Let the Bad Times End (2): Pinochet
6,200 Days of the Condor Operation
These bad times might seem like good news in the sense that Chile has since 1990 been a pretty decent place to live for many of its citizens, with some correction of the suffering during the bad times.
For the seventeen years preceding that time, General Augusto Pinochet perched atop an authoritarian state. He wasn’t a wacky charismatic dictator, and he wasn’t a grey dullard autocrat like the rulers of Eastern Europe in the Cold War. He was a sort of military ruler straight out of central casting. To Americans, he sort of looked like he was a guest star villain on the old Disney TV series version of Zorro, sent specially from Spain to track down the titular hero.
Only in real life he caught his enemies and killed thousands of them, imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands more.
For a great while he was a darling of the American right. In fact, he still is. Putatively this was because he had the courage to introduce a real no-fooling American-style free market in Chile, though that took ignoring the social democratic institutions that he chose to keep intact, if underfunded and malfunctioning. Celebrating his economic policies, however, was really just a way to dog-whistle their politely unstated enthusiasm for pushing leftists, suspected leftists, ordinary professionals mistaken for leftists, and anybody else who displeased his minions out of flying helicopters or into dungeons. Which is pretty much why you still find some far-right Americans who keep his poster on their walls right alongside Ted Nugent and Hulk Hogan.
Moreover, it might be relevant to point out that Pinochet’s economic policies actually hurt the Chilean working class fairly substantially in the reading of many experts, though this remains subject to all the usual ideological back-and-forth. But foreigners made out like bandits, and the professional middle classes were subsidized somewhat to keep them quiescent. (When they weren’t being arrested and tortured for looking too much like leftists.)
The question in this series is: what brings autocracies and dictatorships to an end? Pinochet’s beginnings are exceptionally well-understood and not much in doubt: a combination of conservative elements in Chile, international financial interests, and the United States government worked together to overthrow the elected head of state, Salvador Allende, and elevate Pinochet to power.
In a sense, he ended as he began. Get installed by foreign powers, get supported throughout your rule by foreign powers, well, get pushed out by foreign powers. Much as Pinochet’s Chile might have been a laboratory for neoliberal economic policies, it became an accidental study in what not to do if you were trying to fake being a democracy in order to appease pesky critics in the international community. Staging elections and trying to rig a phony democratic process is difficult work, and it can easily spiral into an invitation to domestic dissent and empower nosy outsiders.
As other authoritarians who used the Cold War as a kind of Platinum Master Card for torture and brutality found out, when the Cold War ended, you got the world’s worst margin call. The money vanished, the CIA gave you a tinfoil medal, and suddenly here’s Pope John Paul II of all people traitorously insisting that you had to respect human rights, even of suspected Communists. What the fuck, El Papa? I thought we had this clear: Communists get helicopters, Catholics get communion.
There is a kind of magic trick feeling to these sorts of dictatorial endings. They’re like heist movies, seen from the outside. Santiago’s Doce. The villain gives up after he figures it out: there’s no way to get back the power. The reality, if you read richer and smarter histories, is that the relentless pressure of a population that is basically fucking sick of having people disappear in the night because they wanted nothing more than to be free, because they were tired of a Caravan of Death visiting towns like some horror-movie version of a Chautauqua made to kill the country in slow motion. It’s not a trick and yet not a revolution when the monster finally steps down and a democracy comes back into existence. It’s the end of a struggle that should never have had to happen in the first place.
Under that is the point we’re up against right now in the United States. (There is a brutal, unpleasant kind of semi-justice in Americans having to face a cosplay version of Pinochet in the years to come, considering how much Pinochet was empowered by and supported by the United States.) We have people swarming into power right now to try things that they know a majority don’t want and would never support. It is easy to imagine a world where free-market capitalists confident in the validity of their ideas would wait for someone like Allende to fail, even in the Cold War. In the end, where that patience (accidentally or on purpose) has held, some form of bounce back towards market capitalism and liberalism has generally happened. The problem is that the wheel turns and it turns out that no ideology that resides with a political class or a technocracy—Washington Consensus, Social Democratic, or State Socialist—is able to deliver what most people in most countries really crave. A fair deal, a minimalization of the kinds of risks that destroy lives while they’re being lived, a modest sense that the world is getting better, and some suppression of the most vicious kind of short-termism and inequality. The people desperate to inflict their fevered ideas about control, the people most keen to redefine disagreement as dissent and hence to disloyalty and to fill the prisons and graves when that forced march is done, fear to lay out what they want done, because they know many people don’t want it, and fewer still will want it when it’s been done. That was Pinochet’s Chile. In some basic sense, it ran out of gas—but that’s partly because brave people there and brave people elsewhere put it on a road with no refueling stations.