Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile: The Dethronement of Politics 21 страница
It was in this context that many on the left began using the language of human rights. Those who remained committed to Marxism found that, while they were more likely to escape repression by framing their claims in the language of human rights, making themselves heard in this discursive space required them to adopt a depoliticised, legalistic language. At great personal risk, communist militants protested for the release of their relatives and comrades, notably holding a ten-day hunger strike inside the ECLA office in Santiago in 1977. As the regime depicted ‘international communism’ as a threat to the country’s wellbeing, and subjected active communists and labour organisers to torture and disappearance, these militants obscured their political affiliations and presented their demands in neutral, humanitarian terms. While they did not initially use the language of human rights, when their protest was portrayed as a human rights campaign by UN figures and the foreign press, they adopted this language, appealing to the UDHR in a letter to the UN secretary-general, Kurt Waldheim.187
While key figures in Pinochet’s regime described Marxism as a cancer, human rights, stripped of all relation to political violence, redistribution and revolutionary aspiration, became part of the Christian ‘Western’ heritage within which they wished to position Chile – thus the repeated references in the 1980 constitution to dignity, ‘freedom of conscience’ and human rights. There is no doubt that regime figures were aggravated by the attentions of organisations like Amnesty International, which they believed would be better directed at the Soviet Union or Vietnam.188 Nonetheless, while the attentions of human rights organisations were focused on the regime’s violent means, they did not challenge its ends. Today, Chile is not only a highly unequal neoliberal society. It is also a society in which the judiciary has been rehabilitated, as human rights NGOs have promoted a ‘new constitutionalism’ that limits legislative power in the name of human rights.189
The shift from armed anticolonial struggle to Amnesty’s brand of human rights activism was stark. In Chile, Amnesty’s impartiality and refusal of violence gave it a legitimacy that enabled it to travel the country and speak out against torture and disappearance. But it simultaneously contributed to normalising a closure of the political imagination and delegitimising other emancipatory visions.190 As one sociologist writes, in the face of the depoliticisation of Chilean society in the wake of the coup, human rights is now ‘the sole base on which a better future can be constructed’.191 Just as Harberger and his neoliberal colleagues once hoped, Chile has been transformed from a ‘society in which political mobilisation was the characteristic route to recognition into one where individual access to the market is the preferred means of advancement’ – a development fostered by the extension of credit, which has made consumption available to the poor at the cost of entwining them in a disciplinary relation of indebtedness.192 In the wake of the junta, torture and disappearance have been largely replaced by ongoing human rights trials. Even so, key aspects of the junta’s programme remain, along with two of its most significant commitments: the subjection of politics to law, and a conservative Catholic suspicion of mass politics.
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One might have expected that the end of the junta and the election of a democratic government coalition, La Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, would mark a break with the ‘limited’ or ‘protected’ democracy instituted by Guzmán and supported by his neoliberal allies. Quite the opposite is true. As Fernando Atria notes: ‘Democratic politics is no longer seen as the best insurance against human rights violations, but as the primary danger.’193 As Atria suggests, while in some contexts it may be reasonable to assume that judges should protect individual rights and the constitution from democratic politics, in Chile, whose key problem has been authoritarian anti-democratic tendencies, including in the judiciary, this focus is difficult to justify. It was Pinochet’s 1980 constitution that first gave judges a substantial role in adjudicating matters which, prior to the coup, belonged to the political process. But 2005 amendments to the constitution, after the ‘return to democracy’, dramatically expanded the powers of the constitutional court to determine the constitutionality of legislation, in the name of protecting human rights.
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The consequence has been what one Chilean scholar calls an ‘unprecedented willingness by the Constitutional Court to strike down legislation deemed contrary to the constitution’ or to international human rights law.194 Today, the courts are increasingly involved in adjudicating matters of healthcare, tax policy and sexuality rights. Simultaneously, ‘helped logistically by a dense network of international nongovernmental organisations’, marginalised groups have been encouraged to channel their struggles through the courts on the assumption that, given its ‘rights-oriented’ ethos, the judiciary will be better able to support the marginalised and subaltern than the political process.195 In reality, the results of this process have been ‘very frustrating’ for the most marginalised groups, notably prisoners and indigenous people, as the courts have been unwilling to challenge widespread abuse in the prison system or the continued use of Pinochet-era counterterror laws against the Mapuche.196 Today, the neoliberal programme remains in place, while, in the name of human rights, Chile’s constitutional order restrains democracy and closes down the margin of freedom in ways that Guzmán could not have imagined.
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