ulture of fear" was created, encouraged, by the new regime. Simultaneously, Pinochet unleashed his "Chicago Boys" - economists trained in the monetarist philosophy of the University of Chicago's Milton Freidman - giving the eager young technocrats his open-ended approval to dismantle "Marxist statism" and recreate Chile as a "free enterprise model." By 1981 the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, was pointing to Chile's economy as a neo-conservative example to be emulated.
Within less than a five-year span, then, from 1969 through 1974, Chile devolved from being Latin America's premier democracy, with a 130-year tradition of relatively peaceful government transition, into an anarchy-ridden neo-Marxist state - then devolved further into the "orderly" terror of neo-fascist "free market" government. It is a chronology with a few heroes, many villains, and a very depressing political lesson for any democratic nation.
History is to be studied only if its lessons can mean something to the present. In this respect, the Frei-Allende-Pinochet c
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