PBS Allende-Pinochet Documentary Flawed

Friday, 22 August 2008 [The Santiago Times]

(Ed. Note: Monday’s ST reported that the film “The Judge and the General” about Chilean Judge Juan Guzmán’s prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet is being shown this week on U.S. public television. As we didn’t report, the film can also be seen online till September 2 free of charge at http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2008/judgeandthegeneral/fullfilm.html.

(The following review of the film is by our Feature Editor Bill Stott. His opinions are his own, but it is fair to point out that he is the author of a classic book on documentary, Documentary Expression and Thirties America.)

"The Judge and the General" is moving, impressive, and half-true. It "documents"—that is, shows with vivid, gruesome evidence—why Judge Juan Guzmán came to believe that General Pinochet as well as his followers were guilty of crimes against humanity including torture and murder.

It is only half-true because it doesn’t document, indeed doesn’t mention, why Judge Guzmán—and before-Allende Chilean President Eduardo Frei (1964-70) and after-Pinochet Chilean President Patricio Aylwin (1990-94) and some 80 percent of the Chilean people supported Pinochet’s 1973 coup against President Salvador Allende.

Here’s the part of the truth the film doesn’t give vivid evidence of: Allende and his followers were guilty of crimes against humanity including torture and murder. He reduced a moderately prosperous, democratic country to poverty, chaos, and violence and counter-violence bordering on civil war. He did this through ineptitude and because he wanted to make permanent an apparently totalitarian Marxist regime.

Like Pinochet, Allende was an autocrat; he violated Chile’s constitution and laws when he wanted to. The difference between the two men is one of degree, not kind. Directly and indirectly, Pinochet tortured and killed many more people. But whereas Allende left Chile in shambles, Pinochet—unlike any other dictator who comes readily to mind—left his country much better off for his tenure.

If the public-spirited Americans who watch PBS had been Chileans in the Allende years, 80 percent of them would also have supported his overthrow; more than 80 percent of them, like today’s Chileans, would support the economic and social changes Pinochet brought about; and I suspect that even knowing the crimes committed by Pinochet and his followers, more or less 50 percent of them, like today’s Chileans, would generally approve of his rule.