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WHELAN Posted on 09/14/2003 3:09:40 AM PDT by 8 Cincinatus' Wife On Sept. In a confidential report to President Richard Nixon, he wrote: It will have the most profound effect on Latin America and beyond; Despite elaborate plans to train, arm and equip a clandestine militia, and to ring Santiago itself with fortified factories, the fighting on the llth took fewer than 200 lives on both sides. In the aftermath, another journalist -- the talented British writer, David Holden -- wrote Salvador Allende died a lucky man. Both his policies and his country were shattered long before the end. For one thing, they prevented the transformation of Chile into a sort of Latin American Czechoslovakia, complete with Soviet bases. The election of the first Marxist-Leninist government ever to reach power via the ballot box did reverberate through the entire world. And the Myth of Allende did billow up from the smoke of battle. The Soviet propaganda machine was never idle, but the Western press and academics were the principal agents of the myth. But as Alan Angell, head of Oxford University's Latin American department, observed recently, a crucial source of the propaganda was the Chilean exile community. All the Socialists, Communists, Christian Democrats and Radicals found welcome outside of Chile. The exile community succeeded in securing the condemnation of the Pinochet government by international organizations such as the United Nations, in convincing governments to boycott Chilean products and to break relations with the government. His wife was sent round the world to proclaim her late husband's deep devotion to democracy and brutal slaying at the command of blood-soaked generals. But, while bleeped off the international screen, he never was in Chile. There, the man and his government, have been dissected, diagnosed, debated and delved into for years. The consensus is that Holden had it more or less right: He was a failure, his own worst enemy in government -- charismatic, yes; And, in the end, unable or unwilling or both to contain the radical firebrands in his own Socialist Party -- a party then, by the way, far more Maoist than democratic, a party utterly committed to violence. With a Socialist again at the head of the Chilean government -- and a Socialist (Ricardo Lagos) who had actually served in Allende's government -- it appeared for a brief time recently that the image of Allende might be moved back to center stage. But when the Socialists announced plans to make an homage to Allende the centerpiece of the Sept. The Allende homage was rescheduled as an unofficial event on the 10th, while the official ceremony would dwell on the loss of democracy 30 years ago and the need for all Chileans to unite so that that never would happen again. Allende was, of course, ousted by a military coup headed by Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet and the other armed services took over a country whose economy, social and political arrangements had -- in the phrase of Chile's leading contemporary historian ''suffered a progressive decay, culminating in its later and total collapse -- the collapse of death -- in 1973. In those 17 years, 2,279 persons -- on both sides -- died or are missing, more than half of them in the first, conflictive 90 days after the coup. Parallel with that, they set out to rebuild the economy and create a new and sturdy institutional framework; Indeed, it remains in force 13 years after Pinochet voluntarily relinquished power to an elected government. The economy has made Chile the envy of all of Latin America. Altogether, the Chilean revolution of 1973 was the most successful in Latin American history. Whelan has written on Latin America since 1958, and six of his seven books deal with Latin America.
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