Little Hitlers

Chile Sendoff

The Reagan Years were just great. . . they gave us hair bands, Head of the Class, The Hooters, and a half-dozen or so petty little Central and South American despots, perpetually propped up by the U.S. State Department and/or the C.I.A., suddenly finding they were losing their footing and wondering if the U.S. would rush in and save them from their own subjects.

Their doubts were raised by the fact the U.S. had recently given in to international sentiment (and to the idea of universal human rights) and for the first time had let one of its former puppet regimes fall to a popular native uprising, in Nicaragua. This successful revolution happened technically in Carter's administration, but Reagan had assumed power by the time former Nicaraguan leader Anastasio Somoza was blown to smithereens by a car bomb in Paraguay, where he had gone into exile after being overthrown. The reverberations from this assassination were felt by every two-bit military dictator in that part of the Southern Hemisphere, from the leader of the lowliest banana republic to that of one of the large, emerging Second World countries.

If you don't believe me, it was all documented on The Clash's Sandinista! LP (1980), a record that helped make the Reagan era bearable. And of course Reagan himself will be forever remembered for overseeing a scheme around that same time whereby, 'off the books', the U.S. sold arms to our bitterest enemy in order to raise money for the reactionary paramilitary forces challenging the Sandinistas in Nicaragua a few years after the revolution. The infamous Iran-Contra scheme also involved using various South American drug lords as middle men, and was integral in emboldening that particular group of murderous thugs, who then greatly expanded the smuggling of weed and cocaine into the U.S. in the years immediately following Iran-Contra, with incredibly disastrous consequences for the U.S. government and many of its citizens.

Iran-Contra was also responsible for inflicting Marine Lt. Col. Ollie North on the culture for the first time. This may have been the gravest consequence of all. North gained popularity with the faith-and-values set by boldly standing up to Congressional inquisitors and lying and obfuscating his way through the entirety of his testimony in nationally televised hearings. The reverence for the man and his courageous act of lying through his fucking teeth under oath was such that at the time the mere invocation of his name brought some strong, patriotic Americans literally to tears.

Anyway, pretty soon all these brutal South and Central American Presidents for Life/martinets/CIA puppets were falling like dominos all over - Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, Omar Torrijos and then Manuel Noriega (who was driven from power partly by really loud recordings from the Guns 'N' Roses oeuvre) in Panama, Jorge Videla in Argentina, "Baby Doc" Duvalier in Haiti. One of the other members of the club, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, held out until 1990. I guess because I associated all the Latin American facism with the 1980's, I just assumed Pinochet was long dead, so I was startled to see he expired just this past Sunday, at the ripe old age of 91. Pinochet had in fact outlived many of his bitterest enemies. Now a debate has started in Chile as to whether he should be remembered as a brave defender against Marxism, or as a bloody fascist who was responsible directly or indirectly for the deaths of over 3,000 of his fellow Chilean citizens during his repressive reign.

At any rate, hearing of his demise somehow reminded me of another of Pinochet's ruthless and repressive fascist bretheren, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain who himself is, I think we may all safely assume, still dead.