1973 Chilean coup

El golpe de Estado contra el gobierno de la Unidad Popular tuvo un enorme impacto político en México. Junto a su condena por el gobierno y las izquierdas, varios actores políticos, inclinados a posturas de derecha, reaccionaron positivamente al derrocamiento de Salvador Allende. El
presente artículo expone los motivos, los argumentos y las acciones que las derechas mexicanas realizaron para mostrar su respaldo al golpe de Estado, recuperando a tres actores políticos concretos de este complejo campo político: la derecha empresarial, el Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) y la
extrema derecha. Más allá de los particularismos, la afinidad mostrada al golpe tuvo ejes directrices comunes como el combate al comunismo, mal que México adolecía por las buenas relaciones diplomáticas que el gobierno de Luis Echeverría mantuvo con Allende. Bajo esta premisa, las derechas intentaron responsabilizar a esta relación de la inestabilidad económica y política que vivía el país en la época. En este sentido, el objetivo del artículo es mostrar cómo un acontecimiento internacional puede impactar de manera notable en la política interna de un país, ya que el apoyo de las derechas mexicanas al golpe fue también una crítica al gobierno mexicano, acusado de intentar “allendizar” a México.

The 1973 Chilean coup gave rise to an unprecedented growth in a global human rights consciousness. In its aftermath, transnational activists from a diverse array of political and ideological backgrounds found common cause–indeed, a common language of human rights–in campaigns to ameliorate the repressive acts of the Chilean military junta. This article focuses on two models of activism in particular: Amnesty International, whose 1973 investigative mission set the terms of the global debate about human rights in Chile; and transnational solidarity activists, especially Chilean exiles from leftist parties, whose vision of social activism narrowed as their interest in human rights surged. These campaigns–while not without tensions over the role of politics in the moral appeal to human rights–both articulated a transnational discourse of human rights and created new activist techniques to foment moral outrage by revealing the prevalence of torture through the power of personal testimony.

One of the presumed components of liberal democracy is the principle of pluralism. This principle is presumably premised on the idea that political power in society is dispersed, that it is not concentrated in one group or class, that relationship among groups -regardless of size --is constantly shifting, that the citizenry make choices freely, that citizens from all walks of life and from all sectors of society participate openly and responsibly, and that the outcome of the electoral contest is legitimate and valid. This paper tests these assumptions and arrives at quite different, often opposite, set of conclusions. By deploying the concept of "demonstration elections" originally used by Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead in a 1984 book of the same title, this paper finds that, in the cases examined herein, pluralism often means elite-led for it is the elites -social, economic, and military -that have the most resources and, therefore, the most at stake in the outcome of the political contest.