Chile Military

Chile 1997

Chile is a country located in South America. According to AbbreviationFinder, CL is the two-letter ISO code of Chile, and CHL is the three-letter country abbreviation for Chile.

Yearbook 1997

Chile. According to Countryaah, the national day of Chile is September 18. Chile’s students protested during the summer against the allocation of financial resources to the universities. The protests in the city of Valparaíso were particularly violent.

Chile Military

During the year, a Spanish court opened an investigation into Augusto Pinochet during his time as dictator (1973–90), contributing to the death of 3,000 people, which he was accused by Joan Garces, legal adviser to President Salvador Allende (1970-73). The US government responded positively to a request from a Spanish judge to get evidence that Pinochet had committed a crime against humanity. The US Federal Police was tasked with collecting documents. Chile’s foreign minister said the government would reject all allegations made by the Spanish court. During the year it became clear that in 1998 Ricardo Izurieta will succeed Augusto Pinochet as Chile’s army commander. In December, the Chileans went to election to appoint a new parliament. It was the third election since democratic rule was reintroduced in the country in 1990. The election was a victory for the government coalition Concertación, which received just over 50% of the vote. In second place came the country’s right-wing parties, which received 36% of the vote. Augusto Pinochet was given a lifetime seat in the country’s Senate, a privilege he himself signed into the Constitution before he left power in 1990.

1973 Military coup

The Chilean road to socialism was drowned in blood on September 11, 1973. General Augusto Pinochet was at the head of the coup. The presidential palace, La Moneda was bombed and Allende committed suicide. Democracy was abolished, all political parties to the left of the center banned, the CUT disbanded, well over 100,000 people arrested for less or less during the first year of junta rule, thousands killed and hundreds more thousands had to leave the country.

It was a myth that the army had never intervened in politics before 1973. The reason for the development of a stable civil state power was the absence of deep conflicts within the various parts of Chilean citizenship in most of the country’s recent history. When internal conflicts have threatened to shake the system, the Chilean military has intervened. It interfered with President Balmaceda’s attempt to threaten the ruling alliance between citizenship and British imperialism in 1890. It went into action in the 1920’s when the parliamentary system was about to collapse. The conflict then stood between a conservative Congress that refused to approve a comprehensive reform program and the radical bourgeois alliance that had emerged in the presidential elections. From 1924 to 1932, a number of coups took place from different wings of the military.

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After this period, the military did not intervene against any elected government. Not even against the People’s Front government in the late 30’s. As a result, a strong ideology – including within the armed forces – was developed about loyalty to elected governments. It is characteristic that René Schneider, the commander of the armed forces in 1970, repeatedly stated this and was the main obstacle to the CIA’s coup plans after the election of Allende. Schneider was cleared of the way as was the penultimate representative of this ideology, Commander-in-Chief Carlos Prats. He was pressed out in August 1973 for the coup to be carried out with a united army. The ideology of loyalty was not representative of the class forces represented in the officer corps, nor did it correspond to the role of bloody butcher played by the army since the end of the last century: In 1925, over 3,000 workers were shot in La Coruna, in In 1957, the army massacred demonstrator workers in Santiago and in 1966 troops were deployed against striking miners in El Salvador – just to name a few examples from different decades.

The military coup in 1973, was completely in line with the massacre tradition – but now at the state level – because the labor movement threatened citizenship nationwide. Before the class conflict reached that level, the army’s non-participation in politics served the interests of the Chilean citizenship. It did not need an army for the implementation of palace revolutions, but for counter-revolution.