Abstract:
Just before the first visit to Australia by a Chilean president in October 1993, several Australian journalists accepted all-expenses-paid trips to Chile, courtesy of the ruling centre-left coalition government of Patricio Aylwin. Elected in 1990 – the first elected president of Chile since Salvador Allende in 1970 – Aylwin was, whilst leader of the Christian Democrats, a supporter of the bloody 1973 coup. This fact, and the human and economic costs of Pinochet’s policies following the coup, was not lost on Chilean exiles in Australia, who demonstrated against the continuing detention of junta opponents. Unfortunately this history was lost on the Black and Murdoch press and in government and business circles. It was Chile’s Friedmanite ‘economic miracle’, and how to cash in on it, that preoccupied bureaucrats and commentators.
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