09/10/2023 – 5:31
The fall of Salvador Allende’s government turns 50 this Monday. Unlike what happened years earlier in Brazil, the Chilean coup shocked Europeans. Images of the new dictator, Augusto Pinochet, went around the world. If Che Guevara’s face became the symbol of the idealist revolutionary, Augusto Pinochet embodied the image of the dictator par excellence. The general who violently overthrew Salvador Allende’s government on September 11, 1973, in Chile, stood out among the Latin American dictators of the time as a negative icon for public opinion in Europe. But what is this phenomenon due to? Why did this episode have so much international repercussion?
The power of images
The coup d’état in Chile caused a greater shock than the 1964 coup in Brazil, mainly because of the presence of the media, assesses historian Caroline Moine, from the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, in France. “This scam did not occur in the middle of the night, discreetly, but in front of the cameras. There were many journalists, which means that the images quickly reached the public, including abroad,” she highlights.
For Moine, the scammers wanted this disclosure. “The military wanted people to see what was happening. They wanted to impress not only their opponents but also their supporters, at home and abroad.”
Thus, the bombing of La Moneda Palace was recorded in international public opinion. And the photo of Pinochet, with his arms crossed and wearing sunglasses, also went around the world. “I think this image represented the perfect antithesis of the good image of Salvador Allende”, assesses historian Joan del Alcázar, from the University of Valencia. “The figure of an affable and empathetic doctor, a man with undeniable attractiveness, contrasts with this hateful image of an unpleasant, authoritarian, despotic and, moreover, criminal military man”, he highlights.
The end of hope
Understood in the context of the Cold War, what happened in Chile takes on dimensions that go far beyond its borders. “In West Germany and Europe,
Allende was an important symbolic figure because he represented the democratic path to socialism; a very strong symbolic figure for many left-wing intellectuals in Western Europe”, says historian Lasse Lassen, from the University of Würzburg.
Historian Caroline Moine, in turn, recalls the European context at the time: “There was an attempt to unite communist and socialist forces in France and Italy, for example, and what was happening in Chile with Popular Unity was a certain model, a great hope. The coup put an end to this project, destroyed this hope, which aroused great emotions,” she explains.
Moine also highlights that, after the coup, “especially the communist party, and also the socialist party in Chile, quickly launched a major international campaign”. This stylized not only the figure of Pinochet as the personification of evil, but also [consolidou] the antagonistic version of the overthrown president.
“Allende was the figure who wanted to defend democracy in Chile and who, for it, gave his life. In Europe itself, the idea of heroes who are willing to die for their ideas also has a strong emotional charge,” he says. “The various Popular Unity parties were not so united, but it was always said that the UP was a victim of the dictatorship; there was no public talk about internal tensions. There was a kind of myth,” she adds.
The brutality of repression
In addition to the left, however, what shook consciences was the brutality of the repression in Chile, although there were also violations in other dictatorships in the region. “This military coup is a separate point, because of its savagery, its extreme virulence”, assesses Joan del Alcázar.
In the same vein, Lasse Lassen considers that, “in the West, the rapid awareness of human rights violations and, at the same time, politicization in the context of Cold War tensions, contributed to its great resonance”. The researcher highlights that, however, “neither Franco nor Pinochet received the condemnation, at least on a national level, that Hitler received. This is a complex process that drags on and remains politically controversial.”
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