At the end his defenses collapsed at every level. It had been
popular among his supporters to say that he was untouched by
greed. But a federal investigation into "money laundering and
foreign corruption" disclosed that he had manipulated the banking
system in order to cultivate a private fortune in the Riggs Bank
in Washington. The myth of an elder statesman who lived austerely
on the income of a retired general came crashing to earth, and
with it the entire defense structure of Augusto Pinochet. The
talk now in Chile has to do with whether his former subordinates
can be successfully brought down. As for the general, there is
nothing left to say. Is it always so? I wondered.
In 1968, in the company of a British historian, I tried to
inquire into the personal lives of the three "colonels" who had
brought down the Greek government. Their rule was not protracted,
and Greece quickly returned to its madcap democratic ways. But as
in Chile, the Greek experiment with clean revolutions foundered,
and the colonels lived out most of their lives in jail.
There was the great postwar exception, and it happened in
Portugal, where Antonio Salazar exercised power without ever
using it for personal debauchery. When his successor, Marcello
Caetano, was overthrown in 1974, Portugal had a brief
revolutionary moment, but in the end stability made its way. All
that Portugal lost was its empire, but it had been losing that
for 400 years.
The general rule is implacable: Power begets the abuse of
it.