Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 17 страница
Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics
For you to be a Communist or a Socialist is to be totalitarian. For me, not so. I believe man is free when he has an economic position that guarantees him work, food, housing, health, rest and recreation. I am the founder of the Socialist Party and I must tell you that I am not totalitarian, and I think Socialism frees man.
Salvador Allende
Don’t confuse totalitarianism with authoritarianism. I don’t know of any totalitarian governments in Latin America. The only one was Chile under Allende. Chile is now a great success. The world shall come to regard the recovery of Chile as one of the great economic miracles of our time.
Friedrich Hayek
In late 1977 – as the Chilean military junta extended the state of siege in place since its 1973 coup and formally dissolved all political parties – Friedrich Hayek wrote a letter to a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, to protest what he depicted as unfair international criticism of the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. When his article was rejected, he wrote to the editor expressing disappointment that the newspaper lacked the ‘civil courage’ to resist popular anti-Pinochet sentiment.1 Hayek singled out the human rights organisation Amnesty International – which had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier that year – for turning ‘slander [into] a weapon of international politics’.2 After accepting an invitation to lecture in Chile, he complained, he was inundated with phone calls, letters and anti-Pinochet material by ‘well-intentioned people I did not know but also from organizations like “Amnesty International”’, who asked him to cancel his visit.3 Amnesty’s materials on Chile from this period detail the Junta’s widespread use of arbitrary imprisonment, execution, systematic torture and the ‘disappearance’ of political detainees, 1,500 of whom then remained unaccounted for. In a style Amnesty helped pioneer, its 1977 report on Chilean political prisoners combined legal analysis with moving accounts of missing individuals. To take only one example, it recounted that José Baeza Cruces, a trader from Santiago, had been arrested in his shop in July 1974 by personnel of the Air Force Intelligence Service. Cruces was taken to a basement in the Ministry of Defence and later to the Air Force Academy of War, where, according to witnesses, he was tortured every day for at least six months. After that the witnesses were transferred and contact with Cruces was lost.4
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This combination of vivid description of individual cases with legal analysis would ultimately become central to a new wave of international NGO-led human rights activism that looked dramatically different to postcolonial demands for self-determination and economic sovereignty. This new human rights activism had little impact on Hayek, who travelled to Chile and declared the dictatorial regime ‘an example at the global level’.5 Hayek’s fellow Mont Pèlerin Society member, the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman, later echoed this assessment, describing Chile as an economic and political ‘miracle’.6 Neither Hayek nor Friedman were detached observers of this ‘miracle’. Both men gave advice to Pinochet, and both had disciples in his authoritarian regime – Friedman among the Chicago-trained técnicos (or ‘Chicago Boys’), who formulated the regime’s economic ‘shock’ programme, and Hayek among the conservative Catholic gremialistas, who produced an institutional order to protect the economy from political challenge. These two civilian elite factions were to define the economic and political orientation of Pinochet’s regime.
Given Hayek’s support for Pinochet’s regime and his criticisms of Amnesty International, it seems surprising that some have criticised the new politics of human rights for helping to sanitise neoliberalism. Focusing on the role of Friedman and the ‘Chicago Boys’ in guiding the junta’s economic reforms, Naomi Klein, for instance, criticises Amnesty International for obscuring the relationship between neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ and political violence.7 Noting that the Southern Cone was a ‘laboratory’ for both neoliberalism and grassroots human rights activism, she argues that, in its commitment to impartiality, Amnesty occluded the reasons for the torture and killing, and thereby ‘helped the Chicago School ideology to escape from its first bloody laboratory virtually unscathed’.8 Samuel Moyn, on the other hand, contests the claim that the human rights movement was complicit in the rise of neoliberalism, deeming Klein’s account ‘exaggerated and implausible’. The success of the human rights movement, he argues, is at least partly due to ‘the left’s own failure either to escape savage repression’ or to bring about coalitions to denounce dictatorship with as much success.9
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Viewed from another angle, Moyn’s comment raises the question of why, in the period of neoliberal ascendancy, international human rights organisations flourished, largely escaping the repression that was pursued so furiously against leftists, trade unionists, rural organisers and indigenous people in countries such as Chile. As Pinochet’s regime engaged in a systematic campaign to eradicate the Chilean left, it allowed overseas human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, the International Commission of Jurists, and Americas Watch (a precursor to Human Rights Watch) to enter the country, and gave them extensive freedom of movement.10 While the CIA-trained National Intelligence Directorate had instructions to carry out the ‘total extermination of Marxism’, the junta, anxious to present Chile as a modern, Western, Catholic and ‘civilised’ nation, did not disavow the language of human rights, even at the height of the repression.11 Moreover, despite Hayek’s displeasure at Amnesty’s anti-Pinochet activism, the neoliberals did not eschew the language of human rights; on the contrary, they argued that their own proposals were necessary in order to secure freedom, human dignity and human rights.
As the regime unleashed a brutal programme of torture, assassination and extra-judicial killing aimed primarily at Hayek’s own antagonists – leftists, social democrats and trade unionists – he remarked that he had ‘not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende’.12 Rather than simply dismissing this claim, we should look more closely at the neoliberal idea of freedom, and the place of rights and law within it. This means departing from the standard story, according to which the neoliberals in Chile focused on their area of technical economic expertise while turning a blind eye to the repression necessary to implement their economic agenda. On the contrary, not even the most technical of the Chicago economists justified their work in Chile simply on economic grounds. Rather, they argued that the junta had saved Chile from a totalitarian regime, reversing a history of planning and state intervention and making possible individual freedom and human rights. Despite the fact that neoliberals had devoted sustained attention to rights, law and human dignity since the 1940s, little attention has been paid to the distinctively political vision of neoliberalism in Chile – or the place within it of human rights.
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The problem was not that the neoliberals obscured the connection between a competitive liberal economy and human rights, as critics such as Klein contend. Rather, they were explicit that human rights and civil freedoms presupposed a functioning competitive market. If, as Mises had put it much earlier, ‘as soon as the economic freedom which the market economy grants to its members is removed, all political liberties and bills of rights become humbug’, then defending human rights meant defending economic freedom.13 In line with the argument I have traced over the course of this book, the neoliberals in Chile mobilised a stark dichotomy between politics as violent, coercive and conflictual, and market relations as peaceful, voluntary and mutually beneficial. It was in Chile that a neoliberal human rights discourse was consolidated. This neoliberal version of human rights justified constitutional restraints and law as necessary to preserve the individual freedom that only a competitive market could secure. If human rights were a product of a functioning market, as the neoliberals consistently argued, they were also necessary to protect the market from egalitarian political movements. Rather than protecting individuals from state repression, neoliberal human rights operated primarily to preserve the market order by depoliticising society and framing the margin of freedom compatible with submission to the market as the only possible freedom.
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In focusing their attention on state violence and unlawful political mobilisations while upholding civil (or market) society as a realm of freedom and voluntary cooperation, human rights NGOs lent credence to the great neoliberal dichotomy between coercive politics and free and peaceful markets. Allende’s government had challenged the myth of the market as a realm of voluntary, non-coercive and mutually beneficial relations. The junta (with the aid of the Chicago Boys and the gremialis-tas) sought to undo this politicisation, decimate collective political identities, and inculcate norms of submission, personal responsibility and self-reliance. The human rights movement, with its politely worded reports about torture and disappearance, offered little threat to the junta’s ideal of a liberalised market society free from class struggle and political conflict. In challenging the junta’s torturous means, human rights NGOs arguably helped to restrain the worst of its violence, but they did so at the cost of abandoning both the political conflict over ends and the economy as a site of political struggle.
In framing their human rights agenda as apolitical, and without implications for economic arrangements, NGOs such as Amnesty International sought to avoid the violent political conflicts between rival economic and political visions that marked Allende’s rule. But, in accepting the dichotomy between violent politics and pacific civil society, they further discredited political challenges to the inequalities and impersonal domination of market society. The human rights politics consolidated in Chile followed only one of the paths laid down decades earlier by the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), who also sought to render visible the heavy costs of economic deprivation and the compulsion exerted by hunger and want. In abandoning the political conflict over ends, human rights NGOs could do little to contest the terms of a ‘return to democracy’ that combined neoliberal policies with the language of individual freedom, human dignity and the subjection of politics to law.
Allende’s Regime, Dependency and the Market
In 1986, Friedman and his Chicago School colleague Arnold Harberger participated in a symposium on the relations between economic, political and civic freedom organised by the Fraser Institute, a pro-market Canadian think tank. The symposium’s premise was that economic freedom and civil liberties could flourish in conditions in which political freedom was absent, as majority rule had ‘no particular virtues, especially if the majority decides to abuse the rights of the minorities’.14 For Harberger, who had spent decades overseeing the training of economics students from Latin America, this relationship between political and economic freedom was a ‘dilemma’. Latin Americans, he told the symposium, were beset by a ‘predilection to romanticism’, a ‘tremendous, incredible vulnerability to demagogy’ and a collective tendency towards ‘self-pity’. Military governments, he contended, were ‘best at leading them to think their way out of that, but it is a terrible dilemma for us as freedom-loving individuals’.15 If romanticism was a barrier to economic freedom, Harberger wondered, was it legitimate to use political repression to shatter it?
Harberger’s ‘dilemma’ highlights the concern with questions of culture, politics, morality and subjectivity lurking behind the value-free positivist veneer of Chicago economics. Although Chicago economists were less preoccupied than European neoliberals with these questions, they too intuited that their economic proposals presupposed what William Rappard had astutely called a ‘Scottish homo economicus’, who was often absent in other parts of the world. The primary barrier to ‘good economics’ in Latin America, Harberger believed, was therefore cultural and subjective. ‘Asians think self-reliance in any situation in which you put them’, he argued. ‘Anything that happens to them was done by fate’, and they take responsibility for changing their situations. Such a comportment was also central to Hayek’s account of the morals of the market. While in the nineteenth century, people still believed that an ‘economic crisis, a loss of a job, a loss of a person, was as much an act of God as a flood or something else’, the Austrian economist contended, the loss of this fatalistic attitude had made people unwilling to ‘accept certain moral traditions’ and submit to their market-dispensed fates.16 For Harberger, this problem was particularly pronounced in Latin America, where people ‘are forever explaining that somebody else did it to them; they didn’t do it to themselves’.17
Harberger was responding to a paper by the Uruguayan economist Ramón Díaz, who argued that ‘Latin American democracy has sought its inspiration very much in Rousseau, and very little in Locke’ – that is, it has prioritised popular sovereignty over property and individual rights.18 It was this culture of romanticism and popular political mobilisation that Harberger saw as the source of Chilean socialism. On returning from his regular trips to Santiago, Harberger (the former Chicago student and development economist Andre Gunder Frank recalled) would describe Chile’s health and education systems as ‘absurd attempts to live beyond its underdeveloped means’.19 Forcing Chileans to live within their means and submit fatalistically to the judgment of the market would be the central task of Harberger’s ‘Chicago Boys’.
Harberger oversaw a US government–sponsored partnership between the Catholic University of Chile and the University of Chicago, which, he reflected, spawned more than a dozen key ministers, Central Bank presidents and budget directors.20 The Chile Project stretched back to the era of import-substitution industrialization of the 1950s – a time, he reflected, when the watchwords across Latin America were ‘interventionism, paternalism, nationalism, and socialism’.21 The Chicago Boys’ opposition to the politicisation of the economy preceded Allende’s victory by decades; but his socialist government’s economic planning, Keynesian demand-stimulation and wealth redistribution provided their ideal adversary, and brought them to the attention of Chile’s business elites. From the Chicago-inspired perspective of these técnicos, Allende’s proposals amounted to an ignorant violation of the laws of the economy and the destruction of a free society.
Allende’s first speech as president, in November 1970, exemplified the ‘romanticism’ Harberger believed blighted Chile’s economy. Allende urged his fellow Chileans to rebuild their country ‘according to our dreams’ – to rebuild a country in which ‘all children begin life equally, with equal medical care, education and nutrition’.22 His government sought to ameliorate existing inequalities in wealth and power by displacing the market as the key allocator of basic commodities. It significantly expanded spending on health, education and housing, distributed free powdered milk to young children, heavily subsidised public transport, mandated pay rises, introduced price controls, and established popular resorts (balnearios populares) devoted to socialised leisure.23
More disturbing to neoliberals was the government’s move to nationalise Chile’s largest US-owned copper mines. US law required ‘adequate, prompt and effective compensation’ for expropriated US companies. As the campaign for Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources discussed in Chapter 3 intensified, Allende received a standing ovation in the United Nations General Assembly when he explained that his government would deduct ‘excess profits’ amounting to US$774 million from the compensation it paid the two biggest US mining companies, leaving them with a debt to the Chilean government.24 What Allende termed Chile’s ‘reasoned rebellion’ challenged the inequalities of the global economy, giving substance to the demand for economic self-determination.25
In an address to delegates of sixty-three nations at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Santiago one year before the coup, Allende stressed the need to rectify an unfair international division of labour based on ‘age-old exploitation’ and a ‘dehumanized concept of mankind’.26 Chile’s delegate to the UNCTAD conference was Hernán Santa Cruz, who had struggled decades earlier to secure the social and economic rights in the UDHR. At the UNCTAD conference, Santa Cruz stressed that the realisation of the UDHR’s social, economic and cultural rights required a just international economic order. Only days after the New York Times had revealed plotting between the CIA and the ITT telecommunications company to prevent Allende becoming president, Santa Cruz told the plenary that any external attempt to deprive a country of its right to dispose freely of its natural resources was a ‘flagrant violation of the principles of self-determination and non-interference’, and a threat to international peace and security.27
To Harberger and the Chicago Boys, Santa Cruz’s emphasis on social and economic rights reflected the influence of ‘nationalist, protectionist, distributive mythologies’, notably the dependency theory of the Argentinean economist Raúl Prebisch, executive secretary of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA).28 Prebisch’s account of unequal trade between the centre and the periphery challenged the neoclassical assumption that market relations are free, voluntary and mutually beneficial. In opposition to the myth of the sweetness of commerce, Prebisch highlighted the centrality of domination to the operations of the world economy. To Harberger, this stress on the external determinants of economic development – the international economic system, commodity prices, multinational corporations, and what Allende termed ‘neo-colonial exploitation’ – elevated the Latin American tendency to assume that ‘somebody else did it to them’ to the level of theory.29
The US government, guided by the Monroe Doctrine, and alarmed both by Chile’s domestic policies and by the threat they offered to US regional hegemony, devoted substantial funding and efforts to sabotaging Allende’s progress in ‘establishing a totalitarian Marxist state in Chile’.30 The Unidad Popular (UP) government’s expropriation policy led to increasingly strident demands for a harder US line, not only on Chile but on the entire postcolonial economic agenda. The US Treasury secretary, John Connally, argued that preventing a snowballing trend of expropriations across Latin America and the Caribbean required that Chile be made an example. (Even he could not have imagined that Chile would soon offer an example of radical market reform that, forty years later, would be hailed by the Wall Street Journal as a model for Egyptian generals who had just seized power from the elected government of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi.)31 As Harberger noted, it was ultimately a military government, and a particularly brutal one, that induced Chileans to ‘think their way out’ of the attempt to transform their collective situation, and instead submit to their (market-dispersed) fates.
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