The strongman dilemma

Why didn't David build the temple?

Some years ago, I developed a theory about the need for “strongman leaders” to bring balance to unbalanced societies. Here are my thoughts for your judgment. Please consider this a work in progress and add your ideas in the comments section or by email. Here goes…

Several years ago, my family and I enjoyed Christmas dinner with two other families whose origins were in Chile. The conversation was far ranging but naturally began to focus on the political scene in Chile. By the time dessert arrived both men were standing, gesticulating with considerable energy, and shouting at each other over the real details of Chile’s military coup of 1973. I found it both interesting and highly entertaining having learned from experience that the energy of the conversation was just a natural part of the conversation and red faces did not translate into lingering anger. In fact, laughter returned almost immediately, and I remember the evening with fondness.

As an aside, I had worked with one of the participants and witnessed a similar conversation he had with a colleague from Russia. It was the same scenario; standing, gesticulating wildly and shouting. This time the shouting was in Spanish and Russian making the scene both surreal and very funny.

In 1970 the people of Chile elected the politically experienced, Salvador Allende, to be their president. He was an avowed and unapologetic Marxist. Mr. Allende had lost the 1964 election to Eduardo Frei who was supported by $5.6 million from the American CIA. In 1970, the election resulted in a very close three-way race which Mr. Allende eventually won by a constitutional vote in the Chilean senate.

As demonstrated by the Christmas dinner over 30 years later, there are differing opinions regarding the effects of the Allende presidency. At the beginning, economic and social criteria improved but by 1973 inflation was over 100 percent and Chile was moving into the orbit of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Labour strikes and increasing friction between Mr. Allende and the more conservative Congress brought the country to the edge of social and economic chaos. The United States was watching carefully. In August 1973, General Augusto Pinochet, a graduate of the School of Americas, was appointed Commander-in-Chief and on September 11 he staged a coup. The role of the CIA in the lead up to the coup and the coup itself was much discussed and widely refuted until the statute of limitations on the classified documents expired and the role of the CIA was exposed.

Mr. Pinochet ruled for the next 17 years as the leader of a military junta and then as the appointed president. International pressure, the pope’s visit in 1987 (during which, according to some sources, John Paul II asked Pinochet to step down), and internal strife caused Mr. Pinochet to hold a referendum in October 1988 on a return to democracy. He stepped down as president and turned over power to the elected government on March 11, 1990. Under the constitution he received permanent immunity from prosecution within Chile. Unfortunately, the British did not extend that immunity and in 1998, he was arrested for the murder of a Spanish citizen during the 1973 coup. While awaiting extradition to Spain, the British government overruled the extradition order and flew Mr. Pinochet back to Chile. He spent the last years of his life fighting charges of crimes against humanity and corruption related to money laundering. Two days after he was judged competent to stand trial for the alleged crimes, he died of a heart attack.

The socialist policies of Mr. Allende were destroying the country and the wealth of rich and poor alike. Something was going to happen, and the country was rumoured to be the target of an ultra-left-wing coup leading to a communist take-over. Following three years of stark economic shocks, the economy of Chile recovered under Mr. Pinochet and the country led the world in GDP growth. People returned home, money was repatriated from US bank accounts, investment activity accelerated, the companies nationalized by Mr. Allende were privatized, and income per capita eventually rose 50%. Chile was the poster child of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics.

It is also well established that tens of thousands of Chileans were tortured and 2,279 were “disappeared”.  Almost one million citizens of Chile fled the country. So, was Pinochet a fascist, authoritarian monster or was he a strong man called upon to do the awful things necessary to rebalance an unbalanced country.

In 1994, I was offered the opportunity to establish an engineering office in Peru. Peru had recently “cut the head off the snake” of the Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path Marxist rebels by capturing its leader, Abimael Guzman, and putting him in prison. Its economy had subsequently turned around and business was booming. We had to decide whether our engineering company should participate in the boom or not.

As part of the due diligence and data collection for making this decision, I interviewed the country’s president Alberto Fujimori and published an opinion editorial.  My twenty-minute interview lasted almost two hours and was intensely interesting.

Following a military coup in 1968 (as the result of a contested oil lease concession by Canada’s Imperial Oil), the country was ruled by a Marxist military junta until 1980. In 1973, the Agrarian Reform redistributed land from the latifundistas or land owners to the workers of the haciendas. More than 9 million hectares of land representing 16,000 plots were expropriated, benefitting some 370,000 families. The newly land-rich workers were organized into communes (cooperativos) and within five years the animals, trees and land were killed or left fallow. The experiment was a colossal failure and cotton production in Peru, for example, did not reach 1968 levels until well into the new millennia.

The failure of the military government left the door open to Mr. Guzman, a university professor from Ayachucho, to organize his “march to the sea”. During the presidencies of Mr. Belaunde Terry and Alan Garcia, Peru descended into almost complete anarchy. It is estimated that over 60,000 Peruvians were killed in the fighting between the Senderistas and the government. Anyone who had money put it into offshore bank accounts. Children were sent all over the world to attend school and millions went into exile to avoid the terror and violence.

In the early 1990’s, Mr. Guzman brought his terror to Lima and exploding car bombs became a regular occurrence. I asked Mr. Fujimori, who defeated writer Mario Vargas Llosa in 1990, what his most difficult task was when he took the reins of power. Unhesitatingly he responded that he could not find people willing to serve as cabinet ministers because the position came with an immediate death threat. By staging an auto-coup, changing the constitution, arming the rural communities, and employing the services of an ex-military operative called Vladimiro Montesinos, Mr. Fujimori brought order to the country (I do not subscribe to the theory that Mr. Montesinos was the puppeteer pulling Mr. Fujimori’s strings). By 1994, Mr. Guzman was in jail, a Truth and Reconciliation committee was starting to heal deep wounds and money and children were flowing back into Peru.

On my first visit to Peru, every wall of every house was covered with graffiti. Garbage covered every empty lot and boulevard. Grass and flowers did not exist, and sixty percent of the city population lived in woven bamboo huts in surrounding slums. The population of the city had swollen from under one million in the 1950’s to over 12 million by 1994. Much of the growth was peasant farmers escaping the violence of the Shining Path.

In 1995 Peru led the world in economic growth and by the early 2000’s, every home was painted, parks were full of flowers and people, the tourist attractions really were attractive and living standards were higher both in the cities and the rural communities.

In 1996, on my taxi ride to the airport to spend Christmas with my family, I was prevented from passing by the Japanese embassy by a sea of flashing lights from the police and military vehicles surrounding the embassy. Another Marxist group known as the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) had taken over the embassy and hundreds of foreign diplomats were now hostages. In April 1997, special operations forces gained access to the embassy through tunnels, killed the fourteen MRTA regulars, and recovered the diplomats. Some felt that the killings were excessive, but they hadn’t spent almost four months in uneasy captivity.

In 2001, the widespread corruption of Mr. Montesinos and, by extension, Mr. Fujimori were exposed and both men fled the country. In 2005, Mr. Fujimori landed in Chile apparently to negotiate a return to Peru. He was arrested by Chilean authorities and extradited to Peru in 2007 where he was tried and convicted of charges of corruption.  Additional convictions for crimes against humanity were later added.  These were for the extra-judicial excesses of the Grupo Colina who were responsible for several extermination killings during the war with the Sendero Luminoso.

Another fascist authoritarian?  Or a strong man who did the horrible things necessary to rebalance an unbalanced nation? Which brings me to the last of this trio of thugs, Mr. Vladimir Putin.

When the Soviet Union imploded in 1992 and Mr. Yeltsin became the president of Russia, the national economy collapsed and a period of darkness worse than the Stalinist purges of the 1930’s descended. These are not my words but are from Russians I met on my visits to that country. One friend told me that he lost two cousins to random crime - one for his coat and the other for his car. I walked through many factory buildings with the plundered remains of motors with no windings and recoverable metal stripped from foundations. People literally starved to death and salaries were rarely paid. The 1990’s were a terrible time in Russian. But not for everyone. I was told about one man, a longshoreman in Murmansk, who became the owner of docks in several Russian cities. Where does a longshoreman get the money to buy docks? According to Bill Browder, the money came from parasitic Americans (and others) who saw great opportunity in buying assets for pennies on the dollar. He admitted to being one of those parasites, so I am inclined to believe him.

In 2001, the City of St. Petersburg was the most violent city in the world based on crime statistics. In 2011, as I walked the canal streets under the midnight sun with no evidence of crime or its potential, I asked my Russian friend how the change came about.

“Mr. Putin made it happen.”

“Yes, but what did he do to make it happen?”

“I don’t know. He is ex KGB. I guess they know these things.”

Well one of the things he did was put the biggest oligarch in jail for ten years. Was Mr. Khodorkovsky put in jail in 2003 because he was a political risk to Mr. Putin or was it to send a signal to the other oligarchs that the rape of Russia was over. Maybe it was both. In any event, he lost his oil and gas empire and now lives in exile. But how did he get his empire? No one wants to talk about that.

My visits to Russia in 2011/12 took me to every corner of the country and I spoke with over one hundred people. All of them supported, in varying degrees, Mr. Putin and all revered Mr. Solzhenitsyn by studying his books, especially the Gulag Archipelago. And they studied the Gulag by order of the revanchist Stalinist Mr. Putin.

I once watched an older woman break into tears as she recounted the reconversion of her church, which had been converted to a shoe factory by Stalin, and its rebirth as a church financed by Mr. Putin. I am pretty sure she didn’t regard Mr. Putin as a thug. But who knows.

Russia, during my visits, and according to Western reporting from December 2022 has a stable economy with a growing middle class. A lot of Russians are very happy about that.

I am not a fan of Mr. Putin’s Special Military Operation but then I am also not a fan of Mr. Zelensky’s proclivity for bombing civilians in the Donbass. The Ukraine war is a mistake of tragic proportions but remember that it was the French and Germans who destroyed the Minsk Accords just as it was the US who ended the peace talks of March 2021.

Is Mr. Putin a fascist authoritarian or is he a strong man who did/does objectionable things to rebalance a society out of balance?

There are several things these three men have in common.

1. They came to power during periods of advanced societal decay and economic ruin.

2. They were conservative and fascist in their desire to grow government and business in tandem and with interconnections.

3. They turned economies around allowing social structures to grow and strengthen.

4. They grew the pie of their national economies so that everyone prospered relative to their former condition.

5. They all profited greatly from their time in office and undoubtedly were corrupt in their handling of the national finances.

6. They overstayed their welcomes. Mr. Pinochet held a referendum on prolonging his presidency and lost. Mr. Fujimori fiddled Peru’s constitution and, in 2000, allegedly forced out his political opponent by corrupt means. He was subsequently chased out of Peru. It remains to be seen what will come of Mr. Putin. I think he may leave office on his own terms but what happens after that is an open question in my mind.

7. They all were involved in the dirty activities necessary to change the direction of their countries. Did the future happy state of their countries justify the dirty activities that seem to be a necessary part of such transitions?

Here is my dilemma. David was not allowed to build the temple in Jerusalem because his hands were red with blood - not all of it legitimately shed. Are strong men who recover nations, thugs? Or are they like David? Or was David a thug?