The Chicago Boys and the Birth of Neoliberalism - San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina
San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina
Like a child, Latin America was to be seen and not heard. - Seymour Hersh
The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system - whether political, religious or economic - that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.- Naomi Klein
You came lost and hungry
we took care of you
You forgot you were our guest.
Now you are the same evil you fled from.
You took our good ways and labeled them evil so you could destroy us.
You took what we considered evil and said it was good to benefit your avarice.
You understand nothing of creation, only destruction.
You speak of the Great Spirit as one speaks of bar flies.
You worship only profit and death.
You use spirituality as your purity and leave truth in obscurity.
Hear me blind ones, with heavy hearts of greed.
Your 500 years are over and the sacred buffalo comes with the sun.
- Raymundo "Tigre" Peréz
Imagine you're an 18 year-old college student studying in one of the few universities in Chile back in 1973. Like countless other young people, your interests include family, experience, education, music and football. You also enjoy throwing back a few beers or smoking a joint with your friends. While you're not very political, you agree with the creation of peasant unions during the 1960s, as well as the agrarian reforms initiated by former president Eduardo Frei Montalva - who defeated Salvador Allende in 1964 by a narrow margin thanks to covert donations by the CIA - that expropriated almost 1500 properties totaling 3.5 million hectares held by latifundistas and purchased other holdings of fertile land at low interest rates, compensating owners in all cases. (Land ownership in Chile has been highly concentrated in few hands going back to colonial times when the Spanish created huge estates on lands of the natives they conquered, enslaved and relocated, and the wine industry was the most developed aspect of Chilean agriculture until the 20th century.) Under this latter reform, which was supported by the Alliance for Progress and the Catholic church - the church having ulterior motives as Protestantism spread throughout the region - someone owning 1000 hectares but only cultivating 10% of them (more than enough to make them quite wealthy and powerful), would have 20% of their uncultivated property expropriated and turned over to peasants to farm it. At the same time, Frei kept the door open for multinationals to operate in the Chilean economy, especially the mining industry, allowing U.S. firms like Anaconda and Kennecott Copper to maintain control of 80% of copper production, which accounted for 60% of the nation's exports.
When Allende becomes the first democratically elected Marxist president in the West and uses the legal tools handed down by previous administrations to increase the percentage of land to be redistributed to 40%, keeping the compensation policy intact, you don't disagree because you know the realities of the Chilean peasantry and the inefficient use of your country's arable land. Balancing power in rural areas as wealth - and thus political might - move to Chile's developing cities is part of this strategy, as Allende, like Frei before him, wants to expand agricultural production, spread the increasing standard of living in the cities to the countryside, and alleviate any possible peasant unrest like that which had been plaguing Chile's neighbors for many years due to factors at work within Chile's borders as well. You also support Allende's culmination of the process to nationalize Chile's then American-owned copper mines which began in the 1950s, a move backed by a constitutional amendment that was ratified unanimously by the Chilean Congress and celebrated as Dia de la Dignidad Nacional. Foreign investors, on the other hand, cry foul once they learn of the indemnization allotted them by the amendment and quickly inveigh against this "act of sovereignty."
Growing up around the port of San Antonio - the busiest of South America's western coast - you're within two hours of the Chilean capital, Santiago. Even before the coup of September 11th you're aware of trouble brewing on the horizon as American warships are spotted in nearby Valparaiso, an action that follows a few years of international economic boycott spawned by pressure from ITT Corporation and choreographed by the CIA with the aid of multinationals and commercial banks. (International Telephone and Telegraph was managed by John McCone, who directed the CIA until 1965. ITT was used to conceal illegitimate funding by the CIA to organize strikes, produce a climate of crisis across Chile, and finance a campaign of black propaganda through the conservative El Mercurio newspaper, among other subversive acts. Pepsi Cola also fervently desired the removal of Allende and sought help from President Ric**********, once a lawyer for the company, who not only shared a Pepsi with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 during the American National Exhibition in Moscow, but also happened to be attending a Pepsi board meeting the day Kennedy was assassinated.) Not long after the coup is carried out and President Allende is killed, the organized persecution of socialists, students, unions, intellectuals, hippies, peasant leaders and countless others grouped under labels like "leftist" is begun. One day you're an average college student enjoying time with friends and family, and the next you're arrested without a warrant and accused of being a terrorist plotting to dynamite a train. But the shock and awe is just beginning. Before you realize what is happening you're carried off by Chilean soldiers - some of whom received training at the infamous School of the Americas - to the first of Pinochet's concentration camps on the outskirts of your city along the Maipo river. You spend the next two months there being interrogated and tortured by men with clinical eyes inside shipping containers that are stacked four-high. The torture isn't just what you personally suffer but also what you witness being done to your fellow citizens brought here on equally absurd and baseless charges. When not locked in a container you are forced to finish construction of the mostly open-air camp with other bewildered men and women of all ages, some of whom you know. Your human rights have literally been trampled underfoot.
The concentration camp you've been detained in for no good reason is the first of 1200 others that the regime will use during the next 18 years, serving as a model for state-sponsored savagery and macabre rituals of an unspeakable nature. Being located along the river, signs are erected by the army on the adjacent bridge advising drivers to keep their eyes on the road. Other signs direct pedestrians to look at the ground while passing on the sidewalk. While the new government works to imprison the minds of those who deep down know something unsavory is afoot in this "camp" adorned with steel containers that are home to a growing number of their fellow citizens, scare tactics are employed that include everything from the supposed uncovering of a Russian-backed plot to enslave Chile and stamp the foreheads of all children with a hammer and sickle, to reports of horror planned by homegrown leftist saboteurs bent on destroying the economy, to claims of communists being cannibals who feed on infants. (This latter tactic was used by the New York Times when reporting on the Soviet Union in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.) The psychological warfare being waged against the population at large finds fertile ground due to widespread fear and uncertainty - two valuable instruments for any propagandist - about what is happening, and as the collective awareness of the people is increasingly at odds with the official pronouncements of the new regime committing atrocities while declaring itself a savior, most people bury this blatant contradiction by refusing to see what is as clear as day, thus swallowing lies wholesale and willfully yielding to a form of auto-repression as the organized persecution, abduction, torture, and extermination of their countrymen becomes endemic.
But on the inside of the camps far more extreme measures of repression are carried out - many of them experimental - such as amputations, sexual barbarity involving dogs, electric shock, forcing detainees to ingest urine and excrement, mock executions, and genital mutilation. As part of the psychological torture you endure, a soldier puts you through a mock execution one afternoon that leaves the mock executioner laughing all the more when the fear of death reaches such an inconceivable pitch that when the trigger clicks you feel a bullet smashing your head from behind that hurls you to the ground. You are aware of forty people taken across the street where the river meets the sea to be executed for real, most of them active supporters of Allende or actual members of the communist party. Later it will be revealed that many people detained in these camps - among them pregnant women - were flown over the Atlantic in helicopters, given a sedative and dropped into the ocean. Sometimes cinder blocks were tied to their bodies. A woman you know in the San Antonio camp is disposed of in this fashion after months of torture and sexual abuse, but she doesn't lose consciousness entirely when given a sedative and is dropped into the ocean without any additional weight to make her sink. What is more, the soldiers accompanying her in the aircraft fail to observe a small boat in the vicinity where they dump their load, and the curious fishermen on board end up saving the woman's life. Many years later she will return from exile and have a random encounter with a man whose face was seared into her memory during the imprisonment and attempted murder in San Antonio, leading her to denounce the pilot of the helicopter publicly and bring him to justice.
After surviving two months of hell in a concentration camp you were forced to help erect in your hometown, you are released by the army and told in unambiguous language that you will meet your demise if you don't leave Chile within three days. So you and a few friends hoof it west through the Andes to Mendoza, Argentina, and find a small pueblo in the mountains where the locals all know one another and give you shelter in exchange for working the land. (Some 200,000 Chileans will go into exile during Pinochet's reign.) Juan Peron is back in power as Argentina's president for a third term after 18 years of exile, and his third wife Isabel, a former cabaret dancer, is serving as Vice President. Now that "democracy" has returned to the region, Peron is seen as a typical caudillo at best and a fascist at worst who exploited the working class to stay in power, drained the wealth of Argentina and sold the country to the international economic bureaucracy after it became the fifth richest in the world by selling beef and wheat to the Allies during World War II. It is also well known that he sheltered Nazi war criminals. The fact that Peron chose to spend most of his 18 years of exile in Francisco Franco's Spain speaks volumes, as does the fact that Pinochet is the only world leader to attend Franco's funeral in 1975. While Argentina's "dirty wars" are mostly associated with the junta that ruled from 1976-1983, people who were anti-Peronist were persecuted by the Perons going back to the 1950s. For example, a man from Cordoba told me how Eva Peron once went to a factory and demanded 5000 bicycles be gifted to the children of families that supported the government or the factory would be closed, and how benefits during the Peron regime were often more the result of patronage than rights. He also told me how many people in Cordoba suspect the bottom of the San Roque reservoir, which provides the city with drinking water, is believed to be hiding countless bodies of Argentina's some 30,000 desaparecidos, especially since yet another mass grave containing the remains of 25 people was found in the region just four months ago...
Despite all you've been through life is good in rural Argentina, and you and your friends quickly become part of the community where you've taken refuge. However, by 1976 Argentina is ruled by a military junta friendly with Pinochet after a coup against Isabel Peron. Many Chileans exiled in neighboring countries are followed by the DINA secret police, as the dictatorships of South America unite under the clandestine campaign of Operation Condor - supported by the U.S. - to pursue exiles across Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. In trying to get to Brazil via Argentina you and your friends are caught by the police who find the 'L' stamped in your Chilean passports that stands for "lista nacional", or national list. This scarlet letter deems you a persona non grata and leads to another arrest. You are tortured yet again outside Buenos Aires where the same brutalities are being committed as in Chile. But once more you are released after a few more harrowing weeks and threatened with death if you don't leave Argentina immediately. Not wanting to press your luck any further you jump into the sea out of desperation and swim to a vessel not far from shore. The Greek crew takes you aboard and gives you work for the following year on the high seas. You see Africa, Asia, the United States and Europe, finally deciding to settle in Holland where you live in exile for the next 33 years. In 2007 you finally return to Chile and find employment in your hometown where you soon realize that the effects of the coup are just starting to be realized by many. Others continue to live in denial and refuse to even talk about what was lost and destroyed during the dictatorship, avoiding any contemplation of the years spent betraying their own conscience, repressing their memories and willfully living in a thoughtless state of limbo verging on hypnosis, thus aiding the abduction of justice that thousands of Chileans seek to recover today. Despite the morbid revelations of truth commissions and the building of a few human rights museums, politicians harp on the country's appeal to foreign investors and point to economic statistics, hailing the country as a Western kin of the East Asian tigers and thus adding insult to injury. Chile is the first official guinea pig of neoliberalism, an experiment that teaches the world - especially developing nations - a powerful lesson about the inalienable rights of money as the root of progress and the basis for a system of law and order whereby the ends always justify the means.
In a television interview given in 1995, Pinochet said, "The only way to solve problems is olvido (oblivion). If day after day we are always returning to the same point, we will continue fighting. Forget it, do not talk more about the issue, then you will forget and I will forget." Forty-two years later there are still no official statistics compiled by the Chilean government, but the number of torture victims during the dictatorship is held to be around 40,000, while the number of Chileans murdered/disappeared is said to be some 3200. You can see many similarities between what occurred in the U.S. on September 11th, 28 years after the Chilean coup d'etat, though I'm not going to waste time pointing out the obvious. However, I will say that those who continue to demand truth and justice in the United States' watershed September continue to be attacked not for any lack of merit, but rather via the hurling of crude epithets like 'conspiracy theorist' or damning by the most ridiculous associations, both of which conveniently avoid countless questions and suspicious physical evidence - or a total lack thereof. Contrary to Chile, the victims in the U.S. terror attacks are used as pawns to fuel a belligerent - and quite lucrative - foreign policy that has resulted in a state of perpetual war abroad and an increasingly militarized culture at home - both in the name of freedom and security - bolstered by the daft conviction that fear and hatred will conquer fear and hatred. Meanwhile, independent thought and theories that challenge orthodoxy are often drowned by cheap cries of treachery or thanklessness when not smeared with absurd labels that make intelligent debate impossible.
For those interested in Chile and the ongoing global aftershocks of the Chicago Boys' philosophy and today's "Washington Consensus", I highly recommend the book The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. As for the aftermath of the second September 11th in 2001, although the cliche of 'Never forget' continues to cruise the "homeland" by means of emotionally-charged verbal ejaculations, the state of affairs displayed by a collective memory light on veritable content and bereaved of meaningful context belies the apparent resolution of a people once famous for their civic pride who today seem more keen on swaggering about the perks of "democracy", as if freedom were a brand name. For their fervid avowals are in word only and fail miserably at masking a long and shameless affinity with historical amnesia that is regaled with material glut and crowned by a warped sense of self-righteousness. Nevertheless, such a dereliction is far more real and dangerous than any threat bruited by the running dog media. Information isn't knowledge, no matter how fast your internet speed or frequent your inspection of numbing news updates, and the mouthing of trite slogans is nothing more than a parody of informed memory. (I must admit that I'm finding it quite thorny to speak of memory, especially regarding things that happened before one's birth, not to mention the difficulties arising from the unobjective power of emotion when examining the contents of one's mind, whether the event is firsthand or not. And of course, my words are only a tiny fraction of the big picture...) In describing Brave New World, Neil Postman said Huxley feared a future in which the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance - you know, like Hollywood, pornography, digital thrills, Toyotathons, and professional sports.
George Santayana's popular aphorism also comes in handy here in the case of Chile and the United States: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Chile's current president, Michelle Bachelet, was not only arrested and tortured during the Pinochet regime, but she has used her heart-wrenching story to appeal to a country still struggling to come to terms with its own history. However, she is also employing the dictatorship's anti-terrorist laws against the Mapuche, one of the few indigenous groups in the region that the Spanish, like the Incas, never conquered. In fact, the Spanish ended up signing the Treaty of Quillin in 1641 recognizing the Mapuche nation (Mapuche means "people of the land") as the area south of the Bio Bio river, but Chile eventually abrogated the treaty upon defeating Spain in its war of independence in 1810 and would later massacre the Mapuche in a rout after the latter formed the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia in 1860 on its ancestral territory when confronted with an invasion of their lands by Chile and Argentina, as both sought territorial continuity and agricultural lands. And as the story of the European invasion of the Americas goes, the Mapuche's native lands, rich in resources, continue to be prized today by Big Business, such as Chilean timber companies, one of the country's largest industries. In fact, much of the Mapuche land has been stolen underhandedly and turned over to business interests after deeming the native inhabitants "savages" or "terrorists" and then throwing them in jail. The silver and gold mines of the Black Mountains in South Dakota, the Treaty of Fort Laramie, and the turbulent history of the Lakota Sioux in the United States is just one of many stories that comes to mind...
One of the richest families in Chile controls Forestal Mininco, a timber company that owns thousands of hectares of pine and eucalyptus plantations. They also enjoy an alliance with the IFC, which is a branch of the World Bank. Both the pine and eucalyptus trees are genetically modified to grow quickly on monoculture plantations to supply the paper/pulp industry and for timber, much of the latter being exported. But a plantation of genetically modified trees planted in homogenous rows is NOT a forest. Not only are these artificial trees being planted on lands where biodiverse native forests once supported local communities living in harmony with Nature, they are chopped down after only eight years of growth - eight years during which, like most young trees, they guzzle so much water that these plantations are draining the water table while degrading the soil, watersheds and natural habitats, exacerbating large-scale erosion with each harvest of wood. In addition to monopolizing water and provoking drought conditions, both trees are highly combustible in the event of a fire, and pine resin is flammable. What is more, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) claims that the earth's forests are expanding, when the exact opposite is the case. The FAO defines a forest as any land covered by trees, a definition that ignores structural, functional and biological diversity, not to mention the cultural importance of forests to the communities they support, or the millions of people who depend on native forests for food and other non-timber products. And while it has been touted that these plantings increase vegetation and therefore aid in the capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, with 70% of the wood harvested being turned into pulp most of that carbon is being re-released into the air.
In short, the FAO says that a forest is nothing more than timber, which clearly benefits the timber lobby, as well as the paper and plantation industries, taking a business-friendly view of things that is increasingly hostile to all forms of life on earth. Bachelet herself has stood straight-faced before her constituents and boasted of Chile's recognition by the UN for reforesting (exploiting) the country with what are nothing more than monculture "planted forests" whose genetic modifications threaten the genetic composition of remaining native trees. Her pleas to encourage Chileans to support reforestation projects is simply a deceptive means to open the door further to exploitation of the country by the timber industry, which has earned millions off Chile's land while millions of Chileans are landless and live in poverty. For example, the press celebrated the planting of 100,000 hectares of "forest" in the country during 2012, but if anyone had taken the time to look into what kind of trees this vast project included they would have discovered that pine accounted for 45.5% of all species, while eucalyptus covered 48.4% of the land in question. The project has been extended for 20 years with a plan to cover some 2 million additional hectares. And while the claim that small land owners are benefiting from this project may be true, it's not difficult to see who they will ultimately sell the resulting timber to...
When crossing the border from Chile into Argentina the other day I knew it was very possible that the raw honey, numerous types of seeds and grains, and a few other natural food items in my bag might be confiscated by the gate keepers on the border, which consists of soldiers, police, customs agents and agricultural specialists. As I waited in line to get my passport stamps I noticed one of the big and colorful signs pointing out what items travelers are prohibited from introducing to Argentina, among them a few things I possessed and wasn't going to surrender unless forced to, not as some petty act of rebellion but because I had put time and effort into procuring wholesome foods that were anything but a threat. As I thought about the heavy use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers in Chile, or the salmon farms further south producing wannabe fish by means of harsh chemicals that pollute the water, or the "planted forests" I've walked through arranged in neat rows on lands where the remnants of furrows belonging to fruit orchards could still be seen, I wasn't surprised to see Argentina's policies at the border knowing how their agricultural, and to a degree their ranching, practices are dependent on the use of chemicals that debilitate their soils, plants and animals (and ultimately people) thus rendering them far more susceptible to diseases while compelling viruses and insects to mutate in order to develop a resistance to the toxins. Moreover, GMO crops require even more pesticides and thus only hasten the cycle of genetic modification as scientists are constantly working to alter GMO crops further while creating more powerful chemicals to battle evolving "pests". While I knew without a doubt that my "contraband" wasn't harmless but rather what I consider to be medicine and the antidote to Frankenstein's food chain, I had to laugh when I saw that one of the large warning signs posted for everyone to see stated clearly that the so-called "prohibited" items could "damage Argentina's export markets". (This is one way of saying that Europe depends on Argentina for a lot of its food.)
When I exited the building where the agents and officers perform their tedious circus with forms, cameras, stamps and X-ray machines and saw kids selling sugar-laden treats, sodas and cheap steak sandwiches, I had to wonder if the ingredients underwent the same kind of inspections due to Chile's border patrol sharing the same space and imposing even stricter policies upon its visitors. (Despite these measures Chile has become one of Latin America's largest consumers of cocaine, most of which comes in from neighboring Bolivia and Peru.) And knowing how food safety standards are distorted in the U.S. as a matter of course while completely natural products must sport tattoos that declare an absence of that specious FDA approval, I couldn't help but see this rigmarole as one of countless ways that personal autonomy is surrounded by a cage of bureaucratic complications and authoritarian taboos. That the "lunch" I was given on the ten-hour bus ride consisted of crackers, cookies, a brown twinkie and a "berry" juice that boasted twice as much flavor on the bright label and admitted of nothing but artificial flavors and wordy chemicals in the tiny writing that listed the ingredients, I couldn't help but think about how my life sometimes seems to consist of striving to remain sane in an asylum. To use words like 'progress' and 'civilization' to describe the general state of the world today is to be blind, a sell-out, a defeatist or completely numb in the breast.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Jiddu Krishnamurti