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Marc Cooper

As I board the train to return to Argentina, I leave behind me a Chile still in the grip of a homicidal spasm. Pinochet and the military, to the applause of the Chilean Right and with the nodding approval of the Nixon administration, staged their 1973 coup in the name of liberating Chile from Marxian socialism. But under the overthrown Socialist government of Salvador Allende, a liberal constitution was fully in force. A vibrant private sector dominated the economy. A fully functional congress was controlled by the conservative opposition. A dozen daily newspapers from far right to extreme left flourished free of all censorship. Not one Chilean was in jail for political crimes. Freedom of speech and assembly was fully respected. Allende's election had enriched, not atrophied democracy. - And now the junta that has overthrown him in the name of freedom is constructing a regime every bit as noxious, and in many ways worse, than the Stalinist governments of which it claims to be the antithesis. The Congress has been padlocked, the free press trashed and burned along with the courts and the political system itself, all opposition is banned and those suspected of resistance are hunted down tortured, beaten, dismemebered, assassinated and "disappeared

Marc Cooper, Pinochet and Me