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Originally Posted by Surf n Turf
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.
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Let's see... If a Communist party aparatchik in 1973 told me the sky was blue, I'd have to go the window to look and make sure. I think most here would be just as skeptical. Communists have always claimed workers are on the verge of breaking free from their chains and rising up. Were they about to in Chile? I can't say, but given Allende's failed policies and low popularity, it seems unlikely. That Chile never had a significant guerrilla movement against Pinochet is more proof. (To be sure, Pinochet's ruthlessness made it difficult for such a movement to start. After all, that was his whole MO. But one would think that if Communist were about to start a civil war that would leave up to a million dead, then at least there would be some resistance to Pinochet that even 3,000 deaths couldn't deter.)
So I can't see that this person's comments are justification for 17 years of dictatorship?
I'll say it again. It's not the coup that earned Pinochet the opprobrium, but rather his actions in the following 17 years.
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