Nearly 50 years after Augusto Pinochet seized power with armed forces and installed a military dictatorship, a third of Chileans think he was right to do so. While Chile’s opinion regarding Pinochet fluctuates depending on the moment, the resurgence resonates with the recent election results.
In Chile, a third of the population views the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet positively, a resurgence in favor of the regime that resonates with the recent success of the far-right Republican Party.
The results from the CERC-Mori Politics Barometer published on May 30 suggest Chile has never looked at the dictatorship so positively since its return to democracy. However, the population’s opinion fluctuates greatly depending on the moment.
In the latest poll, almost 50 years after the coup d’État, more than a third of Chileans support the idea that Chile was liberated from Marxism on that day, and only 4 out of 10 believe that the coup destroyed democracy.
On September 11, 1973, the armed forces led by Pinochet overthrew the government of socialist Salvador Allende. The dictatorship lasted 17 years with severe breaches of human rights and left over 3,200 dead and missing persons.
In 1988, the year of the public plebiscite that marked the return of democracy, Pinochet collected 44 percent of the votes in his favor. Thirty-five years later, support of the population only lost eight percentage points.
Thirty-six percent of the population still thinks General Pinochet was right to carry out a coup. This opinion gained 20 percentage points in ten years when it reached a historic low (16% in 2013). When the question was first asked in 2003, 36 percent of the Chileans thought he was right, which decreased until 2013 before steadily increasing until 2023.
Yet, 64 percent also consider Pinochet will be perceived as a dictator in history.
According to the opinion research firm, no Western country shows so much support for a dictator after they left power.
The CERC surveys have been conducted with face-to-face interviews of people representative of the Chilean population since 1987, only interrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The minister of justice, Luis Cordero, said he found the results “worrying” in a radio interview. “I believe that 50 years after the coup, we should have a basic consensus, one, that to smash the institutional order to impose another is to break the essential bases of the rule of law, the second is that there is no justification for any political struggle that justifies the systematic violations of human rights.”
Chile doesn’t categorically condemn the dictatorship, with as many as 47 percent of people considering the military regime was partly good and partly bad, while only 25 percent perceive it as bad.
The survey was carried out in February and March 2023 in the context of strong opposition to the government of the leftist Gabriel Boric, who took office in March 2022, amid an increase in crime and where irregular migration, inflation, and a stagnant economy appeared as a backdrop.
Marta Lagos, the founder of MORI Chile, points out that Chileans don’t have a definitive position on the dictatorship, and the evaluation depends on when the questions are asked. She directly links the opinion shown in the survey with the recent votes for the Constitutional Council.
On May 7, the far-right Republican Party won the majority of the seats in the Constitutional Council that will draft a new constitution. They gathered a third of the votes in a country where voting is mandatory, similar to the adult population who sees the dictatorship positively.
