Milton Friedman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Augusto Pinochet: What a Team!

The founder of the "Chicago School" of economics, Milton Friedman, the former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the military strongman of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, have all departed this mortal world. Friedman called for the most extreme privatization measures even in the impoverished Third World; Kirkpatrick was the intellectual guru for US-backed "authoritarian" regimes; and Pinochet was a practitioner of the Kirkpatrickian world view. In the 1980s, during the dictator's glory days, Kirkpatrick used to enjoy General Pinochet's company with a quiet cup of tea in his private residence.

Pinochet, perhaps more than any other US-supported dictator, put into practice Kirkpatrick's social theories and Friedman's "free market" economics. In the name of "anti-Communism," Pinochet liquidated the Parliament, censored the press, jailed and tortured his opponents, made mass arrests without due process, terrorized his own population, and then privatized nearly all of Chile's public institutions. He gave back the copper mines and operations to Anaconda and Kennecott Copper, and the phone lines back to ITT. He presided over a 17-year dictatorship responsible for the murder or "disappearance" of tens of thousands of innocent Chileans. (He launched "Operation Condor," which was responsible for assassinating his political opponents all over Latin America and the world, including the car bombing of Orlando Letelier and the 25-year-old journalist, Ronnie Moffet, in Washington, DC in September 1976.)

On September 11, 1973, General Pinochet led a military junta that ousted the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. His co-cospirators among the Chilean military bombed La Moneda Palace; Allende went on the radio to call for his supporters to resist the illegal coup d'etat. Allende himself was murdered (though false stories of his "suicide" were sent out to the US press). The Chilean military declared martial law, imposed a strict curfew, turned the soccer stadium in Santiago into a vast execution hall, and sealed off the entire country from outside observers, including the Red Cross, for thirteen days.

When the dust settled, the US had a reliably pro-"free enterprise," anti-Soviet dictatorship in charge of Chile. Pinochet soon established himself as one of the worst human rights abusers on the planet. Milton Friedman's acolytes descended on Chile, and ran the Chilean economy -- the "Chicago Boys" they were called -- and they used Chile as a laboratory for their "free market" theories. The model they imposed, which amounted to economic "freedom" combined with political repression, created growth for the rich few while impoverishing the less fortunate many.

Soon after the coup in Chile, information began to leak out that the Nixon Administration had ordered the CIA to engineer the coup that toppled Allende and installed Pinochet, and that ITT corporation had given the Nixon White House $1 million toward this end. The Church Committee report of 1976 exposed the embarrassing details of the operation, which included economic sabotage, political meddling, assassinations, financing of street gangs, and military coordination between the Chilean armed forces and the CIA.

Nixon's National Security Adviser (and later Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger was behind many of the machinations that overthrew one of Latin America's longest standing democracies to be replaced by one of the world's longest lasting dictatorships. It is one of the most sordid and sorry chapters in the history of United States foreign policy.

Friedman was responsible for the Pinochet regime's economic theories, Kirkpatrick created the geo-political framework, Kissinger engineered the coup, and Pinochet provided the muscle. They were a great team that will not be missed.