Fake News in Latin America: The Legacy of Pinochet

Image Source: https://actualidad.rt.com/galerias/194724-amercia-latina-fotos-emblematicos

By: Maximilian Frederik van Oordt

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao.

Election campaigns, climate change, and recently coronavirus have all provided brilliant demonstrations of the pervasiveness of fake news and of its impact on the general public. Latin America has suffered more than most in this area and the sheer magnitude of the pandemic of disinformation here is strongly linked to the region’s Cold War-era military dictatorships. Some of the most impressive disinformation campaigns occurred in Chile under the government of Augusto Pinochet and, with the remarkable social unrest that has erupted across the country since the 18th of October of last year, Chile provides a unique insight into the modern-day social consequences of its military past.

On September 11 1973, the Chilean armed forces deposed the Communist President after three years of economic turmoil. Six days later, the military revealed ‘Plan Zeta’; an alleged plot by the now-deposed government to kill military and opposition leaders and install a Marxist dictatorship. This was used as a justification for the armed overthrow of a constitutional regime until it was discovered that the plan had one flaw: it never actually existed. In an interview in 1986, General Gustavo Leigh Guzman – one of the four military commanders who led the coup of ’73 – admitted the plot was fictitious and CIA documents would later confirm that it had been fabricated by the armed forces.

A headline during the military government that reads: “Sinister Plan ‘Z’ Discovered with which [the Communists] would launch a civil war”

Fast forward to 2019, the consequences of such deceit were immediately evident in the first days of social upheaval of that year. As metro stations were burned and the headquarters of a major electricity company became a tower of fire, articles were shared claiming that soldiers and policemen were behind the violent destruction, with the aim of justifying another military coup or at the very least forcing a military presence on the streets. These were promptly debunked with evidence to the contrary, but many maintained the line of argument that the state is involved in staging vandalism to serve its interests. The impact of these allegations is shown in Termómetro Social, a national survey which asked Chileans to quantify their trust in institutions from one to ten. The national police scored a dismal 3.8 and the armed forces managed only 3.7. The legacy of the Pinochet era on public trust is clearly visible here, with recent conspiracies resorting to the country’s history to prove what the present cannot.

In the almost two decades of military rule after the coup, it was government policy to control the media and to maintain the impression that the country remained at war with Marxism, thereby justifying the violent government repression and ‘suspension’ of political parties. Pinochet’s regime relied on painting itself as an indispensable shield against Marxism and to this end it instructed the media to follow a series of psychological rules: (translated from Spanish) “General struggle against [previous government’s Communist movement]. This campaign aims to create two links: a) Marxism equals Lies. b) Marxism equals Treason. c) Marxism equals Corruption.” Articles were published linking the previous government with drug trafficking and claiming the Communists sought to change the national flag, all under the state campaign to create psychological links in the population’s minds.

A poster from the Pinochet era comparing “Chile Yesterday and Today” (before and after the military takeover

Looking back to October of 2019, it did not take long for posts to appear on social media claiming that the government was pursuing a strategy of sowing chaos and attempting to link the extreme violence and vandalism seen across the country with left wing policy. The media of a now-democratic Chile was alleged to be cooperating with the state in this strategy, with the aim of turning the protestors against themselves and against the left. To say these allegations are fantastical is an understatement, but the powerful disinformation campaigns of the Pinochet dictatorship in the 70s and 80s have allowed these theories to gain more traction than common sense could have deemed possible.

A major aspect of the Pinochet dictatorship’s media campaigns was the coverup of state executions by having press statements declare the victims to have died in vicious gunfights against the authorities or in other ways that cleared the military of wrongdoing. Arguably the most famous of these coverups was Operation Colombo which claimed that 119 members of the MIR guerrilla group had been killed in infighting amongst its different factions. This image of a divided armed opposition group was wildly different to the reality: the guerrilla members had been slaughtered in detention centres by soldiers and policemen. Other state coverups included adding machine gun fire sounds to video footage and even original tapes showing security forces being told when to ‘take cover’ and move forward by the camera crews. This made it seem as though battles with the opposition had been fierce and that Pinochet’s soldiers had acted in self-defence.

The accusations of coverups by the police and armed forces were almost instant when the protests began last year. Only four days after the social unrest began, a post was shared on Twitter which read: (translated from Spanish) “According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) there are up until now 42 dead, 12 women raped, 121 people disappeared and thousands tortured”. These statistics were of course completely fabricated and disproved on several occasions including by Chile’s independent National Human Rights Institute. According to La Tercera, a major Chilean newspaper: “The information reached over half a million interactions on social media, not including instant messaging apps. It even managed to be published by international media.” Horrifyingly, the original source of the claim was an Instagram account with a stunning six followers. The ease with which many Chileans accepted the statement as factual can undoubtedly be attributed to the fact that, for them, coverups are simply all too familiar and therefore a realistic possibility even in democracy.

The Pinochet dictatorship engraved itself firmly into the minds of Chileans and remains, thirty years later, a major scar on the country’s past. The current crisis of trust in Chile has shone a light on the effects of two decades of political disinformation campaigns. Undoubtedly, fake news is a major challenge across the globe, and governments will have to expertly analyse this issue in order to fight it properly. In the case of Latin America, the setups, coverups and psychological strategies do not come from an Orwellian novel; they come from the history books. State deceit is well-known and greatly feared, and these two factors make it easy for conspiracies to be widely accepted today. As a result, the role of the military dictatorships of the 20th century will have to be considered in order to understand the true scale – and depth – of Latin America’s disinformation pandemic.

Maximilian is a first year student at KCL interested in politics, history and law. Originally Chilean, he enjoys focusing especially on Latin American affairs, with an emphasis on these areas.