John Bawden investigates the entrenched military culture and mindset that marked Chile's “Pinochet generation” of officers, the cohort that carried out the 1973 coup against socialist president Salvador Allende. Augusto Pinochet and his allies instituted a 17-year dictatorship that used state violence and terror, combined with neoliberal restructuring, to “change the mentality” and destiny of Chileans.
The author's history of the Chilean armed forces in Chapters 1 and 2 is useful, as is his review of geopolitical thinking. He recognizes the powerful Cold War role of the United States in the hemisphere but argues that internal and national perspectives shaped the Pinochet generation more. He clarifies some of the internal divisions within this military cohort. To explain military thinking, Bawden draws on military magazines, autobiographies, and media interviews. The values of realism—pessimism and conservatism—as well as Prussian discipline, anticommunism, loyalty to the institution, suspicion of democracy, and particular interpretations of historical events all informed this generation's perspectives.
The author argues that military men have been caricatured or misunderstood in previous studies and that there is a paucity of serious historical work on the Chilean military (he excludes work done by political scientists on the military as a political actor; 1, 6). Bawden's method to clarify this military generation's goals, fears, and objectives is to present its unfiltered declarations and justifications, buttressed by its own public rationales. For example, he presents Pinochet's view that the dictatorship “established a cycle of expansion in the life of the Chilean state, of modernizing its economy and bureaucratic structures, of breathing into it the vital forces needed to begin a sustained growth cycle” (94). Bawden states that “from 1972 to 1973 officers watched silently as their homeland came apart” (143) before undertaking the coup. But this approach also raises some conceptual and methodological issues.
It requires a fine balance to present the voices of politicized military men while maintaining a critical analytical distance. Here the book does not always succeed. The author tends to present perspectives held by Pinochet and his comrades with little or no critical comment or contextualization. Bawden quotes Manuel Contreras—the feared and brutal head of the Gestapo-like National Intelligence Directorate (DINA)—on “the pernicious nature of Marxism-Leninism” (86) without acknowledging his role in multiple crimes against humanity (after the transition from military rule he was sentenced to some 1100 years in prison for various crimes).
The author repeatedly argues that “a great many officers held center-left views. They supported income redistribution, strong unions, and regulated capitalism” (77) and respected the rights of labor (e.g. 135, 147, 149). But in practice the Pinochet regime destroyed unions, “disappeared” and killed union leaders, imposed severe cutbacks in jobs, wages, and benefits, and privatized state industries and welfare functions. Social inequality in Chile was enormously exacerbated during the dictatorship, but the book does not tackle this contradiction.
At times, the line between the voices of the junta officers and the author's voice is nebulous. For example, Bawden tends to present the military's hostile view of the Allende government without scrutiny (97, 100, 133, 135, 162, 203). He claims that “a majority of Chileans actively or passively supported the [military] regime” (163, 202, 204, 208, 215) without citing a source. Bawden's discussion of the notorious “Plan Z” goes on for several paragraphs without recognizing that this supposedly Allende-inspired conspiracy to kill opposition leaders (141) is known to have been false. Only after extensively repeating the accusation claims does Bawden mention “the fabrication of Plan Z.” An analysis of Plan Z is absent. The problem with giving such weight to junta statements is that they were a calculated part of a psychological warfare project: to stoke fears in the population, legitimize the regime, divide and confuse pro-Allende forces, and propagate nefarious myths to justify their own coup.
In sum, the book presents a rather incomplete—and antiseptic—view of a very repressive regime and its leaders. It should be read in conjunction with others that analyze more deeply the actual destruction of Chile's democracy wrought by the Pinochet regime and the legacy of fear and trauma it left behind, themes that are scarcely mentioned here.
