From Hitler to Gen. Pinochet: the

strange fruit of fascism in Chile

By Roger Bybee

Graeme S. Mount, “Chile and the Nazis: From Hitler to Pinochet”  (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2002) $19.99, paper.

“At the end of World War II, if some prescient commentator had described the terror regimes that … dominate Latin America [in the late 1970’s], liberals would have derided this visionary for spelling out the likely consequences of a Nazi victory.”-Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman[1].

Book-burning, torture chambers, mass executions, the appointment of Nazi officials to top government posts, and raw anti-Semitism in the media did not go out of fashion with Hitler’s defeat by the Allies.

As a matter of fact, these Nazi-style practices were energetically resurrected in Chile under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who led the bloody US-coordinated coup. The coup resulted in the death of democratically-elected President Salvador Allende, a socialist firmly committed to a democratic path, and plunged the country into barbarism during Pinochet’s gore-spattered18-year reign. [2]

 

But where German Nazism was almost universally condemned, the Pinochet regime found eager allies among the US government and, and even more ironically, the Jewish state of Israel. 

While most Americans imagine their government to be following a benevolent, idealistic foreign policy based on promoting democracy, the reality has been more sordid. As several authors have carefully documented, the US hired Axis war criminals and adapted Nazi counter-insurgency manuals to assist in fighting leftist guerrilla movements in Greece, Malaya and elsewhere.

[3]

As with the blatantly anti-Semitic dictatorship of Argentina of the 1970’s and 80’s,  America’s leaders strongly embraced a tyranny deeply associated with Nazi-tinged tactics and symbols.

The Nazi imprint was no accident, as Canadian historian Graeme S. Mount shows in “Chile and the Nazis: From Hitler to Pinochet.”  Chile’s history has been profoundly shaped by the existence of large colony of German immigrants. Some were democrats who fled Germany after the failed revolution of 1848. But others brought with them a dedication to Nazism that reinforced conservative forces in Chile and resulted in the recruitment of native Chileans. (It would have been highly valuable if Mount had reflected more on why Nazism so strongly resonated with some Chileans.)

On Sept. 5, 1938, a group of Chilean Nazis—most of them not from German lineage—launched a disastrous attempt at a “putsch” in emulation of their Fuhrer’s seizure of power in Germany. The coup attempt was easily turned back and resulted in the deaths of 55 participants. Each year, dozens of Nazi sympathizers come to a swastika-wreathed memorial in Santiago on Sept. 5. Even more shockingly, a plaque dedicated to the “martyrs” of the Nazi putsch still rests to this day on the front of the Ministry of Justice.  

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