Even if he had just said that, it would have been enough to make him a supporter -- considering that he said that for a fascist junta leader that overthrew a democratically elected leader, and is responsible for thousands of executions, and tons of torture and violence. There was just no redeeming quality.
But Hayek went much further: http://crookedtimber.org/2013/06/25/the-hayek-pinochet-conne...
That is absurd. He supports who he supports. He never claimed to support Pinochet, so he didn't. If I say that Krushchev was better than Stalin, does that make me a Krushchev supporter? Of course not!
>There was just no redeeming quality
Pinochet's reign, brutal though it was, led Chile to become the most prosperous country in South America. If that is not a redeeming quality, I really don't know what is. Hayek also correctly predicted Chile's transition to democracy ten years before it happened. I think most of Hayek's work post-1950 is nonsense, but a correct prediction is the highest standard of scientific demonstration, and this was a big one.
Note that the election was far from being "the majority of electors" and heavily disputed at the time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende#1970_election
Let's not pretend Allende represented the population of Chile at large, please.
Hoover report on before and after Allende: https://www.hoover.org/research/what-pinochet-did-chile
> In 1970, Allende won 36.2 percent of the popular vote, less than the 38.6 percent he had taken in 1964 and only 1.3 percent more than the runner-up. According to the constitution, the legislature could have given the presidency to either of the top two candidates. It chose Allende only after he pledged explicitly to abide by the constitution. “A few months later,” Whelan reports, “Allende told fellow leftist Regis Debray that he never actually intended to abide by those commitments but signed just to finally become president.” In legislative and other elections over the next three years, Allende and his Popular Unity (UP) coalition, dominated by the Communist and Socialist parties, never won a majority, much less a mandate, in any election. Still Allende tried to “transition” (his term) Chile into a Marxist-Leninist economic, social, and political system.
and
> Many on the left had long believed that capitalism and democracy were incompatible. In a brazen demonstration of its contempt for majority wishes, and for the institutions of what it called “bourgeois democracy,” the pro-Allende newspaper Puro Chile reported the results of the March 1973 legislative elections with this headline: “The People, 43%. The Mummies, 55%.” This attitude and the actions that followed from it galvanized the center-left and right, whose candidates had received almost two-thirds of the votes in the 1970 election, against Allende. On August 22, 1973, the Chamber of Deputies, whose members had been elected just five months earlier, voted 81–47 that Allende’s regime had systematically “destroyed essential elements of institutionality and of the state of law.” (The Supreme Court had earlier condemned the Allende government’s repeated violations of court orders and judicial procedures.) Less than three weeks later, the military, led by newly appointed army commander in chief Pinochet, overthrew the government. The coup was supported by Allende’s presidential predecessor, Eduardo Frei Montalva; by Patricio Aylwin, the first democratically elected president after democracy was restored in 1990; and by an overwhelming majority of the Chilean people. Cuba and the United States were actively involved on opposite sides, but the main players were always Chilean.
He wasn't, still, he got a 64,1% approval rate in 1972, which is much more than the actual president (Michelle Bachelet) on her whole second government.
> Main players were always Chilean
Not true, there is evidence that proves US intervention in both elections and government.
The actual democratic representation was against him by 1973, That's what's important.
It's telling that the text you quoted has zero actual facts against him, only reports of vague accusations. The name for that is "character assassination".
> only reports of vague accusations.
Where vague accusations? The economic situation of Chile during his regime went from bad to worse and his directives were directly responsible for it (as proven countless times in countries where the same policies were adopted). Check out the wikipedia page on the economy of Chile during his years.
You contested the claim that he was democratically elected. I don't see how this is relevant to that claim.
In any case, I don't see evidence that his former allies were against him. Congress wasn't his ally, and besides - as the text you quoted says - there was an election in between, so they weren't all the same people. His allies were the UP, and as far as I can tell, they still supported him.
Finally, losing support from your allies means nothing. That happen just five years ago in my Western European country, and it might happen again soon. It's an expected development in a country with a diverse polity.
Where vague accusations?
"destroyed essential elements of institutionality" and such.
The economic situation of Chile
Which might make him a bad President, but still a democratically-elected one, which was the point being argued.
The implication there is that economic freedom trumps any other kind of freedom, which is exactly what the GP was trying to say.
If you believe in democratic freedom, you believe in the right of the people of a country to choose whatever they want even if, in your opinion, it's a mistake or too radical for your taste.
Compare that to Pinochet who was choose by the CIA and the Chile oligarchy. Defense of freedom certainly.
Well, that's how Stalin's Soviet became an industrial power that could fend off Germany, and basically how South Korea rose economically under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee (except that "nationalization of means of production" was changed to "give means of production to subservient businessmen who are rolling in the same bed as the government").
You can't predict a country's future by a few soundbites like "Is it central planning?": you immediately run into problems, like how do you even define central planning?
Where? Hayek said basically that there was more freedom under Pinochet than under Allende, which is not the same thing as being a supporter of Pinochet.
> Hayek: More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.