The Mussolini effect

He made the trains run on time? Sickening.

The widespread publication on Sunday of a farewell letter from General Pinochet to “all Chileans, without exception” was perhaps the most notable salvo in that posthumous public relations offensive, but it was not an isolated move. Rather, it appears to be part of a campaign to portray the former dictator as a victim of a vengeful leftist cabal, instead of a notorious human rights offender and embezzler.

“My destiny is a kind of banishment and solitude that I would never have imagined, much less desired,” General Pinochet lamented in the letter. He also referred to what he called his “captivity in London,” where he was held from late 1998 until early 2000 while British judges debated whether to extradite him to Spain to stand trial for some of the thousands of murders, kidnappings and acts of torture that occurred during the 17 years he was in power.

The main argument being presented to try to restore General Pinochet’s tainted reputation is a variant of one used to eulogize Mussolini, of whom it was said that “he made the trains run on time” in Italy. Right-wing commentators in the generally conservative Chilean press have praised General Pinochet for his role in transforming Chile into Latin America’s most dynamic economy, without mentioning that he crushed labor unions and outlawed political parties in order to do so.

Those arguments were initially articulated at General Pinochet’s funeral on Dec. 12. Carlos Cáceres Contreras, one of General Pinochet’s cabinet ministers, called him the “father of the modernization of Chile” and gave him credit for restoring respect for private property, opening the economy to the outside world, stimulating exports, privatizing pensions and other free-market initiatives.

At the same ceremony, Hernán Guiloff, president of the Pinochet Foundation, also justified the former dictator’s political policies, noting that he died without ever being convicted of any crimes. Near tears, he told how General Pinochet, at his last birthday lunch in late November, boasted to his guests that “I have never committed an improper act for which I need be ashamed.”

In the six-page farewell letter, which Mr. Guiloff says General Pinochet gave to him in 2004 for safe keeping, General Pinochet said he had “no room left in my heart for hatred,” but is similarly unrepentant. Though he acknowledged “abuses and exaggerations,” he argued that he was compelled to act in order to prevent “a civil war, without quarter, door to door, with thousands of people dead,” which he maintained the left had been plotting.

As late as 2003, the 30th anniversary of the coup that brought him to power, General Pinochet and Salvador Allende, the man he overthrew, enjoyed roughly the same level of rejection and support in Chilean society.

But most of that support evaporated in 2004, when an investigation by the United States Senate revealed that General Pinochet had stashed millions of dollars abroad, some of it under aliases like Arturo López.

This is not surprising. The "free market" is the important thing here. It's a shame about the thousands who died at the hands of his henchman, but privatizing social security is the silver lining in that cloud.

Hell, even the Washington Post editors are acolytes of the quote-evil dictator-unquote.

It's hard not to notice, however, that the evil dictator leaves behind the most successful country in Latin America. In the past 15 years, Chile's economy has grown at twice the regional average, and its poverty rate has been halved. It's leaving behind the developing world, where all of its neighbors remain mired. It also has a vibrant democracy. Earlier this year it elected another socialist president, Michelle Bachelet, who suffered persecution during the Pinochet years.

Like it or not, Mr. Pinochet had something to do with this success. To the dismay of every economic minister in Latin America, he introduced the free-market policies that produced the Chilean economic miracle -- and that not even Allende's socialist successors have dared reverse. He also accepted a transition to democracy, stepping down peacefully in 1990 after losing a referendum.

By way of contrast, Fidel Castro -- Mr. Pinochet's nemesis and a hero to many in Latin America and beyond -- will leave behind an economically ruined and freedomless country with his approaching death. Mr. Castro also killed and exiled thousands. But even when it became obvious that his communist economic system had impoverished his country, he refused to abandon that system: He spent the last years of his rule reversing a partial liberalization. To the end he also imprisoned or persecuted anyone who suggested Cubans could benefit from freedom of speech or the right to vote.

The contrast between Cuba and Chile more than 30 years after Mr. Pinochet's coup is a reminder of a famous essay written by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the provocative and energetic scholar and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who died Thursday. In "Dictatorships and Double Standards," a work that caught the eye of President Ronald Reagan, Ms. Kirkpatrick argued that right-wing dictators such as Mr. Pinochet were ultimately less malign than communist rulers, in part because their regimes were more likely to pave the way for liberal democracies. She, too, was vilified by the left. Yet by now it should be obvious: She was right.

Will the Washington Post say the same about Saddam Hussein when he's swinging from a rope next month? After all, he was one of "our dictators" back in Jeane Kirkpatrick's day too. And 17 years of a Pinochet dictatorship was a small price to pay for a non-Socialist Chile, no?

The world saw it all begin on television. First, the daylight bombing, from the air, by British-made Hawker Hunter fighters, of La Moneda, with President Allende still inside. Then came the roundup of thousands of people, who were herded at gunpoint into the huge National Stadium, where they were detained for weeks. Black-hooded informers walked in front of people huddled in the bleachers, pointing out suspected subversives to uniformed officers. Out of sight, in the warren of cubicles of the sports facility, people were tortured and murdered. Firing squads executed hundreds at the stadium and at other places around the country. The musician Víctor Jara was one of the victims, shot to death, his hands broken. People were buried in mine shafts, in unmarked graves, in mass graves yet to be found. A former air-force intelligence agent admitted that bodies were dumped from helicopters over the Pacific Ocean, their bellies slit open so they would sink. Detention camps were set up the length and breadth of Chile. Agents of DINA, the National Directorate of Intelligence, struck against anyone they suspected of being an enemy of the new Chile. The killing became more selective and the techniques of execution were varied as time went on. Allende’s former Foreign Secretary, Orlando Letelier, and his American secretary, Ronnie Moffit, were blown up in Washington, D.C., by a car bomb in 1976. Assassinations continued well into the late nineteen-eighties. In 1985, three Communist Party members were kidnapped and murdered. Their throats were slit, and their bodies were dumped by the roadside.

Not far from Allende’s tomb in the national cemetery in Santiago is a huge wall of white marble inscribed with the names, the ages—ranging from thirteen to almost eighty—and the dates of death or disappearance of the regime’s victims. On either side, stretching away from the great wall of names like wings, are two lower walls, with niches where the bodies are to be placed when they are discovered. Only a few niches are occupied.

Thousands more would die, or become los desaparecidos.

Oh, and the economy ain't all that terrific in Chile, with one of the greatest disparities between rich and poor in Latin America. And private pensions? Um, not so much.

But remember what Pinochet said about those who would murder his opponents and bury them two to a grave: "[He] should be congratulated because he saved the Chilean government the price of more nails."