latin America, including El Salvador, which gave tacit approval to the murdering death squads of those nations. We tolerated Asian dictators like Marcos, Park Chung Hee, and Suharto. There is a lot that we have to be ashamed of as a nation. I say that as an American and a Christian who believes that the things that are best about our country and my faith were put on the back burner in order to win a war – one that had to be won.
There in lies the challenge, and it is a challenge that has come up again with the death on Sunday of former Chilean President and dictator Augusto Pinochet. Now, one thing I want to say in Pinochet’s favour right now is that unlike Alberto Fujimora, the ex-dictator of Peru, Pinochet responding to the 1988 plebiscite by leaving office after in 1990 after new presidential elections. He could have gone out in a blaze of bullets and glory, but did not.
I remember being on college campus in 1988 when the anti-Pinochet fever hit. Of course, all the leftist celebrated Pinochet’s demise, and starting saying all the good lefty things about Allende (note this is still the case, as judged by the historically inaccurate poem I heard a trendy evangelical female writer give this summer that lamented Pinochet without understanding the context). But I had studied Chilean history. I knew that Allende was a Marxist thug who was on the verge not only of making his country a Soviet satellite state, but was also starving his people and had his own list of people marked for death. I also knew that well over 80% of the deaths attributed to his regime (3197 total) occurred during the first weeks after the coup, in what was for all intents and purposes, a civil war.
Pinochet kept his country out of the Soviet constellation, did revive the economy, and has left a nation that has transformed itself into, alone with Brazil, one of the few healthy democracies in South America. But his regime did torture political opponents, did force them into exile, and did kill at least 400 after the end of the coup. As a Christian I stand against such actions, condemning them and were he still alive and reading, would call him to repentance and to stand before the court of justice (but only after Castro, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pot and the countless other real murders of the 20th Century).
Was it right for us (America) to have supported Pinochet during the Cold War? This is why I am not an ethicist but a theologian. Theology is great in the abstract, but we live in a fallen world where there are very few saints and where the causes of justice and peace are rarely nicely and neatly dealt with on the national level. Had Allende remained in power it is not hard to believe that more than 3197 political enemies would have died. Had Allende remained in power it is very likely, as happened in Russia, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, China and North Korea that his land and economic policies would have led to massive death by starvation and poverty (not all of those are regimes that were led by leftist). Had Allende remained in power, it is likely that Chile would not be the democratic model it is today thanks to the democratic elements slowly added by Pinochet.
That doesn’t make him a saint. His murdering and torture does make him an evil man…but during the Cold War the choice was usually between one of two scenarios:
Evil Marxist vs. Slightly less evil Right-wing autocrat
Or
Evil Marxist vs. weak and incapable Democratic leader
Yes, I am leaving out nice Marxists, because nice ones were never supported by the Soviets and usually came to power (as in Italy) through democratic elections and left the same way (never undoing the central liberty that these nations enjoyed). The Soviets supported evil Marxist dictators (okay, usually dictators who were willing to let the Soviets plan their country’s future) because they knew that brutality was needed to keep the country in-line. This is perhaps hard for people under 30 to realize, but until the late 1980s, most people believe the Soviet were going to win the Cold War. After the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution the Soviets had a long and relatively uninterrupted series of successes – in Southeast Asia, in Africa and in Latin America.
While I do not believe that it was necessary for Pinochet or the Shah on any other thug we supported to kill their political opponents, what do you do when you opponents are willing to do anything necessary to take over your country, using both democratic means and military subversion in order to bring chaos (this is particularly relevant if you are in Lebanon right now). I don’t know. There is no easy answer. As a Christian I am called to be an agent of both peace and justice (sometimes justice means you cannot be an advocate of no violence).
Abraham Lincoln only freed the slaves after he set into action the events that took 600,000 men’s lives in the Civil War. Should we have had the end of slavery without death and bloodshed? Of course, but sometimes the events do not allow for that and you are left with two equally poor options – war and death or allowing injustice. As a Christian I know the world to be fallen and in rebellion. I need to constantly live and work from the perspective of God’s coming Kingdom. But what did that mean in the Cold War? What does it mean in Lebanon? I am not sure…
In the end, for those who were untouched by the murders and torture of his regime, Pinochet (and here I leave aside his embezzlement, for which again he should have faced judgment) left Chile a better nation than when he took over in his coup. That does not make him a saint. It does make him a reality of the Cold War. A reality which conservative and leftist, American all, need to come to grips with and soon.
Today I hear some saying that what Iraq needs is a strongman who can bring Iraq back into control. We would prefer a strongman who is on our side vs. the terrorists. Would we welcome an Iraqi Pinochet, a man who can bring stability to his country and who in a generation might be able to lead the country towards real democratic institutions? Would we support someone like this if it meant 3197 of his political enemies were murdered? Would we support this man if it meant ultimate victory in the war on terror? Look, I don’t have the answer…and I doubt you do. But before we vilify Pinochet as he now faces the ultimate judgment that all humankind must face, maybe we better be ready to answer this question?
