The article commits truth about the effects of decades of hardline “free-market” austerity, but the initial paragraph weirdly soft-pedals the origins of the introduction of that policy in Chile.
The introduction of those policies wasn’t simply “an agreement” between the country and the “Chicago Boys”-it was the result of a military coup against the elected left-wing government of Chile-the “Popular Unity” coalition of the Socialist, Communist and other left groups-and its combination of democratic socialist economic policies, measures to extend political democracy to give greater voice to the poor and to Indigenous Chileans, sizable and effectively utilized increases in social spending-including measures that, for the first time, guaranteed free milk to poor children-and its encouragement of a cultural renaissance that, for the first time in the country’s history helped create a uniquely Chilean creative voice, extending to music, poetry, theater, and visual arts.
A few months before the coup, in early 1973, the Popular Unity coalition made a strong showing in the midterm congressional elections, and was considered likely to win a second term in the presidency in the elections then scheduled for 1976.
President Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had been trying to destabilize Chile from the moment Allende was elected. In response to the Popular Unity gains in the midterms, they sharply tightened the economic embargo they had imposed on the country, throwing Chile into economic chaos. The Chilean military, most of whose senior generals and admirals had never accepted Allende’s election as president, moved to overthrow the Allende government and to end Chilean democracy on September 11,1973-a day many Chileans still describe as “Our 9/11”. General Agostin Pinochet took power at the head of a military junta, a regime which banned ALL political parties other than those of the far right, banned all dissent against his coup, and even repressed the playing of Indigenous musical instruments because they had been a key component of the “New Song” movement led by the legendary songwriter, singer and musician Victor Jara, who was arrested, imprisoned in a football stadium with thousands of other leftists, and would be dead by September 18 after experiencing two long days of agony in which he would be slowly but savagely beaten to death, the beating having commenced with the breaking of every bone in both of his hands-this measure chosen in retribution for the role Victor’s guitar playing had played in his cultural and political work.
While few people were actually killed that day-President Allende chose to end his own life, not as a suicide in the truest sense, but because he knew that, if he accepted the Pinochet regime’s offer of a plane to fly him and his family out of the country, the plane would be shot down and his family would die with him-3,000 would be killed by the junta by the time the people finally dared to vote it out in what was meant to be a rigged referendum to keep Pinochet in power for life, and 30,000 would be arrested or tortured.
All to keep the people of a country from voting to put human need before profit and to do so in a way that oppressed no one and harmed no one.
It matters that the only reason Chile took this direction was that the U.S. and the Chilean military, serving the interests of the ruling classes in their country and no one else, ended a stable democratic political culture and imposed a brutal dictatorship on the Chile-the imposition of which started a chain of economic and political events that destroyed all effective means of opposing austerity capitalism in the supposedly “free world” for decades.
