| | I respond to this with extreme reluctance, but I think the issue is worth a response. Dr. Pinera is no doubt as energetic in working for liberty as Kilbourne's essay says he is, and I have read his essays on Social Security reform with profit. Pinera is a serious advocate for liberty, and he strikes me as a decent person. But as someone who takes the principle of sanction very seriously, I think there are legitimate questions worth raising about participation in the Pinochet regime that are not addressed by any of the virtues I've just mentioned. I have raised these questions in public with Dr. Pinera before, and have not been satisfied by his response.
Let me emphasize that I have no sympathy whatsoever for Allende and do not regard his government as legitimate, certainly not as of 1973, but not even before that. Still, the question is: was collaboration with Pinochet justified? I think I can speak with at least second-hand experience on this issue, as an uncle of mine was assassinated in Pakistan under the socialist regime of Zulfikar Bhutto, who was then replaced by the right-wing general Zia ul Haq. Zia then went on to persecute the sons of the very same uncle, along with any number of people I know, one of whom suffered a heart attack from the stress, and another of whom was tortured in Zia's torture chambers. I do not think that sanctioning such a person as Zia was justified. For decades I heard the excuse that the human rights violations were anomalies rather than policy under Zia--total nonsense. There are striking similarities between Zia and Pinochet, so I look on the same claim in the Pinochet case with skepticism.
In his original piece for TOC's Navigator, Dr Pinera had written this:
According to the report of the commission set up by President Aylwin (an antagonistic successor to President Pinochet): In a seventeen-year period, 2,279 people died, including members of the armed forces, terrorists, and possibly innocent civilians. "Most of them," Crozier states, "died during the first months of military rule, when Chile was in effect a combat zone." By way of comparison, 600,000 people died in the Spanish civil war (2 percent of the population), 375,000 in the American civil war (1.1 percent of the population), and 250,000 in the Guatemalan civil war (2.5 percent of the population)—not to mention the 100 million deaths attributed to socialism by The Black Book of Communism. In a country of 12 million, where a third of the voters had initially supported Allende, the toll was so low that clearly there was no systematic policy of human-rights violations such as would have involved hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I had construed this as an oblique admission of Pinochet's complicity in political murder; Dr Pinera disputed this in the exchange mentioned above (via the previous link). Well, the problem is the highly equivocal nature of the passage itself. It quotes a report that concludes that there was a systematic policy of human rights violations, and then concludes that there wasn't one. In a response to me, Dr Pinera insisted that there was no systematic policy, only anomalies. Even if I took that claim entirely on faith, I would still have to find a way of reconciling it with the parts of the report (only in Spanish, to my knowledge) he doesn't discuss. The numbers he quotes don't settle the relevant issue.
I personally have no vested interest in insisting that Pinochet and his regime were committed to murder, kidnapping and torture. I have not taken any position on the issue and don't pretend to be an expert on Chile. Nor is my concern with Pinera's personal biography. The issue is historical: what kind of regime was Pinochet's regime, and how does one deal with it, if one deals with it at all? The findings of Chile's Truth and Reconciliation Commission really do seem to suggest that there were systematic abuses under Pinochet. Maybe that is not the whole story; maybe that story is distorted. But before Objectivists sign on to "Pinochet wasn't as bad as the leftists say he was," we need to see a rigorously worked-out case that really demonstrates that. I'd be the first to accept that case if I saw it, but I haven't seen it.
(Edited by Irfan Khawaja on 8/26, 11:08am)
|
|
