Chile's 9/11 -- and the legacy of Gen. Pinochet

Thirty-five years ago today on a different 9/11, army Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile. Since that day, two issues have continued to generate contention: Should Pinochet be remembered merely as a tyrant who became an international symbol of repression, or as an economic reformer who turned Chile into a global success; and to what extent did the U.S. government bring about his dictatorship?

Many of those who backed the 1973 coup had wanted the armed forces to simply restore order and then call for elections. Pinochet did initially bring about order after a period of instability and chaos. But having seized power -- joining the coup at the last minute -- he decided to keep it. He ordered the murder of union leaders, the exile of thousands of dissidents, the torture and disappearance of political prisoners, the terrorist bombing of exiled leaders -- including the 1976 assassination of former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his U.S. citizen colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffit, in Washington -- and created a state of internal war.

But during that time, he also transformed Chile economically. Pinochet was a pragmatist who, faced with a broken economy, introduced major free-market reforms inspired by University of Chicago Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. Inflation was drastically reduced, state-owned businesses and social security were privatized, the financial system was deregulated, external tariffs were lowered and non-traditional exports fostered.

By the end of the decade, the Chilean economy had become one of the most prosperous in Latin America and the inspiration for the "Washington Consensus," the set of rules recommended for countries wishing to "put their houses in order" and grow.

There was a social cost though: Income distribution deteriorated, and Chileans living under the poverty line climbed from 20% in 1970 to almost 40% by the end of Pinochet's rule.

The real economic miracle occurred after Pinochet, between 1990 and 2007, when his reforms were legitimized and improved through democratic debate and consensus. Successive governments also made many of those reforms more palatable with heavy social investment to help those left behind during the Pinochet era. As a result, growth rates almost doubled those of the preceding three decades, and poverty was cut by more than half