It's time to bury the myths

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Truth, though painful, is best faced head on.

For decades, the Left spread the image of a passionately democratic Salvador Allende who, in 1973, fell from power through a combination of naiveté and a reluctance to use force against his enemies. The distance and simplification of the intervening years pictured him as a kindly martyr who, at the end, chose to take his own life with a rifle given to him by Fidel Castro, rather than surrender to an authoritarian enemy.

But that wasn't so. The history that now emerges reveals a character very different from that portrayed by popular lore.

The first hammer blow against the sugary memory of a heroic Allende came from Chilean historian Víctor Farías, the author of Salvador Allende: Anti-Semitism and Euthanasia. Farías unearthed the dissertation written in 1933 by Allende to get his medical diploma.

Allende's thesis bore the title ''Mental hygiene and crime'' and could have been signed by any fanatical supporter of Hitler. It was something like a handbook for the perfect Latin American fascist. Homosexuals were described as repugnant. People with mental illnesses should be chemically castrated so they couldn't transmit their biological heritage. Jews were characterized as usurers, swindlers and slanderers.

When Allende wrote this, he was only 25, but at age 40, a health minister, he tried to put his eugenic theories (so typically Nazi) into practice by introducing a bill to sterilize the mentally ill. Fortunately, that bill was rejected by Congress.

At 64, when he was president and Simon Wiesenthal, the late Israeli Nazi-hunter, asked him for the extradition of Walter Rauff (a Hitler henchman who ordered the murder of thousands of Jews), Allende rejected the petition.

Deep in his heart, though a sexagenarian, he remained the same ardent anti-Semite he had been in his youth.

The second blow against the falsified image of Allende comes from other historians: Vasily Mitrokhin of Russia and Christopher Andrew of Britain. The former, now dead, was a patient archivist for the KGB who had the fortunate thought of taking home copies of his work. The latter is a respected British historian.

In 1992, amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin defected to the West, carrying that valuable information and began to publish it. The second and final volume of his book contains this information about Allende: The late Chilean president was a KGB collaborationist, who received money, transmitted information and contributed to Soviet plans for the conquest of Latin America.

Allende was known as a confidential contact, someone who Moscow counted on to undermine democratic regimes and -- in accordance with the great Soviet project for world hegemony -- to eventually achieve the political defeat and destruction of the United States.

In reality, there is no contradiction between the young Allende, captivated by the fascist ideas prevalent in the 1930s, and the old Allende of the 1970s, a KGB collaborationist. Mussolini was an admirer of Lenin, while Hitler, along with the communists, felt a deep antipathy toward liberal democracy and the United States, a country that he thought was dominated by the Jews.

Fascism and communism were not extremes that resembled each other, as has often been said, but close branches emerging from the same socialist trunk. Allende came from that authoritarian and cruel tradition. He did not believe in freedom or democracy, although he did use them to achieve power.

In a way, the end of the myth of Allende is very positive for Chile's democratic left. Just as providential for that country's right has been the revelation -- in great detail -- that Gen. Augusto Pinochet was not only a despot who ordered or allowed thousands of murders and tortures but also a shameless thief.

Both sides face a clear history lesson: The nation's redemption and reconciliation are possible only through democracy, tolerance, the rule of law and a humble public admission that neither Allende nor Pinochet was a leader that the country deserved. Neither matched the image his supporters attempted to create.

It is time to bury all the myths.

September 27, 2005

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