As we commemorate the terrorist attacks of 9/11, I want to draw attention to the “other” September 11: the U.S.-backed military coup in Chile, which led to a seventeen-year military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The scars of those tortured and forced into exile, and the pain of thousands of families that lost loved ones to murders and disappearances, lived on even once freedom was restored.
It is a case study of what happens when the rule of law is replaced by rule by the lawless. Law was at the center of the destruction of democracy in Chile: complicit judges and prosecutors transformed the law from “a shield for individual rights into a weapon of persecution,” as Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela note.
The normalization and defense of lawlessness in Chile had a transnational dimension which also merits our attention. It involved alliances with neo-Nazis and neo-Fascists, and the creation of Operation Condor, the U.S.-assisted, Pinochet-led consortium for sharing intelligence, policing and torture tactics among right-wing regimes in Latin America. It reflected a Cold War National Security doctrine that legitimized regime change in Latin America and saw fighting Communism as a transnational endeavor.
This essay is long, but it has subheadings, so you can find what most interests you.
It Can’t Happen Here, Chile Version
The dissolution of the rule of law in Chile was particularly shocking because Chileans thought they had escaped the fates of their Latin American neighbors. Chile remained democratic as right-wing coups took place in Guatemala, Paraguay, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay starting in the mid-1950s.
The Chilean army’s dedication to the rule of law and the Constitution made it difficult to create support for the idea of overthrowing Socialist President Salvador Allende, who had been elected in 1970. “[The] parameter of action is exceedingly narrow and available options are quite limited,” the CIA Santiago station chief complained to his Washington D.C. bosses that year.
It took three years of extensive recruiting among extremist elements in the Chilean military, and the engineering of an economic crisis and more, to create a hospitable environment for the coup that quickly transformed a military known for its rectitude into a tool of state repression.
The duty to serve the head of the country, no matter what he did, played a role in the military’s compliance. So did the fear of being purged. Dictators love to “make an example,” and in 1974 Air Force officers accused of treason were brought to court in chains to bring home the stakes of noncompliance.
Many conservative judges and lawyers welcomed the coup, and accepted a state of juridical exception that included using military tribunals to judge political crimes by civilians. Pinochet also coopted elites by giving important judges and members of the Supreme Court cars and drivers; armed forces officers got education and housing loans.
Pinochet justified the coup and the right-wing counter-revolution it unleashed as a moral as well as political necessity. Speaking ten days after the coup, he used the language of Fascist biopolitics to justify the extension of the state of emergency. “Our aim is to normalize and heal the country. It’s like when you amputate the arm of a sick person, it’s hard to predict how long they will take to recover.”
There was no recovery possible for the multitudes who were killed in the first months of Chile’s reign of terror, and the “healing” of Chilean society involved making torture into de facto state policy. Rejecting international norms regarding human rights, the junta developed a legal framework to legitimize the use of violence that regarded dissident civilians as enemy combatants.
Pardoning criminals is part of the process of normalizing lawlessness. Pinochet’s 1978 amnesty covered “authors” and “accomplices” of crimes and “concealers” of those crimes, meaning those who removed human rights abuses from military and police service records were protected.
The junta also justified the repression as the state’s defense against “foreign agitators” who were “in the country illegally,” but Chileans, not foreigners, were the vast majority of those targeted. General Manuel Contreras and other officials traveled in helicopters to hunt down prominent figures from the Allende era, killing almost 100 people. They hid victims’ bodies or dumped them into the sea.
The “Caravan of Death” produced some of the first “disappeared” in Latin America, and it is one source of the “helicopter ride” memes popular among today’s far right, who include GOP officials such as Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA). On Feb. 1, 2024, Collins posted this about an immigrant on his official U.S. government account: “Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back” (the post was deleted but you can read it here).
The recent news that Collins, who is now running for Senate, has surrounded himself with racists and extremists, is unsurprising, given the Republican Party’s role as a vehicle for domestic radicalization and its relations with far-right parties and governments worldwide.
Transnational Cultures of Lawlessness: Chile as a Neo-Fascist Haven
Chile, and Operation Condor, have been on my mind since the Trump White House invented a Communist conspiracy for domestic purposes and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House advisor Stephen Miller recently convened a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” with officials from over 60 countries present for discussions on cross-border investigation and intelligence sharing.
Add in the Nazi salutes of MAGA luminaries who operate transnationally (such as Elon Musk and Steve Bannon), the White House’s plans to be funding far-right “independent journalists” and civil society groups in Europe, and Vice President J.D. Vance’s efforts to legitimate extremist parties such as Alternative for Germany (which includes Hitler-saluting neo-Nazis). The little-known history of how Pinochet’s dictatorship collaborated with neo-Nazis and neo-Fascists seems more relevant than ever.
During the dictatorship, Chile became the new hub for far-right fugitives such as Nazi Walter Rauff (a former SS official who supervised the development of vans that gassed Jews) and Italian Fascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie. Pinochet’s idol Francisco Franco had harbored neo-Nazis and neo-Fascists, some of whom worked for the Spanish secret police. The Italian Social Movement party (MSI), which was founded in Italy in 1946 to keep Fascism alive as a political force, even had an office in Madrid.
Pinochet hired Delle Chiaie, who was a member of the MSI, when he came to Spain for Franco’s funeral in 1975, and used him for psychological warfare and terrorist operations.
Neo-Nazis such as Rauff, who moved to Chile in 1958 and became a Chilean secret police (DINA) agent (as did former SS officer Otto Skorzeny) connected with Chile’s long-established German community. The neo-Nazi compound Colonia Dignidad, founded in 1961 by DINA collaborator Paul Schäfer, became a torture site during the Pinochet years and also hosted an Army chemical weapons laboratory. The long relationship between the German and Chilean militaries also helped to recruit Germans for terror and torture activities in Chile.
“Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong”
It is doubly important to call out how law justified the Chilean junta’s violence and suppression of rights, because Pinochet is a hero of today’s far right. The popular slogan on this Proud Boy’s shirt, “Pinochet did nothing wrong,” whitewashes the junta’s crimes against Chilean leftists and defenders of democracy while also declaring that those crimes were fully justified.
A widespread effort to rehabilitate Pinochet is underway in Latin America as well. The German-born father of far-right Chilean President José Antonio Kast was a member of the Nazi Party. Kast is an open supporter of the Pinochet regime, and his brother served as its central bank president. So that lineage continues into the present.
Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who served in the Army and is now serving a jail sentence for having plotted a coup in 2023, admires Pinochet and has praised the 1973 coup. His son, Flavio, who is now running for President, calls Lula da Silva’s government “dictatorial” for having imprisoned his father and poses as the bearer of freedom against tyranny, just as the military in Brazil and Chile did years earlier.
Neo-Fascism is also represented. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was a hard-core MSI militant for many years and head of its youth organization. When she created the Brothers of Italy party she included the MSI “flame” (symbolizing allegiance to the spirit of Fascism) in the party’s logo. So it is no surprise that Meloni has refused to denounce the spectacle of black-shirted Italians saluting Il Duce in public. A number of her cabinet officials also have neo-Fascist backgrounds. It is alarming that individuals formed by the same MSI that produced Delle Chiaie now govern Italy.
Concluding Thoughts
The consolidation of authoritarian legal orders may happen bit by bit, or quickly, as in the aftermath of a coup. But once law is converted into an instrument of authoritarianism, and rule of law gives way to rule by the lawless, violence becomes institutionalized, and takes on a logic and rationale of its own.
Years after the end of the Chilean dictatorship, a former military prosecutor reflected on the terrible events enabled by collective complicity. His words can be a warning for us today.
“We believed in the letter of the law, and we tried to do our jobs well, but the whole system seemed to have gone insane. People were tried for war crimes even though we weren’t at war…We all went along with it, because we were afraid of losing our jobs...we all became part of it. Nobody escaped.”
Cheeto’s War On Elections: Behind The Scenes
The judiciary continues to counter Cheeto’s litigation on free and fair elections. One can be grateful that there’s pushback by district and appellate courts to dispel Cheeto and the fascist Republican’s relentless bogus claims of election subversion.
But these “superficial” judicial victories belie more sinister undertakings by the neofascists by right wing election subversive efforts by owning companies that can manipulate the results of the election date of record.
One substack channel This Will Hold has done a yeoman's job of investigative reporting(bit.ly/4hgEB2r) on the right's gradual control of the electorate's voting system that produces the election data of record. This attempt has been going on since Reagan and is now being firmly placed into the hands of right wing ownership without transparency or regulation. There is currently a circulating comprehensive action plan to state AG’s to promote a transparent election process(bit.ly/4y71GMd).
I’ve been to Chile numerous times. Chile has never fully recovered all these decades later. That’s what the U.S. is facing. Generations lost to autocracy.