Blog 9

This past week in Latin American Civilization and Culture we have been looking at Salvador Allende and Augusto Pinochet and their roles in Chile. What I think is interesting is that we are also looking at the same topic in my Spanish class right now. In class we talked a lot about all the awful things that Pinochet did with the support of the U.S. but not so much the outcome of his presidency. In Spanish, we learned that he called for economic support from the U.S. and brought in a bunch of economists from Chicago (or at least that's what I got from our lecture in Spanish). Since his presidency, the per capita GPD has risen drasitically and inflation was somewhat taken care of. This creates a really interesting polarization of his legacy. We read some articles on how he is remembered in Chile and the reality is that people are really split. Some remember the horrible torture and murder and other atrocities that he committed while others see that he "saved a generation" from poverty and starvation. Chile is now a thriving country in the southern cone and it appears that some of that success is due to him and his dictatorship. I think that that is incredibly interesting. I think we like to look back at history and decide who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and we believe that we assume that bad guys only do bad and good guys are the saviors of their countries. Looking at Pinochet, we can see that this is not necessarily true and the parallel between being a good person and doing good for your country isn't always quite so clear.