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MARIO J. TORRES
The
"soft" dictatorship
In Spanish the ending "ship" in the word "dictatorship" means "hard" so it
reinforces the idea that a dictatorship should be a hard process to undergo.
There is a somewhat funny phrase quoted by General Augusto Pinochet, former
dictator of Chile, who, when referring to his government and for the sake of
a defense to it, declared it, in an intentional pun with words, as a "soft"
dictatorship, maybe thinking of other "harder" ones existing in the
hemisphere. Without deepening in an analysis on to which extent General
Pinochet was unfair or made injustice during his government at that time, on
how he violated the democratic essence of his country and even less, without
trying to excuse him or justify his mistakes, it can only be pointed out,
and this would be more likely addressing Chileans who did feel it on their
own flesh, that Pinochet's dictatorship was not soft, according to him,
because he was good, kind or merciful with his enemies but because it was a
more strictly political dictatorship and even though he killed, persecuted
or made his enemies disappear in order not to be overthrown and he had an
iron claw on power, he did not go beyond that point regarding the change of
national values: he did not have his people starve of hunger or cry for
their everyday needs, he did not ration to the minimum the elementary and
necessary resources for life as clothing, water, electricity and food, he
did not create new ideologies or dogmas for mandatory consumption, he did
not export his policy nor sent his people to die overseas with threats of
retaliation if they refused, he did not alter landscape of cities, nor even
forced his fellow citizens to massively escape across dangerous borders or
through the sea in weak rafts in an adventure where many died , he never
prepared his people for imaginary invasions nor forced them to come out to
the streets for mandatory parades and concentrations, he did not create
repressive political organizations that controlled the people's slightest
moves and expressions house by house in a sophisticated system of informers
where nobody knows who is who, there was never any modification or banning
on religious beliefs, there was no elimination of Christmas or the tradition
of the 3 Wise Men day, there was no denial of God, there was no apartheid
for the nationals of his country and no prohibitions of destruction of
habits, customs and traditions of his people nor the removal of holidays or
historical dates replacing them with new ones created on his own, there was
no cultural nor social commotion in the country and its geopolitical
structure was not changed, political parties were not eliminated and what is
much more important, instead of having his country travel behind in years,
making the economy collapse with crazy and failed plans and in this way
destroy it, Pinochet lifted it and improved it, which sounds like a great
contradiction but it has been like this. This will never excuse the Chilean
dictator, but it only points out that whenever there is something bad, there
will always be something worse in comparison.
When people think on dictators, names such as: Trujillo and Stroessner come
to mind but the father of all of them, Fidel Castro, cannot escape memory
and for sure, at the moment this rightist dictator, now an old and helpless
man who seems never killed a fly and that life will soon give him the
justice he deserves, made the comment about his soft dictatorship he was
thinking of his leftist communist counterpart, master and owner of the
greater of the Antilles who, for more than 45 years, has destroyed the
Caribbean island with the hard version, not the soft one and who has indeed
scored for his records all the previously described facts Pinochet did not
attain.
The case of Chile is the same as that of the bad and corrupt Latin American
democracies in which the general population does not know about a worse
situation than the one they have or a more disgraceful evil and they
normally think that what they suffer is the most painful and unfair of
situations, so they believe that Cubans exaggerate when they complain,
criticize the Cuban government and describe its atrocities and along with
the false propaganda that comes from the island, many people think that
Fidel Castro, who at the same time pleases many for opposing the Americans
in a sort of common enemy style, is a saint or a redeemer and those who are
against him are evil gangsters at the service of the very "gringos", Yankees
or whatever you can call them. Again, with the _expression he used, it seems
Pinochet was aware that in fact he could have done more damage than he did
but anyhow he is not even close to the dean of dictatorships also due to
considerably less time in the power.
Doctor Castro, and now the real specialty of his doctorate is discovered to
be the same as the well known Dr. Evil, has indeed applied the real and
integral dictatorship and not only in the political field but also socially,
economically and in all spheres of the Cuban life and along with his brother
Raul, both have behaved as two real insane persons that have unfairly played
with the lives of millions of Cubans, exterminating many of them either by
execution, drowned in the sea or by means of his "internationalism",
separating families, practically destroying the country and turning Cubans
into an annihilated generation that apart from unhappy and miserable, is
lost.
MARIO J TORRES
DECEMBER 2004
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