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augusto pinochet
The American Reckoning
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know US leaders belong there too.
Sep 11, 2025
I have met people who gave me grace in Iran, in Mexico, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Cambodia, in Vietnam. People who understood the difference between ordinary citizens and the governments that rule them. People who offered me kindness when they had every reason not to. That grace stays with me.
As a US citizen and physician, I have lived my life trying to hold onto a sense of responsibility. But what I see now, in Gaza, in Haiti, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the full weight of what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It is the shrug that says: Someone else will answer for this, someone else will carry the shame.
The United States cannot keep living in that shrug. We armed, funded, and protected Israel as it has carried out the genocide of the Palestinian people. We have supplied not only weapons but coordination, intelligence, and political cover. We let the American Israel Public Affairs Committee function as the arm of a foreign government, not as a lobbying group. We looked away from the checkpoints, the administrative cruelty, the killing of children. This is our legacy.
But Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror held up to the long history of our interventions. We overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953, not because he was a tyrant but because he dared to nationalize oil. We turned that nation toward dictatorship and decades of repression, then had the arrogance to call it democracy. In Central America, we toppled leaders and propped up death squads. In Chile, we helped usher in the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet, betraying yet another democratic choice in favor of authoritarian brutality.
We speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous ways as if they are foreign to us. They are not. We have assassinated leaders. We have sanctioned extrajudicial killings, calling them “targeted strikes.” We have funded militias and trained torturers. We still carry Guantánamo on our conscience. We are not better than Putin. We are his rival and his mirror.
We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
In Vietnam, we unleashed hell. Entire villages were burned to the ground. At My Lai, US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 unarmed civilians, women, children, elders. It was not an accident, not a one-off. It was part of a culture of violence we exported and excused.
And then there is the School of the Americas, now rebranded as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US military institution in Panama where we trained some of the worst dictators and death squad leaders in Latin America. The manuals we gave them were explicit: torture, execution, terror as tools of governance. We sowed horror and called it security.
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know we belong there too. For Mossadegh, for Pinochet, for Central America, for My Lai, for every extrajudicial killing and every sanctioned massacre, and most immediately for Gaza, we should be in the dock as well. We should stand in handcuffs, our heads lowered in shame, finally facing the truth of what we have unleashed in the world.
The truth is that our foreign policy has been one long history of intervention, violence, and betrayal of human dignity. We were in Haiti. We were in Iraq. We were in Afghanistan. We have left the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa littered with the bones of our experiments. Always we tell ourselves it was complicated. Always we tell ourselves we meant well. But what we meant was power, and what we left was ruin.
What reparation looks like now is not cash or aid dropped into a void. It is restoring justice. It is ending our culture of nation building and intervention, and replacing it with support for people, families, language, culture, dignity, and jurisprudence. It is standing against genocide, no matter who commits it. It is admitting that our strength lies not in military power but in whether we can build schools instead of prisons, communities instead of empires.
This is not just a populist opinion. It is a moral imperative. We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
I am a doctor. My oath is to heal, to do no harm. But as a citizen, I see harm everywhere our government touches. We cannot keep pretending that this is someone else’s crime, someone else’s burden. This is ours.
The reckoning will not wait forever. The question is whether we face it with honesty now, or whether we let it destroy us later.
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GOP Congressman Suggests 'Pinochet Air' Death Flights for Migrants
"We wonder why the right-wingers aren't freaking out about Trump's dictator talk but we shouldn't," said one local Democratic leader in Georgia.
Feb 02, 2024
A Republican congressman from Georgia on Thursday suggested a novel way to stem the influx of migrants at the southern border: throw them from helicopters into the sea.
Responding to a photo showing a migrant flipping off the camera following his release without bail from a New York City court, Rep. Mike Collins took to social media to reply to a post by Rep. Anthony D'Esposito (R-N.Y.) advising the young man to "holla at the cartels and have them escort you back."
"Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back," Collins suggested. He was referring to former U.S.-backed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose regime was known to "disappear" critics by throwing them from helicopters into the Pacific Ocean and other waterways while they were still alive in what became known as "death flights."
As Christopher Mathias—a senior HuffPost reporter who covers the far-right—noted, Collins "is parroting a meme that's been popular among white supremacists and neofascists like the Proud Boys."
After Collins' post was removed from X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the congressman appealed directly to owner Elon Musk, saying that "he's apparently got a few more folks to fire," a reference to the site's purge of content moderators following its purchase by the multibillionaire.
Collins' post was restored with a notice that although it "violated the X rules," the site determined that "it may be in the public's interest" for it to remain accessible.
On right-wing sites including Daily Caller, commenters overwhelmingly voiced support for Collins' suggestion—although one reader found helicopter flights to be a "waste of time," preferring to "just shoot them at the border."
Pete Fuller, the Democratic Party chair in Jackson County, Georgia—which is part of Collins' district—tied the congressman's remarks to those of former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for the November election.
"We wonder why the right-wingers aren't freaking out about Trump's dictator talk but we shouldn't," Fuller said. "The hard right would love Trump taking over dictatorial powers and to start disappearing the people that are inconvenient to them."
Trump infamously suggested shooting migrants and stocking the Rio Grande with alligators, a proposal that resurfaced this week when Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) attempted to breathe life into her floundering reelection campaign by affirming she would co-sponsor legislation authorizing an alligator moat.
Collins is a more serious supporter of deadly obstacles in the Rio Grande. Responding to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling affirming the Biden administration's order for federal border authorities to cut down razor wire installed by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Georgia lawmaker said he will introduce the Restricting Administration Zealots from Obliging Raiders (RAZOR) Act. His bill would ban the federal government from removing or altering "any state-constructed barriers installed to mitigate illegal immigration."
The Supreme Court ruling followed a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit over Texas' razor wire-topped buoy barriers in the Rio Grande, in which numerous migrants have drowned while trying to cross into the United States. One migrant's body was found in the buoy barrier last year.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden has come under fire from migrant rights advocates for expressing his willingness to "shut down the border" in exchange for a deal with Republican lawmakers that would continue U.S. funding for Ukraine's defense against Russian invasion.
Critics have warned that such a bargain would cost migrants lives and result in the evisceration of rights and protections for legal asylum-seekers and other immigrants.
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Can the US Follow Chile out of Its Crisis of Representation?
Both countries find themselves with a growing disconnect between citizens and the institutions that claim to represent them, but Chile has gotten more democratic since 2020 while the U.S. has gotten less so.
Dec 27, 2023
On December 17, Chileans voted once again on a new constitution, opting to reject—for the second time in two years—an attempt at constitutional revision. Rejecting a highly conservative text, voters chose to keep the dictatorship-era constitution for the time being. A political saga that began amid immense hope has now devolved into a dismal disarray that’s left countless Chileans tired and frustrated.
Here in the United States, we face an equally bleak political outlook. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 25% of U.S. adults feel that neither of the nation’s two major parties represents them adequately enough. Some 63% of Americans express little to no confidence in the future of our political system.
Both the United States and Chile, in other words, find themselves at the center of what we can call a “Crisis of Representation,” a growing disconnect between citizens and the institutions that claim to represent them.
Each time Chileans took to the street, they sang louder and danced harder. The more their voices resonated, the harder they became to ignore.
This crisis has spared few countries. In 2019, major pro-democracy mass mobilizations erupted in nearly half—44%—of the world’s nations, an all-time high that surpassed previous records set during the fall of the USSR and the Arab Spring. People all over the world are demanding dignity and democracy. People all over the world feel that their voices are going unheard.
The U.S. and Chile share other links as well. Chile, according to the U.S. Department of State, rates as “one of the United States’ strongest partners in Latin America.” Our countries have maintained diplomatic relations for over two centuries and share proud, longstanding democratic traditions.
Yet this relationship has not always been positive. To say merely that the U.S. has “meddled” in Chilean politics would amount to a gross understatement. The CIA and Nixon administration stood behind the “first 9/11,” the September 1973 military coup that violently uprooted Chile’s then 143-year-old democracy. The U.S. would go on to prop up dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime for nearly two more decades—17 years of rape, torture, and murder.
The Pinochet years essentially birthed what we now call “neoliberalism.” The conservative U.S. economist Milton Friedman and his disciples used the captive Chile as a testing ground for our world’s now-dominant right-wing economic ideology. Under Pinochet’s neoliberalism, inequality deepened and worker power dwindled. Chileans found themselves forced to operate as consumers not citizens.
Since Pinochet’s ousting by plebiscite in 1990, the neoliberal economic model has continued to constrain Chilean democracy, just as neoliberalism has in the United States and many other countries across the globe. Today, the U.S. and Chile rank among the world’s most unequal nations.
Even so, according to Freedom House, Chile has been getting more democratic since 2020, with one of the highest rankings of any democracy in the world: 94. The United States has only become less democratic, with an 83 ranking. Here in the United States, we clearly have a lot to learn from the recent Chilean political experience.
Twenty-first-century Chile has been a progressive success story. Starting in the mid-2000s, three cycles of protest changed everything. Chile’s 2006 Penguin Revolution, 2011 Chilean Winter, and 2019 Social Explosion each began with student protests and developed into mass movements. Each cycle grew larger than the last, forcing politicians to pay ever greater attention to the widely shared popular demands.
Before the December 17 election, I spoke with two 31-year-olds, the psychologist Gustavo Ignacio Mancilla Andrade and the professor Jose Luis Escalona Muñoz, about their experiences as student leaders in the Valparaíso region.
“2006 made us realize that change was possible,” Jose told me. “2011 was chaotic at first, but soon we became highly organized. We got to the point where we were all speaking the same language, all calling for education to be recognized as a human right.”
We can see the power of these mobilizations in the policy changes they helped trigger, everything from landmark education reforms to a national plebiscite. Each cycle’s expressive intensity correlated with its impact. Each time Chileans took to the street, they sang louder and danced harder. The more their voices resonated, the harder they became to ignore.
“The arts kept the movement alive,” Gustavo explains. “If you march every day, you reach less people. If you adopt creative tactics, you draw people in. For this reason, you can trace the evolution of Chilean social movements just by looking at how protesters sing.”
Through protest, song, and dance, Chileans had begun resolving the Crisis of Representation.
The 2019 anti-inequality mobilizations turned out to be the largest in Chilean history. Millions flooded the streets to demand new forms of political representation.
“Pandora’s box is now wide open,” as Franco-Chilean historian and sommelier Francisca Herrera Crisan put it at the time, “letting the ghosts of the past escape, finally forcing us to face them. In pain, certainly, but also in the hope set free from the box: that of a people rediscovering themselves.”
Only a worldwide virus, notes the psychologist Gustavo, proved strong enough to slow that opening. Even so, Chile’s then president, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera, would soon concede to protester demands and announce a plebiscite to determine the fate of Pinochet’s constitution. In October 2020, 78% of Chileans voted to scrap the document, initiating a new and historic constitutional drafting process.
By early 2022, the future looked bright. A new constitution was taking shape, and Chile had just inaugurated its youngest president ever: the 36-year-old Gabriel Boric Font, a former student leader elected on an ambitious reform platform. Boric’s election signaled a new direction for Chile. He represented the voice of the young and the dispossessed.
But that hope soon dissipated. Assorted scandals plagued the constitutional assembly, and, after a concerted disinformation campaign, an overwhelming majority of voters rejected the assembly’s draft constitution. Chile’s far right used this political blunder to seize control of the constitution’s second drafting assembly.
In the meantime, Boric has faced strong political headwinds. Inheriting a deeply polarized country, he has found it difficult to build the broad coalitions necessary to pursue crucial reforms.
The story doesn’t end here.
The only way past the Crisis of Representation turns out to be through it, and in Chile the gears for change are still turning. Recent political setbacks have not detracted from Chile’s inspiring victories in deepening democratic engagement.
“These movements served as an important cultural catalyst,” explains the professor Jose. “They made us realize that it was possible to protest and demand a better future.”
Pushback, of course, will always come. Newton’s third law promises that. But if we look at the long trend, we’ll see it traces a positive trajectory. The social process initiated in 2019 has not run its course. The struggle remains alive, now more than ever.
During periods of demobilization, we must pause to regroup—using the lull in momentum as a chance to learn from the past and envision the future. This is the natural rhythm of change, the ebb and flow of progress.
I leave you with the last words of President Salvador Allende, delivered while defending Chile’s presidential palace from the conspirators of the 1973 coup:
“Neither crime nor force can delay social processes,” said Allende. “History is ours and it is made by the people.”
“Go forward,” he assured, “knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues through which free men pass to build a better society will open once again. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!”
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