Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 19 страница
In truth, the realities underpinning inflation were deeply political, as Friedman implicitly recognised. The correlate of the monetarist conviction that inflation is always caused by an increase in the supply of money is that it occurs because governments want to ‘provide “goodies” for their supporters and constituents’ without increasing taxes.85 As we saw in the previous chapter, the Mexican MPS member Gustavo Velasco attributed his country’s inflation to excessive popular expectations in the context of a welfare state. The Chicago economists also saw inflation as a ‘moral crisis’ bound up with heightened expectations and a failure of personal and familial responsibility among the working class in a context of victorious political struggles.86
As early as 1958, on a panel devoted to inflation at the MPS conference in Princeton, Friedman argued that inflation damaged free societies by strengthening unions, which were more able to win pay rises in inflationary conditions, and by generating pressure for government subsidies and price controls to protect people from rising prices.87 Friedman’s fellow panellist, the French philosopher Jacques Reuff, gave an even starker account of the problem: ‘Inflation is a far greater threat to liberty throughout the world today than Marxism’, he told his fellow liberals.88 Reuff argued that inflation weakened the regulatory role of the price mechanism and discouraged submission to its dictates. In Friedman’s view, the only solution to inflation was restraint, both on the part of the people, who should avoid demanding government intervention in the face of a downturn, and on the part of government, which should refuse to bow to such demands. ‘The crucial problem’, which in 1958 remained largely unresolved, was ‘how to get such “restraint”’.89
The problem of restraint was all the more difficult because, as Friedman later recognised, some benefited from inflation while others suffered, so ‘society is divided into winners and losers’; the prime winners, he argued, were debtors, as the real value of debt was diminished by increases in prices, and the prime losers were creditors and the entire ‘savings and loan industry’, whose returns on their lending were simultaneously diminished.90 If inflation had distributional consequences, including transferring money from creditors to debtors, then the decision to treat combatting inflation as the primary economic goal could not be value-free. This was clear in Chile, where Allende’s government broke with a long tradition of responding to inflation by cutting social services, especially for the poor. When the opposition blocked new taxes that would have financed social programmes, the UP government accepted inflation as a ‘lesser evil’ than failing to fulfil its election commitments to Chile’s poorest citizens.91
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The consequent price rises are generally represented, even by sympathetic commentators, as evidence of the government’s economic incompetence.92 It is true that the government was unable to fulfill its earlier Keynesian hopes that higher wages and public spending would stimulate demand without serious inflation. In 1973, a government member of the Central Bank laid out the following options: ‘reduce the speed of societal change; detain the redistribution of income; lower the level of employment; reduce the growth rate; decrease the level of capital accumulation – or increase inflation’. By 1972, he noted, the Allende government, ‘with much regret, had to opt for sacrificing monetary stability’.93 Chile’s inflation was the consequence not of economic ignorance in the context of a basic unanimity of values, but of a political commitment to Chile’s poorest people in dramatically constrained circumstances. The Chicago Boys would make precisely the opposite choice. Pinochet’s economic miracle was to preserve monetary stability by sacrificing Chile’s poor.
As Friedman had predicted, the junta’s ‘shock’ approach produced ‘severe difficulties’ – but not for all sections of the Chilean population. As he acknowledged, the immediate effect was ‘severe recession’, as Chile’s GDP fell by 13 per cent per annum.94 In an open letter to Friedman and Harberger, Andre Gunder Frank denounced ‘economic genocide’ in Chile. Frank pointed out that the removal of price controls, combined with the destruction of trade union power, had drastically reduced real wages, to the extent that, by December 1975, one hour of work at the official minimum wage purchased 160 grams of bread.95 From 1975, stark spending cuts and the ‘freeing’ of prices on two thousand commodities caused purchasing power to fall to 40 per cent of its 1970 level.96 While the real incomes of the poorest plummeted, the share of national income in the hands of the upper 5 per cent of income receivers rose from 25 per cent to 50 per cent.97
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What Friedman termed a ‘temporary transitional period’ and Gunder Frank called ‘economic genocide as a calculated policy’ was a deliberate attempt to strip Chileans of non-market social reproduction and force them to submit to the judgment of the market.98 This was what Friedman meant when he said that ‘underdeveloped’ countries needed ‘an atmosphere of freedom, of maximum opportunities for individuals to experiment and of incentives for them to do so in an environment in which there are objective tests of success and failure – in short, a vigorous, free, capitalistic market’.99 In Chile, the political miracle was that a (transcendent) military regime operating under a state of emergency had secured the central condition for the (immanent) operation of the price mechanism: submission. Once this condition was met, the ‘normal’ order could be restored. ‘The really important thing about the Chile business’, Friedman said decades later, ‘is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society.’100 That miracle, however, cannot be attributed to the work of the free market. It was Pinochet’s jurists who devised an institutional structure to lock in the junta’s economic reforms and prepare for a return to a (limited) democracy.
Amnesty International in Pinochet’s Chile
In November of 1973, within months of Pinochet’s coup, Amnesty International sent an investigative team to report on Chile’s human rights situation. When the team – a law professor, a judge and an Amnesty researcher – arrived in Santiago, the atmosphere of repression was immediately clear.101 They found Chile absolutely overwhelmed by the military. One team member recalled that there was ‘no rule of law whatsoever – it was just a façade’.102 Amnesty’s subsequent reports focused on this absence of legality while avoiding contested political territory. Amnesty described its mandate as working for adequate treatment of all prisoners, fighting for the rule of law, and seeking the release of those it called ‘prisoners of conscience’, defined as ‘any person who is physically restrained (by imprisonment or otherwise) from expressing (in any form of words or symbols) any opinion which he honestly holds and which does not advocate or condone personal violence’.103 Dismayed by the Chilean Bar Association’s indifference to the junta’s crimes, one team member addressed a letter his legal colleagues, reminding them that Chile had endorsed the UDHR and ratified the two human rights covenants, and that it was ‘unconscionable’ that these could so quickly be discarded.104
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The Amnesty team’s mandate was strictly limited: ‘the revolutionary cause, either before or after the revolution, was none of our business’, one team member stressed.105 The report itself provided an extremely detailed and balanced account of imprisonment, torture and disappearance under Pinochet’s rule. It depicted the coup as the outcome of ‘an atmosphere of bitter social tension, after months of increased polarization between pro-Allende and anti-Allende factions’.106 Despite asking, ‘Who are the political prisoners? Why are they detained?’ the report answered neither question, instead reverting to the universalising platitude that the ‘political prisoners have stemmed from all sections of the Chilean population’.107 Amnesty’s 1977 report, which claimed to provide a ‘legal and historical report on the situation of disappeared prisoners’, began with the lines: ‘When the military took over on 11 September 1973 the Junta declared a “state of siege” throughout the country’.108 Here, the coup appeared as the ‘year zero’ that began history anew – a response to a ‘social tension’ and ‘polarization’ whose causes remained unintelligible.
Despite the new centrality to which Amnesty elevated the UDHR, this taking up of human rights was distinctly partial, and emphatically did not include social and economic rights. Its 1974 report on Chile made clear that it would exclude from consideration the approximately 200,000 workers ‘who lost their employment for political reasons, many of them apparently being reduced to starvation levels’.109 Not only the ‘non-political’ economic consequences of the coup, but even the use of starvation as a political weapon, was relegated outside the frame of human rights, giving credence to Klein’s account of human rights as ‘blinders’.110 A year later, Amnesty’s 1975 report noted that the ‘varying economic and social difficulties in the Third World’ had hampered the organisation’s attempts to ‘become more culturally diverse’ by recruiting members outside Europe and North America, and to ‘harness the opposition to torture and sympathy for prisoners of conscience’ in the non-Western world.111 The challenge was to mobilise support ‘despite the political, social, financial and other problems that exist’.112 In striking contrast to the economic concerns that animated Allende’s government, and anticolonial human rights activism of the previous decade, poverty and economic inequality were not of concern in their own right. They entered the frame only insofar as they affected advocacy against torture, and the cultivation of sympathy for its victims.
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It could be argued, in response to Klein’s position, that Amnesty’s narrow approach provided a politically pragmatic response to the junta’s regime of terror, offering more to those subjected to the worst of its violence than did critiques of economic shock treatment. From this perspective, legalistic human rights activism would complement the goals of leftists, who aimed to discredit a hated regime, thereby ‘promoting a new, hopefully socialist, future’.113 My argument is different: the problem was not simply that the human rights NGOs dealt with political violence in isolation from the economic transformations it facilitated, as Klein has argued. Rather, it is that they thereby bolstered the neoliberal dichotomy between violent politics and free civil society, thus contributing to a narrowing of the political and economic margins. The assumption that Chile’s key problem was unrestrained political power did not distinguish between political mobilisation to challenge arbitrary economic power and authoritarian mobilisation to entrench it. Rather, Amnesty’s portrayal of politics as a field of ‘tension’ and ‘polarisation’ reinforced the neoliberal attempt to constrain politics within strictly defined bounds, shaping a distinctly non-socialist future.
Much attention has been devoted to Amnesty’s founder Peter Benenson’s origin myth, which traces the organisation to his own indignation at reading, as he rode the London Tube, about two Portuguese students imprisoned by Salazar’s dictatorship for raising a toast to liberty.114 Less attention has focused on the coordinates of Benenson’s journey between his London law chambers and the Church of St-Martins-in-the-Fields, where he supposedly got off the train and formulated the plan for Amnesty International. Amnesty has commonly been viewed as inaugurating a new focus on what Elaine Scarry terms the ‘body in pain’ as the prototypical site of human rights abuse. By ignoring the political views of the accused and focusing only on the fact of their imprisonment, its goal, it is assumed, is to respond to the universal suffering of the human body. In its early days, however, Amnesty described itself as ‘An International Movement for Freedom of Opinion and Religion’.115 Its focus on the conscience drew on a human rights tradition that, as we have seen, conceptualised the person as a spiritual, not a material, being. Amnesty’s conscience clause was in the same lineage as Malik’s contention that conscience is the most ‘sacred and inviolable thing’ about the person, which had informed both his opposition to social and economic rights and his attempt to protect the person from the intrusions of mass politics.116
Benenson, a convert to Catholicism, shared this spiritual vision of the dignity of the human person. In his initial formulation, Amnesty was to be ‘an international movement to guarantee the free exchange of ideas and the free practice of religion’.117 The category of the prisoner of conscience signalled this shift of focus from the political action of the ‘political prisoner’ towards her ‘conscientiously held beliefs’. In the stark context of the violent anticolonial struggles still being waged in South Africa, Palestine and the Portuguese colonies, the new category of the prisoner of conscience marked a prohibition of violence and a new privileging of speech as the legitimate mode of expression. This emphasis on nonviolence, which drew on the Quaker background of important Amnesty founders, generated an attempt to protect the conscience that was often ‘ambiguous and discriminatory’.118 An early test of the prohibition on violence in Amnesty’s definition of the prisoner of conscience led to the expulsion of Nelson Mandela from the list of such prisoners, after he justified the African National Congress’s decision to establish an armed wing by arguing: ‘If war were inevitable, we wanted the fight to be conducted on terms most favourable to our people.’119 There was also controversy over whether communists could be prisoners of conscience at all, given that all communists, an official 1981 Amnesty document explained, ‘wanted the overthrow of the capitalist state by violence’.120
For Benenson, as for Malik, the appropriate response to human rights violations was individual spiritual transformation, not collective political action. The main purpose of the new organisation, Benenson contended, was to promote cooperation amongst the world’s idealists.121 Amnesty, he wrote in a private letter, is ‘geared to appeal to the young searching for an ideal, and to women past the prime of their life who have been, unfortunately, unable to expend in full their maternal impulses’.122 If this was borne in mind, Benenson wrote, in a somewhat extraordinary admission, it ‘matters more to harness the enthusiasm of the helpers than to bring people out of prison … the real martyrs prefer to suffer, and, as I would add, the real saints are no worse off in prison than elsewhere on this earth’.123 Benenson’s vision was explicitly antidemocratic. In another theologically charged letter, he maintained: ‘When each citizen is individually on the road to the Kingdom, then I believe that there will be a just society on earth without need for the intervention of Parliament.’124 If only a few leading citizens took this path of spiritual transformation, he wrote, ‘we would be nearer the goal than if 51 per cent of the electors voted for laws designed to promote social justice’.125
Benenson himself came out of the Catholic NGO Pax Christi, and he took inspiration from the ‘wish’ of Frank Buchman’s anti-communist, Christian ‘Moral Re-Armament Movement’ (MRA) ‘to change people, and especially leading people’.126 During his days as a graduate student, Malik was also a member of the MRA’s precursor, the Oxford Group, which Buchman, its founder, described as a ‘Christian revolution for remaking the world’.127 Kwame Nkrumah, in stark contrast, cited the MRA as an agent of neocolonialism in Africa. In 1961, the liberal journalist Honor Balfour wrote that Amnesty International’s ‘conscience clause’ ‘smacks of a form of political Buchmanism’.128 The gap between Amnesty’s version of human rights and Nkrumah’s was wide. Amnesty’s human rights had little in common with the programme of economic self-determination and violent anti-colonial struggle promoted by diplomats from postcolonial societies in the UN during the same period. While Amnesty was principled in its criticisms of the Chilean junta’s human rights abuses, Benenson’s own vision was closer to that of the Catholic jurists and politicians who had produced the new institutional order that would ensure that Chile’s return to democracy would not mark a return to the mass, socialist politics of the Allende years.
Modernising Chile
Prior to the coup, a young economics student at the Catholic University wrote a critique of the dominant monetarist perspective of his economics school, whose blindness to social misery, he argued, was an affront to the university’s Christian anthropology. The student stressed that ‘certain economic structures’ could never allow ‘man … to live in conditions which are compatible with human dignity’.129 His letter would seem to support the argument, made most prominently by Juan Gabriel Valdés – the son of the founder of Chile’s Christian Democrats, Gabriel Valdés – that there was ‘a permanent and irreconcilable struggle between the ideas promoted by Chicago and the Catholic point of view’.130 How curious, then, that this same young student, José Piñera, went on to play a major role in Pinochet’s ‘modernisation’ of Chilean society, and is idolised today by the neoliberal right as the architect of the world’s first fully privatised national social security system.131
The story of the institutionalisation of neoliberalism in Chile is not only a story of economists struggling to reduce state intervention and secure price stability through massive austerity. It is also the story of an attempt to make explicit what Harberger implicitly recognised in describing Latin American romanticism as the key barrier to good economics: the market does not create its own virtues, but requires a moral, legal and institutional order to produce submissive subjects. Piñera, who continued his studies at Harvard before returning to Chile after the coup to assist in founding ‘a new country devoted to liberty’, personally embodies the synthesis of conservative Catholicism and radically market-centred economics that defined Chile’s new institutional order.132 While the Chicago economists inspired the junta’s early economic reforms, the impetus for its institutional order came from other branches of twentieth-century neoliberalism: German ordoliberalism, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s public choice theory, and Hayek’s constitutionalism.133 In contrast to Friedman’s naive rhetoric about natural liberty, these conservative strands of neoliberalism were far more useful to those seeking to bolster the legal foundations of the competitive market. They shared an evolutionary social theory, an attention to the role of morality (and particularly Christianity) in a market order, and a commitment to using law to protect the intermediate institutions of civil society from political interference.
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