The left’s ability to turn great villains into heroes never ceases to amaze. Salvador Allende was a despicable villain. This week marks 50 years since the military coup that ended his Government in Chile, the first freely elected Marxist government in the West, and the left, national and foreign, does not refrain from praising, cheering and recognizing his number, when , In fact, His legacy is one of dictatorship, violence and destruction.
Allende was not a democrat, but a declared enemy of democracy and basic rights and freedoms which, at that time, was included in the Constitution of the Republic, as criticized by the Chilean Chamber of Deputies itself by a large majority in August 1973, a few weeks before Pinochet’s military coup.
but If the people, in large part, supported the coup, it was because of the economic collapse that the country suffered during his short mandate. between 1970 and 1973, in his failed attempt to impose “Chile’s road to socialism”, a model that, decades later, Hugo Chávez imitated in Venezuela through “21st century socialism”, with equally devastating consequences for the entire population.
With only 36% of the votes, Allende, who remained in a minority position in Parliament during his government, attempted to take state control of the means of production and end private property crossing all legal and constitutional limits necessary to achieve its objective.
The first step towards his particular utopia of a planned economy consisted of the confiscation of companies, goods and services.. And he did it mercilessly, by stealing, without even paying compensation or justification to pay less to the legitimate owners, as required in a typical expropriation. Allende took over 100% of the mining industry, his agrarian reform confiscated all private property over 80 hectares and, finally, he controlled a large part of the financial system under threats of liquidation and closure. After this, it was launched in all kinds of smaller companies through a relentless wave of expropriations.
“Allende caused public spending by uncontrolled money printing, causing hyperinflation”
Because of this, In 1973, the Popular Unity Government controlled 40% of the country’s total production, excluding agriculture.. It owns 85% of the banking and mining sectors, 70% of transportation and communications, and 40% of industry. And he did it with a gun, ignoring laws and judges, against the will of merchants, workers and farmers.
The second major step was to control prices and wages. Allende caused public spending by uncontrolled money printing, causing hyperinflation, with an annual rate of more than 600%. And the situation worsened due to the imposition of strict price and wage controls on more than 3,000 products, which, in the end, created a black market and shortages. The control of exchange rates and imports did the rest, throwing the country as a whole into a deep economic and social crisis.
Real wages, discounting inflation, fell by 39%, Poverty has risen above 50% of the population and the lack of basic products has become the norm, to the point of having to resort to rationing, with the result of social unrest and the explosion of protests in the streets of the explosion of empty pot.
Destruction and misery, that is the result of the 10th socialist experiment. The incredible thing about this story is that the left continues to applaud such failure at the economic, political and social levels. Allende destroyed Chile’s economy in just three years, promoting institutionalized violence and crime and tried to overthrow democracy to impose a new dictatorship of the proletariat, in the image and likeness of neighboring Cuba. Such drift ended in a military coup that took almost 20 years to restore democracy in Chile.
Allende’s revolutionary government was an unmitigated disaster, a nightmare of disastrous consequences from which nothing good could come. except for the valuable lesson that communism, no matter who applies it, no matter the time or place, leads to the worst of all possible worlds..
