https://www.thenation.com/article/40-years-ago-this-chilean-exile-warned-us-about-the-shock-doctrine-then-he-was-assassinated/
40 Years Ago, This Chilean Exile Warned Us About the Shock Doctrine.
Then He Was Assassinated.
Orlando Letelier’s 1976 Nation essay is still essential reading.
By Naomi Klein
2016.09.21
In August 1976, The Nation published an essay that rocked the US
political establishment, both for what it said and for who was saying
it. “The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic ‘Freedom’s’ Awful Toll” was
written by Orlando Letelier, the former right-hand man of Chilean
President Salvador Allende. Earlier in the decade, Allende had appointed
Letelier to a series of top-level positions in his democratically
elected socialist government: ambassador to the United States (where he
negotiated the terms of nationalization for several US-owned firms
operating in Chile), minister of foreign affairs, and, finally, minister
of defense.
Then, on September 11, 1973, Chile’s government was overthrown in a
bloody, CIA-backed coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. This shattering
event left Allende dead in the smoldering presidential palace and
Letelier and other “VIP prisoners” banished to a remote labor camp in
the Strait
of Magellan.
After a powerful international campaign lobbied for Letelier’s
release, the junta finally allowed him to go into exile. The 44-year-old
former ambassador moved to Washington, DC; in 1976, when his Nation
essay appeared, he was working at the Institute for Policy Studies
(IPS), a left-wing think tank. Haunted by thoughts of his colleagues and
friends still behind bars, many facing gruesome torture, Letelier used
his newly recovered freedom to expose Pinochet’s crimes and to defend
Allende’s record against the CIA propaganda machine.
This kind of activism was having an effect. Pinochet faced universal
condemnation for his human-rights rec-
ord, which became impossible to
ignore: the mass disappearances and executions of leftists (more than
3,200 dead by the end of the junta’s rule); the imprisonment of tens of
thousands of people; the complete bans on political protest and
dissenting political activity; the murder of beloved artists like Víctor
Jara; the roughly 200,000 people forced into exile.
What frustrated Letelier, a trained economist, was that, even as the
world gasped in horror at reports of summary executions in the national
stadium and the pervasive use of electroshock in prisons, most critics
were silent when it came to Chile’s economic shock
therapy—the brutal
methods used by the “Chicago Boys” to turn Chile into the very first
laboratory for Milton Friedman’s fundamentalist version of capitalism.
Indeed, many who condemned Pinochet’s human-rights record heaped praise
on the dictator for his bold embrace of free-market fundamentals, which
included rapid-fire privatization, the elimination of price controls on
staples like bread, and attacks on trade unions.
Letelier set out to explode this comfortable elite consensus with a
litany of factual evidence and persuasive rhetoric. He argued that the
junta wasn’t pursuing two separate, easily compartmentalized
projects—one a visionary experiment in economic transformation, the
other a grisly system of torture and terror. There was, in fact, only
one project, in which terror was the central tool of the free-market
transformation. “Repression for the majorities and ‘economic freedom’
for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin,”
Letelier wrote.
He went further still, arguing that Friedman, the famed US economist who
served as “the intellectual architect and unofficial adviser for the
team of economists now running the Chilean economy,” shared
responsibility for Pinochet’s crimes. (Friedman’s name comes up in the
essay 19 times.)
Letelier dismissed Friedman’s claim that urging Pinochet to introduce
economic “shock treatment” (as the Chicago economist put it at the time)
was merely “technical” advice, unrelated to the human-rights abuses. On
the contrary, Letelier insisted that Pinochet’s political violence was
what made his economic violence possible. Indeed, only by murdering and
imprisoning left leaders, and by terrorizing the wider society, could
Pinochet force the same nation that had democratically elected Allende a
few years earlier to accept this savage clawback of social gains. As the
late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano would put it a decade later: “How
can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock?”
* * *
Letelier’s essay was so bold and persuasive that
it had an immediate
impact, provoking debate and defensive responses. Yet much of why we’re
still reading it today has to do with what happened next. On September
21, 1976, less than one month after the article’s publication, Letelier
was murdered—assassinated in a car bombing in the embassy district of
Washington, DC. His 25-year-old IPS colleague Ronni Moffitt was in the
car and also died in the attack, which took place exactly 40 years ago
this week.
An FBI investigation revealed that the bombing had been the work of
Michael Townley, a special operative for Pinochet’s secret police, who
later pleaded guilty to the crime in a US federal court. The assassins
had tried to enter the country using false passports earlier that
summer, an incident brought to the attention of the CIA by the State
Department. Recently declassified documents contain persuasive evidence
that Pinochet himself ordered this defiant act of terror.
To reread Letelier 40 years later is to be reminded of how much—and
how little—has changed. Chile is led today by a center-left government
headed by Michelle Bachelet, herself a survivor of Pinochet’s torture
camps. But in other Latin American nations—from Brazil to
Honduras—popular democratic victories are once again under siege.
In North America and Europe, meanwhile, the intellectual myopia that
Letelier condemned so ferociously continues to restrict the perimeters
of far too many of our public debates. As in Letelier’s time, our
loudest establishment voices generally have no trouble condemning
repression by foreign dictatorships or the rise of neofascism within our
borders—some will even admit that there is a crisis of police violence.
But very rarely are the dots connected between such troubling phenomena
and the celebrated free-market policies for which Chile, under the
Chicago Boys, was the earliest and purest laboratory.
And yet the connections are screaming to be made. There is a reason, for
instance, why authoritarian
China has become the sweatshop for the
world: As in Chile in the ’70s, its suppression of democracy,
restrictions on information, and brutal repression of dissidents create
the required conditions to keep wages down and workers under control.
Similarly, there is a clear reason why mass incarceration exploded in
the United States in the midst of the neoliberal economic revolution,
when the welfare system has been radically eroded and the public funding
of virtually all social services is under attack. It isn’t a grand
conspiracy, but the economic exclusion of huge swaths of the population
required some parallel strategy of escalated repression and containment
(the drug war was awfully handy that way). There are connections, too,
between the imposition of brutal austerity and corporate-friendly trade
deals and the frightening rise of far-right parties in Europe and the
United States. And yet, too often, we imagine that these forces can be
defeated without substantive shifts in policy.
The good news is that social movements are weaving their own
histories, filled with intuitive connections between the political,
social, economic, and ecological. Most notably, “A Vision for Black
Lives,” the sweeping policy platform released this past summer, puts to
rest any notion that the state violence visited on black bodies can be
treated as a narrow human-rights issue, fixable with a simple set of
police reforms. Instead, the platform places that violence in the
context of an economic project that has waged war on black and brown
communities,
putting them first in line for lost jobs, hacked-back
social services, and environmental pollution. The result has been huge
numbers of people exiled from the formal economy, allowing them to be
preyed upon by increasingly militarized police and privatized prisons.
“High levels of unemployment and decades of disinvestment in black
communities have led to dangerous interactions with police,” explains
Dorian T. Warren, one of the authors of the Movement for Black Lives’
economic platform and board chair of the Center for Community Change. Or
as Letelier put it all those years ago: “The economic plan has had to be
enforced.”
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