Born in Blood and Fire: Chapter 9 (

  Authoritarianism in Chile, Peru, and Cuba during the Cold War

           

 Uruguay was a stable democratic country that looked like it was not capable of having a dictatorship but the Cold War proved it wrong. Chile is one of the countries that were the same as Uruguay. For years, they had a constitutional government and no one other Latin American country could equal their record of having it. 

In the Chilean presidential election of 1958, a socialist communist got almost one third of the vote. The candidate was Salvador Allende he was a Marxist. However he was committed to Chilean constitutional traditions. In the election of 1964 he ran again and did even better and this alarmed the U.S. In the 1970 presidential election of Chile, he finally won. With this he and the popular unity group could change Chile into a socialism country. The two people that had lost the elections against him were more conservative than him. So they together opposed the popular unity government. The US department of state used all the power it had to cut off international credit towards Allende’s government.

The popular unity in my opinion was trying to win the vote of the majority which was the lower class. As they were imposing the price freezes and wage increases to improve the living standards of the Chilean poor. Very prosperous Chileans, moderately prosperous ones and entrepreneurs fought the initiatives of the Popular Unity. But the popular unity government had the backing of the urban workers. In the 1971 midterm elections, Popular Unity won by a large majority.

Chilean armed tanks rolled on the streets on 11 September 1973. The Chilean coup turned out to be one of the deadliest and bloodiest takeovers in the history of Latin America. I saw the pictures of it and you could picture Chile been destroyed. The people that supported the government may have never been heard from again, their bodies were put into secret graves.

I don’t know how I will feel if I had to live through this and then having the military decree for seventeen years. For all most all the time it had the support of the US state department. But the worst came after this which was the Chilean dictatorship which was basically like the book says a bureaucratic authoritarian regimen; its original leader was General Augusto Pinochet.

Peru on the other side was an exception to the trend that was forming in the other Latin American countries. The Peruvian officers announced revolutionary intentions that were not really communist but also not capitalist. The military government did want to help out the majority class of Peru which was the poor. Overall, Peru’s military government which lasted 12 years from 1968 to 1980 was hard to say it fit into the category of the cold war governments. Even though it was a dictatorship it was never guilty for human rights violations.

The government of Cuba could be describe as a follower of the Peruvian regime mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. The state worked really hard to improve the lives of Cuba’s poor majority.