Fidel Castro learned a lot from Chilean President Salvador Allende's failed power grab in 1973. And he used the lessons of that bitter defeat to coach Venezuela's Hugo Chávez to dictatorship under the guise of democracy more than 25 years later.
Now Latin America's revolutionaries may be experiencing another setback and this time they can't claim that a military coup removed their would-be dictator. Instead, former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was arrested by order of the Supreme Court and deposed by Congress. And despite enormous international pressure, the Honduran democracy has so far defended its rule of law.
Yet far from giving up, Castro protégés are already using what they learned in Tegucigalpa in El Salvador. Central America's most promising free-market democracy is now fighting for its life.
Allende got the boot from his military because he had been trampling the constitution. The Supreme Court, the Bar Association and the Medical Association all denounced his disregard for the rule of law. According to James R. Whelan, author of a history of Chile titled "Out of the Ashes," the lower house of its Congress passed a resolution on Aug. 22, 1973, that "said bluntly that it was the responsibility of the military . . . 'to put an immediate end' to lawlessness and 'channel government action along legal paths . . . .'" Less than a month later, the military complied.
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Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez welcomes El Salvador's President-elect Mauricio Funes in Caracas.
The lesson from Chile for the hard left was that success depended on first getting control of the institutions with the power to check an aspiring tyrant. Now the leadership of El Salvador's FMLN party, composed of many former guerrillas, is attempting just that.
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