Tag Archives: Chile

What’s Behind Our World on Fire? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on November 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

The title is wrong. The world isn’t on fire yet, what Buchanan is describing is a brush fire. The real conflagration is yet to come. From Buchanan at buchanan.org:

When the wildfires of California broke out across the Golden State, many were the causes given.

Negligence by campers. Falling power lines. Arson. A dried-out land. Climate change. Failure to manage forests, prune trees and clear debris, leaving fuel for blazes ignited. Abnormally high winds spreading the flames. Too many fires for first responders to handle.

So, too, there appears to be a multiplicity of causes igniting and fueling the protests and riots sweeping capital cities across our world.

The year-long yellow vest protests in Paris, set off by fuel price hikes that were swiftly rescinded, seemed to grind down this weekend to several thousand anarchic and violent die-hards.

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Four lessons from the biggest riots in decades, by Simon Black

Posted on October 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

You usually don’t get much advance notice of a riot. The recent riots in Chile are instructive. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

If you’re been following the news, you might have seen reports about civil unrest in Chile– the worst in decades.

I lived in Chile for more than seven years before moving to Puerto Rico; I still have business interests there, along with hundreds of employees (both foreign and local), many of whom I’ve been speaking to over the last few days.

First things first, Chile is ordinarily a quiet, stable, peaceful country.

The last time Chile went to war was 140 years ago back in 1879. They even skipped both world wars.

And while there are occasional protests, Chile is quite tame by Latin American standards.

It’s also the most modern and advanced nation in the region– this is not a destitute, impoverished country.

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Is Democracy a Dying Species? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on October 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

If democracy is a dying species, what follows? From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

What happens when democracy fails to deliver? What happens when people give up on democracy?

What happens when a majority or militant minority decide that the constitutional rights of free speech, free elections, peaceful assembly and petition are inadequate and take to the streets to force democracy to submit to their demands?

Our world may be about to find out.

Chile is the most stable and prosperous country in Latin America.

Yet when its capital, Santiago, recently raised subway fares by 5%, thousands poured into the streets. Rioting, looting, arson followed. The Metro system was utterly trashed. Police were assaulted. People died. The rioting spread to six other cities. Troops were called out.

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Hard Choices, by Southern Sage

Posted on July 8, 2018 | 1 comment

Southern Sage responds to critics of an article SLL posted yesterday. From Southern Sage at theburningplatform.com:

I recently wrote an article about the death of Victor Jara, a Chilean Communist folk singer, and the September 11, 1973 coup in Chile, carried out by General Augusto Pinochet.  A number of readers expressed some skepticism about the article or objected to my central point, that hard choices and hard measures have to be taken to deal with Communists before they deal with you.  By “Communists” I do not mean just members of “official” Communist parties, who are often pen-pushing, lazy nobodies.

I include all Marxists who believe that they have a right to use violence or other extra-legal means to impose their will on ordinary people.  This most certainly includes Marxists who claim that they want to use democratic means to impose a Marxist state of any description.  My view, simply put, is that no Marxist or socialist state can ever be legitimate because by definition such a state will violate the fundamental, God-given rights of the population.  There is no such thing as “Communism with a human face”.

Let me get a couple of things out of the way.  My article was not revisionist history.  I invite anybody who is interested to refer to Allende: Death of a Marxist Dream, by James Whelan, or Chile’s Marxist Experiment, by Robert Moss.  As I said in the article I have discussed the historical events with men who were on the Communist side and in every particular they supported the conclusions in these two books.  Both writers are solid anti-Communists and, if you are familiar with the amount of leftist bullshit floating around regarding Communism in Latin America you will understand how rare it is to obtain a clear-eyed view of the truth regarding the revolutionary left in that region.

For some reason that escapes me a couple of people took exception to my mention of the Cuban fishing boats (really, ocean-going trawlers) that delivered clandestine arms shipments for the Communist workers militias.  This was standard practice in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  How do you think the dozens of Cuban-supported guerrilla and terrorist organizations got many of their arms?  In both Colombia and Venezuela there were famous cases of Cuban attempts to send arms to their guerrilla friends that went badly.

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Sad Death of a Crooner, by Southern Sage

Posted on July 7, 2018 | Leave a comment

A different take on the coup in Chile that overthrew socialist Salvador Allende. From Southern Sage at theburningplatform.com:

In the latest news from Chile, a kangaroo court has just convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison eight former soldiers for the killing of Victor Jara, a Communist folk singer who was shot following the September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew the regime of Salvador Allende, the “socialist” president of that long, thin, country at the tip of South America.  One other soldier was sentenced to five years for his part in a “cover up” of the killing.

For one who has spent much of his life fighting people Like Jara, these “convictions” are a dreary repetition of many similar instances whereby soldiers and police officers who fought the Communists in Latin America are being hounded by their liberal and leftist enemies for actions taken under desperate circumstances.  In view of the looming civil conflict in America, it would be well for all of us to remember that a fight is not over until the last one of these rats and their sympathizers are put in a place where they are never again in a position to take revenge on their political enemies.

Imagine an America where the lunatic left has managed to seize power and then imagine the fate of those who have opposed their conspiracy to destroy our country.

Uninformed Americans have been spoon-fed a tale of a “democratically-elected socialist” government in Chile that was tossed out by a brutal military coup which was followed by the mass killing of innocent people, with the complicity of the CIA, Nixon, etc.  The truth, of course, is totally different.

The facts are that feckless, self-centered Chilean politicians allowed Salvador Allende to be elected through a minority vote.  Allende was the head of the Chilean Socialist Party, a party that was even more radical than the stodgy Chilean Communist Party.  Once the levers of power were in his hands Allende set up making sure that there would one man, one vote, one time.

Surrounded by a gang of vicious bodyguards and terrorists from the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) and a host of Cuban intelligence agents and special forces soldiers, Allende and his even more extreme supporters began to a calculated campaign to destroy the democratic system that brought him to power.  It is an old Communist tactic.  Allende set out to marginalize the Chilean middle class, neuter the military, and make his “fundamental transformation” of Chile irreversible.  Sound familiar?

To continue reading: Sad Death of a Crooner

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5 Ways Capitalist Chile is Much Better Than Socialist Venezuela, by Marian L. Tupy

Posted on March 10, 2018 | 1 comment

One country moved towards market-based capitalism; one country went socialistic. One country prospered; one country impoverished itself. From Marian L. Tupy:

The story of Chile’s success starts in the mid-1970s, when Chile’s military government abandoned socialism and started to implement economic reforms. In 2013, Chile was the world’s 10th freest economy. Venezuela, in the meantime, declined from being the world’s 10th freest economy in 1975 to being the world’s least free economy in 2013 (Human Progress does not have data for the notoriously unfree North Korea).1. As economic freedom increased, so did income per capita (adjusted for inflation and purchasing power parity), which rose from being 31 percent of that in Venezuela to being 138 percent of that in Venezuela. Between 1975 and 2015, the Chilean economy grew by 287 percent. Venezuela’s shrunk by 12 percent.

2. As its economy expanded, so did Chile’s ability to provide good health care for its people. In 1975, Chile’s infant mortality rate was 33 percent higher than Venezuela’s. In 2015, almost twice as many infants died in Venezuela as those who died in Chile.3. With declining infant mortality and improving standard of living came a steady increase in life expectancy. In 1975, Venezuelans lived longer than Chileans. In 2014, a typical Chilean lived over 7 years longer than the average citizen of the Bolivarian Republic.4. Moreover, more Chileans of both sexes survive to old age than they do in Venezuela. As they enter their retirement, the people of Chile enjoy a private social security system that was put into place by Cato’s distinguished senior fellow Jose Pinera. The system generates an average return of 10 percent per year (rather than the paltry 2 percent generated by the state-run social security system in the United States).5. Last, but not least, as the people of Chile grew richer, they started demanding more say in the running of their country. Starting in the late 1980s, the military gradually and peacefully handed power over to democratically-elected representatives. In Venezuela, the opposite has happened. As failure of socialism became more apparent, the government had to resort to ever more repressive measures in order to keep itself in power—just as Friedrich Hayek predicted.

This article first appeared in Reason.

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