On September 11th, 1973, Augusto Pinochet assumed power in Chile by overthrowing the democratically elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende – starting his controversial 17-years of rule. While many leftists point to the clear human rights abuses which occurred under Pinochet, they often omit the equally relevant backstory, the Chilean economic miracle, and the surprising willingness of Pinochet to give up power and transition the country back to democracy. What is the untold story of Augusto Pinochet? Axel Kaiser is executive director of Fundacion Para el Progreso and the author of Interventionism and Misery: 1929-2008 and El Engaño Populista.Website: http://www.fppchile.orgTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/axelkaiserInterventionism and Misery: 1929-2008 http://www.fdrurl.com/Interventionism-and-MiseryEl Engano Populista http://www.fdrurl.com/El-Engano-Populista Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
We are going to talk all things Chilean, perhaps even Friedmanite, and certainly Pinochet and Allende with Axel Kaiser.
He's the executive director of the Foundation for Progress and the author of The Populist Delusion, and just so my accents are not horribly criticized, and probably rightly so, Axel, I wonder if you could give these in your language the titles for these organizations and books.
Sure.
It's Fundación para el Progreso, and And El Engaño Populista, that's my latest book that has been published in several countries in Latin America and Spain, so...
Now, the irony of that is that is exactly how I was going to say it, too.
So that's good.
Now, the website is fppchile.org, and you can follow Axel on twitter.com forward slash Axel, A-X-E-L, Kaiser, like the bun, or the guy with the funny hat.
So, Axel, thanks so much for taking the time today.
We want to talk to, and this is a very, very oft-requested topic, For what I do, Allende and Pinochet and socialist and communism, dictatorship, and the wide divergence of narratives that has emerged from what happened in Chile in 1973 and, of course, afterwards.
Reading these two narratives, and there are two general narratives which we can get into, that it was a good thing with bad elements or that it was a bad thing with no good elements...
Reading the two narratives of these historical events is like reading two different planets completely.
I wonder if you could help people understand some of the lead-up and what happened, and then we'll start talking about these diverging narratives.
Oh, sure.
I mean, it is very important to stick to the facts, which is something that I would say the more left-wing narrative has not done.
I think that's a problem because if you don't really understand these kinds of processes that are going on in these countries, You might have a repetition of the problem.
And we don't want in Chile another institutional collapse, another military dictatorship and all these things.
But in order not to have that again, we need to understand what really happened.
And when you have so many people on the left, or even not even the left, I mean, Even on the right or center-right saying things that are not true, then it's a cause for concern for me.
And what really happened with Allende is that he's not the saint that left claims he was.
He really let Marxists take over, you know, of this country with the aim of transforming Chile into a socialist dictatorship.
That's the reality and that is the reason why he was supported by Fidel Castro's Cuba.
He spent one month in Chile after he won the election.
And that is also the reason why the Soviet Union sent so much money and so much support for him.
And this is, everything is in the archives.
I'm not making this up.
And he was an unpaid informant for the Soviet KGB since the 1950s.
So he was, of course, not very convinced about the violent revolution.
Classical Marxist dictatorships came to power because they had this violent revolution where they killed all the people and so on.
But Allende was the first Marxist president ever elected in the history of the world.
And that is why he was so important for the left.
And also important for the US when Henry Kissinger was their Secretary of State and he said after the Allende election that this was one of the greatest threats to the Western Hemisphere, that Chilean had elected a Marxist president.
This was a dangerous precedent for the world.
But the reality is that Allende ran the country like socialists ran the country.
So he ended up destroying the economy.
It was a similar situation to what you have in Venezuela right now.
So we had a thousand percent inflation rate.
We have scarcity of basic goods.
The country is completely broke.
We didn't have oil.
So Venezuela still has oil.
We didn't have oil.
We basically had to live on charity, and some countries sent us food for our people, even.
And in the end, the military coup came after the Chilean Parliament in a resolution on August 22, 1973, called the military to intervene in order to put an end to what they defined by two-thirds of the votes.
As a Marxist attempt to install a totalitarian regime in the country that was violating human rights and that was unconstitutional and was destroying democracy.
This was the deputy's chamber in August in 1973.
And after that, on September 11, 1973, the military took over power.
And we don't have to forget that Pinochet was the last of the military who wanted to take over power.
He had been appointed by Salvador Allende himself commander-in-chief, so no one knew to whom he was loyal.
And many thought this was even a left-wing coup, so no one really knew for sure what was going on.
So these are facts that people don't know.
And the other thing that's important, I think, is that to remember that we had guerrillas going on here in Chile.
The left had killed many innocent people.
Their terrorist organizations from the left had killed many innocent people and also members in uniform.
We call them men in uniform, like members of the armed forces and police officers and all this.
So we had these organizations here.
They were supported by Cuba and Soviet Union.
They were heavily armed even.
And this was also a threat for internal security and the Chilean military didn't want to have this, of course.
And so Allende was protecting these groups and his bodyguards were, most of them, many of them had Close ties to Cuba and many of them were Cubans even.
So this was becoming a satellite of the whole Marxist empire and this was too much at some point and of course the CIA intervened, the US intervened, there were sabotages to the Allende regime, although the greatest sabotage came from the regime itself because They printed so much money and they destroyed the economy in a way that no democracy would have survived.
So in the end, what is important to remember is that the coup was called by the Chilean parliament, by the elected representative of the Chilean people.
And this is a historic fact no one can deny.
No one remembers this.
No one tells this.
But this is a fact.
And 70-80% of the people were happy.
It's like it would happen now in Venezuela.
80% of Venezuelans or maybe 90% would You know, be very happy about military taking over the Venezuelan regime, which is already a dictatorship anyway.
And, you know, reforming the economy and bringing order to the country and all this.
And this is what the Chilean military did.
And that's why Pinochet, and this is also something many people forget, he had a referendum in 1988.
And so when he came to power in the military junta, we didn't have a unipersonal dictatorship in Chile.
We had a junta.
So it was the four commander-in-chiefs of the armed forces and the police, and they were the legislative body.
And Pinochet was the president of the junta.
So these other branches were also blocking each other.
And this is very interesting.
There is a very famous study that was published by Cambridge University Press about this.
And he created this constitution in 1980, and immediately he set a limit to his regime.
In 1988, democracy was going to be reintroduced.
And the question in the referendum, yes or no, was not if democracy was going to be reintroduced, but if Pinochet himself would continue as president with unelected parliament.
And he lost with almost 45% of the votes, so he was very popular by any standards.
And after 17 years and a huge financial crisis.
So he lost and he went home, basically, and we had this transition to democracy.
And, of course, during these 17 years, horrible things happened.
It's what happens when the military ran the country under circumstances.
And they, of course, some of them committed horrible crimes.
And this is an undeniable fact.
But it's what you have when your politicians destroy democracy, unfortunately, but it's the reality.
Right.
Now, there had been a sort of slow, creeping socialism that seemed to reach this tipping point.
You know, there's the old argument from Vladimir Lenin, or I guess postulate, that says that the end goal of socialism is communism, that you introduce more and more government control over the economy in order to end up with total government control over everyone and everything.
Right.
Because from what I've read, of course, Chile had a history of having natural resources, copper and other resources, which gave the government a lot of money, which allowed the government to grow.
And even before Allende got in, in 1970, according to some economists, almost half of the Chilean economy was controlled by the state.
And so this kind of creeping socialism was huge, and it resulted in the usual slowdown from 1965 to 1970.
Real per capita GDP grows only 5%, not per year, which would be okay, but in general.
And this, of course, is with a huge amount of foreign aid coming in.
And so there was this government takeover of the economy that had been happening for about 150 years.
And then, as, of course, a lot of the communists hope, it reaches a tipping point where then grabbing the remaining sectors of the economy becomes easier.
And that's what Allende did.
The rule of law completely broke down.
Under his administration, I mean, you had massive seizures of factories and farms in particular were just taken over with no due process, sometimes with no restitution, and there was no way to fight this in particular.
So there was this massive cancerous growth and grabbing of property and of the means of production through the Allende government.
That's exactly right.
I mean, Chile was, in the late 19th century, we had a very famous French economist coming in the mid-19th century.
His name was Jean-Gouste Hafe-Courcel Zenuil.
He was a very famous French economist.
He's so famous that even Karl Marx cited him in his work capital a couple of times.
And he came to Chile and he was a free market economist and he advised the Chilean regime and he was the first professional economics professor we had under his With his influence, Chile became a very free country in economic terms and we grew a lot under his influence and we became, I think it was the 16th country in the world in terms of per capita income.
And so we were on the right way to become a developed nation, if you want.
Of course, we were depending a lot on raw resources like copper and things like this.
But we had this institutional framework, a very small government, and the country was very prosperous by the standards of the day.
And what happened then was that these ideas, fascist ideas and socialist ideas came to Chile, intellectuals started spreading them here, and politicians and all this, and protectionism.
And then we had the Great Depression, 1929, the big crash that Chile was one of the countries in the world that was hit the hardest by this crisis, if you take the measurements of exports and all this.
And then we had protectionism, socialism, interventionism, all the way.
We had the CEPAL, which is ECLA, European, is the, what's the translation, the Commission for Latin America from the UN. But basically, it's based in Santiago.
It was founded in 1949.
Argentinian economist Raul Previch who was the guy who invented the um inward development theory or structural theory for Latin America and from here these ideas spread all over Latin America and so you had everywhere very interventionist government uh you had protectionism you had um land reforms which would basically confiscate land from from people And this was a disaster because the results were so bad.
People would not see their living standards really going up.
And then what happened was that the Kennedy administration came up with this very bad idea, the Alliance for Progress, which was based on the belief that if they put a lot of money into Latin America in order to promote certain investments and all this,
You would have development and then you could, to some extent, stop these socialist radical movements that were growing.
Of course, the alliance was a complete disaster and many things that they promoted actually were more of the same thing, of the same failed status recipe.
And the money was a complete waste and Chile was a good example of that.
And it did not achieve what they had promised, that in 10 years or so you would have countries with clear, better living standards than when it started.
It was a failure, a colossal failure.
And well, in the end what we had was that people were blaming capitalism for the mistakes of socialism.
So the premise was that everything was going wrong because we had still too much capitalism.
And actually, when Allende ran for president, what they were saying, even though we had hundreds of prices that were fixed, we had protectionism all the way, we had a huge government that controlled most companies, important companies in the sense of electricity, telephones and all this work were run by government, even hotels, everything.
But the premise was, no, the country is not prospering because we don't have enough socialism.
And we did have enough socialism.
That was the problem to begin with.
But then Allende was elected and, of course, he just moved the same road to Serfdom a little more.
I mean, he walked down the road to Serfdom until its end, basically, until the country collapsed.
But socialism was the prevailing mentality of the time and interventionism was the...
The institutional framework for decades in Chile, from the 1920s until 1973.
And actually, when Milton Friedman came to Chile in 1974, he gave a speech, which was called the fragility of freedom.
And he said, you know, when you start messing, and this is true, when you start messing, With economic freedom and you start regulating, you start creating, you create taxes and then more governments and institutions and this and that.
And it comes a point where you would completely destroy economic freedom.
And when you destroy economic freedom, you destroy all freedoms, including democracy.
And this is exactly what happened in the Chilean case.
They destroyed economic freedom in the end.
And this was not only Allende.
He built upon the work of his predecessors.
And in the end, you had a complete catastrophe in the country.
The democratic system collapsed, and you had to bring someone in that put some order into it.
And if you take into account the context of the Cold War on top of all that, The more reason you had the military coming into the government.
This is what really happened and that's why when Pinochet came to power and they made this new constitution in 1980, They created a constitution that would not make possible for politicians to destroy economic freedom using populist discourse and populist measures and being demagogic as they usually are.
And that's why in Chile the government is, for example, nowadays banned from engaging in economic activities unless they approved a very high, you know, a very difficult law to approve, which is they have special forums for these sorts of things.
And so you have You need white majorities, and that's why the left in Chile wants to have a new constitution, so they can do whatever they want.
Because property rights are very well protected in the current constitution, and that's the reason why Chile is the most prosperous country in Latin America.
Chile was the least free economic country in 1973.
It was the first year the Fraser Index came out, I think.
And now it's one of the top 10, top 15 countries in the world, and we have You know, the best living standards in the whole of Latin America, we have 7% poverty, 8% compared to you have 40, 50 or even 70% in Venezuela.
You have decreasing levels of inequality, so the country is becoming more and more equal.
This has been published recently by the UN, by the program for the Of the UN for these developing nations, they published this report a couple of days ago.
And they showed that we not only have become a prosperous country in terms of per capita income and rising, you know, the poor above poverty level and all these things, but all the more equal country.
And this has been thanks to this, some people call it social market economy that was created during the 1970s and 80s and it was continued.
Over, you know, the 1990s and the 2000s with the democratic regime, center-left-wing regimes that came to power and understood this time that, okay, this is the way to go.
The Berlin Wall fell, we failed, and we are not going to deprive the people from the prosperity they are enjoying right now.
So when Elwin, the first democratically elected president after Pinochet came to power, the economy was growing 7-8% a year.
And this was due to this free market system, social market economy, which made of Chile the most prosperous country in Latin America.
And this is a fact.
No one can deny this.
And even Paul Krugman admits this in his book, The Return of Depression Economics.
So, I don't know.
I mean, there were, of course, the dark part of all this is what I already mentioned, which was the...
Human rights or fundamental rights of people that were abused and crushed by Chilean military.
That was the dark part of the story.
But in the context of a war, which was the Cold War, and then you had these two groups in Chile.
It was almost civil war, basically.
It's a little bit like Spain.
You had these communists wanting to kill everyone.
And then you have the non-communist wanting to kill the communists or defend themselves from the communists.
And of course, when it comes to a point where you have a society that is so fractured that civil war is the only thing ahead, it's an inflection point.
And once you reach that inflection point, you can do nothing about it.
Well, there is an argument to be made, and I wonder if I can get your comments on this, that Allende was allowing arms to be imported and distributed among Marxist and left-wing domestic terrorism groups with the aim of destabilizing and perhaps going from a minority government in a democratic situation to a totalitarian government in a Marxist situation.
A week before Pinochet's coup, the army, they used a 1972 gun control law to search for weapons in these communist-controlled factories, and this did disrupt some of the leftist militias and allowed the army commanders to gather intelligence on who their enemies were going to be, who was sowing the seeds for a civil war, and also who among their own troops might be able or turned to the Marxist Of course.
And so the case could be made that the leftists, the Marxists, that they were gathering steam and gathering momentum for a civil war.
And what has frustrated the left since, the radical left, the communist left, is that Pinochet just hit them before they were ready for their own particular coup, because the gathering of these weapons and the forming of these militias and the usual leftist terrorist tactics that occur in these situations domestically were escalating. because the gathering of these weapons and the forming of And this is probably why the parliament panicked and said, we have to have a change.
Well, it is true that they were getting weapons from Cuba or the Soviet Union.
That is true.
And actually, the Soviet Union even thought about it.
And they were sending ships with tanks and heavy weaponry to Chile in 1973 shortly before the coup.
But in the end, they decided not to send the weapons or to change the course of the ships because they feared that these weapons would go into the hands of the military instead of the left-wing revolutionaries in the country.
But I don't think that's the case.
You know, when the coup came, all these very brave people that were talking about killing a million Chileans if it was necessary in order to achieve a socialist paradise, and they actually said that.
You see, Claudio Almeida was a minister to Allende, a very important socialist.
He said, probably we'd need a million people dying in order to achieve the socialist dream in this country.
And they were threatening everyone.
They were going to kill everyone.
The Socialist Party in 1967 declared the armed revolution as the legitimate way to achieve power and change the country.
And I'm sorry to interrupt, but some of the people who supported violent overthrow of the government were actually in the government, were actually part of Allende's senior people.
Yes, of course, of course.
These people that were talking about a socialist dictatorship that was going on, Because they thought that the others were going to defend themselves, so a civil war, a million people dying, well, it's worth it if it's for the socialist dream.
They were saying these things.
But then, when the coup came, they ran away.
No one defended Allende.
He stayed in the Moneda, in the Casa La Moneda, the presidential house, with bodyguards that were Cubans, some of them.
And he was offered exile and offered to go away and everything.
He said, no, I'm going to stay here.
They started shooting and then the military started shooting and then the famous plane came and they bombed the Casa La Moneda and Allende shot himself with the AK-47 that Fidel Castro had given him as a present when he had come to Chile in 1971.
Or 1972, I think it was late 1971.
Anyway, so the reality is that these people were not really willing to defend the Socialist Civil Revolution.
When they really faced the threat of the Chilean military coming after them, they hid, they went away, they went to embassies, and they left.
Many of them, most of them, left the country.
They panicked.
And so there was big talk and big, we are so brave and everything.
They were cowards.
That's the reality.
And of course, with small terrorist organizations, you know, killing one people here and kidnapping other people there and then robbing banks because it's also something that they did.
It was a sort of, they justified like, we are, you know, against the capitalist system, so we robbed the banks.
And killing senators, they killed Peresukovic, who was a famous senator they killed from the Christian Democratic Party.
And that was, for them, it was already okay.
But then when they have to face really the organized violence, I mean the organized military forces, they run away.
Socialists always prefer to act against a disarmed population using the overwhelming might of the state one-on-one.
When there's an equal fight, in my experience, they tend to be just a little bit less aggressive.
No, exactly.
At least in the Chilean case.
Maybe in other places it's different.
But, you know, the difference in Chile, and if you compare it to Venezuela, is that the military in Venezuela has been completely purged by Chavez, and they are engaged in drug dealing.
Are engaged in traffic and drug dealing and are loyal to Maduro or at least to this dictatorship they have there.
And most of them are Chavistas anyway, in the higher ranks.
In Chile that was not the case.
You had, of course, socialists and communists among the military forces like General Carlos Prat, who was commander-in-chief of the army.
And he was a Marxist.
He was collaborating with Allende in order to, you know, to create this Marxist state in the country.
And, of course, Michel Bachelet's father, who was from the Air Force General and who was being in charge, he was in charge.
Of the rationing system.
The Allende regime was creating, like in Cuba, you see, like they give you a certain amount of food every week, and so you don't have any markets where you can get the food, you just get what the government gives you.
And General Bachelet, it was called HAPS, Juntas de Abastecimiento Provisionales, I think it was.
And so General Bachelet was supposed to run these things.
And then after the coup came, he was put into prison and he died from a heart attack.
And they say no, they killed him.
The reality is that everyone knew that he died from a heart attack.
He had a heart condition.
And so, but this is...
This is one of the facts that are disputed.
In any event, I mean, everyone in the country, not everyone, but most people in the country were in favor of putting an end to the agenda regime.
Because once you start starving, you don't have anything to eat, you don't have milk for your baby, you can go to the Venezuelans and ask them now if they support chaps like they used to.
You have nothing else to lose.
You want this to be over, and that's the reality.
That's how human beings are.
And so socialist regimes in the end, like the Allende regime or the Venezuelan regime, they don't deliver on their promises to create heaven on earth.
They don't do that.
And so they lose support.
And then the middle class, Chile had some middle class at the time, the trackers, they paralyzed the whole country.
They say it was the CIA. No, it was not the CIA. It was the trackers.
They didn't want to live with the agenda regime anymore.
It was impossible to prosper, to do business, to have certainty over your property rights.
It was completely impossible.
So they paralyzed the country.
This was a huge game changer under his administration.
And it was a complete disaster.
I don't know how these people are...
You know, willing to defend him.
And we even have a monument for him in front of La Moneda.
It was created a couple of years ago.
And you see a statue of Allende.
And this is an important fact.
Allende was also, because he was, he started medicine.
He was a famous Nazi.
Allende was very sympathetic to the eugenics of the Nazi party.
And he wrote it in his doctoral thesis when he became a doctor.
And Victor Frey is a very famous professor from the Frey University in Berlin.
He wrote these books where he found all this evidence.
Allende was saying gays had to be operated.
Because it was some sort of a problem.
He was explaining that Jews were genetically inclined to robbing or stealing, basically.
So this is what Allende was all about.
And he even collaborated with the Third Reich when he was a minister.
So this was not a person that you would define as a moral icon of any sort.
He was a nice person, yes, a frivolous guy.
He was a famous womanizer.
He loved, you know, parties and he loved, you know, drinking a lot and fine whiskeys and very nice suits, all that.
He must have been a very nice guy to go out with.
And that's probably the reason why he was not so much into the armed revolution, the violent thing.
He was more like, no, let's use democracy and let's try to achieve it through democracy.
So he was a 21st century socialist because The idea that democracy was the way to achieve power is what the Forum of Sao Paulo created in the 90s, after the Berlin Wall fell.
And then that's the way Chávez, Ortega, and Rafael Correa, and Evo Morales, all these new socialists have come to power because they have legitimacy.
They say, no, it's a democratic regime.
So they create laws, you know, restricting freedom of expression, confiscating things and all this, and they create a dictatorship, but they came to power democratically.
But of course, the communists or the socialists rarely look at something like the 1917 revolution in Russia and say, well, that was completely illegitimate because it wasn't voted in.
I mean, either way, it's going to work.
What is called the dark heart of the Pinochet regime, the thousands who disappeared, the dissidents who were arrested and imprisoned and tortured and killed and so on.
I sort of braced myself for massive numbers because I'm used to with these kinds of situations, coups and dictatorships and so on, particularly on the communist side.
I'm used to, you know, 100,000 plus like in the Castro regime.
I'm looking at millions, say, in Cambodia or tens of millions in Soviet Russia and communist China and so on.
I'm looking for massive numbers.
I kind of brace myself.
We have about 2,000 who are confirmed to have been arrested and disappeared and so on.
Another thousand, it's suspicious circumstances, and the allegations of tortures of thousands more.
Given that the Pinochet regime had...
Fairly good knowledge of who the communists were and targeted those people.
And when I compare that to, as you point out, the million-plus that the communists were willing to kill to impose their regime, a couple of thousand, you know, not great, not great at all, but compared to what could have been or what would have been imposed by the communists, it seems relatively like a small number.
Does that make any sense, or am I way off the base as far as that goes?
Well, you know, when we believe in freedom and we believe that every human being has a right to live, of course one is too much, is too many, you know?
One is two or five thousand or ten thousand or twenty thousand.
You can say Well, life is, you know, it's not a way to measure it like in quantities.
But I think there is a number of people killed 100,000 like Fidel Castro according to Project Cuba.
You have in Cuba, for instance, 100,000 people that they estimate, they have to confirm it yet, but they estimate that 100,000 people could be victims of the Castro regime.
And you compare that to 2000 something by the Chilean, it seems like the Chilean leader regime was not as cruel and as bloody as the Castro regime or as any other socialist regime for that matter, like you mentioned many of them.
So, I think that is an argument you can make from a scientific point of view or political science point of view that you have regimes that are more violent than others.
The caste regime is for sure was more violent and criminal than the Pinochet regime.
There is no doubt about this.
And the real question is not if it's okay in one case and it's not okay in the other case because we all know it's not okay in any case to do things like this.
It happens because societies and human beings are like they are.
But the real question becomes why does the left in general and liberals in general, not even the radical left, the liberals in general, New York Times and all this, condemn the Pinochet regime so harshly and they are so soft and sympathetic towards the gastro regime condemn the Pinochet regime so harshly and they are so soft and sympathetic towards for example.
Why is that the case?
Why, when Fidel Castro was, by any standards, objective standards, A terrible dictator who not only killed thousands of people and tortured thousands of people and stayed there for 60, 50 years, but also condemned them to misery and starvation in many cases.
Why is he treated like he was a sort of a hero by the international press?
By the media, by the New York Times, by politicians like Trudeau in Canada and all these people who celebrated him when he died, and Pinochet who stayed 17 years, who created the basis for the most prosperous country in Latin America, and who was far less brutal in terms of quantity.
I'm not saying that some things were not similar or the same, but in terms of quantity was far less brutal than Fidel Castro.
He gets to be compared to Hitler, more or less.
And the answer is, in my opinion, is that these people don't care about human rights.
They have an ideology, they have an agenda, they don't They care about human rights because when they are rushed by the left and left-wing dictators like Castro, they literally can get away with murder.
But when a traditional military, you know, ruler like Pinochet, who was not a socialist, had he been a socialist, he would have never been condemned the way he had been condemned.
Never.
Ever.
And you see it with Phil Castro.
And so, my point is, like, they have an ideology.
Mrs.
Bachelet was a Marxist.
Our current president, she complains a lot about human rights abuses during the regime.
But she was the first to tweet that Phil Castro was a great hero for social justice and for the poor in Latin America when he died.
And the same is true for liberals around the world in general, when you see their reactions to Fidel Castro's death.
So they don't care about human rights.
That's what I think.
Because I believe that, yes, if you are in a terrorist organization, the state has the right to fight you back and to kill you.
If you are like the ISIS guys, if you are killing people, And you are trying to, you know, blow things up and all this, military forces and all this, and police officers are, you know, entitled to and even obliged to defend the civic population.
People who are innocent, basically.
And that's also something that happened under Pinochet.
Many of the people who died were terrorists.
Not all of them, but many were terrorists.
And so some of them died fighting in the street.
It's not like All of them disappeared.
Some of them died fighting, you know, on the streets, shooting, you know, at the military forces and back and forth and back and forth.
And so some of them died.
And members of the military also died.
That's also something we don't have to forget.
So I think that's the crucial question.
And so when anyone comes and says, oh, Pinochet was so terrible, no.
Don't come and tell me that Pinochet was so terrible when you are saying that Fidel Castro was so great.
Or you are not Saying at least exactly the same or even worse in the case of El Castro, because by any objective standards, the Castro dictatorship was worse than the Pinochet dictatorship.
I don't like any of those, but I don't know any reasonable person who would prefer to live under Castro to being a regular citizen.
Then under Chile with Pinochet.
First of all, you could leave Chile any time you wanted during the 70s and 80s.
You weren't forced to stay here.
Many people went to exile and that diaspora was one of the reasons why this very bad reputation of Pinochet spread around the world.
And that was not the case in Cuba.
You try to left Cuba and they would kill you or they would put you in prison or something like this.
And then you had economic opportunity.
You had declining poverty rates.
You had an economic miracle going on.
In Cuba you had misery.
You have starvation.
You have the island has turned into a big, you know, You say you follow prostitutes and how do you call this?
A bordel?
Yeah, basically a place where you would go to visit a prostitute.
Sex tourism is famous in Cuba because their parents would give you their daughters.
The parents would give you the daughter in order to get a couple of dollars.
So it's a complete disaster.
I don't know how anyone...
Can relate to that and defend something like this and at the same time be so upset about what happened in Chile.
Naomi Klein, by the way, the short documentary author who writes a lot of nonsense, we have to say.
I don't see how anyone can take her seriously, but of course you have a public for everyone.
She doesn't Her book is a disaster, but it's a mess.
It's a real disaster and the real shock is the book itself.
But when she comes and says, oh, they use torture and use Chile as a laboratory for introducing these free market reforms because in a democracy there is no way that this is going to be introduced or anything.
Well, here is the news.
After the Pinochet regime was over, The democratically elected central left-wing regimes in Chile not only maintained the system, they even deepened the system.
They went even further with the free market agenda in many cases.
And then, of course, you have many countries where free market reforms have been achieved through democracy.
New Zealand, Ireland, and many other countries.
Most countries which are capitalistic right now are democracies.
That's the reality.
But I want to stress that I think what happened here in Chile is terrible.
It was the result of a confrontation between left-wing and right-wing or military forces.
Dams were broken, and when you do that in a society, you have violence, you know, spreading, and that's the problem, and that was the darkest side, I mean,
without any doubt, of the military regime, and I strongly condemn these abuses that happened under the military regime, and that doesn't mean That there was not a historical context in all this, and that doesn't mean that the economic reforms were not successful.
That's something different.
Well, and, you know, you could make a case that if there had been someone like Pinochet around in Russia in 1917 or in Germany in 1933, when the communists took over in Russia and the National Socialists took over in Germany, that, you know, Tom Cruise makes a movie about killing Hitler and everyone cheers.
And if there had been somebody to stand in the way, of course, as there was, to stand in the way of the communist takeover in China, tens of millions of lives could have been saved.
And so it is hard for me.
You know, every individual death is a tragedy, as they say.
But when you look at it in the larger context of what was cast and what was saved, it becomes a little bit more complicated because the left, it's just their team.
It's just their team.
Their team lost.
Their team wanted to take over Chile as their team has taken over other countries around the world.
Their team lost and Pinochet has to be attacked because he provided a solution to encroaching Marxism.
He was, you know, like Cincinnatus in the ancient Roman Empire, you could make the case that he assumed a dictatorship in order to save a republic, and like Cincinnatus in the Roman Empire, he voluntarily relinquished his dictatorship, and this is something that the left simply cannot abide.
They have to demonize him.
Because he was an example of how to brutally true but successfully push back against a Marxist takeover that not only would have cost the lives, I believe, of millions of Chileans and condemned them to living in the dungeon of socialist economic control for decades, but of course with the base in Chile could have been used to spread the Marxist virus further around the region and elsewhere.
So I regret the deaths.
I regret the deaths.
But you don't have the right to take over a country, impose a dictatorship, and start slaughtering millions of its citizens.
And if people fight back against that, I can certainly understand why.
Sure.
Well, someone could tell you that's a counterfactual and everything, but we have plenty of evidence that these counterfactuals are true, basically, that if Allende or the Socialist Party in Chile, which was the most extreme party, had had its way You would not have had 2,000, 3,000 people being killed.
You probably would have had 10 times that number.
And I'm even underestimating because they were saying a million.
And so you could certainly make the case, and I know it's complex and everything, that the alternative was a much higher cost in terms of human lives.
And in terms of prosperity for Chile, that's for sure.
Had the military coup, you know, came from the left side of the spectrum, had it been a Marxist coup, probably we would still have a dictatorship in this country.
I mean, like in Cuba.
I mean, it's hard to say, but it's not 100%, you know, you cannot rule it out 100%.
Well, the dictatorship in Russia lasted longer.
The dictatorship in North Korea has lasted longer.
I mean, there are many examples of leftist takeovers that have lasted far longer than from the 1970s to the present.
Like Cuba.
And that being said, of course, and we will always agree on this, that many things that happened were not necessary.
All these disappearances and all these things were just, you know, just the military...
Well, these people are trained to kill, basically.
And that's the way they run things.
And that's why it's not good when they come to power.
But sometimes you don't have the two alternatives of the ideal democratic system and the awful dictatorship.
You have a very awful dictatorship On the left side, and you have a not so awful dictatorship on the right side.
Which one do you choose?
That's the problem, that sometimes history presents yourself with such complex decisions and possibilities.
It was not the case that if Allende had continued running the country.
I mean, we would have, you know, moved into a very functional democracy and everyone would have, you know, lived like in la-la-la land.
No, that's not the case.
We would have had a civil war or we would have had a massive, you know, problem with left-wing dictatorship or something of the sort.
Sorry to interrupt, but it's also funny to me to think that people are being...
Exhauriated for basic self-defense, because when the leftists take power, they purge the non-leftists.
They purge them from the military, they purge them from academia, and they do it sometimes extremely violently.
And so when you're facing a Marxist dictatorship that is going to target you, you know, if you're in the military and you're not a Marxist, if you're in academia, if you're in business, if you're in the government and you're not a Marxist or not a strong leftist— They're going to purge you.
And we saw that happen over and over and over again with these Marxist dictatorship takeovers.
So it seems kind of extraordinary to me that when people are staring down the literal barrel of a Marxist dictatorship that is going to blow their brains across a cobblestone street, and then they fight back, and the Marxists are just absolutely appalled.
It's like, what?
You're not supposed to fight back when you're being targeted by Marxists?
I don't quite understand how that's not considered a legit Well, and you know, this is not a mystery because they were speaking about this, you know, openly.
It's not like they were saying we are not going to do this.
They were saying we are going to kill everyone who opposes our project.
That's what they were saying.
And I know many of people here in Chile who were threatened, even some people have relatives that were killed by communists or socialists, militias and all this, and tortured.
So it's not the case that they were only thinking about socialism in utopian terms.
No, they were engaging in concrete actions, they were taking the guns, they were killing people, they were kidnapping people.
And they wanted to take over the state in order to have this communist dictatorship.
They were saying this.
This is not a mystery.
I don't know how anyone can come now and say, no, this is not what they wanted.
Or maybe they think this is what they wanted.
It was okay.
And they are mad because it didn't work out.
And the guys who end up winning the fight were the guys on the other side.
But this is the hypocrisy of the whole situation and this demonizing of Pinochet.
The problem I see in the Western world is that most universities and the media are controlled by left-wing journalists and professors and all this.
And they are not willing to seriously argue about these things.
And there are exceptions, like Richard Pipes, a very famous Harvard professor, expert on the history of communism and Soviet Union.
He does it in a very neutral way, and he balances both sides of the argument, and the same with Neil Ferguson and other serious historians.
But then you have, of course, the whole machinery and propaganda machinery of these social justice warriors, but when they speak about these things, And they take this moral high ground and say how awful it was that we had free markets in Chile and we had Pinochet, but how wonderful it is that, you know, you had Fidel Castro in Cuba and socialism there, which is completely lunatic, a complete lunacy for me.
You should not get your politics from sting songs.
Now, let's talk a little bit about what's called the Chilean miracle.
And I find that term, oh, it's so annoying.
It's sort of like, there's a guy, he's 300 pounds, he's eating less and exercising, and he's losing weight.
It's a miracle.
No, it's not a miracle.
It's the natural consequences of acting in a sensible manner.
I mean, when Pinochet, people don't I often remember this, but for the first two years, he tried a continuation of the price-fixing, central planning.
He retained the nationalization because, you know, the guy's a military guy.
He's not an economist.
And then the Chicago boys, as you point out, Milton Friedman came down, met with him for 45 minutes, did a bunch of speeches, wrote him a long letter about how to liberalize the economy, put an end to your price-fixing, privatize stuff, and...
And very quickly, the economy turned around.
Poverty went from 50% down to 7%.
You got per capita income going up 400% relatively quickly.
And people say this is just some incomprehensible miracle.
No, it's just these property rights, free trade, freedom of association, a smaller government.
And now, of course, as you point out, Chile is the wealthiest country in Latin America.
So it's not just Pinochet.
They demonize the free market through the proxy.
Of Pinochet.
But their real target is if you claim to care about the poor, then you should be the most into free markets because free markets, they help the rich as well, but they help the poor in particular.
We see this in India and in China where you've had the biggest reduction in human poverty throughout all of human history just in the past two decades or so.
So it seems to me that they refer to it as a miracle because it's somehow incomprehensible.
And they have a tough time demonizing the actual numbers, the actual reality on the ground of how free market reforms helped the poor in Chile.
So what they have to do is make bad movies with Sigourney Weaver about how evil everything was, and they have to rely on pop musicians to write songs about how evil everything was.
Because the numbers are irrefutable, the liberties and the happiness, and you look at the growth of the Chilean wine industry and its massive fruit and vegetable exports and so on, all would have been impossible under a socialist or communist regime.
I mean, there is no doubt.
Even a progressive and liberal institution like the UN just came out with a report that About Chile and prosperity inequality in Chile that they didn't know what to do because the numbers were so good, you know?
I mean, if you take inequality, for instance, at the bottom 10% of the income scale, their income has increased five times faster than the income of the top 10% of income earners.
And, of course, you mentioned all these numbers.
And that's right.
Milton Friedman once said, this is not a miracle.
This is institutions, right?
The free market working.
And every time in history where you have had free markets working, you...
You saw good results.
This is not a mystery.
The free market system is the best system to create wealth, to, you know, elevate the masses, you know, to better living standards and all this.
And this is a fact.
And you are right, I think.
And, you know, Friedman was even sabotaged when he got the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in the ceremony where he got the prize.
Some people, because he met with Pinochet for 45 minutes, but no one said anything when he met You know, with these communist dictators in China and Eastern Europe.
No one said anything.
And why?
Because the academic establishment in the West is largely sympathetic to socialism.
And I don't mean social democracy, I mean socialism.
And it has always been the case.
So they have tried to contaminate Friedman and Hayek, the same thing, because Hayek came to Chile two times during the 70s and early 80s.
And they have tried to say, well, I mean, this neoliberal agenda and all these things only work because of Pinochet and all this.
And they are basically more or less also responsible for the human rights violations that took part in Chile because it was necessary in order to introduce the system.
This is so much nonsense.
I mean, this has nothing to do with the other thing.
I mean, first of all, as you mentioned, Pinochet tried to run the economy.
In the old status fashion, the first two years, and that's when 75% of the casualties happened, according to the Reddick report that was written during the first years of democracy in the 90s.
So 70% of the casualties happened when the economy was being run in the old interventionist status fashion.
And the rest were spread across all the years until 1990s.
So it has nothing to do with it.
Free market institutions were a program that these civilians had in order to end economic chaos and social stagnation and all this.
And Pinochet, thanks God, supported them because it could have been the case that he could have said, no, I don't care about free markets.
I will continue doing this and Chile would be a miserable country by now.
By the way, Chilean military regime It was the only one in Latin America because all countries more or less had this dictatorship that had good economic results and lasting results, you know?
And so it was not the case in Argentina, it was not the case in Peru, it was not the case in many countries that they had these so-called miracles.
It was the case in Chile.
And so, would you rather have a military regime that has created an economic mess?
No.
If you already have one, well.
And that's why Friedman said, I only gave advice as to...
He was never hired by the Chilean government.
He never got sent from the Chilean government.
But he said, you know, you have to bring inflation down in order to In order to, you know, improve the situation of the Chilean people.
And you have, in order to do that, you have to do this and this and this.
And so they are, how could you advise a dictator or anything?
I mean, come on, if you had a plague and people were dying because the virus is so deadly and you are in a dictatorship and you are a physician and you can help the people Even if I had to go and help Stalin so that half of the population in Russia does not die from this disease, I would go and say, Stalin, use this vaccine, please, so your population will survive.
And that's better than not doing it out because I don't want to talk to Stalin.
I mean, the Western newspapers were regularly shilling for Stalin all throughout the 1930s.
They were always covering up the crimes against the population.
They covered up the Holodomor.
They covered up the concentration camps.
And, of course, the West sent massive amounts of food aid to Russia and to other communist regimes.
No, Friedman was out there trying to get a guy who was used to the top-down of the military to get used to the idea of the bottom-up of the free market.
He was not there to talk to him about how to successfully wage war against feral communists.
He was there to talk about the economy and thank heavens for the vast majority of the Chilean population, both then and since, that Pinochet had the astonishing capacity to listen to a free market economist despite his military training.
Friedman even condemned many of the atrocities that were committed by the Pinochet regime when he was in Chile.
This is something people don't want to say, but he did that because he said there is no justification for these things happening here.
That doesn't mean that he was not in favor of the free market.
And he was very convinced that the free market and economic liberty would eventually lead to political freedom.
And this is what happened in Chile, at least.
So, in that sense, he was taking the longer context, I mean, the broader context, and, you know, in helping him, his former students.
By the way, Arnold Haberger was much more influential than Friedman in the Chilean case.
He was much closer to the Chilean students.
He came here a couple of times.
And basically, we are all...
Heirs of this system and we are lucky enough, even the left, the left is lucky enough to have lived, to live now in a country where you have democracy on the one hand, but you have free markets working, sustaining this democratic system and creating prosperity, not only for them, but for the rest of the country.
And you might like it or not like it, but history is history and the origin of this is with Pinochet and the Chicago boys.
And that's the reality.
You like it or not, that's why Chile became the most prosperous country in Latin America.
Not only because of that, of course, because, I have to insist, democratic regimes that came later continued the model and the system, and they even beaten the system, and so the system has endured longer under democracy than under, you know, an authoritarian regime.
And this is the key why we have been so successful and I hope we are not going to ruin it now because love is going back to its old populist socialist agenda and in Latin America you never know.
Well, and I just wanted to put a sort of final postscript on what happened to Pinochet at the end of his regime.
So he did resign, but he resigned with the guarantee that he was not going to be prosecuted or persecuted for what happened under his regime.
And then the socialists or the democratic government that took over immediately began burying him in legal actions and so on.
This was a huge tragedy fundamentally because what it does is it encourages dictators to hang on to power until the very end.
Thank you.
to give up power.
So in pursuing Pinochet, they sent a clear signal to other dictatorships around the world to not ever relinquish power, which I think was a great tragedy.
So I want to really thank you for your time today, Axel.
It was a great pleasure to chat.
I want to remind people, please check out his website at fppchile.org.
And we'll put links to all this below, as well as links to your book, The Populist Delusion.
Follow Axel on twitter.com forward slash Axel, A-X-E-E-L, sorry, A-X-E-L. K-A-I-S-E-R, Axel Kaiser.
Really appreciate your time and just want to invite everyone who's watching this, who's listening to this, some information may be really surprising to you given the sort of mono-condemnation that they've tried to inject against Pinochet, against Friedman.
They can't argue about the results so they just smear...
The people, I just invite you, look at the facts, put aside the ad hominems, look at what actually happened to the average Chilean, and in particular to the poor Chileans, and I think you'll find that the reality is very different from the story that was presented.
