John R. Bawden. The Pinochet Generation

John R. Bawden’s The Pinochet Generation: The Chilean Military in the Twentieth Century is about military officers whose careers overlapped that of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and took part in overthrowing the left-wing administration of President Salvador Allende Gossens in 1973. These officers either were members of the junta and brought Pinochet into power or were his advisers and henchmen when he was president of the military junta and president of the republic (1973–1990). The work is based on officers’ memoirs including Pinochet’s, newspapers, an extensive body of secondary works from the United States and Chile, and some archives of the United States government and records of the Chilean junta. The military archives are still closed. The work is notable for how well it synthesizes its information into a portrait of military objectives and behavior between the 1930s and the 1990s. Bawden’s intent is to present various political crises as seen through the eyes of its officers and the impact these had in forming a common mentalité across the services. The views of the National Police (Carabineros) are largely ignored, as a result of poor information. This is too bad, for the police were about the same size as the army, numbering twenty-five thousand, and far more important than Naval and Air Force units in maintaining everyday order during the dictatorship. The author is very good in presenting the officers’ conviction that they had never been defeated by any foreign power or domestic insurrection; actions against the latter were equated with those against the former as “victories.” This military pride rested as well on “geopolitics,” a “science” in which Pinochet and other officers believed. One of Bawden’s more shocking findings is that the dictator’s text on the subject is still assigned in the Army Academy of War (80). Geopolitics is, of course, not a science but a series of metaphors declaring how a nation has a body that must be protected. Its origins, as Bawden explains, are in Western Europe near the end of the nineteenth century. Here Bawden could have branched out a little and explored the popularity of this topic in other Latin American militaries. He should also have read Susan Sontag on the use of medical language in other contexts. Many of the military regimes talked in terms of removing a “cancer” (the Left) from the body politic. Then, the author could have made a comparison of his analysis of the language of the Chilean junta with Marguerite Feitlowitz’s 1998 analysis of the Argentine lexicon of terror under its junta. In reviewing the events from 1973, Bawden plays down the roles of the United States government and U.S. corporations. He almost ignores the role of Chile’s economic elites, the National Party, and leaders of the Christian Democratic Party in making Allende’s situation impossible in order to blame chaos for the coup.

Administration (probate law) · Aristocracy (class) · Conviction · Democracy · Dictator · Dictatorship · Economic history · Memoir · Military government · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America