Free Republic

Milton Friedmanesque reforms helped create South America’s most prosperous nation.There are now two South Americas,” says Chilean economist Rolf Lüders, a former prime minister under Augusto Pinochet. The old South America, which remains mired in populism and Marxist rhetoric, includes Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The new South America is democratic and free-market-oriented, and includes Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Chile is undoubtedly the most prosperous and stable country in the group, with an annual real growth rate averaging 5.5 percent over the last 15 years and a per-capita annual income of $12,000, the highest...

Pensions: Nearly 30 years ago, on the very day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as U.S. president, Chile became the first nation to privatize its social security system. Three decades hence, it has surpassed all expectations. Decades ago, Chile's then-military dictatorship shuddered at a proposal from then-Labor Minister Jose Pinera to privatize Chile's liability-laden pension system. The military men argued that the public was too ignorant to manage its own affairs and only government's firm hand could be trusted to provide. Pinera explained that the pension liabilities the government then couldn't pay were not only perfectly payable, but could be...

"Milton Friedman has been dead for more than three years. But his spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile in the early morning hours of Saturday. Thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse." ... "As for Chile, Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet's democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America's richest people....

SANTIAGO, Chile — Facing the prospect that Chile could swing to the right for the first time in two decades, Eduardo Frei took the stage in the working-class neighborhood of La Granja and pressed his leftist credentials one more time. “We are going to win by a nose,” Mr. Frei confidently declared last week, to the tepid applause of flag-waving supporters, some swinging hammer-and-sickle Communist Party flags. One month after the center-right billionaire Sebastián Piñera won the first round of Chile’s presidential election with 44 percent of the vote,

If there was any question which side of the ideological blogosphere a lot of the inside-the-beltway media establishment go to regularly, Politico may have just cleared that up. In an Oct. 11 Politico story headlined "Think Progress makes its mark," which was the top story on its Web site that evening, Daniel Libit paid reverence to the left-wing Center for American Progress' Think Progress blog. "Can a liberal blog launched in the midst of the Bush era - a blog that once obsessed over Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove and the outing of Valerie Plame - still make its...

Augusto Pinochet--Some Perspective By Humberto Fontova Tuesday, June 9, 2009 To read the mainstream media you’d think that in Sept. 1973 Augusto Pinochet’s villainous henchmen, while twirling their pointy black mustaches and snickering maliciously, overthrew a Chilean “president” (Salvador Allende) somewhere on the order of Jimmy Carter. Then these ghouls lined up 3,000 harmless sociology professors and innocent leftist parliamentarians and shot them—for the sheer heck of it. The real story, as you might imagine, is a tad more complicated—despite the media and academia’s Black Legend regarding Chile.

<p>SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — The reappearance of a man who was officially dead has shaken and outraged some in Chile, a nation that mourns 1,196 other political prisoners who vanished in the hands of a military dictatorship.</p> <p>Human rights judge Carlos Gajardo said Tuesday he was questioning German Cofre, who turned up alive this month — and with a second family in Argentina.</p>

In a remote part of Chile, an evil German evangelist built a utopia whose members helped the Pinochet regime perform its foulest deeds Deep in the Andean foothills of Chile’s central valley lives a group of German expatriates, the members of a utopian experiment called Colonia Dignidad. They have resided there for decades, separate from the community around them, but widely known and admired, and respected for their cleanliness, their wealth, and their work ethic. Their land stretches across 70 square miles, rising gently from irrigated farmland to low, forested hills, against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains. Today Colonia Dignidad...

The Other September 11 On 11 September 1973, in response to formal requests by his nation's judiciary and legislature, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against the regime of the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, an avowed Marxist whose government had placed foreign agents of revolution in positions of power, stolen the private property of Chilean citizens, nationalized many of the country's major industries, and wrecked Chile's economy and sense of public order. The coup succeded: stolen property was returned, the foreign terrorists with Chile were hunted down and eliminated, and law and order were restored to the...

Pinochet family arrested in Chile US bank accounts were found in the name of Pinochet and his relatives The widow and five children of Chile's former military ruler, Gen Augusto Pinochet, have been arrested on charges of embezzlement. They are accused of illegally transferring $27m (£13.2m) to foreign bank accounts during the general's time in power between 1973 and 1990. A judge ordered 17 other suspects to be held, including aides to Gen Pinochet. Gen Pinochet died in December 2006 before he could stand trial on charges of corruption and human rights abuses. More than 3,000 people were killed or...

The Other 911 On 11 September 1973, in response to formal requests by his nation's judiciary and legislature, General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup against the regime of the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Allende, an avowed Marxist, had placed foreign agents in positions of power, stolen the private property of Chilean citizens, nationalized many of the country's major industries, and wrecked Chile's economy and sense of public order. The coup succeeded. A military junta assumed control over Chile. Under their rule, stolen property was returned, foreign terrorists within and without Chile were hunted down and eliminated, and...

Two dictators, Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet, both brought tremendous suffering upon the Chilean people -- one through his socialist policies and nationalization of industry, and the other through systematic campaigns of terror.

Posthumous letter by lonely Pinochet justifies '73 coup Monday, December 25, 2006 Eduardo Gallardo Associated Press Santiago, Chile -- In a letter to Chileans written to be published after his death, Gen. Augusto Pinochet expressed regret for the bloody 1973 coup that put him in power but said it was necessary and he called the abuses under his regime inevitable. His fate was public shunning and unimagined loneliness, he said in the message made public Sunday. The former dictator, who died Dec. 10 of heart failure at age 91, said the military takeover avoided civil war and a Marxist dictatorship,...

Castro, Pinochet , and Human Rights Humberto Fontova Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2006 Two former Latin American heads of state have been much in the news lately. One because he passed away; the other because his death seems imminent. The terms "human rights abuses," along with "murders and tortures" appear consistently in the articles on one while being almost completely absent from the ones on the other, where the terms "gains in health-care and literacy" predominate. One jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Hilter and Stalin — and for three times as long. Modern history's longest-suffering political...

On Sunday, December 10, General Augusto Pinochet of Chile died, at the age of 91. General Pinochet deserves to be remembered for having rescued his country from becoming the second Soviet satellite in the Western hemisphere, after Castro’s Cuba, and, like the Soviet Union, and Cuba under Castro, a totalitarian dictatorship. The General is denounced again and again for the death or disappearance of over 3,000 Chilean citizens and the alleged torture of thousands more. It may well be that some substantial number of innocent Chilean citizens did die or disappear or otherwise suffered brutal treatment as the result of...

Santiago, Dec 21 (EFE).- A Chilean municipality's decision to fire the grandson of a general murdered on the orders of former dictator Augusto Pinochet who spit on the coffin at last week's wake for the late strongman drew condemnation Thursday from politicians. Francisco Cuadrado Prats, a 39-year-old artist whose grandparents were killed in Argentina in 1974 by agents of the dictatorship, was beaten by Pinochet loyalists and arrested after producing what he later described to reporters as "an expectoration of disdain."

Michelle Bachelet is the current commie president of Chile who made news all week by trashing Gen. Augusto Pinochet after he died. She adamantly refused to give state recognition for Pinochet's funeral, as is customary for former Chilean presidents when they die. Before his death Bachelet was one of the main driving forces attempting to get Pinochet prosecuted for "war crimes" against the dozens of Castro-backed marxist terror cells that he stamped out during his rule. At the funeral earlier this week Pinochet's grandson Augusto Pinochet Molina, a Chilean army captain, praised his grandfather's legacy. Bachelet retaliated against Molina for...

Contrary to conventional wisdom, former Chilean autocrat Augusto Pinochet averted civil war and saved millions from the destruction of socialism SIX months before Salvador Allende was overthrown on September 11, 1973, Volodia Teitelboim told an interviewer for the Communist Party daily newspaper in Santiago that if civil war were to come, then 500,000 to one million Chileans would die. Teitelboim knew whereof he spoke. He was then the No.2 man in the Chilean Communist Party, the third largest in the Western world (after France and Italy), and a senior partner in Allende's Marxist-Leninist government. The Communists were then planning to...

Contrary to conventional wisdom, former Chilean autocrat Augusto Pinochet averted civil war and saved millions from the destruction of socialism -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- December 15, 2006 SIX months before Salvador Allende was overthrown on September 11, 1973, Volodia Teitelboim told an interviewer for the Communist Party daily newspaper in Santiago that if civil war were to come, then 500,000 to one million Chileans would die. Teitelboim knew whereof he spoke. He was then the No.2 man in the Chilean Communist Party, the third largest in the Western world (after France and Italy), and a senior partner in Allende's Marxist-Leninist government. The Communists...

Allende: The Untold Story By Humberto Fontova FrontPageMagazine.com | December 14, 2006 To read the mainstream media lately you'd think Augusto Pinochet's villainous henchmen, while twirling their pointy black moustaches and snickering maliciously, overthrew a Chilean "President" (Salvador Allende) somewhere on the order of Jimmy Carter. Then they lined up 3000 harmless sociology professors and innocent leftist parliamentarians and shot them, for the sheer heck of it. The real story, as you might imagine, is a tad more complicated—despite the media/academia Black Legend regarding Chile. Upon Stalin's death in 1953, Chilean Communists held a "Homage to Stalin" in Santiago's Baquedano...