The Pinochet Regime 1588264068, 9781588264060

Table of contents :
Cover
Book Title
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface to theEnglish-Language Edition
Preface
Introduction
Notes
1-The Many Faces of the Pinochet Regime
The Three Identities of the Pinochet Regime
Developmentalist Dictatorships: Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile
Varying Approaches to Analyzing the Pinochet Regime
Notes
2-Installing the Authoritarian Regime
Seizure of Power: Prerevolutionary Conditions
Civilian Tolerance of Violence
A Case of Political Violence: Argentina, 1969–1976
The Rapid Seizure of Power
Implementation of Limited Synchronization
Excising the “Marxist Cancer”
The “Caravan of Death”
The Institutionalization andPersonalization of Terror
Voluntary Synchronization
Limited Synchronization in the Universities
Notes
3-Pinochet’s Leadership: The Bases of Power
A Personalist or Strongman Dictatorship?
Pinochet’s Professional Background
The Army High Command
The Presidency: Institutional Foundations and Ratification by Plebiscite
Civilian Support
A Sultanistic Resource: The DINA
Notes
4-The Role of the Military
Military Participation Without Politicization
Worsening Civilian-Military Relations
Growing Military Political Participation Under Allende
Military Participation in Government Ministries
Military Participation in Regional and Provincial Governments
The Importance of Military Participation in Government
Military Participation in the University System
Notes
5-The Legitimation Strategy
The Military’s Early Decision to Retain Power
Historical Legitimacy and Chilean “Decadence”
Legal-Constitutional Legitimacy
Drafting the New Constitution
The Constitutional Acts
Constitutional Debates in the Council of State
A Constitution for Pinochet
Legitimacy Through Efficacy: The Neoliberal Model
Notes
6-The Organization of Political Power
The Problem of Military Institutionalization in Argentina and Uruguay
Traditional Military Regimes and the Influence of Franquist Corporatism
The Junta and the Organization of Legislative Power
Gustavo Leigh’s Leadership Aspirations
Presidential Personalization of Power and Institutional Resources
The Council of State
Weakening of the Military and Demands for a New Institutional Order
The Role of Dissidence: Qué Pasa
The Chacarillas Political Shift
Implementation of the Chacarillas Plan
The Fernández Cabinet: The Gremialista–Chicago Boy Coalition
The Seven “Governments” of the Military Regime
The Cabinet: Proportional Distribution of Posts and Ministerial Instability
The Regime’s Ministers
Notes
7-Jaime Guzmán and the Gremialista Movement
The Gremialista Movement: A Power Group
Jaime Guzmán and the Influence of Franco’s Spain
Building the Gremialista Movement
The Four Faces of the Gremialistas: From Adaptation to Innovation
Guzmán and the Question of Human Rights Violations
Guzmán’s Relations with the DINA and the Roman Catholic Church
Mobilizing Political Support: Civilian Organizations
The Gremialistas in Municipal Government
Notes
8-The Chicago Boys: Legitimation Through Economic Success
Political Orientation of the Chicago Boys
Economic Leadership: Sergio de Castro, Hernán Büchi, and Miguel Kast
Designing the Economic Program: “The Brick”
Neutralization of Academic Centers
Neutralization of Military Officers in COAJ and CORFO
The ODEPLAN Boys: The Gremialista Movement and Economic Management
Notes
9-Privatization: The Economic Policy of the Authoritarian Regime
The Three Stages of Privatization Policy
The Political Objectives Behind Privatization
The Political Argument Behind Privatization: “Popular Capitalism”
Privatization of the Pension System
Privatization of Electric Companies
Notes
10-The 1982–1983 Economic Crisis and the Politics of Apertura
Reinforcing Pinochet’s Personalization of Power
Conflicts Among Security Services
The Weakening of Legitimation Through Efficacy
Political Clientelism
Renegotiating Debt and Neutralizing Small Business Discontent
The Politics of Apertura and Liberalization
The Catholic Church and the National Accord
Opposition to the Apertura
Radicalization of the Carabineros: DICOMCAR and the Degollados
The End of Apertura and the Militarization of Politics
Notes
11-Pinochet’s Defeat and the Question of Succession
Institutional Consequences
Conflicts and Divisions Among the Regime’s Supporters
The Launch of Pinochet’s Electoral Campaign: Regional Tours
The Opposition’s Role: The Long March to the “No” Campaign
Pinochet’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The Opposition’s Three Arenas for Political Action
The Opposition’s Decision to Participate in the 1988 Plebiscite
Notes
12-The Limits of the New Democracy
Partial Dismantling of the “Protected Democracy” and Military Prerogatives
Political Criteria in Supreme Court Appointments
Deepening Economic Reforms
Obstacles Limiting the Elected Government
Preparations for the 1989 Electoral Campaign
Notes
13-The Consolidation of Democracy
Difficulties of Democratization
Human Rights Policies and General Pinochet’s Reaction
The Downfall of General Pinochet
Economic Performance Under Democracy
Consolidation of Democratic Institutions
Reemergence of the Party System
Notes
14-Conclusion
Notes
Acronyms
Chronology
Bibliography
Index
About the Book

Citation preview

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The Pinochet Regime

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THE

PINOCHET REGIME Carlos Huneeus translated by Lake Sagaris

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

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Published in the United States of America in 2007 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2007 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huneeus, Carlos. [Régimen de Pinochet. English] The Pinochet regime / Carlos Huneeus ; translated by Lake Sagaris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58826-406-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Chile—Politics and government—1973–1988. 2. Authoritarianism— Chile—History—20th century. 3. Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto. I. Title. F3100.H87613 2007 983.06'5—dc22 2006020884 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

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To the memory of my grandfather, Roberto Huneeus Gana, and my father, Tomás Huneeus Eastman

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If we wish to get a true understanding of the French Revolution and its achievement, it is well to disregard for the moment the France of today and look back to the France that is no more. This is what I have aimed at doing in the present book, and I must admit that it proved to be a far less easy task than I had expected when I first embarked on it. —Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution

What would man be without his capacity to remember? Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it. It is to revive fragments of existence, to rescue lost beings, to cast harsh light on faces and events, to drive back the sands that cover the surface of things, to combat oblivion and to reject death. —Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea

In Chile there is no room and no viability in any historic project, any social model that involves infringing on personal freedom or national sovereignty. Our society would be incapable of assimilating it, because it would be totally foreign to our essence. Any legal regulation or institutional structure, economic and social policy, or educational system must work to guarantee every Chilean the full exercise of freedom and respect for his person as an inviolable being. Any other end—for example, using social institutions for the sole benefit of a small minority—would be condemned out of hand and rendered useless, due to its foreignness and antagonism to the national soul. Peoples cannot abandon their souls with impunity. —Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, homily during the Te Deum, September 18, 1974

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface to the English-Language Edition Preface Introduction

1 The Many Faces of the Pinochet Regime

xi xv xvii xxi

1

2 Installing the Authoritarian Regime

31

3 Pinochet’s Leadership: The Bases of Power

71

4 The Role of the Military

107

5 The Legitimation Strategy

139

6 The Organization of Political Power

179

7 Jaime Guzmán and the Gremialista Movement

225

8 The Chicago Boys: Legitimation Through Economic Success

271

9 Privatization: The Economic Policy of the Authoritarian Regime

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10 The 1982–1983 Economic Crisis and the Politics of Apertura ix

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11 Pinochet’s Defeat and the Question of Succession

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12 The Limits of the New Democracy

431

13 The Consolidation of Democracy

449

14 Conclusion

477

List of Acronyms Chronology Bibliography Index About the Book

491 495 503 531 559

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Illustrations

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Tables

1.1

Victims of Human Rights Abuse and Political Violence, 1973–1990 Sociodemographic and Political Characteristics of Victims of Human Rights Abuse and Political Violence, 1973–1990 Civilian Power Groups Under the Pinochet Regime Pinochet’s Image in Chilean History: Among the Country’s Best Rulers of the Twentieth Century? Pinochet’s Image in Chilean History, by Vote Intention and Age Outcome of Noncompetitive Elections Held Under the Pinochet Regime The Thirteen Longest-Serving Ministers of the Pinochet Regime, by Profession and Political Profile Structure of Ruling Coalitions in Military Regimes in Argentina, 1966–1973 and 1976–1986, and Brazil, 1964–1983 Distribution of Regiments by Region, 1988 Military Officers as Regional Governors, June 1988 Distribution of Provincial Governors, June 1988 Generals in Government Positions During the 1988 Plebiscite Army Generals Not Holding Government Posts in 1988: Time Spent on Military Assignments and in Government Posts, September 1973–June 1988 Military Participation in Government, July 1988 Military Officers Appointed University Presidents, 1973–1986 The Pinochet Regime’s Seven “Governments” Composition of the Pinochet Regime’s Seven “Governments” Ministerial Instability Under the Military Regime, 1973–1990

1.2 1.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1

4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

4.7 4.8 6.1 6.2 6.3

xi

5 6 23 74 75 87 94

117 121 122 123 125

126 128 131 200 201 209

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6.4 Ministers of the Pinochet Regime, 1973–1989 7.1 Electoral Results of Catholic University’s Student Federation, Executive Committee, 1967–1972 7.2 Gremialista Presidents of Catholic University’s Student Federation: Political Careers, 1968–1989 7.3 Leaders of the National Youth Secretariat: Political Careers 8.1 Comparison of Key Macroeconomic Indicators, 1959–1998 8.2 Salaries, Family Allowances, and Public Social Spending, 1970–1998 8.3 Composition of Boards of Directors of CORFO-Controlled Companies, June 1986 8.4 ODEPLAN Executive Staff, 1981–1985 8.5 Joint Academic Projects of ODEPLAN and Catholic University’s Economics Institute, 1974–1987 9.1 Who Bought Public Companies, 1985–1988 9.2 Changes in the New Pension Fund System, 1981–2005 9.3 Private Pension System Concentration, by Affiliates, 1981–2005 9.4 Pension Fund Concentration, 1985–2005 9.5 The Breakup of Endesa Under the Military Regime 10.1 Changes to the Legal Minimum Wage, 1981–1985 10.2 Patronage Policies for Small and Medium Debtors, January–June 1986 11.1 Statements by High-Ranking Army Officers in Favor of Pinochet’s Candidacy, 1987–1988 11.2 Pinochet’s Tours in Preparation for Presidential Nomination, 1986–1988 11.3 Decision to Vote in the 1988 Plebiscite 11.4 Voting Intentions in the 1988 Plebiscite 12.1 Laws Passed by the Military Regime After the 1988 Plebiscite 12.2 CORFO Decisions on Privatization, 1988–1989 12.3 UDI and RN Deputies’ Participation in the Military Regime, 1989–2001 12.4 UDI and RN Senators’ Participation in the Military Regime, 1990–2010 13.1 Deposits and Interest in Pinochet’s Bank Accounts, 1973–2004 13.2 Comparison of Key Economic Indicators, 1974–2005 13.3 Results of the Congressional Elections, Chamber of Deputies, 1989–2005 14.1 Profile of Board Members Elected by AFPs in Shareholder Meetings, 1995–1997

210 233 235 259 273 274 287 292 294 316 318 328 330 337 368 370 407 408 418 420 439 441 443 444 458 462 468 482

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Illustrations

14.2 Opinions on Pinochet and Democracy, by Vote Intention, 2004–2006

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Figures

10.1 PEM and POJH Workers, 1982–1985 12.1 Public Defense Expenditure as Percentage of GDP, 1963–2004

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366 437

Photos

The first visit to the Supreme Court The scene of Orlando Letelier’s murder Jaime Guzmán, Claudio Sánchez, and Jaime Fillol celebrating Youth Day Paratroopers take arms against a student protest Carabineros at Alameda Avenue Jaime Guzmán, General Augusto Pinochet, and Jovino Novoa, days before the 1988 plebiscite Eduardo Frei Montalva in the only opposition rally against the 1980 constitution

47 53 252 381 383 401 413

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Preface to the English-Language Edition

The English-language edition of this book is a revised and expanded version of the Spanish text published by Editorial Sudamericana in early 2001. I have provided explanations to aid readers who are not steeped in Chilean politics; updated the chronology, the bibliography, and Chapter 9 in regard to privatizations in the energy sector; and included a new chapter (Chapter 13) on how the Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994), Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994–2000), and Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006) governments of the new democracy dismantled the institutions that authoritarianism left behind and consolidated the new political order. A significant occurrence since the release of the Spanish-language edition was the discovery, through a US Senate investigation, of major funds in accounts that Augusto Pinochet held at the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., of which the public was informed in July 2004. This was pursued further by the Chilean courts, which uncovered a large network of accounts that Pinochet and members of his family had opened in numerous financial havens. As a result, the once-powerful dictator was charged with tax evasion, altering an official document (a passport), and the false declaration of assets. The military regime has had a major impact on the new democracy, which is manifested in a number of ways. The triumph of Michelle Bachelet (the daughter of a general who was tortured and died as a result of the abuse, and herself the victim of torture and exile) in the 2006 presidential election cannot be understood without examining the past. Pinochet’s death on December 10, 2006, as I was finalizing the proofs, closes a chapter of Chilean history—although his presence in Chilean society and politics will last for a long time. *

*

*

Many people helped me with the preparation of the English-language manuscript, and I thank each and every one of them. At the risk of leaving some out, I would like to mention Solange Berstein, Carlos Carmona, Rodrigo Cuevas, xv

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Alejandro Ferreiro, Mario Marcel, and Ricardo Ffrench-Davis. I would also like to thank my assistants at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality (Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporánea [CERC]): Alejandra López updated the chronology and helped me with the analysis of the human rights policies, and Fabiola Berríos updated the bibliography. The tracking of Chilean public opinion on Pinochet and the military regime was made possible through CERC polling. For the photos I thank Cristián Boffil, editor of La Tercera, and Alvaro Hoppe. Lake Sagaris translated the text with great enthusiasm and professionalism, and Mary Reardon then edited the manuscript and translated the chronology update and new chapter. I thank them for their work. Alan Angell, director of the Latin American Centre at Oxford University, encouraged me to undertake the translation, and the invitation he extended to have me as visiting fellow at St. Antony’s College in 2004 was an important step in that direction. I am very grateful to him. I also thank J. Samuel Valenzuela. Last but not least, I would like to extend warmest thanks to Lynne Rienner for publishing the book. —Carlos Huneeus

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Preface

I started to work on this book some time ago, and its development is intimately linked to my personal and professional life. It would not have been possible without help from many institutions and individuals. I have been searching for the singularities of the Pinochet regime since 1975, when, as part of my doctoral studies at the University of Heidelberg, I began a comparative study of the breakdown of democracy in Chile, the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918–1933), and the Second Republic in Spain (1931– 1936). I studied these European countries because they symbolized major democratic failures, and I hoped that by understanding them I might better understand the causes that drove my own country to tragedy. It was in this context that my interest in studying Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian regime and Francisco Franco’s authoritarian regime also arose. My interest in the Franco dictatorship multiplied when I spent Christmas 1975 in Barcelona with my family, a few weeks after the death of the Generalísimo de los Ejércitos y Caudillo de España (Supreme General of the Armies and Maximum Leader of Spain). The Spaniards’ jubilation at the regime’s end and the news that the country would soon enjoy democratic rule was obvious on the streets and in public squares. I was able to explore this more deeply during postdoctoral work on Spain’s transition to democracy at the Union of the Democratic Center (Unión de Centro Democrático [UCD]) in Heidelberg, thanks to a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation. My exploration of the Franco regime was useful not only for analytical purposes, but also for my understanding of the ideological background of the Pinochet regime. Chilean intellectuals and right-wing groups had followed Spain’s political development with interest since the 1940s, and they translated this into the political discourse of Chilean authoritarianism, seeing in the European experience a frame of reference for defining the nature of Chile’s new political order in its early years. The National Unity Youth Front (Frente Juvenil de Unidad Nacional), launched on July 9, 1975, during a ceremony marked by xvii

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parades and torches—a choreography typical of fascist events—was the most visible expression of this influence. The organization’s name also pointed to the influence of the Franco regime, whose youth wing was the Youth Front (Frente de Juventudes). It is ironic that Spain triggered the humiliating arrest of General Pinochet in London on October 16, 1998, through a judicial resolution accusing him of responsibility in the death of Spanish citizens in Chile. My research for this book formally began with the support of the Academy of Christian Humanism’s Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality (Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporánea [CERC]) in the mid-1980s and also enjoyed support from the Volkswagen Foundation. Jorge Olave and Sergio España helped with great enthusiasm and effectiveness, especially through their detailed analysis of policies and the governing elite, a task that also received assistance from María Olivia Monckeberg. The Ford Foundation made it possible for me to begin a series of surveys that allowed me to explore Chileans’ opinions and attitudes during the authoritarian period. These surveys were expanded with support from the European Union and the Center of Investigation for Latin America and Europe (CIPIE) in Madrid. Throughout the 1990s I continued this work with CERC, which was headed by Marta Lagos until 1995 and by me from then on. This has allowed me to compile a time series based on more than eighty surveys, with extensive information on the authoritarian regime’s image and the figure of General Pinochet. I would like to thank all those who have made these surveys possible. After a four-year interruption, during which I served as Chile’s ambassador to Germany on behalf of the first post-Pinochet democratic government, headed by President Patricio Aylwin, I resumed my research in 1995 when I returned to my position as professor of political science at the Pontifical Catholic University, in part thanks to a grant from the Humboldt Foundation. I again enjoyed the support of the Volkswagen Foundation for a research project, in cooperation with Harmut Sangmeister at the University of Heidelberg, to study economic reforms and civilian power groups. I am grateful for the assistance of Alfred Schmidt from the Volkswagen Foundation. I also enjoyed effective support from my assistant, Ricardo Gamboa, and from Gloria Miño, who was in charge of administering the project. A Fondecyt grant made it possible for me to continue this study and to prepare the first draft of this book. The Pinochet Regime also draws on a systematic review of many primary and secondary sources. The first include the information collected in the archives of the Vicariate of Solidarity and the National Library of Congress. Pablo Policzer drew my attention to the existence of the Minutes of the Honorable Governing Junta (Actas de la Honorable Junta de Gobierno), which remain secret, but which I was able to read upon authorization from Senate president Sergio Romero (National Renewal) and Chamber of Deputies president Gutemberg Martínez (Christian Democratic Party). I reviewed scores of volumes in the presence of a functionary of the National Library; and though I was not allowed to make photocopies, I was authorized to use a tape recorder,

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with which I recorded many paragraphs of interest. The “secret” nature of these minutes is anachronistic in terms of legality, because in truth they contain no information that cannot be made known to researchers. Junta members resolved the most conflict-laden issues in the absence of their advisers and note-takers. Students of human rights violations will find no useful material in the minutes—except for debates on how to perfect the regime’s legal architecture to protect against any gaps discovered by imaginative and bold human rights lawyers. Documents of the following government ministries and offices were also reviewed: General Secretariat, Planning and Cooperation (formerly ODEPLAN), Foreign Affairs, and the Development Corporation (Corporación de Fomento [CORFO]). Alfonso Lazo, ODEPLAN’s first legal adviser upon the return of elected government in 1990, must be thanked for having maintained the documentation left by the previous administration at ODEPLAN. Videos of interviews with ministers and other high-ranking staff of the military regime were very useful: these are located in the Center for the Investigation and Documentation of Contemporary Chilean History (Centro de Investigación y Documentación en Historia de Chile Contemporáneo [CIDOC]) at Finis Terrae University. The analysis of the Gremialista movement (gremialismo is the political and social philosophy developed by Jaime Guzmán) was further developed using documents from the Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz Foundation (FJGE), provided by its executive director, Marco Antonio González. Articles by Jaime Guzmán that appeared in Revista Escolar and Fiducia were provided by Renato Cristi. Personnel at the library of the Political Sciences Institute at Pontifical Catholic University helped me to obtain many books and articles that made it possible to complete the bibliographic sources. I also worked in the Madrid National Library and its magazine facility (Hemeroteca) to improve my knowledge of the Franco regime and the image of the Chilean case in the pro-Franco media in 1973–1975. I interviewed many military and civilian ministers and others who cooperated directly with the Pinochet regime. They answered my questions, which sought to form the most complete view of the regime’s structure and decisionmaking, with interest and frankness. I was able to present the main conclusions of my research at seminars organized by the Latin American Center at the University of Oxford (thanks to an invitation from Alan Angell), the Department of Contemporary History at the National Distance University (thanks to the late Javier Tusell), the Department of Contemporary History at the Autonomous University of Madrid (thanks to Álvaro Soto), and the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame (thanks to Tim Scully). At the latter, I was able to complete a second draft of the book in the early months of 2000, which was read by Alan Angell, Carlos Bascuñán, Mónica González, and Juan Linz, whose suggestions contributed greatly to the final version. (Of course, the responsibility for the shortcomings of the book is mine alone.)

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In addition to the people mentioned here, I received help from many others during this lengthy investigation. Although I cannot name them all, I would like to mention Héctor Casanueva, Enrique d’Etigny, and Ricardo FfrenchDavis. My debt of gratitude to Juan Linz is enormous. His many studies of nondemocratic regimes and the transition to democracy, as well as the many conversations we had about the Pinochet regime on various occasions in Bad Homburg, Heidelberg, Madrid, New Haven, and Santiago, helped me to better understand the main elements of the regime and appreciate them within a comparative perspective. The many observations that he made after a careful reading of my manuscript were gratefully received. I am grateful as well to my assistants at CERC who worked on various stages of this project: Raúl Cordero, Edmundo Santelices, Carola Ramírez, Daniela Moreno, and Rodrigo Bugueño. The latter prepared the index for the Spanish-language edition of the book. Dora de Groote was responsible for a careful editing of the manuscript, which improved it noticeably. Alejandra López worked actively on many tasks, from verifying data and contextual information to transcribing the many revisions that I made to the manuscript, without neglecting her administrative responsibilities and her commitment to promoting human rights. At Editoral Sudamericana, Jorgelina Martín further improved the quality of the text. In my childhood I experienced a consequence of authoritarianism when I learned that my father, Lieutenant-Colonel Tomás Huneeus Eastman, had applied for retirement from the army immediately after the election of retired general Carlos Ibáñez del Campo as president of Chile on September 4, 1952. During the dictatorship established by the 1925 coup d’état, General Ibáñez had exiled my grandfather, Roberto Huneeus Gana. My father’s sense of military honor and respect for the memory of his father caused him to leave the institution to which he had belonged for twenty-seven years. While writing this book, I have always felt my father and grandfather close by, and it is dedicated to them. The book would not have been possible without the support of my family: my wife, Marta Lagos Cruz-Coke, who has accompanied me on this long journey, and my sons Cristóbal and Nicolás, who shared in my “participatory observation” of authoritarianism when at a young age they started to accompany me to many opposition events. I also acknowledge my children Josefina and Federico, who have patiently at home put up with the years it has taken to write this book. They all knew how to persist effectively, if not always diplomatically, pushing me to complete the work. —C. H.

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Introduction

This book explains the nature of the authoritarian regime of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990), examining its structures and power groups, its main policies, and the factors that made its lengthy duration possible. The coup d’état on September 11, 1973, was of a complex nature. It ended Chile’s long-lasting democratic tradition—an unusual tradition in the Latin American context and one admired far beyond the country’s borders. At the same time, it was the result of a lengthy and profound crisis, accelerated by President Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970–1973), which advocated the creation of a socialist regime through legal means. The coup inaugurated an authoritarian regime that exerted power with enormous violence, deeply wounding society and driving home economic policies that would not only radically change the foundations of government, but also create an economic boom. Thus the new authoritarian regime gave birth to a dual state with two opposing but intimately linked faces: one characterized by political coercion, and the other by the promotion of economic freedom.1 How do we explain an authoritarian regime that lasted so long in a country with such a lengthy democratic tradition? What were the organs of power? What mechanisms made it possible to achieve political stability and broad support, even among poor and working-class sectors? What role did economic reforms and neoliberal ideas play in authoritarian discourse and policy? How was it possible for two such opposite faces as political coercion and economic freedom to coexist, without showing significant signs of tension? What explains the fascination with General Pinochet’s personality and leadership among elites and lower-income sectors alike? These are some of the questions that motivated this book. The historical conditions leading to authoritarian rule are not neglected here, but they are included only for the purpose of helping us to better understand the behavior of actors and institutions. There is an extensive literature on the political face of the Pinochet regime,2 and there are also many studies of the regime’s economic reforms.3 xxi

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This book is one of only a few studies,4 however, to empirically explore the interrelationships of the two dimensions. It consists of fourteen chapters. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to the military regime, placing it in perspective. Chapter 2 explains how the military took power, a process that profoundly influenced how the profile of the new political order was defined. Chapter 3 studies General Pinochet’s leadership, in terms of his dual role as head of state and leader of the governing coalition, and explores the sources of his authority. Chapter 4 deals with the ongoing role of the military. Chapter 5 examines the multifaceted legitimation strategy—involving politics and history, the legal system and the constitution, and economic success—used to justify the regime’s lengthy duration. Chapter 6 reviews the organization of the new political order and the tension between personalization and institutionalization of power. Chapter 7 studies the part played by Jaime Guzmán and his Gremialista movement, which became a key actor in the formulation and implementation of the regime’s political program. Chapters 8 and 9 explore the role played by the Chicago Boys economic team and the profound impact of their policy of privatization. Chapter 10 turns to the 1982–1983 economic crisis and the changes, in response to citizen protest, that made it possible for political parties to reappear. Chapter 11 analyzes the failure of General Pinochet’s attempt to retain his presidency and his defeat in the 1988 plebiscite. Chapter 12 clarifies the “retreat” of the military and considers General Pinochet’s efforts to leave obstacles firmly in place that limited the new democracy’s ability to bring military officers to trial for human rights violations. Chapter 13 deals with the consolidation of democracy, the dismantling of authoritarian structures, and the demise of Pinochet’s public image. Finally, Chapter 14 presents the conclusions of this study. Examining the Pinochet regime is relevant to understanding not only Chile’s past, but also the nature of the democracy that began on March 11, 1990, when General Pinochet handed the symbols of power over to the new president, Patricio Aylwin, who had headed the opposition that defeated him in the plebiscite on October 5, 1988. The politics of authoritarianism continue to have consequences for Chile’s economy and society, as well as for the development of the pluralist order, making it difficult to improve and deepen a democratic model. Explaining the past sheds some light on factors that continue to influence current political development. In the past decade, some Chilean intellectuals who had opposed the military regime have sharply questioned the behavior of Pinochet’s successors, charging that they have not progressed enough in dismantling the authoritarian scaffolding, and have concluded that nothing has changed since the general left La Moneda (the presidential palace and seat of government).5 The continuity of the authoritarian economic reforms during the 1990s and Pinochet’s leadership of the army until 1998 have contributed to this interpretation. However, Pinochet’s retention of power in the military arena cannot be

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explained as a concession from democrats, as if they themselves desired this. Rather, there was a solid, complex foundation of power sustaining the authoritarian regime, which enjoyed the support of the armed forces, business interests, and right-wing parties,6 and which had intended to remain in power until 1997 as established by the 1980 constitution. A plan for succession had been carefully designed that involved the ratification of General Pinochet in a plebiscite and the implantation of a political system different from Western democracy, in effect a “protected and authoritarian democracy,” with limited pluralism under military supervision. This plan was thwarted not by a coup or a military defeat, but rather through an electoral reverse in the 1988 plebiscite. The military’s respect for this legal legitimacy led it to admit defeat and hand over the government to its opposition,7 but without ceding on key questions, such as Pinochet retaining leadership of the army. This outcome brought with it an important political cost to the new democracy. If a pluralist democracy exists today in Chile, it is not because authoritarian forces sought it, but rather because the democratic opposition stopped them from prospering when it defeated General Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite, condemning to failure his attempts to define his own succession, the Achilles’ heel of all dictatorships.8 Faced with this unexpected outcome, General Pinochet accepted reforms to Chile’s founding charter (Carta Fundamental),9 eliminating some of its authoritarian components to prevent the opposition from pushing ahead with radical amendments, but setting out multiple economic and institutional obstacles to make the new administration’s work more difficult (see Chapter 12). The approach used in this book is that of a case study considered in comparative perspective,10 combining a close scrutiny of the Chilean experience with that of other authoritarian instances to reach relevant generalizations that offer insight into this type of political system. The comparison with both the Francisco Franco regime and the “new authoritarianism” of Latin America, with special emphasis on the cases of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, is clear. I also offer an implicit comparison with Adolf Hitler’s regime, thus clearly distinguishing between the authoritarian model of government and a totalitarian regime. By exploring both similarities and differences, my intention is to clearly identify characteristics specific to Chile’s political order from 1973 to 1990.11

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Notes

1. I use the concept of the dual state developed by Fraenkel (1984). 2. Ahumada et al. (1989), Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), Varas and Orrego (1979), González and Contreras (1991), Harrington and González (1991), Verdugo (1989), Informe de la Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación (1991). 3. Fontaine Aldunate (1988), Büchi (1993), Castañeda (1992). A critical view is offered by Meller (1996), Foxley (1982), Ffrench-Davis (1999). 4. For example, Constable and Valenzuela (1991), Valenzuela and Valenzuela (1986), Garretón (1982), Arriagada (1998).

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5. For example, Moulián (1997), Portales (2000). 6. I have analyzed this in more detail in Huneeus (1985a). 7. General Fernando Matthei, top air force commander and member of the governing junta beginning in 1978, admitted in a televised interview that General Pinochet tried to alter the results of the 1988 plebiscite, but was stopped by the top navy commander, Admiral José Toribio Merino, and Matthei himself. See La Nación, October 6, 2000. 8. Sartori (1987). 9. This change was rejected by some of Pinochet’s supporters. Former interior minister Sergio Fernández severely criticizes the reforms in Fernández (1994). 10. The approach draws on Lijphart (1971, 1975), and on the guidelines of Eckstein (1975). 11. Following John Stuart Mill’s logic, as per Skocpol and Somers (1994), esp. pp. 78–82.

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1 The Many Faces of the Pinochet Regime

Chile’s authoritarian regime was not the only one in Latin America in its time, but it was the one that achieved the most stability and international impact. After the March 1964 coup in Brazil, which toppled the government of João Goulart, and that of March 1976 in Argentina, which toppled the government of Isabel Martínez, widow and former running-mate of General Juan Domingo Perón, militaries overthrew democratically elected governments and established authoritarian regimes in most of South America’s countries.1 Several aspects made Chile’s case stand out among other authoritarian experiences in the region. First, particularly during the early years, the regime was characterized by the use of violence applied by security services, the military, and the police. Death, torture, and exile were realities that affected thousands. Chile under Pinochet remained a police state throughout his seventeen years in power, with the government applying strict control over the population and systematically persecuting opponents. Second, the political order became very stable, based on a low level of institutionalization and the enormous personalization of power in the figure of General Pinochet. The regime also enjoyed the institutional participation of the armed forces through the governing junta and the presence of hundreds of officers in the major positions of authority. The military was supported by right-wing groups, which provided valuable political and technical support and held many positions in the government, thus configuring a broad and solid civilian-military coalition with no significant divisions or desertions, unlike the experience in authoritarian Brazil. Third, the concentration of authority and power in General Pinochet turned him into the central figure. He made the major decisions and it was his objectives that set the political stage, making it possible for him to state that “not a leaf moved” without his permission or knowledge. Several factors (analyzed in Chapter 3) explain his prominence and the fact that one can speak of the 1

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Pinochet regime much as one refers to Franco’s government in Spain (1939– 1975) belonging to him personally.2 Fourth, Chile’s authoritarian experience brought about profound economic transformations, led by a group of technocrats known as the Chicago Boys, who changed the country’s production structure, redefined the state’s relationship to the economy and society, and caused both to flourish. This was a nondemocratic experiment, but it did not fail in terms of economic management. On the contrary, it obtained positive results, but with heavy social costs and amid considerable inhumanity. Pinochet’s was the only developmentalist dictatorship* in the second half of the twentieth century.3 The authoritarian context made it easier for institutions to impose economic reforms that would have been almost impossible to implement under democratic rule. Chile began its economic modernization under authoritarian rule, which left profound scars on the system thus created, scars still apparent in today’s democracy. Fifth, Pinochet’s time in power did not end as the result of conflicts and divisions in the military due to the failure of economic management or defeat in war, as occurred in Argentina in 1982 with the Falklands (Malvinas) War. On the contrary, it ended according to its own institutional rules, established in the 1980 constitution, with General Pinochet’s defeat in the 1988 plebiscite; this regime change followed a reform rather than a rupturist strategy, unlike events in Portugal in 1974.4 This explains the continuation of some authoritarian elements in the new democracy, particularly General Pinochet’s retention of the post of army commander in chief until 1998. The Pinochet regime, which emerged at a time when democracy was in retreat worldwide and authoritarian regimes were on the rise in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, was constructed under the influence of several different currents of political thought, both national and international, including the corporativism of Franco’s Spain and the doctrine of national security.5 The decisive role played by civilian elites and the abiding relevance of several currents of conservative thinking make it possible to see the Pinochet era as only a partial rupture in Chile’s political development, since it showed considerable continuity with regard to some trends, especially those involving the right, that were apparent before the coup. Multiple factors, not just coercion, economic success, and Pinochet’s personality,6 provided the authoritarian government with the power that made its

*Here, I mean “developmentalist” in the sense of the concept used by Klaus von Beyme in reference to the Franco regime, which enacted policies that radically changed the economic system and laid the foundations for Spain’s economic and social modernization. In Pinochet’s case, he changed the foundations of the economic system, laying new ones that have remained with the subsequent democratically elected government, although in terms of growth the achievements were modest as far as raw macroeconomic numbers.

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long life possible, to the extent that Chile did not joint the “third wave of democratization” until 1990.7 Pinochet’s hold on power also enjoyed the support of a substantial part of the population, traditional right-wing parties, and businesspeople and their organizations, all of whom still defend the regime a decade after its defeat. Its legacy is significant; the consequences of the Pinochet period will continue to affect the country for years to come.8 Pinochet’s surprise arrest in London on October 16, 1998, after which he was held for sixteen months, demonstrated that he and his regime continue to attract international attention as a symbol of human rights violations. The past has not lost its hold.

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The Three Identities of the Pinochet Regime

Compared to other Latin American dictatorships, the Pinochet regime stands out on three structural counts that, although distinct, are closely intertwined. The first involved its use of coercion and violence in the building of a police state by the National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional [DINA]). The second consisted of the economic reforms, which transformed production and dismantled labor organizations, weakening Chileans’ right to associate with each other and changing their values and the country’s political foundations.9 Third, the figure of General Pinochet himself, as the regime’s strongman, helped to bring together the other two components. Pinochet’s arrest in London blurred the lines between these three dimensions, highlighting the role that, by the time of his arrest, the aged general had played. This has led to some analytical reductionism, which has masked the complexity of those years. Economic success, meanwhile, disguised aspects of the regime’s nature. The regime’s supporters present the economic program as if it were politically neutral, something apart from the strategy to legitimize the authoritarian order. Its critics, on the other hand, treat the Chicago Boys as technocrats solely interested in economic objectives and serving major capital interests,10 as if they were not driven by a desire to achieve the political goals defined by the military and its civilian supporters, especially the Gremialistas. Pinochet’s coercion and leadership prevented the economic reforms from favorably influencing the regime’s democratization, a process that had taken place in Spain and Eastern Europe.11 Identifying the regime with Pinochet himself makes it harder to understand the important role placed by the civilians who worked with him as part of the governing elite, helping to define political discourse and the institutional architecture. It is essential to consider the role of his ministers and close civilian collaborators, such as Sergio Fernández, Sergio de Castro, Hernán Büchi, and Jaime Guzmán, and the many officers, among them particularly Generals Sergio Covarrubias, Julio Canessa, Santiago Sinclair, and Manuel Contreras. These three dimensions functioned as a coherent whole because they resulted in a regime with a low level of institutionalization that remained after

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the military left power, and because General Pinochet provided effective leadership. The political order, the “protected and authoritarian democracy,” was enshrined in the 1980 constitution in an attempt to conceive of an alternative to Western democracy, which was considered obsolete because it was unable to “defend itself” from the “communist threat.” This democracy never came to be, as its realization was thwarted by Pinochet’s defeat in the 1988 plebiscite. The Coercive Identity The Pinochet regime will be remembered for its enormous violence. Violence was used not only at the onset, but also throughout the regime’s development, especially when its stability was thought to be threatened. Coercion was apparent in multiple spheres of daily life as the police state developed. For a long time, people sought answers to the questions about why the coup was so brutal,12 and why it was necessary to apply repression right through to the end of the 1980s.13 This kind of political violence, previously unheard of in twentieth-century Chile, made a spectacular entrance on the morning of September 11, 1973. After two air force jets bombed the presidential palace, La Moneda, a member of the governing junta, air force general Gustavo Leigh, responded with a statement about “excising the Marxist cancer” and establishing a “state of siege” to counter a “state of internal war.” A political and social climate of abuse was created that encouraged the use of coercion as a habitual component of the government’s style.14 Thousands were detained by numerous military patrols, which violently erupted in poblaciones (poor and working-class communities), commercial areas, and universities in Santiago and other Chilean cities. These people were detained on bases and locations especially adapted to this use, such as the National Stadium. Many of these detainees, men and women, were harshly tortured, and many died. In towns and rural communities, Carabineros (Chile’s national police force) committed abuses, causing many deaths.15 The ministers of the Popular Unity government were arrested at the Military School and sent to a detention camp run by the navy on an island in the extreme south of Chile, where they lived under harsh conditions for almost two years.16 Some 5,000 people, Chilean and foreign, took refuge in embassies17 and other places that offered some degree of asylum immediately after the coup, or took refuge with various international bodies.18 An estimated 450,000 people, including the families of those in danger from the regime, were forced into exile for political or economic reasons (a figure that seems more accurate than the 10 percent of the total population that some human rights organizations estimated to have been affected by the situation, which would be about 1 million people).19 The detailed investigation carried out by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación; known as the Rettig Commission), established by President Patricio Aylwin immediately after he assumed power on March 11, 1990, as a first and important step in his policy

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for dealing with human rights violations, found that 2,279 people died due to the repression or violent actions between 1973 and 1990.20 According to the National Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation (Corporación Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación), created by the Rettig Commission, as many as 3,197 people probably died (see Table 1.1). The latter number is more accurate and has formed the basis for the government’s work on policies for political and economic restitution. More than half of these deaths occurred in 1973, but a great many lost their lives in the next three years, with the number of deaths declining after General Contreras was removed from his position as head of the DINA and the latter was replaced by the National Intelligence Center (Central Nacional de Inteligencia [CNI]). Starting in 1983, a new wave of repression hit the opposition, which had undertaken a series of mobilizations in the wake of the serious economic crisis that erupted in 1982 (see Chapter 10). Total deaths among the armed forces, Carabineros, and the civil police force reached 173 during the period 1973–1990, 5.4 percent of all victims. The victims’ sociodemographic and political profiles, including those of military and police officers who died in terrorist attacks, reveal that they were

Table 1.1

1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 Total

Victims of Human Rights Abuse and Political Violence, 1973–1990 Victims of Human Rights Abuse

Victims of Political Violence

Total

1,522 406 140 159 42 20 18 26 39 11 76 73 57 61 48 42 30 4 2,774

301 15 10 5 2 1 4 1 5 3 18 17 22 6 3 6 3 1 423

1,823 421 150 164 44 21 22 27 44 14 94 90 79 67 51 48 33 5 3,197

Source: Informe sobre calificación de víctimas de violaciones de derechos humanos y de violencia política (Santiago: Corporación Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación, 1996), tab. 20.

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mostly young men under thirty, primarily workers, campesinos (rural people), and members of left-wing parties and the Left Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria [MIR]), the latter of which suffered the loss of 440 members between 1973 and 1990, more than the Communist Party (427), which was considerably more powerful in terms of members and organization, thus revealing the efficacy of the “war” against them (see Table 1.2). With 482 victims, the Socialist Party was the body most affected, since the military acted against its members with more intensity due to the maximalist policy it advocated during the Salvador Allende government, which even led to the establishment of contacts with members of the navy who were sympathetic to the ideas of the government.

Table 1.2

Sociodemographic and Political Characteristics of Victims of Human Rights Abuse and Political Violence, 1973–1990

Gender Female Male Unborn Age Younger than 16 years 16–30 years 31–60 years 61 years and older Unspecified Marital status Single Married Widowed Common-law married Unknown Occupation Professional Technical or trades person Public or private employee Worker or rural Farmer Businessperson Wholesaler or retailer Student Armed forces and police corps

Victims

Percentage of Category Total

191 3,002 4

6.00 93.90 0.10

80 1,941 1,101 53 22

2.50 60.70 34.40 1.70 0.70

1,418 1,592 19 106 62

44.40 49.80 0.60 3.30 1.90

272 75 332 1,108 70 9 154 391 173

8.50 2.30 10.40 34.70 3.70 0.30 4.80 12.20 5.40 continues

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Coercion was not an exclusive prerogative of the uniformed. In rural areas, “vengeance was wreaked by landowners with support from the uniformed police. In Salamanca, Isla de Maipo, Paine, Mulchén, Laja and elsewhere, dozens of people accused of being peasant agitators or rural union leaders were arrested by groups of civilians and police officers and later executed.”21 The military justified the violence by arguing that the country was at “war” against Marxism and denouncing the existence of a “guerrilla army” about 14,000 members strong.22 This climate prevailed not only during the installation of authoritarian rule, but also later, especially during the 1982–1983 economic crisis. At that time, the opposition mobilized thousands in protests that were severely repressed by the military and the Carabineros, resulting in

Table 1.2

Continued

Victims Occupation, cont. Housewife Retired Other occupation Unemployed or occasional worker Unknown Political affiliation Socialist Party Left Revolutionary Movement Communist Party United People’s Action Movement Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front Radical Party Christian Democratic Party Christian Left Party National Party Radical Left Party Fatherland and Freedom Movement Party for Democracy Social Democratic Party Independent Democratic Union Other Unknown Total

Percentage of Category Total

47 26 338 45 157

1.50 0.80 10.60 1.40 4.90

482 440 427 36 22 17 12 7 4 3 3 2 1 1 16 1,724 3,197

15.80 13.76 13.36 1.13 0.69 0.53 0.38 0.22 0.13 0.09 0.09 0.06 0.03 0.03 0.50 53.93 100.00

Source: Informe sobre calificación de víctimas de violaciones de derechos humanos y de violencia política (Santiago: Corporación Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación, 1996), tabs. 24–25. Note: Percentages may not sum to 100.00 due to rounding.

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dozens of deaths and hundreds of wounded.23 The regime’s supporters also backed the war against Marxism, without foreseeing the horrendous repercussions it would have in the lives of many and for the character of the new regime. One of the main tools of this coercive violence was a body that specialized in pushing the war: the DINA, organized and headed until 1977 by Colonel (later General) Manuel Contreras. Since its start, the DINA had extensive powers to act in the country and abroad, and even organized attacks in the capitals of three friendly countries, which cost the lives of distinguished Chileans and a US citizen.24 We will return to the DINA throughout this book, especially in the next two chapters.25 The Economic Identity The Pinochet regime is also associated with the reforms that helped the country overcome the very grave economic crisis evident at the time of the coup, a crisis that resulted from the Popular Unity government’s policies. The reforms achieved significant macroeconomic results (a decline in inflation, growth in gross domestic product and exports, fiscal balance, etc.) and transformed production in Chile.26 These policies were “revolutionary”27 in nature and allowed the economy to take off in 1985 and grow at an annual rate of 7.9 percent, growth that lasted into the period of democratic government, until 1997. The reforms involved a wide range of measures, from eliminating price controls, opening up trade to international competition, and encouraging exports, to a radical process of privatizing public enterprises, including healthcare and social welfare programs, on top of the hundreds of firms seized and nationalized during the Allende government.28 The reforms created a dynamic new business class,29 and resulted in a noteworthy diversification of exports. The policies benefited and won the support of not only businesspeople, but also broad sectors of the population who had suffered from shortages and insecurity during the months prior to the coup. The Pinochet dictatorship was the only example of a developmentalist regime in the third world, being comparable only to General Franco’s regime in Spain,30 which used an iron fist to transform a primarily agricultural country into the tenth largest manufacturing power in the world. The economic reforms were applied in an authoritarian context that to a large degree determined their nature, especially in the case of the clientelism and patronage that were particularly obvious in the privatizations. Far from neutral, these were guided by political interests; the economy was subordinate to politics and not vice versa, as some dependency theory advocates once argued.31 The economic program was inspired by neoliberal ideas and applied by a broad group of professionals known as the Chicago Boys.32 Their ultimate objective was to achieve development and use the results to legitimize the political order they were building, a “protected and authoritarian democracy.” To that end, they pushed ahead with a rigid, pervasive economic program, heav-

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ily promoting their successes, while at the same time manipulating some of the indicators.33 Neoliberal thinking influenced the government and its ideology, and was applied to the country’s various economic sectors.34 Everything was explained and filtered through the government’s concepts. Politics had to submit to market rules, and the market was assumed to have an unlimited ability to provide resources; citizens were reduced to the condition of consumers puppeted by market forces; political institutions were treated like economic bodies, in which only “efficiency” and “profitability” mattered. The state’s role was diminished, and it was removed from the economy to such an extent that it made neoliberal philosophy seem akin to anarchism, a vision of a stateless society. This package of ideological neoliberal views made it possible to apply ideas in the widest range of environments, including culture, and served as the basis for a new higher-education policy. It also inspired the institutional framework of interest groups, made affiliation with professional associations voluntary, and eliminated their control over the ethics of their members. Neoliberal notions were also applied to urban policy, as regulations governing land use were eliminated. Economic reforms and coercion were not two opposing worlds, but rather two sides of the same coin. There was a “dual state”35 in which each of these facets responded to different rationales: one economic, the other political. The economic rationale gave priority to efficiency, profits, and economic freedom, without concern about social costs; the political rationale erased basic freedoms, turning human rights into a commodity subject to political interests that justified the use of violence. Economic reforms and partial modernization. The political context in which these economic transformations took place is far from irrelevant, as the context influenced their content, how they were implemented, and who their main beneficiaries were. Modernization in democracy is very different from modernization in an authoritarian context, as occurred in Chile.36 In light of that, in conceptual terms, this was the Prussian model of development, formulated in the shadow of other economic modernizations applied in undemocratic contexts, as occurred in Germany, with its “brusque and hurried”37 late industrialization, and in Spain, under General Franco’s authoritarian regime.38 In this type of economic modernization, the authoritarian context imposes conditions that, while favorable to changing some parts of the economic system, introduce substantial limitations in other areas. The concentration of authority and power in the head of state, typical of this kind of regime and part of what distinguishes it from democracy, also has consequences for the economic system, among them a reduction of the separation between public and private interests. As a result, opportunities for discriminatory decisions arise—decisions that favor individuals and groups who participate in the exercise of power or with privileged access to it. Conditions become very favorable for highly placed

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functionaries and supporters to make use of privileged information for their own benefit. The centralization of power explains why in authoritarian regimes there is no “corruption,” in the strictest sense of the term, but rather huge abuses, which are considered corrupt when they occur in a democracy.39 For all these reasons, authoritarian modernizations are partial, and don’t affect the economy and the social system as a whole; they only change certain areas of economic and social institutions, retaining others as traditional or semimodern.40 This type of modernization offsets the changes and insecurities brought on by reforms through a political system that restricts public freedoms and takes advantage of the traditional components of authority structures, encouraging nationalism and even resorting to religion. If businesspeople receive enormous advantages, workers and unions suffer, becoming excluded from the political system, and being indirectly penalized through negative integration, which reinforces the powerful position of the former even more.41 In Prussia’s case, Bismarck’s modernization and the upheaval produced by rapid and intense industrialization favored the development of large industries, whose power was mitigated thanks to the stability provided by the preservation of the landholding structure of the junkers, the primacy of conservative and aristocratic sectors in the public administration and the army, and the application of certain economic policies.42 As a result, it became possible for “modern means to be used partially or fully to impose traditional objectives and, conversely, for some specific elements of tradition to be used to achieve modern ends.”43 The economic modernization introduced by the Chicago Boys was partial, producing progress in some areas and declines in others. For example, labor policy favored business’s position over that of unions, preventing them from exercising much leadership in their field and at the national policy level.44 This strengthening of business favored large firms and left medium and small firms at a disadvantage, and failed to create regulatory bodies to protect the consumer. Economic structures tended toward concentration in conglomerates that control the major sectors of the economy to this day, among them banking, the media, and private pension fund administrators. As regulatory frameworks were neglected, the economic clout of these entities grew enormously, further complicating relations between the economic and political systems. The traditional view, based on making the most of natural resources, also pushed environmental protection out of the picture. In social terms, the system neglected lower-income groups, who saw their quality of life decline because stabilization policies were applied that reduced resources assigned to education, healthcare, and housing. Modernizations that were considered successful, such as the pension system, also suffered from major flaws, and required substantial changes. These stemmed from organizational deficiencies, such as high administrative costs,45 structural limitations due to the pension system’s marked bias in favor of medium- and high-income workers and against women, and the extremely high cost that they represented to the state, which

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had to assume minimum pensions, among other responsibilities.46 Traditional decisionmaking led to clientelism and patronage, which became especially obvious in the privatizations, which personally benefited top executives in public companies and government advisers or supporters. This partial modernization produced a profoundly imbalanced form of institutional development, with some modern and some premodern or traditional elements, which created problems that became apparent once democratic rule returned.47 As a result, the continuity of these economic reforms in the later democratic context suffered from the tension between an economic system rife with authoritarian elements and the context of a new democracy trying to improve its institutions and processes, imposing major limits on democracy.48 The unintended consequences of economic modernization. The military

regime’s economic success led its supporters to adopt an idealistic view of its economic policy. It is argued that from the start, the purpose of its economic policy was to establish the foundations for democracy, creating a “liberal revolution” that would give rise to “a new and notoriously more stable and democratic Chile than in the decades prior to 1973.”49 It is supposed to have been a pioneering revolution unique in the world, seen as a boost to the economic reforms implemented in developed countries in the 1980s and a means of overcoming the weaknesses of the welfare state established after World War II and dominated by “socialist” policies. Pinochet’s economic policies are said to have contributed to introducing “non-discriminatory formulas for freedom that seemed to exist only in textbooks, on remote islands such as Hong Kong or in nations such as Great Britain and the United States, where they were being abandoned due to the influence of socialism.”50 This view on the part of authoritarian supporters highlights the rational side of the regime, leaving its coercive irrationality in the background. Again, this reflects hindsight, since the purpose of the Pinochet regime, far from reestablishing a pluralist democracy, something it systematically discredited due to its structural flaws in its face-off with the “communist threat,” was actually to instate a very different political order, a “protected democracy.” It is therefore inappropriate to associate the Pinochet regime’s economic reforms with the political reforms developed during the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, which led to the democratization of the vote and the establishment of democracy in Europe.51 Furthermore, it would be wrong to place economic reforms carried out in a democracy on the same level as those applied by an authoritarian regime. The profound institutional and ethical differences between the two forms of government invalidate this comparison. Under dictatorship, the main institutional component that permeates the entire political order is the centralization of authority and the power of the head of state and his main collaborators. This has important consequences, since the economic authorities hold power with no counterweight, thus generating a spiral of discrimination and benefits in favor

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of a minority and those businesspeople closest to the regime. Moreover, the institutional separation between public and private interests makes it possible for top-ranking public servants to assign benefits at their discretion, making room for economic clientelism and patronage. This means that in an authoritarian context, there is no equality in the marketplace, since supporters have privileged access to authorities, which provides them with inside information on key economic decisions, while others are excluded. In democracy, authority is distributed among various bodies of power, and the market demands equal participation amid strong political and ethical demands to ensure compliance and mechanisms against abuses or excesses committed by public employees.52 Thus, while the regime’s economic reforms may seem similar to those applied in pluralist democracies such as the United Kingdom under the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher,53 or Argentina during the government of Carlos Menem,54 they are nonetheless profoundly different given the different contexts in which they are applied, the different decisionmaking processes behind them, and their different political ends.55 In addition, supporters of the “liberal revolution” thesis confuse the objectives sought by the economic team (legitimation of a “protected and authoritarian democracy” through results) with unintended consequences: that is, those that occurred as side effects of their policies and that may have an entirely different character than the objectives initially proposed by the authorities. For example, the economic modernization applied by the Pinochet regime had the unintended consequence of helping to return the country to democratic rule. A great amount of work analyzes the unintended consequences of policies applied by dictatorships, aspects that should be noted in order to outline the true parameters of the Pinochet regime’s economic management.56 The most illuminating studies along this line have dealt with Adolf Hitler’s regime. British historian David Schoenbaum argued that the totalitarian regime produced a “social revolution” that forever changed German’s social structure, making it easier to establish democracy after 1945.57 This social revolution was not carried out to achieve democracy, but rather its very opposite: a totalitarian state. This thesis was further developed by sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf in a noteworthy study on democracy in Germany, which maintained that Hitler, in seeking total power, had to destroy regional, religious, political, social, and even family loyalties, and structure society around the totalitarian party and ideology, producing such sweeping social modernization that “the content of the revolution was modernity.”58 Thus the Nazi regime opened up new opportunities for social mobility that allowed the children of workers or the middle classes to become top leaders of the Nazi Party, without belonging to the aristocracy, the social class that dominated the public administration and the army during the empire (1870–1918) and the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). In addition, not all the results of these economic reforms were positive; many were negative but were ignored by the supporters of the “liberal revolution.” The authoritarian context produced major institutional distortions that

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affected values and attitudes of the elites who supported it, especially businesspeople, a situation that became evident in their hostility to democracy. Economic policy created a business style that functioned on the basis of authoritarian rules: that is, involving limited pluralism and political exclusion, with no labor participation, with economic authorities open to all corporate demands. This experience ultimately led businesspeople to feel uncomfortable and even downright suspicious of democracy. Businesspeople were accustomed to operating without unions, a factor that has marked their political behavior to the present. This negative effect among Chilean businesspeople is also apparent in other cases where economic modernization occurred during an authoritarian regime, such as the German empire, whose businesspeople mistrusted democracy when it was established in 1918 and consistently opposed its development.59 The success of these economic reforms in Chile cannot be explained outside the authoritarian context, which made it possible for the Chicago Boys to push their program with determination and coherence, without having to deal with an opposition that, in a democracy, might have opposed these measures through unions, parliament, and the media.60 Personal Identity Authoritarian rule is also associated with General Pinochet himself, who was both head of state and army commander in chief. This feature was unique among Latin American dictatorships, since in cases such as Argentina and Brazil the president did not remain in direct control of the army.61 Pinochet, moreover, belonged to the governing junta until 1980, so he played a decisive role in determining the laws, since legislative authority was invested in its four members—that is, the commanders in chief of the three armed forces and the director-general of the Carabineros.62 The authoritarian regime cannot be explained without taking into account the role played by General Pinochet. His importance is based on the fact that he played a dual institutional and political function.63 He was head of state, of government, and of the army, jealously exercising each role simultaneously, aware that his authority stemmed from his being at the top of the hierarchy of the most important, most powerful branch of the armed forces. He was also the bridge that joined the two opposing faces of the authoritarian regime—its coercive irrationality and its economic rationale—as master of both General Contreras and the Chicago Boys.64 Pinochet was the undisputed leader of the governing coalition, integrating the various power groups and people who participated in the government or supported the government from outside the administration. These ranged from individuals like Pablo Rodríguez, who organized the extreme rightist group Fatherland and Freedom (Patria y Libertad) in 1970, which was responsible for grave acts of political violence during the Popular Unity government, through distinguished parliamentarians from the Conservative Party, such as Sergio Diez and Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes. He

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also managed to obtain support from much of the population, who were swayed by his simple, direct discourse, and who tolerated the use of violence against his adversaries.65 While communist regimes collapsed in the 1980s due to their economic failures and decisionmaking paralysis, the authoritarian regime in Chile enjoyed great strength and enough energy to attempt to project itself beyond 1990, with Pinochet as candidate for reelection as president for another eight years. His surprising defeat in the 1988 plebiscite triggered the end of the authoritarian rule and opened the way to regime change. The aggressive language he used against the opposition—“We are at war, gentlemen!”—was essential to maintaining the warlike atmosphere in the country throughout those years. Pinochet was incapable of changing his political style once the regime gained a firm hold and was about to enjoy the achievements of economic reforms. He remained glued to the confrontational, aggressive style he had adopted early on, and supported the actions of the DINA and the CNI, protecting General Manuel Contreras right up to his conviction by the Chilean Supreme Court in 1995 for his role in the murder of ambassador and minister Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., in September of 1976. This support involved a high cost, as it rendered Pinochet responsible for every one of the atrocities committed by the agents of these bodies, which explains his arrest in London. An analysis of the authoritarian regime cannot be reduced to the role of General Pinochet alone. Doing this would involve simplifying a complex system, with multiple bodies of power and influence and a range of sources of legitimacy. To reduce the analysis of the whole decisionmaking system to him alone would be to reduce the study of the entire regime to the mere exploration of “Pinochetism.” This would be to commit the same methodological error committed in previous studies of undemocratic regimes, studies that are neglected today precisely because they do not reveal the complexity of the institutions and interests behind these regimes.66

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Developmentalist Dictatorships: Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile

In its economic performance, the Pinochet regime is comparable only to Franco’s regime in Spain,67 the only dictatorship to arise during the fascist period that achieved economic success and managed to push its country out of its primarily agricultural and semi-industrial stage and turn it into the tenth largest economy in the world, modernizing its society at the same time. In Spain, the authoritarian regime is also associated with its dictator, who remained in charge throughout his life. In both countries, economic modernization occurred under authoritarian rule, making them examples of what has been called Prussian modernization, which is different from the process followed by other countries, where modernization occurred in a context of public freedom and a state of law. In both Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile,

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technocrats on the economic team played a major role, putting together their own program and ensuring its implementation. There were substantial differences, however, that should be considered. With the cabinet shuffle in 1957, the Spanish regime enacted a “stabilization plan” directed by a group of so-called technocrats whose purpose was to liberalize the economy.68 While it is true that this program was associated with the economic ministries,69 it resulted from the efforts of a broad group of economists who considered opening up the economy as the only way to break out of the stagnation produced by the autarchic policy adopted after Spain’s civil war ended. This new policy promoted free trade, monetary discipline, and financial clarity in public investments, and “proposed a market-based capitalist economy as an alternative to an interventionism that they [the economists] believed to be totally exhausted.”70 There were some important political differences between the economic teams of the Chilean and Spanish dictatorships. In Chile, the liberalizing economic program was supported from the start by the new government and enjoyed decisive support from business. It was the only serious proposal, with no alternatives on the table. The serious economic crisis affecting the country at the time of the coup created a consensus among the new holders of power that a profound economic reform inspired by monetarism should be enacted. In Spain, the program had to be imposed against official policy, which had promoted an active state role in the economy. The program faced opposition from sectors of the Falange71 and criticism from the top executives of public companies, mainly from the National Industrial Institute (Instituto Nacional de Industrias [INI]), a state and investment holding company meant to stimulate industrialization.72 Nor did it enjoy consensus among businesspeople, who reacted with enormous suspicion and distrust, with the exception of the Catalonians.73 Of course the proposal from Spanish technocrats did not have the ideological slant of the Chicago Boys. That slant led the Chicago Boys to such overwhelming antistatism that they neglected to create regulatory bodies and rules that would help prevent the abuse of the freely functioning market. In Chile, public administration was not modernized, so a solid institutional structure to support the reforms and prevent possible problems did not emerge. In Spain, the technocrats encouraged management reforms, with a strong professional sense and support from the academic community, which led them to view the state’s role as that of supporting private management and regulating economic activity. Thus Franco’s Spain sought not only to strengthen the private sector, but also to modernize civil service. This is why Spain’s experience with economic modernization is as closely associated with the ministers of finance and manufacturing as it is with work of administrative law professor Laureano López Rodó, who in the new government of 1957 was named head of the Government Secretariat and of the Office of Economic Coordination and Programming, a new technical position created especially for him.74 This was another expression of the incomplete nature of economic modernization under Chile’s

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authoritarian government, a source of serious limitations on the political and economic system under democratic rule. Moreover, Spain’s technocrats were a politically heterogeneous group who acted in the clearly defined institutional framework of the Ministry of Economy without interfering in other spheres of public policy where other “families” or power groups controlled state agencies or ministries.75 The fact that Franco’s regime was so institutionalized, with distinct bodies of power, including a political party, an organized movement, and a parliament (Las Cortes), kept the economic team within its own institutional boundaries. In contrast, Chile had a homogeneously political and technical group, formed by supporters of authoritarian rule politically identified with the right, especially the Gremialista movement. Moreover, the political order involved a low level of institutionalization that offered the economic team enormous freedom to act and to impose its decisions without interference from other bodies of power.76 In Chile, the technocrats played a major political role, as exemplified by the presidential candidacy of former finance minister Hernán Büchi during the first post-Pinochet elections, in 1989.

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Varying Approaches to Analyzing the Pinochet Regime

The Pinochet regime can be studied using different research approaches. The first involves examining it as a military regime, which is workable because of General Pinochet’s leadership and the fact that military officers held many important posts. It can also be examined at the state and economic levels, using the ideas of Guillermo O’Donnell concerning the “bureaucratic-authoritarian state,” which is fitting because the authoritarian regime pushed through radical economic transformation, seeking to redefine the relationship between the state and society.77 But that research strategy is not very suitable for the purposes of this study, because it highlights the impact of economic factors; here we want to focus on the influence of political factors and their effect on, for example, the economy. A third research strategy would be to examine the political system, analyzing the structures of power, elites, and the legitimation of the political order and its policies, including economic policy. Based on the concepts of authoritarian regime developed by Spanish sociologist Juan Linz, this stands out as the most appropriate approach and will be used here. Before examining the Linz approach, it is useful to clarify flaws in an approach focusing on the military nature of the Pinochet regime. A Military Regime The enormous military component accompanying the Pinochet regime could justify using a research strategy based on analyzing it as a case of military regime. Legislative power lay in the governing junta, formed by the com-

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manders in chief of the three branches of the armed forces and the director of the Carabineros. Members of the military were in control of many ministries, from Defense to others very distant from their line of work, such as Health and Public Works. They were also present in other ministries as undersecretaries, such as in the Ministries of Finance and Economy. Members of the military also took charge of vertical positions in the state, as regional administrators and provincial governors. They were also appointed university presidents; as well, during the early years, retired officers were ambassadors to many countries, among them the United States and the United Kingdom. The regime instated in Chile in 1973 was no exception within Latin America in those years.78 The region’s political landscape had changed drastically at the time. Presidents were army generals, from Castello Branco in Brazil (1964), to René Barrientos Ortuño in Bolivia (1964), to Juan Carlos Onganía (1966) and Jorge Videla (1976) in Argentina, and to Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1968).79 As French political scientist Alain Rouquié stressed, “In 1975, more than half the total population of the continent lives in countries whose administration is controlled by military regimes, or mainly military regimes. In South America, six nations, representing four-fifths of the territory, have officers as presidents, who achieved power thanks to their peers and a ‘happy’ coup d’état.”80 Argentina offers the clearest example of this trend, as it was ruled by military hegemony from 1930 until the defeat of its armed forces in the Malvinas (Falklands) in April 1982: Since 1930, no constitutional president, freely elected with no army pressure or veto, in the framework of a normal succession, completed his six-year mandate. The average length of presidencies from 1930 to 1971 was two-and-ahalf years, and two years and four months after 1955. This chronic instability is equaled solely by the military’s propensity for installing itself in the Casa Rosada, the seat of the presidency. Of the sixteen presidents of Argentina since 1930, eleven were military officers. They governed the country for twentyeight of forty-two years. Only two “elected” presidents held power until their legal six-year mandate ended: both were generals and they would probably never have achieved power if an opportune coup d’état hadn’t opened a doorway that allowed them to legally reach the presidency, with decisive support from the army. Moreover, of the sixteen presidents, ten were de facto; they took power through a military determination, with no electoral ratification whatsoever.81

Alfred Stepan explained the singularities of the military regimes that arose after the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil, in which the military seized power in another way, through a collective decision, and exercised it as an institution, in accordance with a new view of their professional role, which they called a “new militarism.”82 This differed from the “old militarism,” characterized by an often bloodless coup in which the president was discreetly removed from the presidential palace and sent somewhere else in the country or abroad, allowing him to continue his political career and even win back the presidency, as occurred

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with José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador on several occasions. Military intervention in politics consisted of individual initiatives by a general or colonel, who was accompanied by a handful of officers, and who established an unstable, personalized dictatorship.83 This new character of the military’s participation in government turned military officers into a powerful governmental elite who set an ambitious governmental agenda that ranged from tearing out political and economic problems at the root to changing citizens’ habits and values. They considered themselves the true representatives of the virtues of the nation and believed themselves the only ones capable of rebuilding the country.84 The new governments were inspired by national security doctrine85 taken from training programs developed by the US Army, which gave priority to the struggle against guerrilla movements, and applied these principles to the control of public order; this led them to use repression at enormous human cost. Nevertheless, the prominence of the military in the governments of Latin America is not reason enough to choose this research strategy to analyze the Chilean case. This is because most of the books and other materials on the military have focused on studying the causes of coups, without examining the political order that arose from the coups. Moreover, this approach does not reveal the structures of authority and power provided to the political order, or the strategy of legitimation, because it highlights the role of a single actor and institution. It must be remembered that in Chile, unlike in Argentina, the military did not seek power in 1973; rather, power fell to the military, because democracy collapsed. This leads us to the most important reason for not using this approach: focusing on the military obscures the importance of civilians, who were decisive not only in the economic realm, but also in designing and implementing the architecture of Chile’s new institutions. The military was accompanied in power by dozens of top-level professionals and hundreds of civilian advisers and supporters in multiple positions of authority, from the Chicago Boys to the Gremialistas, National Party politicians, and independents. The economic and policy ideas came from civilians; the military only contributed the national security doctrine, which provided an excuse for the use of coercion and justified some elements of the model of a “protected and authoritarian democracy,” particularly the military’s role as overseer. As a result, the military focus can be useful for understanding some actions and an institution, but it cannot explain the regime’s institutional complexity. An Authoritarian Regime The most suitable approach to this research involves positioning oneself at some distance from the role of individuals and institutions and relying on the model of an authoritarian regime formulated by Juan Linz.86 Using his classic definition, Linz described authoritarian regimes as “political systems with limited, not responsible political pluralism; with no clearly developed guiding ideology (but with a peculiar mentality); lacking in intense or extensive polit-

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ical mobilization (except at some points in its development); and in which a leader (or possibly a small group) exercises power within limits that in formal terms are poorly defined, but in fact are rather predictable.”87 The most important component of this definition is “limited pluralism,” which clearly distinguishes an authoritarian regime from democracy, in which pluralism is “almost unlimited.”88 This, then, has important implications for analyzing types of democratic and totalitarian political regimes of the period, and Linz chose to explain the characteristics specific to this third kind based on how it differed from democracy. One result of this was that he paid less attention to some elements of authoritarian rule that distinguish it from a totalitarian regime, such as its coercive functions and the role of the dictator. Linz’s model was tremendously important for understanding undemocratic regimes. Until then, they had been analyzed as “totalitarian dictatorships,”89 a term that only applies to the fascist regimes between the two world wars and Stalin’s regime, or as “military regimes,” the general way dictatorships in Latin America are understood. Linz provided a new approach that made it possible to understand power structures, tensions, and conflicts of undemocratic regimes, and shed light on aspects not considered by others.90 Linz has been criticized for his analysis of the Franco regime.91 His rejection of the role of ideology, and his replacement of it with the concept of “mentality,” have been questioned. Some writers have argued that ideology was important at different moments, especially in the 1940s and 1950s,92 although they admit that it faded later on. Well-known German political scientist Klaus von Beyme does not share Linz’s view of limited pluralism, which he considers an element that exists only at the level of elites, without ever becoming a part of the political system.93 Linz has also been criticized for the scant attention he paid to the role of coercion,94 which Linz considered relevant only during the early stage of a regime.95 “The authoritarian regime,” Linz wrote, “can go a long way in suppressing existing institutions or groups that oppose the new social order, in controlling other groups, and in any case presenting suppression or control as an ever present threat. But due to accumulating circumstances, this process stops.”96 Several authors have argued that coercion was a very significant component in Franco’s exercise of power and was particularly intense after the Spanish civil war.97 This coercion remained latent throughout the rest of his rule, appearing openly at times when the opposition mobilized against him, as occurred during worker and student protests in 1956 and nationalist struggles in the Basque region during the 1960s and early 1970s.98 On several occasions, it was applied during states of exception that lasted for several months, which limited civil rights.99 These criticisms deal with nonessential aspects of Linz’s approach, which retains its enormous analytical usefulness for studying political regimes other than democracy and totalitarianism in modernizing societies.100 Linz formulated an ideal type, that is, a methodological instrument that does not faithfully reflect

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reality, but rather is a reconstruction of reality that exaggerates some components to understand them better.101 Thus it is necessary to make some adjustments to his model to apply it to a specific case, such that it takes into account distinguishing characteristics of the case. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Pinochet regime was that it used coercion to take power and as an ongoing resource to maintain control of public order. Its impact must be measured not only by obvious consequences (deaths, arrests, torture, and exile), but also by its more subtle consequences, consisting of a sense of terror that took root in broad sectors of the most politicized part of the population and in opposition leaders.102 This sense of fear and insecurity is stronger in countries, like Chile, that lack a tradition of political violence. This violence generated a perception of vulnerability among those who did not support the regime, aggravated by the behavior of the courts, which tolerated arbitrary actions without regard to civil rights. The actions of security services, the courts’ passivity, the silent complicity of civilian supporters, among others, are factors that created a genuine “machinery of terror”103 that affected a broad majority of the population and discouraged opposition party members and activists from participating in politics. The use of coercion against dissidents raises the need to specify how the regime differed from a totalitarian regime,104 in which terror is a central component exercised directly by security services, amplified by the single party, and justified by the “guiding ideology.” Linz was aware of the contrasts between an authoritarian and a totalitarian regime when he emphasized that the former does not seek to provoke an “intense and extensive political mobilization,” as does the latter.105 The totalitarian regime that takes over from a democracy is characterized by the seizure of power through the cancellation (Gleichschaltung, to use the Nazi term, that is, “synchronization”) of cultural, social, and political institutions that mediate between the state and the individual, which are controlled by the state or eliminated.106 In the German case, this touched regional and municipal governments, as parties were banned and many parliamentarians and party leaders, especially communists and social democrats, were arrested, killed, or sent to concentration camps; as unions were eliminated and their leaders persecuted; and as churches, especially the Catholic Church, suffered consequences and many priests were harassed by the security services. This synchronization was not sudden, because when Hitler was appointed Reich chancellor by the president of the republic, Field Marshal Hindenburg, on January 30, 1933, he did not achieve full control over the executive, and the armed forces remained under the authority of the head of state. Hitler had to wait for the death of the elderly president in August 1934 to take over as head of state and, in this position, gain control of the military. Linz also stressed the importance of the strategy to legitimize the authoritarian order, which is one of a mixed nature, combining legal justifications with historical or strength-of-personality resources, as occurred in Hitler’s case. Legitimation proceeds by way of turnover in the leadership and changes implemented

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in the institutional architecture so it may better deal with national and international challenges. This was apparent in the Pinochet regime with the LetelierMoffit case, which in 1978 led to a massive cabinet shuffle and a weak institutionalization.107 Hence the need to distinguish changes in a regime to appreciate its ability to adapt to new problems, which reveals considerable political skill. Limited Synchronization To apply Linz’s conception to the study of a specific case, such as that of Pinochet, some adjustments must be made to take into account the regime’s characteristics. One of these was the coexistence of an intense use of violence during the taking of power and throughout the regime’s hold on power, together with economic reforms meant to overcome underdevelopment. The harshness employed in exercising power calls for examining the Pinochet regime not based on how it differed from democracy but rather on how it differed from a totalitarian regime. Chile’s authoritarian government is better understood when we analyze it in contrast to totalitarianism. If Linz argued that the main component of his model was “limited pluralism” as distinct from democracy, in which this characteristic is complete, we can gauge the Pinochet regime in terms of how it differed from totalitarianism, that is, in its level of synchronization of political and social institutions. In authoritarian rule, synchronization is not complete but rather limited, leaving room for some degree of pluralism that allows for the presence of a weak opposition, which is tolerated as long as it maintains a low profile. The Pinochet regime applied a limited and rapid synchronization to political structures through its discourse of war against Marxism and the use of violence.108 This was expressed in the disbanding of Congress, the banning of left-wing political parties, and the “recessing” of parties that had opposed the Popular Unity government. It was also apparent in the strict control over unions and the suppression of their main organization, the Central Workers Union (Central Única de Trabajadores [CUT]). The country was subjected to a warlike climate whose purpose was to eliminate dissent. Synchronization did not engulf the Catholic Church, which was able to maintain its schools and work with laypeople, including at radio stations, although it did lose control of the universities. Synchronization was achieved not only through measures imposed by the authorities, but also by voluntary decisions made by the new government’s supporters. The judiciary accepted the declaration of a state of war and tolerated human rights violations. The media participated in a voluntary synchronization, since those who continued to publish chose to support the new authorities. From a historical point of view, limited synchronization does not necessarily run its course in the early months of a new regime, but rather may grow deeper down the line, with the suppression of organizations that initially were left functioning. Thus, for example, the parties that were “suspended” in 1973 were not banned until March 1977, when the regime decided that the Christian Democratic Party’s opposition activity had gone beyond tolerable limits.

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Once limited synchronization was wrapped up, the new government proceeded to build a new political order, characterized by its low degree of institutionalization and expressed in a decisionmaking system highly centralized in General Pinochet. Legislative commissions that supported the work of the governing junta consisted mainly of military officers, with no formal forum for deliberation and resolution other than before the junta and the cabinet. This favored the emergence of informal arenas for deliberating and making decisions, which allowed certain people to influence Pinochet without being in the cabinet, as occurred with the “hard-liners” and Jaime Guzmán. The low level of institutionalization favored the consolidation of Pinochet’s power, eliminating opportunities for power groups to pressure for their interests and leaving him with ample decisionmaking powers. This feature gave the regime enormous ability to integrate diverse support groups and public figures, accompanied by great pragmatism in reconciling differences and appointing bureaucratic and political personnel, with Pinochet serving as arbiter. This institutional setup turned him into a central actor in the political process, making his retention of the post of head of state essential for the continuity of the regime and its policies. Pinochet’s was no totalitarian regime, as he did not exercise absolute power and authority. In Pinochet’s case both were limited, first by the military’s participation in power, with each branch preserving its own autonomy to administer itself and determine promotions and retirement. Second, the governing junta made decisions unanimously, forcing each member to reach a consensus with his colleagues. Third, the functioning of other political institutions—the military, the judiciary—placed limits on General Pinochet’s personal power, especially in terms of controlling his succession as covered in the 1980 constitution, which put a time limit on his remaining in power and defined a procedure—the 1988 plebiscite—to reconfirm his presidential authority. This great construct of the regime would backfire when Pinochet was defeated in the plebiscite and had to hand power over to the opposition he had battled against. This low level of institutionalization was one of the main differences compared with other military experiences, such as Brazil’s, where institutionalization was considerably higher. The Brazilian military maintained the party and congressional system, with parliamentarians elected in contests in which party- rather than military-appointed candidates competed,109 with local and state governments run by politicians elected in semicompetitive elections, with ministers being mainly civilians, and with the president being elected indirectly without possibility of reelection. I agree with von Beyme that limited pluralism is an analytical tool for understanding the structure of the governing coalition, which in Chile’s case consisted of the military and several civilian groups, ranging from the extreme rightist group Fatherland and Freedom through moderate sectors. The bestknown civilian group was the Chicago Boys (see Table 1.3), who acted with enormous cohesion under the leadership of economist Sergio de Castro in the

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Table 1.3

Civilian Power Groups Under the Pinochet Regime Degree of Cohesion

Ministers

Situation Under Democratic Government

Ministries of Economy and Finance National Planning Office Council of State

Sergio de Castro (1974–1982) Hernán Büchi (1985–1989) Jorge Alessandri

High

High

Sergio de Castro Hernan Büchi Carlos Cáceres

Private business and Independent Democratic Union

Low

High

Sergio Onofre Jarpa

Low

Low

Miguel Schweitzer Independent Democratic Union S. O. Jarpa National Renewal F. J. Cuadra

Embassies

National Planning Office National Youth Secretariat

Jaime Guzmán Miguel Kast

High

High

Miguel Kast Sergio Fernández M. A. Poduje

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Degree of Influence

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Alessandri supporters Former members of the National Party Gremialista movement

Leaders

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Main Institutional Sphere of Action

Independent Democratic Union

23

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1970s, and engineer Hernán Büchi in the 1980s (see Chapter 8). With a brief pause in 1984–1985, during which Luis Escobar Cerda was finance minister and achieved some influence with his “structuralist” proposals, Pinochet continued to trust certain individuals and the neoliberal program they promoted. Furthermore, some “Alessandristas” were also present, former ministers and collaborators of President Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964) who accompanied him later during his 1970 presidential campaign, which failed. These were individuals with no party affiliation and very critical of parties and parliament, aspects that, along with participation through certain government positions, provided a certain aura of historical legitimacy to the authoritarian regime’s political designs (see Chapter 5). There were also public figures belonging to the National Party.110 As the military was against parties, National Party leaders were not well received, because they shared the blame for the crisis in democracy. Some former parliamentarians were sent out of the country through diplomatic appointments.111 This group had its heyday in 1983, when former National Party president and former senator Sergio Onofre Jarpa was appointed interior minister and led an initiative that was intended to liberalize the regime to a degree and offer the opposition a bit more freedom (known as the apertura, or “opening”), which produced profound changes in the political system through major liberalization measures (see Chapter 10). A fourth group was the Gremialistas, led by Jaime Guzmán (analyzed in Chapter 7). Along with the Chicago Boys, this group had a clear power strategy, which involved holding a wide range of positions within the government and exercising extensive influence in the political system, especially in the National Planning Office (ODEPLAN), the General Secretariat Ministry, and municipal governments. It achieved a high level of cohesion among its members, had a series of substantial ideas and arguments to justify its political participation, and was under the astute leadership of a politician of note, Guzmán himself. *

*

*

In this chapter I have argued that it is appropriate to analyze the Pinochet regime as an authoritarian regime, per Juan Linz’s proposals, which have been adjusted to take into account specifics of the Chilean case.112 The elements particular to Chile include the use of violence and coercion, not only to take power but also later when they became central components of the regime, and the application of economic policies aimed at modernizing the country on the basis of a free market. These characteristics, closely linked to each other, made possible a dual state of coercion and economic freedom. This makes it necessary to analyze policies, which were instrumental in the regime’s consolidation.113 This was no fascist regime, as denounced by leftist sectors in the 1970s, since it exercised limited synchronization and it lacked hallmarks of totalitarianism, such as a single party and a guiding ideology. Nonetheless, the

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security services imposed a climate of terror, rather more radical than that of other authoritarian regimes in Latin America. The following chapters will analyze how power was seized and examine General Pinochet’s specific role.

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Notes

1. For an analysis of the collapse of democracy, I refer to the classic book by Linz and Stepan (1978). Democratic regimes were replaced by regimes known as the “new authoritarianisms”; Collier (1979). 2. This is how some analysts, such as Tusell (1988), Payne (1994b), Preston (1978), have put it. 3. Using Beyme’s concept (1971b). 4. The “reform” and “rupture” strategy arose to compare the cases of Spain and Portugal; see Linz (1981b), pp. 53–87. Much has been written on the transition: Santamaría (1981), Herz (1982), Baloyra (1987), O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead (1988), di Palma (1990), Huntington (1991), Gunther, Diamandouros, and Puhle (1995), Beyme (1994). 5. On the latter, Fernández (1981). 6. This position is defended by Rojas Sánchez (1998). 7. Huntington (1991). 8. The lasting legacies of authoritarian regimes in the democracies that followed have not been extensively analyzed. There are a few exceptions, such as Herz (1982), Linz (1981a), Hagopian (1993), pp. 464–500. 9. The concept of economic transformation has been applied to the change from socialist to market economies, but it is useful to apply it to the Chilean case because the change was so radical. Among the first to conceptualize this was Kloten (1991); see also Brock (1993), pp. 165–198. 10. For example, Silva (1996). 11. I refer to Beyme (1974). 12. Angell (1993). 13. Examples of continuing repression and brutality in the 1980s included the murder of union leader Tucapel Jiménez in 1982, the assassination of three members of the Communist Party in 1985, and the killings of twelve people linked to a terrorist movement, in an incident known as Operation Albania, in 1987. 14. See a very good analysis of terror: Moulián (1997), pp. 172–194. 15. One such case occurred in Lonquén, on the outskirts of Santiago, where a group of peasants was assassinated by Carabineros forces; Pacheco (1980). 16. See an account by one of the detainees: Bitar (1987). 17. There is an interesting account by the head of the Italian mission in those days, de Vergottini (1991). 18. Vicaría de la Solidaridad (1991), pp. 218, 221. 19. Ibid., p. 235. 20. Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (1991), vol. 1, p. 886. 21. Arriagada (1998), pp. 25–26. 22. We will return to this in the next chapter. This figure refers to the total number of foreigners living in the country whom the regime accused of being “subversive.” Vicaría de la Solidaridad (1991), p. 224. 23. I have analyzed this elsewhere: Huneeus (1985a). 24. General Carlos Prats, former army commander in chief and former interior minister of the Allende government, and his wife, Sofia Cuthbert, in Buenos Aires, on

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September 30, 1974; Orlando Letelier, former ambassador to the United States and former minister of defense of the Allende government, and a US citizen, Ronni Moffit, on September 21, 1976; and the unsuccessful attack against the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, Bernardo Leighton, and his wife, in September 1975. 25. While this book was being completed, General Contreras published his longpromised account of the “war” against subversion; it is a very shabby listing of names collected by the DINA: Contreras Sepúlveda (2000). 26. Much has been written on economic policy under the military regime. See the book by the regime’s finance minister in the 1980s: Büchi (1993); see also Castañeda (1992). Critical views are offered by Meller (1996), Foxley (1982), Ffrench-Davis (1999). 27. Meller (1996), p. 181. 28. Foxley (1982), Ffrench-Davis (1999), Meller (1996). 29. Montero (1997). 30. Some writers have compared the economic modernizations of Franco and Pinochet. See Berger, Weller, and Levine (1991–1992). 31. Cardozo and Faletto (1969). 32. For an informative history of the economic team, see the book by journalist and former editor of El Mercurio: Fontaine Aldunate (1988); see also Valdés (1989), Silva (1992). On Jorge Cauas’s role, there is an interesting study by Undurraga Vergara (1995). I have analyzed the second generation’s role in Huneeus (2000b). 33. This was the case with the consumer price index, which was systematically underestimated by the National Statistics Bureau (Instituto Nacional de Estadística [INE]) in the 1970s; Cortázar and Marshall (1980). 34. It was a “worldview” in the sense found in Dahrendorf (1997). 35. Fraenkel (1984), p. 40. 36. I have developed differences between the economic reforms carried out under democracy in Argentina and aspects of the Chilean situation in Huneeus (1998a). 37. Dahrendorf (1971). 38. Maravall (1982) analyzes the Spanish case using the Prussian development model. On the economic policies of Franquismo, see Anderson (1970), González (1979), Gunther (1980). 39. Lamo de Espinosa (1996). 40. Rüschemeyer (1969). 41. The concept of negative integration in the sense found in Roth (1963). 42. To defend industrialists through tariffs and taxes, a certain degree of autarchy was promoted; Rüschemeyer (1969), p. 387. 43. Rüschemeyer (1969), p. 388. 44. On this matter, I refer to the well-documented study by Campero and Valenzuela (1984). Coloma and Rojas (2000) provide a different interpretation, free to consider political objectives. 45. See, for example, de Gregorio (1997), Donoso (1997), Valdés (1997). 46. I refer to the studies by Arenas (1997, 1999). 47. I am using the concept of institutionalization in the classic sense found in Huntington (1968). 48. The importance of congruence in the stability of democracy was highlighted by Eckstein (1996). I have developed these ideas in Huneeus (1998). 49. “La revolución liberal de Pinochet,” from “La semana económica,” El Mercurio, March 13, 1998, p. 3. 50. Ibid. 51. The classic study on this issue is Bendix (1964). 52. I draw on Pérez Díaz (1996).

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53. Much has been written on the economic reforms of the Thatcher government. From the social sciences perspective, I refer, for example, to Dobek (1993b), Kavanagh (1987), Swann (1988). 54. Economic reform in Argentina is analyzed in Huneeus (1998b). 55. Schamis (1993) does not make this distinction when he compares economic reform under dictatorship and democracy. 56. On the modernizing consequences of fascist regimes, see Payne (1995a), chap. 14. 57. Schoenbaum (1966). 58. Dahrendorf (1971), p. 416. 59. Turner (1985). 60. The thesis of the “liberal revolution” has been adopted by former opponents of the military regime; Tironi (1998b), more extensively developed in Tironi (1998a). 61. For the Argentine case, see Perina (1983); for Brazil, see Skidmore (1988). 62. From then on, Pinochet was represented by his main associate in the army, the deputy commander in chief. 63. This distinction is taken from Beyme (1971b), p. 19. 64. Pinochet does not fit the description of the personalist dictator of the 1950s outlined by Szulc (1959), given the variety of methods he used to legitimize his authority, the camouflage of personal power behind the military institution, and the support of civilian elites. 65. There was “sociological Pinochetism,” as I have analyzed in Huneeus (1987b). 66. It’s reminiscent of the approach seen in studies on Hitler’s regime after World War II, which are so obsessed with his role that the national socialist regime was reduced to “Hitlerism.” This approach is criticized in Kershaw (1993), chap. 3. Broszat (1981, 1969) made an important shift of focus toward the study of the political system as a whole. There is an interesting analysis of Hitler’s role and the nature of the political system in the works collected in the compilation by Hirschfeld and Kettenacker (1981). 67. Much has been written, by many authors, on Franco’s regime. Only the sources used in this book are mentioned here. Useful historical perspectives are found in Biescas and Tuñón de Lara (1990), Ben-Amí (1980), Payne (1994b), de Miguel (1975, 1976). See also Preston (1986), Paniker (1978). On Franco’s political role, see Payne (1994a), Fusi (1985), Preston (1995). 68. Spain joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as an associate member in early 1958, and a few months later, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now the World Bank); González (1979). 69. Their religious stance has been highlighted because the minister of finance, Mariano Navarro Rubio, and the minister of commerce, Alberto Ullastres, belonged to the Opus Dei, as did the technical secretary to the presidency, Laureano López Rodó. 70. González (1979), p. 33. 71. The Falangists managed to overthrow the technocrats in 1969 using a corporate scandal, known as the “Matesa scandal,” as an excuse; Payne (1994b), pp. 543–548. 72. I draw from González (1979), chap. 1. 73. González (1979), p. 33. 74. See his memoirs: López Rodó (1990, 1991). See also Payne (1994b), p. 451. López Rodó favored a “substantially more interventionist economic ideology” than the ministers of finance and industry; González (1979), p. 33. 75. Using the concept of “families” in the sense found in de Miguel (1975). 76. None of the economic reforms had been previously examined by the Council of State, created in January 1976. Until 1977, General Leigh opposed some specific points.

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77. O’Donnell (1973). Munck (1998) applied O’Donnell’s ideas to the authoritarian regime known as “El Proceso” in Argentina (1976–1983). 78. On the conditions that explain the appearance of a military regime in Uruguay in 1973 and the way the regime ended, see Gillespie (1990), González (1991). 79. There was a temporary exception in the case of Uruguay when the civilian president, José María Bordaberry, remained in office after military forces seized power in July 1973. 80. Rouquié (1981), p. 9. 81. Ibid., p. 12. 82. Stepan (1973). Stepan had previously written a major study (1991) on the military in the third world, foreshadowing his thesis. 83. Much has been written on this: for example, Johnson (1962, 1964), Needler (1966). For an analysis of the broad selection of work of the 1950s and 1960s, see McAlister (1966), pp. 5–36. 84. One of the most illustrative examples of this messianic dream was the military regime established by General Juan Velasco Alvarado in 1968 in Peru, which proclaimed itself a “revolutionary government of the armed forces” and intended to promote a third way between capitalism and socialism; Lowenthal (1975), McClintock (1981), Stepan (1978). 85. Fernández (1981). 86. Linz published various works on Franco’s authoritarian regime. His major articles were Linz (1964, 1970, 1973b). He wrote a lengthy essay for the Handbook of Political Science (1975), which was later reprinted as a book (2000). Linz did not tackle the subject of Latin American military regimes, except in an article on Brazil (1973a). 87. Linz (1964), p. 212. 88. Ibid., p. 213. 89. Friedrich and Brzezinski (1965). 90. The development of his ideas on nondemocratic regimes was covered in Linz (1997a). 91. For example, Sevilla Guzmán, Giner, and Pérez Yruela (1978). Despite their strong criticism, Giner and Pérez do not break away from Linz’s approach. 92. For instance, Oltra and de Miguel (1978). 93. Beyme (1971b), p. 30. 94. This is not an attempt to explain the authoritarian establishment by underplaying the role of coercion, but to recognize its importance in the political regime according to the particular conditions in each case. The functions of coercion are not examined in Perlmutter (1981). 95. Martínez Alier (1978), esp. pp. 30–31. On the political function of coercion, see the introduction to Fontana (1986). There is extensive analysis on repression, especially after the Civil War, in Payne (1994b), pp. 208–238. 96. Linz (1964), p. 216. 97. One writer summarized it as follows: “Linz’s analysis does not emphasize what is still the basic fact of Spanish political life: the savage killings between 1936–1944 and the memory of those killings; General Franco, as the person responsible, has symbolized a regime that inspired great fear due to the cruelty it showed in those years”; Martínez Alier (1978), p. 30. 98. Maravall (1978), Tusell (1977). 99. de Esteban and López Guerra (1977). Franco did not cease to exercise coercion, even up to a few weeks before his death. Moreover, he had the energy to approve the death penalty for five Basque terrorists, disregarding requests for pardon submitted by various European heads of state and government, including Pope John Paul VI.

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100. Concerning traditional societies, Linz developed the concept of the sultanistic type of regime: Chehabi and Linz (1998). 101. I draw from Weber (1968). 102. The nighttime curfew was used for months as a means to inspire a sense of insecurity in the populace. 103. Using terms from Kolb (1983). 104. Its central elements are ideology, a one-party system, organized terror, political mobilization, the almighty dictator, and centralization of the economy; Friedrich and Brzezinski (1965). 105. Friedrich and Brzezinski (1965), p. 212. 106. The most comprehensive study on this matter is Bracher, Sauer, and Schulz (1960). Bracher (1983) summarized the Nazi strategy to seize power. A great amount of work on the Nazi regime has been undertaken: for example, Bracher (1973), Funke and Jacobsen (1983), Kershaw (1983, 1989, 1993), Broszat (1981), Evans (2005). 107. After World War II, Franco introduced changes in the governing elite, incorporating Catholics into his government in order to adapt to the democratic governments in Europe that were dominated by Christian Democrats; Tusell (1984), Payne (1984). 108. Linz did not discard this analytical option. In a later version of his model (1975), Linz maintains that authoritarianism can also be considered a “limited synchronization,” but he did not further develop this idea because it would have involved profound modifications to his original model. 109. The multiparty system was maintained until October 1965; following Institutional Act no. 2, issued at that time, a two-party system was established, with a governing party, ARENA, and an opposition party, the MDB; Lamounier (1989). 110. Created in 1966 on the initiative of traditional Conservative and Liberal Party politicians, jointly with National Action, founded by Jorge Prat, who inherited the nationalist political ideas developed by him in Estanquero magazine in the late 1940s. 111. Former senators Sergio Diez, Sergio Onofre Jarpa, and Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes were ambassadors to the United Nations, Colombia, and Peru, respectively, in the 1970s. 112. The low level of institutionalization would make Pinochet’s case more of an “authoritarian situation” rather than a “regime,” a distinction that Linz (1973a) made with respect to Brazil, which exhibited a greater degree of institutionalization. 113. I go beyond Linz’s model, which did not examine policies because that would have reduced its scope.

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2 Installing the Authoritarian Regime

New political regimes are defined not only by their laws and constitutions, but also by the decisions their main institutions and players make during the early days when the regime is attempting to establish itself. In Chile’s case, the institutional aspects were minimal, with just a handful of people, mostly in the military, involved in the seizure of power. These decisions are influenced by the political, economic, and administrative conditions specific to the moment in which a new regime is born.1 The level of political development achieved by the previous regime, the intensity of the conflict, especially social polarization, the magnitude of the economic and political crisis, and other factors create a scenario in which the players have to choose among different alternatives. At times of crisis, decisionmaking becomes concentrated in a few individuals who, through their actions, words, and silence, help to establish the initial character of the new regime. At these moments, individuals do not always act with the necessary prudence. They don’t realize the scope of their decisions or imagine the possible consequences, whether direct or indirect. The seeds of the tragic destiny of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) were planted in its early days by two measures taken by the new government: its approval of the Treaty of Versailles and its policy of public order.2 The peace agreement involved enormous economic costs to cover war reparations, and was considered a severe infringement on the country’s sovereignty by the extreme right, which rejected the legitimacy of the new democracy.3 The left was also extremely discontented, because the government violently repressed actions by the far-left Spartacus movement, which cost several lives, among them the legendary Rosa Luxemburg.4 Likewise, the destiny of Spain’s Second Republic (1931–1936) was profoundly affected during the early weeks by a series of violent incidents permitted by Manuel Azaña’s left-center republican government. Attacks on hundreds 31

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of churches had a devastating effect on the conservative segment of the population, who became deeply mistrustful of the new political order, that is, the republic. Azaña’s reforms, including those concerning the military, triggered grave political tension and created profound resentment among the interest groups they affected, which spread through society as a whole. The impact of the initial political conflict was lasting and must be considered as one of the reasons why this young, weak democracy was unable to overcome the spring 1936 crisis, which opened the way to civil war.5 In Chile’s case, the question about the causes that gave rise to the use of such extreme violence will linger for a long time.6 The importance of this question is clear not only given the enormous human costs involved, especially during the weeks after the coup, but also given that this violence became a distinguishing feature of the new political order.7 Violence was used as if it were a legitimate resource and remained latent through 1988, becoming manifest on several occasions, especially when the opposition acted against the government.8 The other coups in the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America weren’t as violent as Chile’s, with the exception of Argentina’s in 1976, although the latter occurred in a different context. The 1968 coup in Peru was not violent, as it was launched early in the day precisely to avoid confrontation. President Fernando Belaúnde Terry was swiftly removed from the presidential palace and sent abroad on a military plane.9 What happened in Chile could be understood as a consequence of the serious economic and political crisis affecting the country at the time of the coup. However, this alone did not establish conditions for the inevitable use of such a high degree of coercion. The violence was neither justifiable nor necessary, and stemmed from instructions issued by the military on the day of the coup, specifically those involved in organizing the coup on an institutional basis, under the coordination and command of the General Staff of National Defense, with no cracks apparent in its unity, unlike in Spain in 1936. Nor were armed groups present that raised doubts about the Chilean military’s monopoly on force. This situation had been reinforced at the institutional level when the Popular Unity government took power under the constitutional reform known as the statute of guarantees (estatuto de garantías), signed by the opposition, and later under the 1972 weapons control law (Ley de Control de Armas). Revolutionary rhetoric was systematically used by the left’s top leaders from the mid-1960s on, but it had not led to the creation of organizations bent on implementing these ideas on revolutionary change through force. This chapter will analyze how the Chilean authoritarian regime was established, based on an examination of the conditions at the time of the coup. The style prevalent at the beginning established the character of the new regime, which was never able to break away from the use of coercion. The chapter will analyze some of the main decisions leading to the regime’s close identification

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with coercive methods, and will also present the stages of implementation of authoritarian rule, by examining how limited synchronization settled in.

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Seizure of Power: Prerevolutionary Conditions

The use of violence to seize power in Chile must be understood within the context of a serious political conflict that divided the country into two antagonistic blocks and generated a power vacuum, propelling the military toward the September 11, 1973, coup. Unlike in Argentina, Chile’s military did not seek power; rather, power fell to the military arms due to the political and economic crisis. President Salvador Allende’s government, formed mainly from the Socialist and Communist Parties, applied policies with the intent of presenting a second road to socialism, which emphasized changes to economic structures and extensive participation from the people.10 The government’s objectives were attractive to a broad sector of the population, but it assumed power with just 36 percent of the vote, making the left-wing coalition that won the September 4, 1970, elections a minority government. The building of socialism was to be based on economic changes, through state control of many large, medium, and small companies, using methods that went beyond the current legal order. Unions and leftist parties led a wave of occupations of factories and farms, shutting down the operations and locking out management in an effort to force government intervention.11 Supporters justified intervention by stretching the law, and through loopholes (resquicios legales) that were opposed by the businesspeople they affected and that rankled the judiciary. The governing coalition did not control Congress, where the main political force was the Christian Democratic Party (Partido Demócrata Cristiana [PDC]), which the coalition treated in a confrontational manner, being antagonistic in its treatment of former president Eduardo Frei Montalva. Ultra-left-wing groups articulated their dreams of building a socialist order like those of Eastern Europe and carried weapons openly. The government faced the opposition of businesspeople and segments of the labor and student movements.12 The traditional business associations—the national manufacturers’ association (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril), representing large manufacturing firms, and the National Agricultural Society (Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura [SNA]), representing major agricultural landowners— sought out opportunities to build a political alliance with interest groups formed by small and medium-sized business owners, mainly those in the national retailers’ association (Confederación de Comercio Detallista) and the national truck drivers’ association (Confederación de Dueños de Camiones), all very affected by the economic problems. The economic crisis sped the radicalization of middle-class sectors and groups who showed an enormous capacity for mobilizing against the government; they achieved a major political impact with their October 1972 strike,13 which prompted President Allende to invite military officers into his cabinet: the army commander in chief, General Carlos

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Prats, was appointed minister of interior, Rear Admiral Ismael Huerta of the navy was appointed minister of public works, and General Claudio Sepúlveda of the air force was appointed minister of mining. In the winter of 1973, another strike by truck drivers worsened political and economic conditions. The seriousness of the crisis engulfing Chile’s democracy politicized neutral powers, among them the judiciary, which lined up against the government.14 The Chilean Supreme Court, in particular, accused the government of not respecting the law and the constitution, in that the administration was not allowing the police to enforce compliance with sentences issued by the courts. The comptroller-general’s office, a national body of constitutional status responsible for monitoring the legality and constitutionality of the administration’s actions, started to lose its neutrality as top officials began to oppose the government. As one official recalled: “My office began to issue rejections of the decrees of the renewal of the appointment of labor inspectors; reports that defined and reduced the sphere of action of these same inspectors; ideas destined to support the rejection of the executive’s decision to partially pass a constitutional reform whose purpose was to define areas of the economy along with other contentious matters that were going around in the enforcement area of the time.”15 Politicization also affected the armed forces, which Popular Unity’s supporters considered defenders of the capitalist order, but which right-wing sectors considered entities that would resolve the crisis through a coup. These opposing views gave rise to a very difficult situation in the high commands, who made an effort to stress their professional role. In his memoirs, army commander in chief Carlos Prats remembered: I am in the paradoxical situation of being a top-ranking military officer who preaches the doctrine of the armed forces staying out of politics but at the same time, after a month’s absence, seeing the abrupt turnabout in domestic conditions, finding myself forced to move politically, acting without the necessary experience in this area, among the government’s political professionals and those of the opposition. All of this, with the supreme wish to avoid my own institution being dragged into pronouncements fatal to the survival of the state of law.16

The army’s top officers gradually took political stances, a situation that became apparent in meetings of the Council of Generals called by General Prats. On these occasions, they did not avoid considering the possibility that political developments could create the conditions favorable to a coup.17 Political polarization led to manifestations of violence unheard of in the country. After the 1970 presidential election, an extreme right-wing group, Fatherland and Freedom, led by lawyer Pablo Rodríguez, emerged with the express goal of preventing Congress from electing Allende.18 On October 22, 1970, another extreme right-wing group, with support from retired general Roberto Viaux, tried to kidnap General René Schneider, then–army commander in chief, who was seriously wounded and died three days later.19 This

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was the first assassination of a political authority committed since government minister Diego Portales’s murder in 1837. Political parties had defensive groups that committed isolated acts of violence, but the confrontations never reached the level that occurred between extreme left- and right-wing party groups in Spain in 1936 or in Germany in 1932–1933. Yet serious acts of political violence did occur in Chile, such as the attack by an ultra-left-wing group that resulted in the death of the former vice president of the country, Christian Democrat Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, in June 1971, or an attack that ultra-right-wing groups committed several weeks before the coup, against President Allende’s naval aide-de-camp. Efforts on the part of the PDC leadership and President Allende in the winter of 1973 (June–August, the winter months in South America) to achieve an agreement to approve a constitutional reform dealing with areas of the economy were blocked by the Socialist Party.20 The growing polarization weakened the chances of Allende and the PDC reaching an agreement, and the parties seeking to create conditions that would make military intervention inevitable gained footing. One very important step in that sense was the right wing’s objection to the results of the congressional elections of March 3, 1973, amid accusations that the voter list had been tampered with. Thus Congress, in which the opposition held the majority, was unable to work toward a political solution to the crisis, which opened the way to action by the armed forces. The claims of voter-list tampering were based on research by academics at Catholic University law school who were associated with the Gremialista movement, which was supposed to have demonstrated that thousands of supporters in the governing coalition were listed more than once, thus allowing them to vote several times. The voter list became “a monstrous machine for altering the genuine expression of the majority.”21 The results of this “study” were never published. Only a partial text was published in the Libro Blanco (White Book),22 a propagandist document produced immediately after the military coup by right-wing intellectuals and journalists in defense of the military’s action.23 In that text, conclusions were based on assumptions, with no empirical data provided to support them.24 The Libro Blanco argued that the Popular Unity parties would have inevitably lost electoral support because of the grave economic crisis. The study concluded with a call to the military: “It is up to the country, and especially those institutions able to fix a democracy formally broken by its public authorities, to assume the responsibility for correcting these mistakes.”25 The study served as the basis for the military regime’s decision to destroy the voter list, representing a definitive rupture within the country’s democratic development. During that winter of 1973, procoup sectors focused their actions on the army commander in chief, General Carlos Prats. He had reiterated his support for a peaceful, constitutional solution, but was considered a pro-Allende military officer by those seeking a coup.26 Those parties managed to force him to resign from his post in late August 1973, with his second in command, General

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Augusto Pinochet, who had worked closely with Prats and had replaced him for lengthy periods on two occasions, being appointed in his stead (see Chapter 3). Despite the intensity of the political conflict, institutions continued to fulfill their functions. There was some paralysis in the Allende government’s decisionmaking in dealing with the serious political crisis, but the judiciary and Congress did not interrupt their work. On August 22, 1973, the Chamber of Deputies publicly denounced the government’s violations of the constitution and the law, calling on President Allende and his military ministers to overcome their paralysis. Supporters of the military regime interpreted the chamber’s move as a call for a coup, but the goal of its promoters, PDC deputies, was to convince the president to change his position to prevent democracy from breaking down.27 The crisis that led to the collapse of democracy did not begin with Salvador Allende’s election to the presidency, but rather lay in the political and social tensions that accumulated during the 1960s, in the heat of structural reforms applied by the government of President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964– 1970), particularly agrarian reform and increased union organization, with a resulting impact on the demands made by workers to the owners of agricultural properties.28 Democracy in the 1960s was criticized not only by the left, which considered it an expression of the interests of the bourgeoisie, but also by the right, which rejected the integration of new voter rights and the PDC’s proposals for structural, social, and political change (see Chapter 5). The agrarian reform was decisive in intensifying the political conflict.29 It was condemned by right-wing parties as a road to revolution, which mobilized agricultural landowners against it and convinced businesspeople that it was the first step toward the nationalization of companies.30 The reform was rejected by the left, which criticized it as reformist, inspiring union and social mobilizations to change the way it was applied. President Frei,31 meanwhile, neglected party unity, allowing for the development of a faction who questioned his policies and promoted an understanding with left-wing parties on the basis of assuming new agendas and ideological directions borrowed from Marxism.32 This change weakened the image of the Christian Democratic Party, contributing to its decline at the ballot box. In those years, left-wing sectors looked with sympathy at the Cuban revolution and the guerrilla warfare that Cuba supported in various Latin American countries. In its 1967 congress in Chillán, the Socialist Party expressed its support for armed struggle, but did not implement its position in practice; instead it continued to follow the electoral path that had placed Allende in the presidency.

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Civilian Tolerance of Violence

The use of violence was tolerated by a broad spectrum of society, in a climate rife with hatred and resentment. After the coup, it was common for people to

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denounce their political adversaries, which led to the arrest of some.33 In some schools, parents denounced teachers or priests as Marxists, which led the military to intervene. This occurred with the well-known private school St. George’s College, which was taken over by the military in a fashion similar to its interference in the universities.34 The main justification for the use of violence was to impede the execution of Plan Z, formulated by left-wing party leaders to violently seize power. According to this logic, the military had to lead a coup to save the country from communism, so citizens owed a debt of gratitude to the military. This thesis was documented in the Libro Blanco. The “civil war” thesis argued that thousands of foreigners had entered the country during the Popular Unity government to join a guerrilla movement that was supposed to have had the training and human resources necessary to constitute a threat to the military. Moreover, the guerrillas were supposed to have had significant weaponry on hand, enough to support the formation of a powerful movement, a “people’s army,” similar to the movements in other Latin American countries.35 In reality, the presence in Chile of institutional channels for resolving political conflicts—Congress, parties, elections, the media, and the like—did not encourage the emergence of urban guerrillas such as those who appeared in Uruguay and Argentina. No serious evidence was ever provided to back up the existence of Plan Z.36 The only source on the plan was the Libro Blanco. Its pages provided no evidence that anyone was capable of seizing power by force. The weapons that were decried with great fanfare were minor, while the references to those found in President Allende’s residence, although excessive for a head of state who was supposed to be protected by the armed forces, exposed a cache irrelevant for use against professional armed forces.37 Nor was there any evidence to confirm the presence of thousands of foreigners who had entered the country illegally to join the people’s army. The Libro Blanco reported the presence of 10,000–15,000 foreigners,38 but without evidence, stating only in general terms that most were Brazilian.39 The other important group was supposed to have comprised Cubans, but specific figures to support this affirmation were never provided.40 In short, these were such gross exaggerations of conditions in the country that they strongly supported the idea that their real purpose was to justify the coup. The only ultra-left-wing group that existed at the time of the coup, the Left Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria [MIR]), had a small membership mostly from the middle class and the student movement. This group lacked real military capability, but nonetheless used revolutionary rhetoric to justify violence against the dominant classes. It was not an important organization, since it had no broad support beyond the University of Concepción, where it arose.41 During the Allende government, the MIR had gained more visibility, thanks to some of its proposals being supported by the maximalist sector in the

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Socialist Party, headed by Senator Carlos Altamirano as general secretary. Both organizations exercised significant influence within the union movement, especially in industries that had organized industrial belts (cordones industriales), which were perceived as a power parallel to the institutional order. However, the MIR and the Socialist Party did not successfully organize their own military apparatus, as was apparent in the coup, during which there was virtually no resistance to the military’s operations. The violence was applied by the military, but it was defended by rightwing sectors convinced of the need for the military to act decisively against the Marxists. No call for prudence came from right-wing civilian groups supporting the coup; on the contrary, some rejected moderate political action, ruling out a dictablanda (a play on words referring to a “soft” dictatorship) early on. In a memorandum to the governing junta a few days after the coup, Jaime Guzmán, founder of the Gremialista movement and the Independent Democratic Union (Unión Demócrata Independiente [UDI]) and an active coup supporter, pointed out the usefulness of continuing to use force, warning of the dangers that could arise if the junta were to change its approach: The success of the Junta is directly linked to its harshness and decisiveness, which the country expects and applauds. Any complexes or hesitance in this purpose would be disastrous. The country knows that it is dealing with a dictatorship and it accepts that. It only demands that it rule with justice and without arbitrariness. Just look at the incredible passivity with which students have taken interference in the universities, a measure that has led to violent resistance everywhere (else). Turning the dictatorship into a “dictablanda” would be an error with unforeseeable consequences. It is precisely what Marxism is waiting for, in the shadows.42

Considerably later, when the security services had gained enough autonomy and were carrying out extremely serious acts of violence, damaging the regime’s consolidation and its international reputation, voices arose among civilians calling for more control over the secret actions of the National Intelligence Directorate. However, these voices were weak and had little effect.

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A Case of Political Violence: Argentina, 1969–1976

In Chile, civilians and the military justified the use of violence by arguing that the country was at war, and that the war did not end with the military’s rapid seizure of power. They argued that guerrilla forces existed, with abundant weaponry, and that these forces had staged a strategic retreat after the coup to prepare a counterattack against the new government. This fact alone made their elimination urgent. The military continued to use this explanation, based on an overdose of subjectivity, during the years of authoritarian rule (and continued to do so even until the late 1990s), to the point that in 1991 the army

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responded to the Rettig Commission’s report on truth and reconciliation, which examined cases of death and disappearance that occurred during the military regime, with the following: To affirm that the country was brought under control in just a few days strays from the truth, given that to definitively dissolve the state of war it was essential to complete the lengthy task of neutralizing any possible capacity for regrouping of the extremist paramilitary groups, whose degree of preparation for war, of political organization and armed power was impossible to measure with exactitude as long as they had not been militarily annulled.43

The navy expressed its opinion in similar terms, arguing that these guerrilla groups received military support from abroad, with reference to Cuba and the countries of Eastern Europe: [The use of violence] became indispensable due to the actions of subversive and terrorist groups, organized into paramilitary cadres and possessing weapons and explosives, much of which came from abroad, [who have] continued their seditious and anti-national activities throughout the country. Especially serious was the public and well-known fact that subversive groups enjoyed the determined support of foreign powers in their revolutionary struggle, which, moreover, gave this the characteristics of a foreign attack on the integrity of our fatherland and fundamental institutions.44

These reports are based on accusations in the Libro Blanco, regarding the climate of confrontation prior to the coup and the presence of guerrilla organizations, that bore no relation to reality. Revolutionary rhetoric justifying the use of violence was rife, but this did not translate into action, except in the case of the MIR. This armed movement was virtually destroyed after the coup and only managed to reappear abroad toward the end of the 1970s. Disillusioned members of the Communist Party joined, and the MIR carried out terrorist activities between 1979 and 1983.45 In the early 1980s the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez [FPMR]), the armed wing of the Communist Party, appeared, also to carry out violent actions, especially against the Carabineros, with the most spectacular being the attack on General Pinochet in 1986. Both the MIR and the FPMR had only a small number of members with military training, and never became a real threat to the regime. Both groups, moreover, found little support from the public in general, and were also rejected by the leaders of the democratic opposition, who were convinced that violence was not the way to end authoritarian rule and, on the contrary, considered its use favorable to General Pinochet, as it gave him an excuse to maintain the repression. To appreciate Chile’s reality in 1973 in terms of terrorism and violence, it is worthwhile to briefly examine conditions in Argentina after the 1976 coup against the Peronist government of Isabel Martínez de Perón.46 There, guerrilla organizations had considerable strength, having confronted the military

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and police for several years prior to the regime change, with support from broad sectors of the population, especially the youth. There were two main organizations: the Montoneros,47 comprising youth from the Catholic and nationalist right who identified with the Peronist movement (Peronismo), which supported them from the outset, and the People’s Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo [ERP]), the armed wing of the Workers Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores [PRT]), founded in 1970 and comprising mainly youth from the Marxist left.48 In the case of the Montoneros, the principal figure of the Justicialista Party (Partido Justicialista), former president Juan Domingo Perón, supported them from his exile in Madrid until some months after his return to Argentina in 1973. Violent acts carried out by these organizations were not rejected by citizens; quite the contrary, violence won their sympathy. In fact, a 1971 survey showed high support for terrorist-style acts, which were considered “justified” by 53 percent of residents of the city of Córdoba and by 45.5 percent of residents of Buenos Aires.49 At their zenith, in 1974–1975, each organization had an estimated 3,000–4,000 guerrillas, with no major difficulty in recruiting new fighters.50 Political violence in Argentina did not emerge during democratic rule, but rather was the product of political and economic conditions arising from the military regime (1966–1973). The climate was evident in Córdoba in 1969 during a student and worker protest that became known as the cordobazo, which was harshly repressed by the military. This was no isolated event: there was discontent among broad sectors of the country due to economic hardships and restrictions on freedom imposed by military rule. During the government of General Alejandro Lanusse (1971–1973) there were several “genuine popular uprisings that mobilized all social classes.”51 The military’s repression of ultra-left-wing organizations after the coup on March 24, 1976, did not start at that moment, but rather had become fully developed years before. State violence expanded and deepened when the military seized power, because the military had learned the techniques of antisubversive warfare in the late 1960s and had used repressive measures against protests by the union and student movements during the military regime of General Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–1970) and during the two regimes that followed. This contributed to the military’s loss of prestige, exacerbated tension within power groups, and expanded the guerrillas’ base. Starting in 1971 the repression worsened, turning into “a genuine “secret war.” The army and the police were not satisfied with using a legal apparatus of fearsome proportions; the struggle against subversion was not concerned with legality. Professional associations, the national lawyers’ association, and the highest moral authorities of the country denounced arbitrary arrests, torture of suspects, and the disappearance of ultra-left-wing leaders.”52 The violence did not decrease when the military removed General Onganía from the presidency in June 1970 and began to apply a liberalization policy with the aim of restoring competitive elections. That was done in hopes of

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securing the return of General Juan Domingo Perón from his exile in Spain, to thus end the confrontation with the movement he led, Peronism. The situation with Perón had dominated Argentine politics since he had been driven from power in 1955 and his party had been banned (until 1973). After General Roberto Levingston’s brief presidency, General Alejandro Lanusse, who supported liberalization, took over as head of state. The confrontation between the military and ultra-left-wing movements became clearer with the 1970 kidnapping of retired general Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, who had been among those leading the military uprising that overthrew General Perón in 1955; he was killed three days later.53 Various rationales were employed to justify the use of violence in those years. While the Montoneros considered violent methods useful for speeding Perón’s return to head a leftoriented government, the ERP sought to radicalize the political situation in order to create the conditions necessary for a revolution.54 The Montoneros interrupted their violent activities for some time after the first elections, in March 1973, in which the Peronism movement participated, and which placed Héctor Cámpora in the presidency as Perón’s personal representative. From this position, Cámpora was to adopt several measures favorable to leftist organizations, among them an amnesty for political prisoners, thus resuming a relationship with the leftist organizations. Once Perón took over as president in October 1973, he ended this relationship, expelling the leftists from the Justicialista Party on May 1, 1974. The Montoneros’ terrorist activities were not directed only at the military or their representatives, but also at leaders of associations connected with the rightist wing of Peronism, such as José Ignacio Rucci, the general secretary of the national workers’ union (Confederación General de Trabajadores [CGT]), a powerful organization. In 1974 the Montoneros also killed former interior minister General Lanusse (1971–1973) for his alleged responsibility in the 1972 massacre at Trelew prison in southern Argentina.55 The military reacted harshly against the guerrillas in several provinces, killing many Montonero and ERP cadres. Aside from the ultra-left-wing and Peronist guerrilla organizations, there was the Anticommunist Alliance of Argentina (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina [AAA]), an ultra-right-wing group responsible for many terrorist attacks and for eliminating well-known individuals in religious, intellectual, professional, and academic spheres. This organization enjoyed the approval of the authorities in the government of Isabel Perón (1974–1976), vice president of the republic, who took over as president upon Juan Perón’s death. The Montoneros responded to ultra-right-wing terrorism with more acts of violence, thus aggravating the confrontation with the democratic government. Guerrilla organizations were extensive and complex, with infrastructure that included radio stations, printing shops for their own materials, medical resources to care for the wounded, weapons, and more than sufficient economic funds, the latter obtained, for example, by kidnapping businesspeople and used

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to finance the work of many guerrillas and supporters.56 The Montoneros had an extensive organization that included a press agency, sustained with support from many public sector employees. They had an enormous number of weapons, obtained through many attacks, including one on the Halcón weapons factory at the end of 1975.57 To finance their many operations, they carried out spectacular and systematic kidnappings of businesspeople, with the most important taking place in September 1974 against brothers Juan and Jorge Born, for whom the Montoneros demanded and received a US$61 million ransom.58 In 1975 the Montoneros came together to attack units of each of the three branches of the armed forces, with commandos formed by dozens of guerrillas, and achieved their objectives in a very spectacular way. The operation against the navy consisted of blowing up a modern frigate, the 3,500-ton, missile-armed Santísima Trinidad, and destroying its electronic equipment. They then went on to target a yacht belonging to the navy’s high command used by Admiral Emilio Massera. The offensive against the air force consisted of an armed assault on its Tucumán base, dynamiting of its landing strip, and the destruction of a Hercules C-130 cargo plane. The attack on the army was no less spectacular: the Montoneros assaulted one of Argentina’s most powerful regiments, located in the town of Formosa, with just sixty guerrilla fighters. Ten guerrillas and ten soldiers died in the attack. British historian Richard Gillespie points out that this was “a spectacular military display, planned and executed for the purpose of getting a good number of weapons, humiliating the army and doing both in the most ostentatious form possible.”59 The group also acted against the police through the Montonero “justice system,” assassinating officers in reprisals for their operations against the guerrilla movement.60 As a result, in Argentina prior to the 1976 coup, there was an armed struggle under way between guerrilla groups on the one hand and military and paramilitary forces on the other, with many victims. A detailed study of the activities carried out by guerrilla organizations, based on information in the press from 1969 to 1979, the latter date corresponding to the disappearance of the Montoneros, resulted in the conclusion that some 3,860 guerrillas had been killed. In the two years prior to the coup alone (1973–1975), 1,831 guerrillas died, 15 percent in armed confrontations.61 The number of deaths at the hands of terrorist organizations has been estimated at 1,358, plus another “445 subversive members who fell in the struggle: approximately three deaths every two days.”62 This atmosphere of political violence, which affected Argentina as early as seven years before the 1976 coup, makes it possible to understand the roots of the coercion exercised by the military afterward. In fact, the military did not begin but rather strongly increased its repressive actions after the coup, and caused more deaths than occurred in Chile. In 1984 the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, established by Argentine president Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989) and headed by writer Ernesto Sábato, documented the disappearance of 8,960 people through state terrorism, although it estimated that the real number was higher.63

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In Chile there was no climate of armed confrontation between guerrilla organizations and the military. Chile’s armed forces were acting within democratic institutions, even cooperating with a left-wing government. In Chile there was no organization comparable to powerful groups like Argentina’s Montoneros and the ERP. In Chile up to 1973, the MIR was not even a shadow of these groups; moreover, it faced a solidly united military body with enormous dissuasive capacity.

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The Rapid Seizure of Power

The focus of this analysis of Chile’s Pinochet regime highlights the importance of the way power was seized and how this influenced the subsequent character of the regime. The armed forces executed the coup efficiently, achieving their objective in just a few hours, even before the airplanes took off to attack the presidential palace, La Moneda. They acted in a unified fashion, with no internal dissidence, determinedly eliminating the limited armed resistance from a minuscule number of supporters around the presidential palace and in some working-class communities.64 President Allende called for his supporters and the government to remain calm. This was nothing like the situation in Spain in 1936, when the government handed out weapons to its supporters to defend itself from the military rebellion.65 The military seized control of Concepción, the country’s third largest city, with a speed that surprised the military, who did not have to use their weapons in the process. The city was a major symbol of the left, with a large manufacturing area, powerful unions, and a major private university where the MIR had considerable influence. One proregime analyst described how quickly the military took control of the city, saying that at 8:50 A.M. on September 11, 1973, General Washington Carrasco, an army division commander, was able to inform his superiors in Santiago that he had completed his task, concluding that “by midday, many of the top leaders were on their way to Quiriquina Island in Concepción Bay, to the north of the city.”66 The navy’s efficacy has also been recognized in its rapid occupation of Valparaiso, the country’s second most important city. With support from other branches of the armed forces, it took control of the many industries and two universities quickly and with no setbacks, having silenced the local radio stations early in the morning. No protests or opposition arose from the supporters of the governing coalition. “By day’s end,” Admiral José Merino later lamented, “they had ‘only’ taken 270 people prisoner.”67 Admiral Sergio Huidobro, a member of the navy’s high command at the time of the coup, remembers the military’s successful action as follows: When the military operation started, Concepción was brought under control without firing a shot, as was Talcahuano. The same thing happened in the mining centers of Lota, Coronel and Chuquicamata. There were only isolated out-

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The Pinochet Regime breaks of resistance in some cities. In most of the country, the population put flags up on their houses and normalcy quickly returned. Santiago was brought under control in scant hours. There were a few isolated skirmishes at some university grounds and nationalized factories and in some of the outlying poblaciones [working-class areas]. Only in downtown Santiago was there a battle, with the fierce firing of snipers posted in the tallest buildings such as the Entel tower, from which came artillery fire; the new Clarín newspaper building, and others. Telephone services, water, electricity, gas, worked normally thanks to the control of the armed forces applied from dawn of the 11th itself.68

The military’s task was made easier by the enormous amount of information it had on “subversive organizations,” including their “strength, organization, logistical means available, main leaders.”69 The military had up-to-date contingency plans for current political conditions, including a careful analysis of the political and military power of ultra-left-wing groups. The groups had been followed by the intelligence services, particularly the Army Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia del Ejército [DINE]), which had been infiltrating the Socialist Party and the MIR since the late 1960s. Since July 16, 1973, the army had been preparing its own plan at the War Academy with a group of officers. The plan was completed by late August, and “called on the Army to seize power on September 14, using that day’s rehearsal for the annual Day of Army Glories parade on the 19th as an excuse for mobilizing troops.”70

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Implementation of Limited Synchronization

If gaining control of the country happened very quickly, so too did the defining of the main pillars of the new order. The same day as the coup, the governing junta was formed by the commanders in chief of each of the three branches of the armed forces and the director of the Carabineros. The junta invested itself with full constituent, legislative, and executive powers. General Pinochet was appointed president of the junta, as first among equals. The junta acted quickly, immediately declaring Congress disbanded.71 The parties belonging to Popular Unity were now outside the law, treated as “illegal associations,”72 and ordered to dissolve, with all their goods confiscated by the state.73 The arguments used to order the dissolution of the Popular Unity parties carried an anti-Marxist component that became one of the main elements in the new regime’s discourse.74 The parties in opposition to Popular Unity were treated differently, being declared “in recess.”75 The purpose of this preferential treatment was to promote cooperation between professionals and technocrats of the National Party and those of the Christian Democratic Party.76 The National Party helped the military by dissolving itself voluntarily a few days after the coup, leaving its leaders and members free to decide for themselves whether they would participate in or work for the government. The PDC did not dissolve itself but rather continued to act, and some of its economists joined the military government.77 The PDC’s leadership issued a statement the day after the military coup,

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explaining the situation as being the result of a political crisis within Popular Unity. The next day, thirteen prominent PDC members condemned the coup. This upset the military, which was expecting the parties that had opposed the overthrown government to support the military.78 The military had had little sympathy for the PDC since the 1968–1969 crisis, known as the tacnazo, in which General Roberto Viaux took over the Tacna regiment to protest his removal from the army, a reflection of the irritation among members of the military about the difficult financial condition they were experiencing.79 They considered the Frei government responsible for the economic problems that had weakened their institution while other organizations enjoyed institutional advantages. The new government took action gradually against the PDC to avoid pushing it into the opposition.80 Early in October 1974, the governing junta forbade the return to Chile of Bernardo Leighton, who had been in Italy since the start of the year. Some weeks later it expelled from the country a former senator, Renán Fuentealba, who had been president of the PDC on five occasions.81 Radio Balmaceda, which belonged to the PDC, was constantly pressured by the authorities, facing sanctions that could have forced it to close; the regime also acted against the magazine Política y Espíritu, which had essentially been the party’s official voice, banning it outright in 1975. In March 1977 the government took a decisive step against the PDC when it decreed that all parties must dissolve.82 These measures against the opposition were arbitrary, but always had some legal foundation to prevent action through the courts. The new government was concerned with establishing a legal system that would legitimize the coercive measures, such as exile, justifying them as mere administrative decisions.83 The government also took measures to deal with the opposition abroad. Decree Law no. 604, of October 10, 1973, banned the entry into the country of Chileans or foreigners who “propagated or encouraged doctrines that tend to destroy or alter through violence the country’s social order or system of government; those with a reputation for being proponents of these doctrines, and in general those responsible for situations that Chile’s laws define as crimes against external security, national sovereignty, domestic security or the public order of the country, or those who the government considered a danger to the State.”84 Local governments were brought under the control of the new rulers.85 Decree Law no. 25, of September 19, 1973, suspended “the mayors and city councilors of municipalities of the country,” due to the “need to harmonize the organization and functions of municipalities within national territory with the rulings in Decree Law No. 1.” The governing junta appointed new mayors, resorting to local personalities or retired officers. Limited synchronization also affected the public service. Decree Law no. 6, of September 11, 1973, made “temporary” all state-administered institution personnel, except for judicial employees and those in the national comptroller’s office. This decision made it possible to use political motives to fire staff

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belonging to left-wing parties, including primary and secondary school teachers.86 Decree Law no. 98, of October 26, 1973, called for the reorganization of the entire public sector, making it possible to introduce modifications into the internal organization of the respective bodies, concerning aspects such as payroll, transfer of staff, and decentralization, expansion, or suppression of services, through a supreme decree. As a result, the military quickly took control, establishing the basis for a new political order and centralizing authority in a governing junta, which became the main decisionmaking body.

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Excising the “Marxist Cancer”

The use of violence to seize power was not inevitable. The military took control of the country using a “war” plan, convinced that Popular Unity was a movement that included armed groups and was planning an action like the “Prague coup” in Czechoslovakia in 1949. As a result, the armed forces behaved as if they were on the battlefield. As the new order was established, some decisions had an enormous impact, deeply influencing the behavior of players and institutions. Three decisions, in particular, established the highly coercive nature of the Pinochet regime. The first was the decision by General Gustavo Leigh, head of the air force, to bomb La Moneda Palace and his speech declaring that war on Marxism was one of the new regime’s priorities. The second was the decision by the army’s commander in chief, Augusto Pinochet, to create National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional [DINA]) as a special security service to carry out the fight against Marxism, and to appoint then-colonel Manuel Contreras as its head. The third was the decision by army general Sergio Arellano Stark, under General Pinochet’s orders, to speed up trials in military tribunals in the country’s northern region, which led to the assassination of seventy-two people in what has become known as the “caravan of death.” All these initiatives heightened the atmosphere of war among the officers of the armed forces and their civilian supporters, generating a climate of fear among the population. Pinochet’s willingness to use violence can be understood as a way of breaking with his previous image as someone who had not participated in the conspiracy from the start. He had worked closely with General Prats, remained at the sidelines of coup preparation, and hesitated to the last.87 Only on Saturday, September 8, 1973, did he join in.88 The military officer with the reputation of a hard-liner during the early months was General Leigh. Through his actions and speeches he tried to become the new regime’s strongman. He had been very important in precipitating the coup, and his decision to order the bombing of La Moneda was an attempt to position his branch, the air force, as the party responsible for “liberating” the country.89

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Photo courtesy of Centro de Documentación–La Tercera.

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September 12, 1973: General César Mendoza, General Augusto Pinochet, President of the Supreme Court Enrique Urrutia, Admiral José Merino, and General Gustavo Leigh, in the governing junta’s first visit to the Supreme Court.

Another attempt to reaffirm his image as a hard-liner occurred when, during the ceremony in which the governing junta was formally presented to the media, he called for excising Marxism “to the ultimate consequences.” The tone of his words was extremely violent, in contrast to the rather more prudent speeches from other junta members, including General Pinochet; Admiral José Toribio Merino, commander in chief of the navy; and César Mendoza, director of the Carabineros. Leigh called for more radical action against opponents, without ruling out the death of Marxists: Chile’s police and armed forces had placed themselves in an exceptional role of not participating in politics. But after three years of bearing the Marxist cancer, which has brought an economic, moral, and social breakdown, and which we cannot continue to tolerate, given the sacred sake of the fatherland, we have been forced to assume the sad and painful mission that we have taken on. We are not afraid. We are aware of the enormous responsibility that we carry on our shoulders, but we are certain, absolutely certain that the great majority of the Chilean people are with us, willing to fight against Marxism, willing to eradicate it to the last. And thanks to the support of the noble Chilean people, with nothing to distinguish them [from one another] other than being Marxist, we will carry the country to economic, political, social and moral resurgence.90

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General Leigh repeated his decision to become the new regime’s strongman on several occasions. The air force’s military tribunals, which held their sessions in Santiago, applied the full force of the law against detainees, with no respect for the most basic rules of due process. Air force officers and noncommissioned officers joined the DINA; when Leigh saw this body working to support General Pinochet, the air force created its own security service, a joint command (the Comando Conjunto), without informing his colleagues in the junta. This body acted decisively against leaders of the MIR and the Communist Party. Considerably later, when its repressive nature had taken it far beyond its objectives, General Leigh moderated his discourse and his actions, but the radical impact of his words and actions had profoundly marked the new regime. Like other revolutionaries, he ended up the victim of the ambition of one of his colleagues, General Pinochet, who removed him from the leadership of the air force and the junta in July 1978, once his authority and power as head of state had been consolidated (see Chapter 3 for more on General Leigh and his conflict with Pinochet).

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The “Caravan of Death”

The crisis that triggered the coup was concentrated mainly in the capital city, which is understandable given the centralization of the political system. In Santiago there was a conflict between the powers of the state, the takeover of industries, and the creation of the so-called industrial belts (cordones industriales), which hoped to become a parallel power base for the maximalist left to pressure for the building of socialism. Outside the capital, relations between military commanders and provincial authorities were less antagonistic, so there was less repression, and the military tribunals gave out less serious sentences. This did not meet with General Pinochet’s approval, as he was determined to expand the climate of war. He therefore assigned General Sergio Arellano Stark to visit several cities as his “delegate,” to speed up trials in military tribunals.91 Arellano was an infantry officer who enjoyed enormous prestige in his organization and whose main characteristic was his strict adherence to military discipline, which led to his nickname, “The Wolf.” He played an important role in planning the coup, being one of the five army officers in the “Group of 15” who prepared the contingency plan to pull off the coup. When he received his assignment, the new regime’s authority structure was not completely consolidated and Arellano considered himself an officer with the legitimate authority necessary to carry out Pinochet’s orders his own way, since he defined himself as the “father” of the coup and enjoyed more legitimacy than his hierarchical superior.92 He chose a handful of his most trusted officers to accompany him on this mission, all of whom would later become well-known members of the DINA.93 Arellano first headed to the south, to cities such as Cauquenes and

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Talca, then to four cities in the north: La Serena, Copiapó, Antofagasta, and Calama. In every one of these cities, there were no incidents the day of the coup and the military quickly took control of the situation.94 The victims of the “caravan of death” were accused of minor misdemeanors and many voluntarily reported to the military.95 When these actions came to light, there were efforts to justify their deaths as having occurred during flight attempts or attacks on the military, claims that have been proven to be false, since the victims were taken from their places of detention to be shot or knifed by members of the Arellano team, officers, or soldiers in the respective military units.96 The victims were grassroots political leaders, workers, and academics. Just forty belonged to political parties, mainly the Socialist Party. In La Serena, for example, one of those executed was Jorge Peña, director of the University of Chile’s music school, a Socialist Party member who did not participate in politics, and son of a physician respected throughout the city. To understand the seriousness of these events and the devastating impact they had on opposition politicians and church leaders who learned about them, it is important to consider a few facts. In La Serena, Antofagasta, and Calama, the Rettig Commission was able to conclude that “it is absolutely certain and undebatable, backed by definitive proof, that at least three members of the committee participated directly in these crimes.”97 In almost all cases, victims were brutally tortured and maimed beyond recognition, which explains why most of the bodies were never returned to their families, but rather buried in common graves or elsewhere. The military was particularly cruel in the treatment of twenty-six prisoners in the city of Calama. The victims were taken from the prison at night, without the authorization of the regiment’s commander, and butchered in a particularly bloody manner. One of these, lawyer Carlos Berger, a Communist Party member and former leader of the University of Chile’s student federation (Federación de Estudiantes de Chile [FECH]), had reached the city just twenty-five days before the coup to direct the El Loa radio station, with his wife, Carmen Hertz, also a lawyer, and a young son. He was arrested on the day of the coup by a military patrol, judged by a war council, and sentenced to sixty-one days for the “crime” of refusing to stop the radio station’s transmissions. The day after his murder he was to have been set free. In Antofagasta, Arrellano’s delegation removed a group of detainees without the knowledge of the military chief. They were tortured and then killed. Later, Colonel Manuel Contreras incorporated members of Arellano’s delegation into the DINA, and they rose to important positions of responsibility. Pedro Espinoza Bravo was operations chief in 1976, and participated in Orlando Letelier’s assassination in Washington, D.C.; the Chilean Supreme Court sentenced him to five years in prison in 1995, a sentence he fulfilled in the Punta Peuco prison. Major Marcelo Moren Brito was commander of the so-called Villa Grimaldi, a clandestine prison from which many disappeared,

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never to be heard from again. Finally, Lieutenant Armando Fernández Larios was involved in many operations, among them the assassination of Letelier; after the accusal by US prosecutors, he was arrested and held in a Chilean military hospital for eight months until the Chilean Supreme Court rejected the US extradition request; finally, in February 1987, he was handed over to the United States, receiving protection under its justice system.98 The violence used by the “caravan of death” was widely known of among human rights lawyers, Catholic bishops, opposition leaders, and army officers. The violence spread from Santiago into the various regions of the country and had a devastating effect, exacerbating the climate of war created by the military.

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The Institutionalization and Personalization of Terror

The use of violence is intimately linked to the National Intelligence Directorate and its director, Colonel Manuel Contreras. Authoritarian rule would have developed along very different lines if Pinochet and the governing junta had controlled the actions of this body and if the courts had made an effort to defend people’s lives with the same determination that they used to protect property rights. The DINA was created on General Pinochet’s initiative a few days after the coup.99 Initially it was conceived of as an advisory body to the junta; however, it soon became instrumental to consolidating General Pinochet’s personal power.100 Contreras, at forty-four years of age, was not an intelligence officer, but rather an engineer who directed the School of Military Engineers in Tejas Verdes, on the outskirts of the port of San Antonio. He had a good military career, which provided him with some prestige in the army. After graduating, he became an instructor at the military school and later a very good student at the War Academy, from which he graduated in 1963 at the top of his class. He taught at the academy for three years. Later he took a two-year course in the United States, receiving accreditation as a professor of tactics, explosives, and demolitions. The DINA quickly became the main instrument in the “war” against Marxism, recruiting many personnel from the three branches of the armed forces and the Carabineros. The DINA battled left-wing groups, opposition organizations, and Catholic Church bodies. Its members acted not only in Chile but also abroad, creating a climate of terror among opposition groups and fear among the regime’s supporters, and becoming a symbol of the military regime’s repressive character.101 It also monitored the government’s top officials, collecting information on their private lives and professional performance. DINA was defined as a “professional technical body” whose job was “to gather all information at the national level from different fields of action to produce the intelligence necessary to formulate policy, planning and the adoption of measures meant to safeguard national security and the country’s development.”102 To carry out these tasks, its director could request that public agencies at any level provide the reports or background that it required. Along

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with intelligence tasks, the DINA was authorized (under secret legislation) to carry out searches and arrests without a warrant. From very early on, to fight left-wing organizations, especially the Communist Party and MIR, the National Intelligence Directorate operated detention centers in which torture was used; many died, joining the growing list of detained or disappeared persons. It is impossible to determine the full impact of the DINA, because information about it was secret, including the numbers of its military and civilian personnel and the size of its budget. An estimate of its vast human and financial resources can be made based on the size of the National Intelligence Center, the agency that replaced it, which clearly must be considered weaker. Decree Law no. 2881, of September 22, 1979, provided the CNI with a large staff of 545 positions.103 Its management staff consisted of fifty-one people, headed by a national director, an assistant national director, a comptroller, a general secretary, two head managers, and six deputy managers, along with sixteen department heads.104 Professional and technical staff consisted of 174 people, almost all of them professionals (168) and military officers; they were complemented by an abundant administrative contingent (222), including 30 section heads,105 which is understandable given the range of duties at the management level.106 The DINA was initially formed by personnel from the three branches of the armed forces, the Carabineros, and the Investigaciones (the civilian detective police force), all carefully recruited. A naval officer was the deputy director, so it would seem to have been dependent on all three military institutions.107 It had many civilian collaborators, recruited from among ultra-right-wing groups such as Fatherland and Freedom. It had an enormous network of informants within the public sector and in private firms, who provided it with information not only about opposition members but also about the regime’s supporters, including ministers. To deal with such broad objectives, General Contreras had budgetary support from the army and organized the collection of funds through companies that the Development Corporation (Corporación de Fomento [CORFO]) provided it with as reprivatized entities nationalized by the Allende government. The DINA successfully dismantled the Communist Party, severely weakened the clandestine organization of the Socialist Party, and destroyed MIR. These results earned it General Pinochet’s trust, and he kept Contreras in command for four years, finally removing him under pressure from the US government due to the participation of DINA agents in the attack on Orlando Letelier. The army did not distance itself from the actions of the repressive DINA, and did not push Contreras into the background, even after he retired in 1979; until his sentencing by the Chilean Supreme Court in 1995 he was regularly invited to many official ceremonies.108 The DINA’s actions conflicted with those carried out by the army under the DINE and those by the Investigaciones. The DINE specialized in intelligence work at the national level and abroad, and, beginning in the 1960s, when the Socialist Party expressed its sympathy for armed struggle, closely monitored left-wing parties, managing to infiltrate the Socialist Party and the MIR.

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Conflicts with the Investigaciones began early. The first Investigaciones director of the period, retired general Ernesto Baeza,109 an intelligence expert who had participated in monitoring the left-wing parties, had frequent run-ins with the DINA and General Contreras.110 He also confronted the air force’s joint security command, a situation that resulted in a few deaths and forced a negotiation to avert new conflicts.111 Contreras did not exclude the Catholic Church from the actions carried out by his inferiors, because he considered its defense of human rights to be a disguised way of cooperating with Marxists. His agents intensively monitored bishops, priests, and laypeople, neutralizing their work and gathering evidence of infiltration by Marxists. One such action took place in 1976, when hundreds of DINA agents and collaborators held a demonstration at the Santiago airport to protest bishops who were returning from an international seminar on human rights, organized by the church in Ecuador.112 The DINA planned to conduct its war against Marxism not only in Chile but also abroad. To do so, it created a special unit, its Foreign Department (Departamento Exterior). This unit carried out its first operation at the end of 1973 in Buenos Aires: its objective was to spy on General Carlos Prats, former army commander in chief, who had left the country some days after the coup. This surveillance turned into preparation for an attack on September 30, 1974, that left Prats and his wife dead. In June 1975 in Brazil and Argentina, the DINA undertook Operation Colombo: its objective was to “explain” the deaths of 119 people who had disappeared in Chile by getting their names published in the Brazilian and Argentine media, so it would seem that they had died outside Chile and not been killed by the regime’s security services. The DINA then extended its operations to Europe, seeking the support of ultra-right-wing Italian groups, which took part in an attack on the former vice president of Chile and a founder of the PDC, Bernardo Leighton, and his wife, Ana Fresno, on September 30, 1975. Both were seriously injured.113 The DINA’s main operation abroad was the attack that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit, his US aide, on September 21, 1976, which occurred in the heart of Washington, D.C. This operation had an enormous impact inside the regime, since some government supporters recognized the DINA’s hand in the attack. General Pinochet was forced to control the DINA when the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) proved the directorate’s participation in the attack, after which the US government pressured its Chilean counterparts to identify those responsible and punish them.114 With General Pinochet’s support, Contreras considered himself an authority independent of the army; he stopped respecting the hierarchy of the army and ignored criticism from some of his superior officers. General Óscar Bonilla, interior minister until June 1974 and then defense minister, complained of Contreras’s actions to the Council of Generals, but this had no effect on the DINA’s behavior. General Augusto Lutz, DINE head at the time of the coup and later an official of the junta, also criticized the DINA. Both died

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Photo courtesy of Centro de Documentación–La Tercera.

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September 21, 1976: The scene of Orlando Letelier’s murder in Washington, D.C.

under strange circumstances that suggest the DINA’s involvement.115 General Arellano also criticized the way the DINA behaved, apparently directly to Pinochet.116 Later, Contreras’s main antagonist was the head of the Presidential General Staff, General Sergio Covarrubias, who tried to convince Pinochet of the importance of removing Contreras from the DINA, to no avail.117 Covarrubias rejected not only the repressive excesses but also Contreras’s autonomy, which he considered a detriment to the regime’s cohesion and efficacy, especially given the way government staff and ministers were being monitored. The DINA followed a predictable path of development, given its all-powerful nature and its direction by a person lacking in moral standards. Navy and air force junta members chose the safe route—removing their officers from the DINA—to signal their disapproval. The organization perverted its own ends and its operations became more radical. Research by journalist Mónica González revealed how Contreras financed DINA activities abroad:118 by taking over several companies being privatized by CORFO,119 and later some businesses in Chile and abroad, especially in Panama. Thus the DINA assimilated elements that further distorted its original character. The DINA contributed substantially to the consolidation of Pinochet’s power, but this eventually backfired: it triggered strong disapproval in the country and abroad, becoming the fundamental reason for international condemnation of the military regime. That condemnation became fixed in historical memory and eventually led to the arrest of the former dictator in London in 1998.

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Voluntary Synchronization

The Attitude of the Judiciary Limited synchronization is not achieved solely through policies imposed by the new government, but also occurs when institutions voluntarily acquiesce and accept the conditions imposed by new authorities. This was the position adopted by Chile’s judiciary, which became apparent when the country’s Supreme Court expressed its support for the junta as soon as the latter had established itself. Supreme Court president Enrique Urrutia Manzano did not hide his support for the new regime, leading a delegation representing the junta at the ceremony in which Juan Domingo Perón assumed the presidency of Argentina, on October 12, 1973. For most of the time that the military regime held power, the courts ignored human rights violations, exhibiting less determination to defend judicial principles than they did while defending private property during the Popular Unity government. Why was the judiciary so passive when confronted with reports of the abuses committed by security services, the military, and the Carabineros? Why did it not protest with the same vigor on display during the Popular Unity government, when it complained about actions it considered illegal or unconstitutional, and even questioned decisions made by the president?120 These questions remain, and lie at the root of the public’s lack of faith in the justice system even today. The new government resorted to states of exception to neutralize the judiciary, which by themselves were an abuse, since their purpose is to resolve emergency situations and then cease effect.121 Decree Law no. 3, promulgated on the day of the coup itself, declared a state of siege throughout the country. Decree Law no. 5, of September 22, 1973, interpreting Article 418 of the Military Justice Code, ruled that the state of siege should be viewed as an “[actual] state or time of war.” The state of siege was extended every six months until March 1978, when it was replaced by a state of emergency, although many of its components were included in the new legal status. A state of siege was applied again in November 1984 and lifted in June 1985, only to be declared anew in September 1986, after the attack on General Pinochet, until January 1987. From March 1981 onward, a “state of danger of disturbance to internal peace” was applied, which was covered by the transitory articles in the 1980 constitution and combined elements from states of siege and emergency, providing General Pinochet with more powers. Essentially, the state of exception became a continuous component of the political order, with the country living under some aspect of exception almost to the start of the campaign for the October 5, 1988, plebiscite. The minutes from the meeting in which the governing junta was created (Decree Law no. 1) recognized the judiciary’s autonomy, although certain restrictions stemming from the current political conditions were applied: the decree “guarantee[d] that the judiciary’s powers will remain fully in effect, and that the Constitution and the laws of the Republic will be respected to the de-

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gree that the current conditions in the country permit.” These restrictions were repeated two months later, when an order limiting the judiciary’s independence was passed, bringing it under a state of exception, thus granting the government exceptional powers.122 The Chilean Supreme Court tolerated the limitations imposed by the state of siege, abrogating its constitutional authority to supervise all courts within the country, and specifically limiting its own authority to review sentences pronounced by the military courts, a status it ratified in November 1973 and again in August 1974.123 This decision was questioned by human rights lawyers and the Catholic Church, and was not unanimous within the Supreme Court, since some judges, albeit a minority, believed that supervision of the military courts was their purview, a position they conveyed privately to Gonzalo Prieto Gándara, the justice minister, who shared their view. Prieto Gándara informed the junta that the Supreme Court should have the final ruling on trials conducted by the military justice system. He considered the Supreme Court’s practice of abstaining from reviewing these sentences as bad for the government, because it was simply “sidestepping the problem.”124 He told the junta that some of the judges agreed with this position, which had formed part of the country’s doctrines and tradition since the 1891 civil war. With words that proved to be visionary, Prieto Gándara warned that without this supervision, “when history judges those guilty of possible injustices” committed during these years, the blame will fall solely on the armed forces.125 The military courts were directed by the highest military authorities in each location, which in almost all cases acted according to the standards of the military institution as a whole. The minimum rules of due process were not respected, sentences were dictated without the accused ever being able to present a defense, lawyers’ arguments were not considered, and rulings were issued as if they had been decided in advance.126 The Rettig Commission found that these trials were seriously flawed in both form and substance, and that they failed to prove the crimes attributed to the accused, “thus leaving doubts about their occurrence.” The rules of the military code were ignored and proofs discarded in favor of mere opinions. In many court-martials no defense lawyer was appointed, or if there was one, he or she was not allowed to speak with the accused.127 The Supreme Court’s support for the new authorities found its most eloquent expression during the court presidency of Enrique Urrutia Manzano (1973–1976). After the coup, the Supreme Court took measures against judges and court officials who were accused of being “Marxists” and expelled them from the judiciary.128 In every one of his speeches inaugurating the court’s calendar for the year, Urrutia made his support for the military regime public, defended the record on human rights, and criticized international organizations that reported the abuses being committed. In the first ceremony under the new regime, on March 1, 1974, Urrutia said that in Chile there was respect for human rights and denounced those who criticized the state of affairs in the country:

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He also defended government policies that restricted public freedoms, rejecting categorically the criticisms raised by some international bodies, such as a report by Amnesty International.130 Urrutia defended the policy of arrests enacted by the government, painting an idealized picture of the state of the country: The president who is speaking has been informed that most of the prisoners, who were arrested under the authority of the laws and rules governing the state of siege, have been released. Others are being tried in regular or military courts, and in the case of those detained under the powers granted by the state of siege currently in effect, an effort is being made to relieve the situation of the prisoners and clarify as soon as possible their participation in illegal activities. It is hoped that this effort will conclude as soon as possible, given the situation in which the affected families find themselves.131

In his 1975 speech, Urrutia again offered a strong defense of the government’s human rights policy, arguing that it fell within the Universal Declaration on the subject. Similarly, he questioned the patriotism of Chileans who spoke out against the reality, deeming them unpatriotic (malos patriotas), and also blasted the “foreign individuals” who spoke out. Using language that would be expected from a government spokesperson, Urrutia declared: “I can affirm that here there are neither firing squads nor iron curtains; and any claim to the contrary is due to a press preaching ideas that could not and will not flourish in our homeland.”132 The Rettig Commission was highly critical of the judiciary’s performance. It concluded that it “did not respond with sufficient determination to the human rights violations,”133 and lamented its lack of a pointed approach to serving this function, as mandated by the constitution and the laws. It admonished the judiciary for not using existing resources, such as the recurso de amparo (writ of protection, similar to habeas corpus); writs of protection “were invariably rejected until well into the 1980s, when the first dissenting votes began to appear and some of these writs were occasionally accepted.”134 The commission also criticized the lack of action against those responsible for violating human rights, as the courts granted “impunity to the violators,” exonerating those who appeared guilty.135 The Supreme Court defended itself from the criticism of the Rettig Commission, using arguments meant to cast doubt on the seriousness of the investigation, but was not able to refute the grave allegations.136 In its response to the commission, it listed the actions that it supposedly took to “put an end to the ir-

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regularities that were occurring,” insinuating that there had been many such actions,137 when in reality there were few and they produced no results. The first example cited was an initiative taken eighteen months after the coup, on March 10, 1975, when “the Supreme Court in full session adopted several measures to prevent delays in processing writs of habeas corpus.” The document, however, does not refer to the nature of these measures or their results. The second example cited constituted visits from the president of the Supreme Court, José María Eyzaguirre, on June 10, 1976, to detention centers, “unannounced, on different occasions and for several hours, even at night, . . . for those detained in the state of siege, in the capital and once in Puchuncaví.” The third example was the appointment of a special investigating judge (ministro en visita) on December 6, 1978, at the request of a bishop, Monsignor Enrique Alvear, “in a case where bones were found,” referring to the Lonquén case, which had produced public alarm. The fourth example was an inaugural speech from the court president in 1979, which was critical of some reforms to the penal procedural code. Some of the relevant initiatives mentioned in the court’s defense came very late. In fact, only in 1982, when the worst period of repression had ended and the regime had begun to show some signs of normalcy in operating under the new constitution, passed in 1980, did the Supreme Court demand that those arrested by CNI agents appear before the courts. One year later, after reports of torture by the CNI, the Supreme Court asked a military prosecutor in Santiago to provide information on the progress of trials. Thus there was voluntary as well as forced synchronization in the case of the judiciary, which, without seeking to do so, created conditions favoring the use of coercion by the security services. The Attitude of the Media The new authorities quickly established control over the media. In the case of television, the government first took over Channel 7, a state-owned channel and the only national network. It secured support from the three university channels through interference, appointing military members as university presidents (rectores-delegados).138 In the case of the press, the government closed down left-wing newspapers and confiscated their equipment. Among those affected were El Siglo, which belonged to the Communist Party; Puro Chile, which appeared during the Popular Unity government and took a very militant position in its favor; and Noticias de Última Hora, an evening paper belonging to public figures in the Socialist Party. At the time of the coup, there were two newspapers belonging to parties opposing the Popular Unity government, the National Party’s Tribuna, and the Christian Democratic Party’s La Prensa, both founded during that period and both having a modest number of readers. Tribuna stopped publishing because the National Party dissolved itself after the coup; La Prensa kept publishing for some weeks, but economic difficulties and harassment from the government,

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which did not buy ad space from it, as well as restrictions on press freedoms, forced it to close in February 1974. The surviving press was part of the regional chains belonging to El Mercurio and La Tercera de la Hora, which immediately supported the new government. The afternoon newspaper La Segunda was rather more militant in its proregime views; it belonged to El Mercurio, and constantly denounced the defense of human rights being carried out by the Catholic Church and lawyers involved in the opposition. In the case of weekly political newsmagazines, two appeared regularly,139 Qué Pasa and Ercilla. The former, belonging to right-wing businesspeople and intellectuals who supported the coup, strongly endorsed the new authorities. However, by mid-1975 it had begun, in its own peculiar way, to echo some of the criticisms against the DINA, saying that the state of siege should be more flexible, and calling for an end to exile.140 Qué Pasa would later become the mouthpiece for the “soft-liners” and criticize the government’s foreign policy. Its editor was appointed foreign affairs minister during the cabinet shuffle in April 1978. Qué Pasa was an organ for the lukewarm expression of a “semiopposition,” to use Juan Linz’s concept; that is, it opposed specific policies of the regime without questioning its overall direction141 (see Chapter 6 for more on Qué Pasa). The weekly magazine Ercilla, associated with the PDC, managed to keep publishing until mid-1977, despite very difficult financial and news-gathering conditions. It played an important role, providing valuable information on political developments, despite the limitations imposed by censorship of the press. Despite being the only news source that acted with independence, featuring in its pages the opinions of some opposition leaders, it was tolerated due to its limited influence on public opinion. The government did not need to close it directly, but achieved this objective when businessmen bought the company that owned the magazine. The new owners changed the paper’s editorial stance, resulting in the resignation of the entire news staff.142 The synchronization imposed by the authorities mainly affected the leftwing radio stations, which were shut down. Radio stations belonging to the Catholic Church were allowed to continue to provide news, as occurred with Radio Chilena. The PDC-owned Radio Balmaceda continued to function, despite constant censorship from the government, until it was banned in 1975. Later, businesspeople associated with the PDC founded Radio Cooperativa, which would become the country’s main radio station, playing an important role in providing political information in the 1980s. The government created its own public information body, the National Directorate of Social Communication (Dirección Nacional de Comunicación Social [DINACOS]), which operated under the government’s General Secretariat Ministry and enforced press censorship. This body played its role rigorously, although this was not hard, given the editors’ voluntary support for official policy.

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With the apertura (the opening), a liberalization process in which the military regime provided somewhat more freedom, starting in the winter of 1983, there was a radical shift in the synchronization of the media (see Chapter 10). In the new scenario, triggered by the economic crisis, the government was forced to provide more freedom to its adversaries, loosen press censorship, and tolerate the appearance of various weeklies and radio stations. Those entities made extensive efforts to provide political news, which contributed to the country’s politicization and dissemination of opposition opinions. DINACOS regained its dominance when the apertura policy was canceled in 1985. However, this could not stop the opposition press from continuing to use the political ground it had gained, which forced the newspapers and weeklies that supported the regime to open themselves to news about opposition parties and bodies.

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Limited Synchronization in the Universities

Limited synchronization was also applied in the universities. They had been very politically important during the 1960s, and during the Popular Unity government they were engulfed in social conflict, especially the University of Chile.143 Through the president of this university, Edgardo Boeninger, a group of university presidents sent a memorandum to the junta expressing their desire to start normalizing the universities and thereby avoid radical measures against them.144 This request was rejected, given that the military wanted to carry out a profound restructuring of the university system.145 The junta announced its plans for interference in the universities and appointed presidents from among top-ranking officers (both active and retired) in the three branches of the armed forces.146 The new authorities were given broad powers to change the internal structure of the universities, including firing professors and administrative staff and applying disciplinary measures against students in order to politically neutralize the student movement.147 “Normalization” measures at the University of Chile, the country’s main university, were applied with relative care, since the junta’s appointee, retired air force general César Ruiz Danyau, had kept the university’s top directors in their jobs without applying the policy of persecution used in other bodies, especially the State Technical University. The prosecutors appointed to investigate alleged illegalities committed by students and staff behaved calmly, listening to the accused, who were able to present a defense. At the University of Chile there was no political group vying for power in order to push ahead with a campaign in favor of the government. Catholic University was a rather special case. Its appointee was retired vice admiral Jorge Swett, who retained his presidential post for thirteen years with the support of a right-wing group that had enormous influence in the leadership of the university: the Gremialista movement.148 Catholic University was one of the places where this movement concentrated its efforts to become the main power group within the new regime (see Chapter 7).

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Initially, the chancellor of the university, Raúl Silva Henríquez, cardinal and archbishop of Santiago, maintained an open attitude toward Swett, approving his appointment. However, Silva’s goodwill would come up against Swett’s determination to faithfully meet the objectives of the new government. Relying on the guidance of the Gremialistas, who were headed by Jaime Guzmán, a member of the university’s board,149 Swett restructured the university’s leadership, eliminating the academic and student representatives from the board and creating an advisory council and a directive committee composed of professors associated with the Gremialista movement, including Guzmán.150 Swett immediately made several appointments without consulting the chancellor: a former dean of the law school was appointed vice president, and another professor took over the academic vice presidency. Both were Gremialistas. In August 1974 the Gremialistas pressured for more direct control of Catholic University, proposing the creation of a personnel office to oversee hiring. Lawyer Raúl Lecaros, one of Swett’s advisers, was appointed to head the office.151 Some weeks later, Cardinal Silva suspended his work as chancellor following a meeting during which Swett confirmed his intentions for development of the university. Shortly afterward, Silva left the university and proposed that a priest, Jorge Medina, replace him as acting chancellor, which Vatican authorities approved. The Gremialistas had succeeded, and their supporters came to run the university according to plan, firing many professors outright or indirectly by cutting their work hours, which resulted in a drastic decline in their incomes and forced them to leave the university in search of other jobs.152 In his memoirs, Silva remembered: “By early 1975, the result was devastating: 152 academics had been fired and another 165 saw their work hours cut to the point where they practically had no reason to stay. A second wave of firings came in March 1975, with a political bias that was impossible to disguise: as the authorities of the day would say, this was a profound clean up.”153 *

*

*

This chapter has analyzed the military’s seizure of power in Chile, the radicalization of its coercive style, and its usurpation of the country’s major institutions, including the judiciary and the media. Despite the regime’s use of enormous violence in the process, the conditions under which the coup occurred provide no justification for the climate of internal warfare. General Pinochet’s decisive involvement in these events opens the way to examining his role and leadership.

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Notes

1. A reference to Richard Rose’s “precursive conditions”; Rose (1969), pp. 602–608. 2. Bracher (1964).

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3. Hitler found one of his principal support bases to stir up a nationalist movement that attracted millions of Germans; Kershaw (1998), Evans (2004). 4. This was where relations between the Communist Party, which emerged from this movement, and the Social Democratic Party began to break down. When the Nazis began to take shape as a true threat to democracy in the early 1930s, the communists preferred to go on strike together with the Nazis to put pressure on the Social Democratic government, weakening the legitimacy of the political order. The fundamental study on the Nazi seizure of power is still Bracher, Sauer, and Schulz (1960). There are numerous historical accounts of this period, such as the outstanding book by Mommsen (1990). 5. Much has been written on the Second Spanish Republic. A major work by one of the top experts on the political history of Spain is Payne (1995b). 6. Angell (1993), p. 93. 7. Stepan correctly asserted in 1978 (pp. 106–108) that the extremely high degree of coercion exerted to establish the military regime would mark it for its entire duration. 8. I make a distinction between latent and manifest based on Dahrendorf (1958). 9. Kruijt (1994). 10. Much has been written on the Allende government. See especially Gil, Lagos Escobar, and Landsberger (1979); see also Nohlen (1973). President Allende’s view was provided by one of his top advisers, Joan Garcés (1976). Among memoirs, see Altamirano (1977), Bitar (1979). 11. The list is presented in Hachette and Lüders (1992). 12. High school students were also actively involved through the secondary-student federation. 13. On the radicalization of the middle class in the Weimar Republic, see Jones (1972). 14. Linz (1978). 15. Mónica Madariaga, quoted in Marras (1988), p. 61. 16. Prats (1985), p. 397. 17. Ibid., p. 402. Upon his return from a long trip to Europe, Prats set out his view of the new national situation in a meeting of the Council of Generals on June 11, 1973: “Several generals express their points of view. There is consensus that a military intervention would be the worst possible outcome. But there is concern that the government’s inaction on the worsening economic crisis might lead to chaos.” 18. Fuentes (1999). 19. General Schneider had become army commander in chief in October 1969, following the internal institutional crisis that led to General Roberto Viaux’s capture of the Tacna regiment. With an outstanding professional career, Schneider had managed to reestablish the unity of this branch of the armed forces, emphasizing its professional role. Prior to the presidential elections in 1970 and in light of a possible victory for Allende, Schneider emphasized that the army would respect the constitutional order. He was succeeded by his great friend and second in seniority, General Carlos Prats, who was, in turn, assassinated by DINA agents in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974. On the thirtieth anniversary of the attack, Schneider’s relatives published a long public letter: “Lección de un sacrificio,” La Tercera de la Hora, October 22, 2000, pp. 8–9. See the interview with one of his sons: “Mi padre, René Schneider,” La Nación Semanal, pp. 10–11. For the first time in twenty-seven years, the army commemorated his death, with a religious ceremony held on October 25, 2000, in the army cathedral. 20. The agreement resolved the issue of the property of the seized companies, seizures that were strongly repudiated by the affected businessmen and denounced by the opposition parties.

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21. Press conference held by law school dean Jaime del Valle; La Tercera de la Hora, July 19, 1973. Del Valle was to become the military regime’s minister of foreign affairs. The “investigation” was conducted by a former president of Catholic University’s student federation, Hernán Larraín; Gustavo Cuevas, head of the civil law department; and Guillermo Bruna, a professor of constitutional law. 22. Libro blanco (1973), pp. 220–230. 23. Many years later, toward the end of the second democratic government, it was disclosed that this book had been written by civilians who had supported the coup, using intelligence information provided by the navy. One of the authors, historian Gonzalo Vial Correa, a former minister of education under the regime, admitted this in his column in the evening paper La Segunda on February 2, 1999. 24. Their main argument was that registration rates among youth aged eighteen to twenty-one should have been lower, which did not make sense, because the 1970 constitutional reform had reduced the minimum age for registration from twenty-one to eighteen, stimulating great interest among young people to register. They argued that the registration rate should have been half among female voters and no more than twothirds in the case of male voters, but in reality the rates went far beyond these limits, due to the extreme politicization and political radicalization, which exceeded the traditional patterns of electoral registration that had existed in Chile until then. 25. Libro blanco (1973), p. 230. 26. This campaign was carried out through the press, and the supporters of former president Jorge Alessandri took part. During one of the regular Saturday meetings at Alessandri’s estate in the town of Malloco, there was discussion on how a general or a colonel was “missing,” but one of the participants, Eduardo Boetsch, clarified that actually there was one general “too many” and that “once he was out, many would emerge.” Jaime Guzmán, who participated in the meeting, told me this in a 1977 interview that I conducted with him while doing doctoral research on the breakdown of democracy. 27. Aylwin (1998), pp. 28–29. I have examined the factors that led to the fall of democracy in Huneeus (1980). See also Valenzuela (1978). 28. On the reforms during the Frei administration, see Molina (1971). 29. Agrarian reform included campesino (rural) trade unions, which were not common in the country. This was an additional factor that irritated agricultural landowners, because it encouraged economic and political demands that displeased them. See Landsberger and McDaniel (1976). 30. The right did not forgive the Christian Democratic Party for having promoted agrarian reform after it had supported Frei in the 1964 presidential elections. 31. There is a biography in two volumes by Gazmuri (2000). 32. The Christian Democratic Youth, under the leadership of Rodrigo Ambrosio, got carried away by an attraction to the Cuban revolution, adopting Marxist analysis and a few elements of Leninism. We will revisit this in Chapter 7. 33. The Santiago garrison’s command post opened a “complaint investigations” office to “coordinate and appropriately control this activity and avoid duplications”; AHJG, sess. 4, September 17, 1973. 34. Property of the Congregation of the Holy Cross of the United States. Some parents went to the governing junta to denounce priests who had been involved in political activism. The junta examined “the situation of five priests who could be Marxists. It was agreed to declare them persona non grata and to put them at the disposal of their embassy”; AHJG, sess. 17, September 21, 1973, no. 3. A few weeks later, teachers were denounced: “The minister of Education reports [on the] activities of the military delegate in Saint George’s School regarding parent representatives’ reports on the Marxist utterances of some priests and teachers, and on the reaction of the U.S. provincial secretary of the student sector, who has been acting in an incriminating manner”; AHJG, sess. 25,

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October 24, 1973. As a result, an officer of the air force (the branch that seemed to be the most anticommunist among the armed forces) took over as principal. He imposed a military style at the school. Seniors had to stand at attention before the flag each morning and were guarded by armed soldiers during their final exams. The interference ended in the 1980s, when the school was handed over to the Archbishopric of Santiago, which transferred management of the school to the Congregation of the Holy Cross at the end of the decade. 35. In the early days of the military regime, the press repeatedly reported large weapon caches and the presence of guerrilla groups, even though this information was based on isolated events. For instance, “Manual de seguridad contemplaba el asesinato,” El Mercurio, October 4, 1973, p. 17; “Operativo militar en Viña del Mar: detenidos 35 extremistas de un campo guerrillero,” El Mercurio, October 6, 1973, p. 11. 36. General Manuel Contreras, head of the DINA, whose widely publicized memoirs served as an attempt to justify the need to promote a war against Marxism, supposedly based on evidence, does not provide further details either. His is a very poor publication, with lists of people and simplistic comments on several intelligence issues: Contreras Sepúlveda (2000). 37. Forty-seven automatic rifles, ten semiautomatic carbines, ten Mauser carbines, fifty-four automatic pistols, nine rocket launchers, two nonrecoil cannons, one mortar, among other weapons, and several types of bombs and other minor military resources (22,000 meters of slow fuse, 3,600 meters of detonating cord, etc.) were allegedly found in the residence at Tomás Moro Street; Libro blanco (1973), p. 45. 38. This was actually the number of foreigners who had legally entered the country, as registered by the police; Vicaría de la Solidaridad (1991). 39. It recounts the arrival of eighty-one Brazilian citizens in January 1971 in exchange for the kidnapped Swiss ambassador to Brazil, adding that “most of them were actively involved in Chilean politics”; Libro blanco (1973), p. 70. 40. Two events were mentioned that were supposed to prove Cuban participation in Chilean politics with an eye toward seizing power: an episode in which luggage that arrived at the Santiago airport did not go through customs, and the August 1973 visit of two major officials from the Castro regime, Vice Prime Minister Carlos Rafael Rodríguez and the head of the “secret police,” Manuel Piñeiro, who were supposed to have visited Chile to organize military aid; Libro blanco (1973), p. 73. 41. The MIR faced determined resistance from the Communist Party, which considered it to be dominated by “revolutionary immaturity.” It suffered a severe blow in 1971 with the death, under mysterious circumstances, of one of its leaders, Luciano Cruz, who had been president of the University of Concepción’s student federation and was in charge of expanding the presence of this organization in universities, factories, and poblaciones in Santiago. 42. “Memorandum. From: Creative Committee. To: Honorable Governing Junta,” n. 5, c/129, FJGE. The seven-page document addresses the following issues: short-term implications of the choice of the junta as historical destiny, the image that the junta should project, support for the government’s economic policy, and work practices of the committee. The document has no date, but was probably produced in late September 1973. 43. The text is presented in “Respuestas de las fuerzas armadas y de orden al informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación,” Estudios Públicos no. 41, Summer 1991, pp. 456–458. 44. Ibid., pp. 480–481. 45. These actions by the MIR are examined in Chapter 10. 46. The Tupamaros of Uruguay, a guerrilla movement that enjoyed widespread sympathy from the left, particularly from the Communist Party, could also be analyzed. The police proved unable to control their violent actions, which would eventually serve

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as a justification for the military intervention. The military launched a major campaign to destroy the movement in early 1973. See González (1991), pp. 39–43. 47. This organization enjoyed considerable support among students, workers, and certain sectors of the Catholic Church. For its history, see Gillespie (1998). 48. I draw on Waldmann (1982). 49. Survey by IPSA, 1971, cited in O’Donnell (1982), tab. 10.1. 50. Waldmann (1982), p. 212. Another author makes a higher estimate, stating that in 1975 it had approximately 5,000 combatants; Gillespie (1998), p. 211. 51. Rouquié (1982c), p. 291. 52. Ibid., p. 292. 53. He was kidnapped on May 29, 1970, and had been president under the military regime (1955–1958); Gillespie (1998), pp. 119ff. 54. Waldmann (1982), p. 237. 55. The editor of a newspaper and a Peronist national parliamentary representative were also assassinated. 56. Waldmann (1982), p. 212. 57. This operation was facilitated by the fact that the company’s production head was a member of the Montoneros. 58. They were the manager and the general director of the powerful corporation Bunge y Born. The ransom paid was considered a virtual “world record” at the time; Gillespie (1998), pp. 223–224. 59. Gillespie (1988) states that, despite all this, the action “serve[d] the Montoneros poorly politically: almost all the political parties condemned the action”; pp. 246–247. 60. For example, the assassination of federal police chief Alberto Villar, an antiguerrilla combat expert, in November 1974. They also used political violence against the extreme right in retaliation for the actions of the AAA; Gillespie (1998), p. 227. 61. Moyano (1995), p. 105 and tab. 7.1. 62. Floria and García Belsunce (1988), p. 232. 63. Acuña (2000). 64. A limited number of officers who opposed the coup resigned before it took place, such as Generals Guillermo Pickering and Mario Sepúlveda, and others who resigned on the morning of September 11, 1973; González (2000), p. 251. 65. Linz and Landsberger (1975). 66. Whelan (1993), p. 450. Whelan’s book provides a thorough account of the planning and execution of the coup based on a large number of interviews with the military chiefs who took part in it. 67. Whelan (1993), p. 450. 68. Huidobro (1989), p. 269. 69. Canessa Robert (1995), p. 183. At the time of the coup, Julio Canessa Robert was a colonel. He went on to become the army’s deputy commander in chief and a member of the governing junta. In 1997, General Pinochet appointed him senator-forlife, representing the army. 70. Whelan (1993), p. 450. 71. Decree Law no. 27, of September 24, 1973, and Decree Law no. 50, of October 2, 1973, which declared the dissolution of the Constitutional Court. 72. To prevent anything from being overlooked, Decree Law no. 77, of October 8, 1973, named the parties affected—the communists, socialists, radicals, and several other leftist parties (Unión Socialista Popular, MAPU, Izquierda Cristiana, Acción Popular Independiente, Partido de la Unidad Popular)—and a general provision was added to prohibit “all those entities or groups . . . that uphold Marxist doctrine, or whose goals, or the behavior of their members, substantially coincide with the principles and objectives of said doctrine” (Article 1).

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73. The latter was stated in Decree Law no. 145, of November 26, 1973. 74. “The Marxist doctrine contains a concept of man and society that harms the dignity of the human being and attacks the Christian and freedom-based values that are part of our national tradition”; its doctrine on the state and the struggle of classes is “incompatible with the concept of national unity,” because it is oriented toward the “destruction of essential or constituent elements of our national being”; Decree Law no. 27, 1973. 75. This allowed them to hold on to their property, which was administered by their executive committees; Article 2 of Decree Law no. 78, October 8, 1973. 76. In the first few weeks after the coup, the junta assumed a cautious attitude toward the political parties that had opposed the Allende government, formally inviting them to collaborate with the new regime: “The Junta agrees that the Interior Minister should arrange to see the presidents of the political parties to clarify the new government’s proposals and its actual obligations and limitations, requesting at the same time, their utmost cooperation in the reconstruction of the country”; AHJG, sess. 7, September 21, 1973, no. 18. 77. The national budget director was economist Juan Villarzú, who worked on the economic program known as “The Brick” (El Ladrillo) (see Chapter 8). 78. Among others, Bernardo Leighton, former vice president and founder of the Christian Democratic Party; Belisario Velasco, interior minister of President Bachelet; and Renán Fuentealba, former senator and several times president of the Christian Democratic Party. The statements made by the PDC are in Ortega Frei (1992), pp. 42–49. 79. See Varas (1972). We will return to this incident in Chapter 4. 80. In November 1973 the president of the PDC assessed the situation as a “military dictatorship in its consolidation stage”; Aylwin (1998), p. 39. 81. The pretext was having used statements from a foreign news agency. The statements were printed in “Exclusivo: el cable que provocó la expulsión,” Qué Pasa, December 3, 1975, pp. 10–11. 82. The excuse was the internal elections held in the PDC to renew its executive committee, which had been headed by Patricio Aylwin, former president of the Senate, since April 1973. The elections were held in secret and two lists competed, headed by former senators Tomás Reyes and Andrés Zaldívar respectively, the latter of whom won. These elections are accounted in “Gobierno: la línea dura,” Qué Pasa, March 17, 1977, pp. 4–6; “Planes políticos DC y UP,” Qué Pasa, March 24, 1977, pp. 27–31. 83. Decree Law no. 81, November 6, 1973. In practice, the detainees were quickly put on a plane, without having the chance to collect any personal effects. The constitution was also reformed to add a new justification for a supreme decree stripping nationality, subject to the approval of the Council of Ministers, with no recourse in the courts. Orlando Letelier was deprived of his nationality by the governing junta shortly before the attack that resulted in his death. 84. Article 1: “To prevent exiled persons from returning to the country without previous official clearance, severe penalties of up to ten years of imprisonment are instated, and these cases will be judged by military courts.” 85. The concept of synchronization is developed in Chapter 1. 86. A few days later, its provisions were extended to include not only the regular permanent staff, but also those employees hired on a consultancy basis, or under other forms of payment; Decree Law no. 22, September 19, 1973. 87. This is thoroughly documented in González (2000), esp. chap. 22. 88. Pinochet’s new style of favoring the use of violence against his adversaries became evident at the start of the coup, as proved by his conversations with General Leigh and Rear Admiral Patricio Carvajal on the morning of September 11, 1973. Those were recorded and then published in the magazine Análisis, no. 122, December 24–30, 1985, pp. 8–13. The recording is included supplementally on compact disc in Verdugo (1998).

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89. The decision to bomb La Moneda from the air was made by Generals Pinochet and Leigh and the head of the General Staff of National Defense, Rear Admiral Patricio Carvajal, the day before the coup, in case “Allende resisted”; Whelan (1993), p. 439. 90. Huidobro (1989), p. 263, emphasis added; the text of the other speeches is reproduced on pp. 261–263. 91. See the thorough journalistic investigation by Verdugo (1989). Arellano’s defense is being conducted by his son, Sergio Arellano Iturriaga (1985). Generals Pinochet and Arellano have been judged for these crimes, resulting in the cancellation of the parliamentary privileges of the former, who became a senator-for-life after leaving his post as army commander in chief in March 1998. In the investigation, led by Santiago appeals court judge Juan Guzmán, documents and statements from witnesses have been collected. For the most part, the trial has been the result of the perseverance of attorney Carmen Hertz, widow of Carlos Berger, who was murdered in Calama. For good summaries of the information collected in the process, see Escalante (2000), Verdugo (2000). 92. During a ceremony at the War Academy a few days after the coup, Arellano asked aloud, “Where is Pinochet?” showing that he did not consider himself a subordinate. I thank Gustavo Lagos Matus, who was a professor at the academy at the time and witnessed the incident, for this information. 93. It consisted of Colonel Sergio Arredondo, Lieutenant-Colonel Pedro Espinoza Bravo, who was head of General Arellano’s General Staff, Major Marcelo Moren Brito, and Lieutenant Armando Fernández Larios. 94. For example, the Chuquicamata mine, located outside the town of Calama, operated normally on September 11, 1973. This is pointed out by Admiral Huidobro (1989), p. 269. 95. Four were executed in Cauquenes (October 4, 1973), fifteen in La Serena (October 16), thirteen in Copiapó (October 17), fourteen in Antofagasta (October 19), and twenty-six in Calama (October 19); see Verdugo (1989). The investigation, conducted by Judge Guzmán, has verified a larger number of deaths during Arellano’s trip to the south: twelve people were executed in Valdivia, seventeen in Chihuío, and fifteen in Liquiñe; see Escalante (2000), pp. 77–90. 96. In Antofagasta, Eugenio Ruiz-Tagle, a member of MAPU and manager of the state-owned company Inacesa, had voluntarily turned himself in to the authorities on September 12, 1973, and was severely tortured. Despite the steps taken by his mother, a distinguished member of an established Chilean family, and his attorney, it was not possible to save his life; Verdugo (1989), pp. 183–186. See the account by his friend Tomás Moulián (1997), pp. 181–183. I also interviewed the lawyer for Eugenio RuizTagle’s family, Gastón Cruzat, as a source on the matter. 97. Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (1991), vol. 1, p. 123. 98. Verdugo (1989), p. 250. In 1999, Arellano was prosecuted and held for some time by the judge who was investigating a lawsuit filed against him for these murders. The deaths caused by Arrellano’s entourage led to the filing of over a hundred lawsuits against General Pinochet for his responsibility in appointing Arellano for this mission, and he is being prosecuted by Judge Juan Guzmán. The former head of state lost his immunity as a senator-for-life in August 2000, and was questioned by the judge on January 23, 2001. 99. Contreras acted without a legal framework during the first few months of existence of the intelligence body, because the legal incorporation of the DINA was announced by Decree Law no. 521 later, on June 18, 1974. Its creation was approved by the governing junta in a session held in November 1973; AHJG, sess. 33, November 12, 1973, no. 8.

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100. Pinochet maintained a close relationship with Contreras, who reported to him on a daily basis. 101. Brazilian officers worked on its formation, as asserted by an expert on the regime: “The DINA was designed, to a great extent, following the model of the intelligence service that the Brazilian military regime established after seizing power in 1964. According to a well-placed source, the Brazilians, who had worked in close harmony with the revolutionary government from the beginning, advised the Chileans to create it”; Whelan (1993), p. 622. 102. Article 1 of Decree Law no. 521, June 18, 1974. 103. Its staff more than doubled that of the General Secretariat Ministry and ODEPLAN, agencies that carried out major political functions. The decree law added another ten nonspecified, and thus secret, jobs. 104. The staff was even larger, because an undetermined number of people were hired as consultants, a common procedure in the public service. 105. At different levels: ten at level eight, twenty at level eleven. 106. An additional payroll included ninety-five more employees, such as butlers, drivers, foremen, and other auxiliary staff. 107. The first deputy director was Rear Admiral Rolando García Le Blanc. 108. I interviewed several retired military officers, and each one repeated similar arguments in defense of Contreras: he was too smart to orchestrate an attack in the US capital; it was planned by the US Central Intelligence Agency to harm Pinochet! 109. See the interview with General Baeza in Marras (1989), esp. pp. 29–36. 110. One of the incidents was due to the DINA’s participation in the assassination of Carmelo Soria, a Spanish citizen and employee of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. 111. The situation is well described by Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), chap. 14. 112. Bishops Enrique Alvear, auxiliary of Santiago, Carlos González, of Talca, and Fernando Ariztía, of Copiapó, who stood out for their defense of human rights. See Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), chap. 13. 113. On the attack against Bernardo Leighton and his wife, see Mayorga Marcos (2003). 114. Pressure from the US government explains why the Letelier-Moffit case was excluded from the 1978 amnesty law. 115. According to Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), chap. 5, Bonilla died in a plane crash while he was minister of defense, and Lutz died in the military hospital after a normally simple operation that should not have led to his death. 116. He wrote a letter on November 24, 1974, whose text is reproduced in González (2000), pp. 466–468. 117. Covarrubias admits that the regime’s great mistake was to let Contreras act without restrictions; CIDOC, p. 35. 118. See the following articles by Mónica González: “Así se financió la represión de la DINA,” La Nación, November 10, 1992; “Los dineros que sirvieron para crear la red exterior,” La Nación, November 11, 1992; “Las platas que se usaron en la ‘Operación Londres,’” La Nación, November 12, 1992; “La DINA financió a grupo de neofascistas italianos,” La Nación, November 13, 1992; “Nace la conexión panameña,” La Nación, November 15, 1992; “Manuel Contreras hipotecó cinco barcos del Estado,” La Nación, November 16, 1992; “Los contactos de la DINA con la Cosa Nostra,” La Nación, November 17, 1992; “Michael Townley asume responsabilidades comerciales,” La Nación, November 22, 1992. 119. Contreras bought two fishing companies in San Antonio that had been taken over during the Allende government.

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120. The Supreme Court’s attitude toward the Allende government is examined in Chapter 5. 121. Rossiter (1963). 122. “The Judiciary will exercise its functions in the way and with the independence and faculties stated in the Constitution, Art. 1, subsection 2.” Decree Law no. 128, November 16, 1973, which clarified the scope of Decree Law no. 1. 123. The first was unanimously decided on November 13, 1973; the text is presented in Fallos del mes no. 180, November 1973, pp. 222–225. The second is dated August 21, 1974, decided by majority, with the “no” vote of José María Eyzaguirre, who would become president of the Supreme Court in 1976; see Fallos del mes no. 189, August 1974, pp. 56–57. 124. AHJG, sess. 111, April 11, 1974. 125. Ibid. In the 111th session of the junta, the minister of justice defended his position with arguments that did not convince its members: “It would even represent a moral backing if the Supreme Court approved a death sentence at any given time under this state of internal war, which could make it not merely the decision of a military court that does not have, I would say, as much technical and juridical competence.” 126. In the weeks following the coup, a large number of court-martials (293) were held, during which 1,935 people were prosecuted, of whom 88 percent were found guilty. 127. Informe (1991), vol. 1, pp. 92–94. 128. From 1973 to 1975, over 250 magistrates and employees were transferred, removed, or forced to resign by decision of the higher court, which ultimately expelled 50 judges and court secretaries of a total 340 employees; Matus (1997), pp. 232–237. 129. La Segunda, March 1, 1974, emphasis in original. 130. When the Amnesty International organization visited Chile, Urrutia reminded the body that “Chilean legislation complies with international commitments on human rights,” and then reproached it for basing its opinions on “anonymous rumors or slogans aimed at quoting the opinion of the president of the Supreme Court,” instead of listening to the Supreme Court’s explanations; La Segunda, March 1, 1974. 131. La Segunda, March 1, 1974. 132. El Mercurio, March 2, 1975, sec. 3. 133. Informe (1991), vol. 1, p. 95. 134. Ibid., p. 97. 135. Ibid., p. 102. 136. Text in El Mercurio, May 16, 1991. Also printed in Estudios Públicos no. 42, Fall 1992, pp. 237–250. 137. An argument that presented “examples taken from the Court archives.” 138. The two main stations were the University of Chile’s Channel 9 and Catholic University’s Channel 13. Channel 5 of the Catholic University of Valparaiso broadcast within that city only. Before the coup, the University of Chile’s channel had been run by left-wing workers, and could not broadcast for several months, which shrank its audience. 139. I am not referring to the several magazines or weekly publications that emerged during the thousand days of Popular Unity and that had clear political affiliations either for or against the government. 140. This criticism enraged the DINA, whose agents attempted to kidnap the director of this weekly in July 1977. 141. Linz (1973b). 142. With international aid, they created a new weekly, Hoy, which appeared a few months later and had great influence during the rest of the military regime. It disappeared in 1998 due to financial difficulties.

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143. Except for the president of the State Technical University, who was a communist, the remaining six university presidents opposed the Allende government, and some of them were Christian Democrats, or close to that party. The presidents of Catholic University, Fernando Castillo Velasco, the Catholic University of Valparaiso, Raúl Allard, and the Austral University of Valdivia, William Thayer, were Christian Democrats. Edgardo Boeninger, president of the University of Chile, joined the Christian Democratic Party after the coup. 144. It was the country’s top university, with national presence and regional locations that offered several career programs, and had its main seat in Santiago. Boeninger had been directly elected by the faculty, the administrative staff, and the students in 1968, and reelected in 1971. I examined the development of this university from the 1960s to 1971 in Huneeus (1973a). 145. AHJG, sess. 10, September 27, 1973: “The memorandum on governmentuniversity relations delivered by the president of the University of Chile yesterday was analyzed. It was agreed to convene the council of [university] presidents as soon as possible, to settle the matter definitively.” This meeting took place the next day and was attended by all university presidents except William Thayer of the Austral University of Valdivia; during the meeting, the minister of education voiced the junta’s rejection of the memorandum; AHJG, sess. 11, September 28, 1973. 146. On October 1, 1973, General César Ruiz Danyau, former commander in chief of the air force, who had acted as minister of transportation for a few weeks in August, was appointed president of the University of Chile; AHJG, sess. 12, October 1, 1973. The following day, Admiral Jorge Swett, former director of the Naval School, was appointed president of Catholic University; AHJG, sess. 13, October 2, 1973. 147. Decree Law no. 50, October 2, 1973. 148. The role of the proregime Gremialista movement and its support at Catholic University are examined in Chapter 7. 149. He had been elected in June 1972 as one of the six faculty representatives on the university’s board. 150. Silva Henríquez (1994), vol. 3, pp. 40–41. 151. This appointment severely limited the influence of academic vice president Jorge Awad, a Christian Democrat, who was supported by another Christian Democrat, economist Reinaldo Sapag. Awad and Sapag refused to endorse the decision, but Swett forced the creation of the staff directorate, appointed Lecaros, and demanded that Awad and Sapag resign. 152. See Cowley (2000) for an interesting account of the impact of the decisions of the new university authorities against the faculty, priests included. 153. Silva Henríquez (1994), vol. 3, p. 47.

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3 Pinochet’s Leadership: The Bases of Power

Chile’s authoritarian regime is closely associated with its strongman, General Augusto Pinochet. His aggressive tone with his opponents—summed up in his statement “We’re at war, gentlemen!”—was part of the tough, inflexible style he developed and imposed on the political establishment. His confrontational relationship with the opposition was characterized by anticommunist rhetoric and attacks on the governments of the numerous countries that opposed him. He stood for a political system that was best known for its coercive nature, provoking international repudiation that peaked with his humiliating arrest in London in 1998. He is the first dictator to be put on the international justice docket for human rights crimes. European politicians, with the single exception of Margaret Thatcher and a former British chancellor of the exchequer, did not speak out in his defense. General Pinochet was the top figure in the military regime because of the high level of authority and power he concentrated in himself. He was an atypical Latin American dictator, the only one ever to head an authoritarian regime for so long, seventeen years, as head of state and head of government and the army.1 He ran the Chilean government longer than any other man, longer even than the Spanish governors during the colonial period, with whom he compared himself as “captain-general.”2 He was even able to hand over the presidential sash, the symbol of the Chilean presidency, in person, to President Patricio Aylwin, on March 11, 1990, in a solemn ceremony in Congress witnessed by millions on television. His power allowed him to remain in the political arena after the handover, because under the terms of the 1980 constitution he kept the post of army commander in chief for the first eight years of the new democratic regime. He was far from passive in this period, pressuring the government and pushing legality to the limits in defense of his interests and those of the army when human rights cases came before the courts. The most disruptive episodes were the so-called 71

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liaison exercise (ejercicio de enlace) in December 1990 and the berets’ protest (boinazo) in May 1993.3 After relinquishing the army command, in March 1998, to General Ricardo Izurieta (a captain at the time of the coup), Pinochet was honored once again: the army gave him the title benemerito, meaning “meritorious,” and he was seated as a senator-for-life. The title device was delineated expressly for his benefit in the 1980 constitution, to assure him an institutional role after leaving government and the army. He thus remained a figure on the official scene, an obligatory point of reference in Chilean politics,4 and a source of voting pressure, particularly on the right-wing and “institutional” senators (senadores designados) (another device delineated in the constitution).5 Latin America offers several examples of authoritarian regimes headed by leading personalities. General José María Velasco Alvarado, the strongman of the “revolutionary government of the armed forces” of Peru, came to power through a coup d’état in October 1968, and was overthrown by General Manuel Morales Bermúdez in 1974.6 In Argentina, “El Proceso” (The Process), as it was dubbed, which the military regime set up after the fall of Isabel Perón in March 1976, was first headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla, whose aims were as ambitious as Pinochet’s. He lasted four years as president of the republic before being replaced by another general.7 Velasco Alvarado and Videla failed to hold on to the army command. Another Argentine dictator in the 1960s, General Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–1970),8 was forced out of power before the end of the period originally agreed upon by the chiefs of the three military branches, due to pressure from the army commander, General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse. Onganía was replaced first by General Livingston and then by Lanusse.9 The authoritarian regime in Brazil was never identified with a single figure, because the president, who was a retired general, was elected by the military for a single four-year term, without the chance to be reelected.10 The Latin American general who held power the longest, after Pinochet, was Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay, who was overthrown by a coup in 1989 and went into exile in Brazil.11 Pinochet’s lengthy term as head of state of a military regime is unusual even among other third world dictatorships. Political scientist Jean Blondel notes that Pinochet’s term was the longest in the post–World War II world, even longer than the extended experiences of military regimes in Ethiopia and Pakistan (each lasting fifteen years) and Bolivia and Nigeria (each lasting thirteen years).12 Pinochet’s enormous power did not rest solely in the backing of the armed forces and his use of coercion, for he was also a skillful politician who drew support from a broad spectrum of civilian groups who were firmly loyal to him. There were no desertions, as occurred in Francisco Franco’s Spain or in Brazil. He was also supported by a substantial sector of the population; it was not by chance he won 43 percent of the vote in the 1988 referendum. It was a

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result no East European dictator could match upon being forced out of power by popular pressure. After the handover of power, Pinochet maintained this support, enjoying the admiration and respect of a significant proportion of the public, of rightwing politicians, and of much of the business community. They saw him as a national savior, a victor over the socialist government of Salvador Allende, and the father of the “economic miracle.” In 1997, Chile’s National Chamber of Commerce (Cámara Nacional de Comercio) and the National Mining Society (Sociedad Nacional de Minería) both gave him medals for his service to the country, accolades that came in addition to the army’s ceremonies to mark his retirement from the institution after a quarter century as its head. In a 1997 survey of twenty-eight businessmen interviewed by a mass-circulation business magazine, fourteen, including three former presidents of the main national business associations, named him as the national figure they most admired.13 In a 2004 survey, a large segment of the general public, 25 percent, also saw him as one of Chile’s best rulers of the twentieth century, and in answer to an open question on how General Pinochet would go down in history, 17 percent of Chileans expressed a positive opinion, while 53 percent expressed a negative opinion (see Tables 3.1 and 3.2). This support in the population began to fall as a consequence of the information given by US Senate investigation on the financial ramifications of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States; secret accounts of General Pinochet and his family were found at the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. (see Chapter 13). For his supporters, specially among the elite, Pinochet was no longer a stateman, but a typical Latin American dictator. Chile’s dictator had no special personal appeal to the general public, unlike other leaders of undemocratic or populist regimes,14 such as Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina or Getulio Vargas in Brazil.15 Instead, he cultivated a caudillo style of leadership inspired by the tone of a previous military president, General Carlos Ibáñez.16 Nevertheless, Pinochet, with a strongly anticommunist rhetoric and a certain populism in some economic policies, attracted the support of wide sectors who had backed the coup and of the right-wing elite,17 from ultranationalists such as Pablo Rodríguez, to distinguished Congress members, and to people from a range of parties and movements, all of whose opinions he would listen to. No analysis of the authoritarian regime would be complete without an examination of the factors that account for Pinochet’s decisive role. His leadership was the result not only of his personal attributes, but also of the political and institutional resources at his disposal. He quickly learned how to operate politically, and was good at choosing ministers and advisers and at gauging the best moment to make shrewd decisions. He made mistakes, though, the most serious being his failure to foresee the consequences of granting unlimited power to General Manuel Contreras in setting up the DINA, and his misjudging of the

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Pinochet’s Image in Chilean History: Among the Country’s Best Rulers of the Twentieth Century? Don’t Know/ Number of Yes (%) No (%) No Response (%) Respondents

Gender Female Male Age 18–25 years 26–40 years 41–60 years 61 years and older Political tendency Left Center Right Vote intention Independent Democratic Union National Renewal Christian Democratic Party Party for Democracy Socialist Party Socioeconomic level High Middle Low middle Low Educational level Incomplete primary Complete primary Incomplete secondary Complete secondary Postsecondary studies Total, 2004 September 2003 September 2002 September 2001 September 2000 September 1999 September 1998 September 1997 September 1996

21 24

67 65

11 11

585 616

20 17 27 30

72 73 57 63

8 11 16 8

115 483 326 276

8 18 58

90 74 38

2 8 4

247 336 251

64

33

1

185

38 9 8 1

52 81 84 93

2 — — —

93 105 91 78

51 22 19 22

49 68 71 64

— 10 10 12

74 231 432 464

26 20 24 23 24 25 25 31 29 31 26 24 24 27

57 69 68 65 68 66 63 59 59 56 59 62 63 59

18 11 8 12 8 11 12 17 12 13 10 13 13 13

187 168 196 319 204 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,188 1,200 1,200

Source: Barómetro-CERC survey, September 2004. Note: Respondents were asked, “How will General Pinochet go down in history?” The table details those who chose the option “As one of the best rulers Chile has had during this century.”

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Table 3.2

Pinochet’s Image in Chilean History, by Vote Intention and Age (percentages) Vote Intention

September September September

PDC

PPD

PS

18–25

26–40

41–60

61+

Totala

1999

1998

1995

57 34 — 23 — 24 20 3

39 36 — 3 — 31 30 1

9 — 5 4 — 73 — 19

3 — — 3 — 92 23 48

1 — — 1 — 88 28 51

9 7 — 2 — 64 44 15

11 5 — 4 2 55 26 19

22 17 — 4 1 49 19 17

27 16 — 10 1 49 23 11

17 11 1 5 — 53 25 16

15 5 3 2 5 49 28 8

19 9 4 5 1 53 30 10

21 6 6 4 6 49 19 9

1 — 3 1 1 1 — 6 9 1 185

— — 2 2 — — — 7 19 1 93

7 7 4 2 1 2 — 9 3 — 105

3 18 — — — — — 4 1 — 91

3 6 1 1 — — — 3 6 1 78

1 4 3 1 1 1 — 14 7 3 115

5 5 5 2 2 1 — 13 12 4 483

7 6 7 6 1 — — 8 9 3 326

4 11 3 2 1 — — 6 13 — 276

5 7 4 3 1 — — 10 11 3 1,200

5 8 9 5 3 1 — 12 8 4 1,200

12 1 4 2 — 1 1 11 5 5 1,188

7 3 9 4 3 2 — 6 7 8 1,240

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Positive opinions Good president Saved the country from chaos Hero Other Negative opinions Dictator, tyrant Murderer, guilty of genocide, criminal Bad president Other Neutral opinions Just another president Military man Responsible for coup Other Other opinions Don’t know No response Number of respondents

Age

Source: Barómetro-CERC survey, September 2004. Note: a. Reelected years, 1995, 1998, 1999, and 2004.

75

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rules of succession established in the transitory articles of the 1980 constitution, which would push him from power. Pinochet’s leadership was based on his highly personalized powers, built up with various resources. Some were institutional, such as command of the army and the national presidency, and others were political, particularly support from right-wing groups. He reinforced his leadership with the politicalelectoral resource of noncompetitive elections—the referendums of 1978 and 1980—after which he considered himself a duly “elected” president. Finally, he also resorted to tactics that could be termed “irrational,” such as the creation of the DINA, one of whose functions was originally to provide him with intelligence and advise him in the battle against Marxism (see Chapter 2). After exploring the interpretations of Pinochet’s leadership, this chapter examines the basis of his authority and power through an analysis of four factors— the army command, the presidency, support from civilian groups, and control of the DINA; the complementary impact of the noncompetitive elections; and Pinochet’s political style, including confrontation with the opposition and conciliation with his supporters and members of the governing elite.

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A Personalist or Strongman Dictatorship?

The prevailing interpretation of Pinochet’s role presents him as an all-powerful dictator, the organizer of a highly personalized regime that allowed him to impose his will whenever he chose. A North American political scientist maintains: “Personal rulership is a central rather than incidental feature of Chilean authoritarianism. Both the durability of Chilean authoritarianism and its distinctive policy performance have been rooted in the concentration of power achieved by Pinochet.”18 After examining the impact of the concentration of functions of army commander and president, this political scientist concludes: “Pinochet’s preeminence is at once the source of his regime’s durability and of its unusual policy performance.”19 In a similar vein, a researcher comments: “Pinochet’s rule has been essentially personal. While by no means identical in every respect, Pinochet’s style of rule has evident resemblances to that of Franco in Spain, Stroessner in Paraguay and Salazar in Portugal.”20 There are several problems with this interpretation. First, it shows a reductionist tendency to give priority to a micropolitical analysis focused on the individual, so the political system is understood to hinge on the decisions of one person, General Pinochet. This exaggerates the role of the individual and oversimplifies the complexity of the political process. Second, it offers an autocratic image of the political establishment, ignoring the existence of power centers beyond Pinochet’s control. This would seem to suggest that the organizational structure was closer to that of a totalitarian regime, assuming the dictatorial style described by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who believe that “the idea of totalitarian dictatorship suggests that a dictator who possesses ‘absolute power’ is placed at the head.”21

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Such an interpretation of totalitarianism does not apply to Chile, and is no longer useful even in the case of other historical examples, such as the regimes of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. This approach has been discarded because it fails to account for the complexity of the power structure. In Hitler’s case, though power was very highly concentrated in the dictator, it had limits, as several studies from the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated. Hitler created a government system that fragmented his authority across uncoordinated ministries and state agencies.22 The rivalries encouraged by political and personal jealousies among the main protagonists of the regime also created problems. Hans Mommsen went furthest in criticizing the view of Hitler’s power as being unlimited, maintaining that he was “an indecisive, insecure dictator, concerned to protect his reputation but influenced by those closest to him, making him in fact a weak dictator.”23 In a modified version of Mommsen’s view, British historian Ian Kershaw concludes that, “if not a ‘weak dictator,’ Hitler was not a ‘master in the Third Reich’ in the implied meaning of omnipotent.”24 Hitler voluntarily set limits for himself by taking into account public opinion, to which he gave considerable weight. This inhibited him from carrying out unpopular policies, even in difficult moments of the war.25 On these bases we may conclude that in a totalitarian regime the dictator’s power is limited, and this is even truer in an authoritarian regime. In Chile, authority and power were highly centralized, but within an institutional structure that included a significant decisionmaking center, the governing junta, which remained the highest authority and could on occasion rein in Pinochet’s ambitions. Some of the decisions attributed to him, such as the dismissal of air force general Gustavo Leigh in 1978, were backed by other members of the junta, who disapproved of Leigh’s constant challenges to Pinochet as damaging to the unity of the armed forces. The institutional framework allowed Pinochet to form an orderly and efficient government that never lost the initiative even in its most difficult moments, such as the economic crisis of 1982–1983 and the defeat in the 1988 referendum, as he was able to remain in power until 1990. The absence of autonomous state agencies, such as those that existed in Franco’s Spain—a single party (Franco’s “movement organization,” or movimiento-organización as it has become known in Spanish), the judiciary, the Royal Council—meant that the various interest groups could not establish centers of influence. Furthermore, in Chile, decisionmaking was not complicated institutionally, and never suffered a paralysis like that of the Franquist regime in its final years as a result of conflicting views among agencies.26 The personalization-of-power interpretation fails to consider the impact of civilian groups, specifically the technocrats and the Gremialistas, who played a decisive part in mobilizing support for Pinochet. Other major players who backed him included politicians from the National Party and figures from the government of Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964).

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As a result, Pinochet’s power and authority were never absolute. The limits were set, first, by the participation of the military in political power. Each service managed its affairs autonomously, handling its own internal promotions and retirements. The military were also determined to ensure that the workings of government adhered closely to established public administration guidelines, to avoid the excesses of highly personalized power. Their firm support of institutional order was decisive in the acceptance of the 1988 referendum defeat, in keeping to the timetable set by the constitution for calling parliamentary and presidential elections, and finally in handing over government to the victor. To understand Pinochet’s leadership, we must make an important analytical distinction. On the one hand, he played a strictly political role, as the leader of a coalition whose members included both military officers and civilians, whom he had to keep united. He also sought to create good relations with politically relevant figures outside the cabinet, whom he drew into the government sphere while mediating their views with those of his other supporters. On the other hand, he performed the institutional roles of head of state and head of government, acting as the driving force behind the regime.27 By playing both roles, he acted as a bridge between the two sides of the authoritarian regime, between a coercive irrationality based on war and an economic rationality based on strengthening private initiative and the market.28 The institutional authority of the presidency gave him power over an enormous range of areas, reinforced further by the centralization of power. This double function was based on a multipronged legitimation strategy, which relied not only on the institutional resources, the legal legitimacy, of the presidency and the army command, but also on the legitimacy of the ballot box, through two noncompetitive elections, the 1978 and 1980 referendums. On both occasions Pinochet managed to mobilize the population and win substantial support.

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Pinochet’s Professional Background

Unlike Spain’s General Franco, an outstanding military leader who earned the respect of his enemies and the admiration of his subordinates and followers, 29 Pinochet was an undistinguished soldier. He played no relevant role in the planning of the coup, which was delineated by the navy, and later by the air force and some generals from the army.30 He was not seen as a symbol, unlike Argentina’s General Onganía in 1966 (Onganía had had a distinguished military career and earned enormous prestige with his defense of the professional status of the army against attempts by the War Ministry to politicize it during the government of President José María Guido, 1964–1964).31 The senior officers who organized Chile’s coup underestimated Pinochet’s personal abilities, which drove him to act from the start with opportunistic cruelty, resorting to and encouraging the use of violence.

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Pinochet had a normal professional career, with postings in several provincial regiments,32 and service in the Military School as a lieutenant and a captain. Later, in 1964, he was a professor at the War Academy, where he became deputy director. In this post he was lucky to escape a difficult moment in 1968, when three classes of students, in protest of the army’s low wages and chronic underfunding, formally presented the director with their resignation papers, forcing the director himself to resign.33 Earlier that same year, Pinochet had been posted as head of the General Staff of General Quarters of the army’s Second Division in Santiago, under the command of General Alfredo Mahn.34 He was promoted to brigadier-general at the end of 1968. There he headed the army’s Sixth Division, based in Iquique, for two years, during which he was acting regional administrator of the province of Tarapacá for six months, thereby acquiring some experience with the workings of local government.35 At the end of 1970 he was promoted to division general36 and appointed general commander of the Santiago garrison, a post he took up on March 8, 1971, at the beginning of the Popular Unity government.37 From Santiago, he had a close view of political developments at a decisive moment in Chile’s history, and was in close contact with the government, to which he presented himself as a supporter of the constitution.38 At the end of 1971 he became the head of the army’s General Staff, working closely under its commander in chief, General Carlos Prats. When Prats was named interior minister in November 1972 and temporarily resigned the army command in order to avoid involving the institution in government, Pinochet took over briefly as its temporary commander and highest authority. A few weeks later he again took the command, while Prats was away on an official trip to Europe for six weeks, between April and June 1973. Both occasions gave him the chance to acquire detailed knowledge of the officers and the prevailing political view in the institution, knowledge he was to put to excellent use in the new authoritarian regime. Pinochet became army commander thanks to Prats, who recommended him to President Allende when Prats himself was forced to resign the command under pressure from his subordinates and the right, who attacked him through the media. Pinochet did not join the coup conspiracy of senior army officers and the other two branches until September 8, 1973.39 After the coup he broke with Prats, accusing him of leading an uprising by a sector of the army against the new authorities. Prats left Chile for Buenos Aires with the authorization of the junta and Pinochet.40 The DINA monitored his movements there closely. On September 30, 1974, Prats and his wife were killed by a car bomb placed by a DINA agent.41 Before the coup, Pinochet displayed no signs of militant anticommunism, although he had been directly involved in the repression of the communists during the 1940s, when President Gabriel González Videla (1946–1952) applied emergency and other legislation to severely limit normal civil liberties,

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suspend union activity, and outlaw the Communist Party. During this period, Pinochet was in charge of a detention camp in Pisagua.42

■

The Army High Command

Pinochet’s main power base, the principal source of his authority, was his position as head of the army, which gave him a power he exercised actively throughout the entire regime. Unfailingly every Monday, for example, he worked in the military’s Zenteno Street building, not in the presidential offices (first in the Diego Portales building and after 1981 in La Moneda, the presidential palace). Chile’s army commanders have historically had great authority, and Pinochet drew on this tradition. As long as he held the post, he was confident he could fight off any challenge from General Leigh or the opposition. He proved this in 1983, when the impact of the economic crisis and the level of mobilization by the Democratic Alliance (Alianza Democrática), the opposition coalition, led some of its leaders to believe Pinochet’s days were numbered. But Pinochet kept the lid on political discontent with the support of the army, which repressed the opposition fiercely (see Chapter 10). The Chilean army was a highly modern and professional organization with major institutional resources and a well-trained officer corps, some of whom had studied economics and political science. It was well equipped to take part in politics, in that it did not suffer from the weaknesses of a semimodern or traditional army, such as untrained officers, a weak esprit de corps, and limited notions of discipline and obedience.43 Pinochet maintained these professional characteristics of the army, since they were fundamental to his power, but he also imposed his personal standards of military leadership, promoting officers who supported his policies, particularly the “war” against Marxism. The personalization of the army command began a few days after the coup, when the promotions board and the appeals board were abolished and their powers were handed to the commander in chief.44 Changes in the high command were therefore entirely at Pinochet’s discretion, and he was able to remove officers he did not trust and replace them with those he knew would follow his orders. A gradual, cautious policy of promotions and postings allowed him to build up a council of generals loyal to his decisions.45 In April 1974 the generals who had not been in favor of the coup were forced to retire,46 including General Orlando Urbina, then the second highest commanding officer of the army’s General Staff;47 General Ernesto Baeza, who had been appointed to head the Investigaciones, Chile’s detective police force;48 and General Ervaldo Rodríguez, who was the head of the military mission in Washington, D.C., and retired in 1973.49 General Óscar Bonilla, interior minister and a former aide-de-camp to President Eduardo Frei, became the new second in command.50 Bonilla quickly lost influence, however, and in the July 1974 cabinet reshuffle was moved to the Ministry of Defense, which at that time had little weight.51

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General Augusto Lutz, a critic of the DINA’s activities who had encountered serious differences with its commander, Colonel Manuel Contreras, was sent to the southern military division in Punta Arenas, far from the center of political power.52 He was an outstanding officer who had been head of the DINE, the army’s intelligence service, at the time of the coup, where he proved his ability.53 A few weeks later he was named secretary to the junta, a key post in the regime.54 At the end of 1974, half a dozen generals were forced to retire, allowing Pinochet to promote his own supporters. Chief among these was Colonel Sergio Covarrubias, who rose to the rank of general and took charge of organizing the political advisory service, which became the new Presidential General Staff.55 Thus, by the time Pinochet had himself named president of the republic in December 1974, he could count on an army high command comprising a large number of generals he himself had appointed, who would back him completely. At the beginning of March 1975, Pinochet made more radical changes, breaking with the tradition of promotion based on seniority or service record. Just two days after the death of Bonilla,56 General Héctor Bravo, next in line to succeed Bonilla, was displaced and sent instead, as ambassador, to Thailand, and General Herman Brady was made minister of defense. General Sergio Arellano Stark was relegated to head of the General Staff of National Defense, an advisory body to the defense minister outside the command structure of the army.57 It signaled Arellano’s imminent retirement; Pinochet forced him out at the end of 1975.58 In order to form his primary political base, Pinochet had to increase the number of colonels and generals available to fill senior posts in the government and the legislative commissions. The number of generals rose from twenty-four in 1973 to fifty-three by 1986. There was an added pretext for the increase: the army needed to maintain a high defensive capability for external security reasons, as it was a difficult moment in relations with Peru and Argentina. The latter had rejected a British arbitration ruling in a conflict over sovereignty in the Beagle Channel, and the two countries were on the brink of war in December 1978.59 Pinochet’s personalized leadership of the army benefited the officers who worked closely with him; their promotions went through smoothly, unlike those of dissenters.60 There were two emblematic cases of personal favoritism, Generals Jorge Ballerino and Patricio Serré. The former worked first on the Advisory Committee to the Governing Junta (Comité Asesor de la Junta de Gobierno [COAJ]), and then directly with Pinochet for eight years, as his aide-de-camp and then as head of military attachés (the Casa Militar), from 1981 to 1985.61 He served for two years as head of the military mission in Spain,62 an important post for the army for arms purchases and parts supply in Europe. He returned to Chile to take up one of the two most powerful army posts, as chief of the military’s high command (the Comando de Institutos Militares).63 After the 1988 referendum he was appointed to a ministerial post at the Presidential Secretariat, where

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he helped address the administrative questions involving the transfer of power to the democratic authorities. General Patricio Serré’s biography was very similar, but the irregularity of his ascent through the ranks was even more marked because of his poor professional record (thirtieth in his class). He served successively as Pinochet’s private secretary, administrator of the Fourth Region for four years, secretary to the military mission in Spain, and national representative to the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington, D.C., and military attaché in the United States. When he returned to Chile, he became coordinator for the army’s training center and, from 1984, deputy minister for regional and administrative development in the Interior Ministry, an enormously influential post that allocated major economic resources for regional development projects. The appointment of a general to this post was unusual, as deputy ministers were normally colonels or lieutenant-colonels. But Pinochet wanted someone he could trust at the head of an organization that would be key for mobilizing support in the 1988 referendum campaign. Serré took an active role in planning the campaign, making political statements in favor of Pinochet’s “reelection” and pushing the “civil action plan,” a major political-electoral operation involving all the mayors, in coordination with the regional administrators and provincial governors.64 Not all those in General Pinochet’s inner circle enjoyed a successful end to their professional careers. General Covarrubias, an infantry officer who had been Pinochet’s student at the War Academy and his adjutant as commander of the army’s Sixth Division,65 was a close collaborator of Pinochet’s during the 1970s. But at the beginning of 1979 he was posted to the southern military region during the period of tension with Argentina. His remote posting was also the result, however, of his criticism of the DINA’s activities and his repeated suggestions to Pinochet that Contreras should be removed from command. Pinochet reneged on a promise to name Covarrubias deputy army commander after his time in the south, and Covarrubias was forced to retire. Later he was named deputy foreign minister, a minor appointment given his former importance. Covarrubias ended his career as alternate ambassador to the United Nations. Situations like these heightened the climate of insecurity among officers, and created a trend of showy loyalty to the commander in chief. Those who pursued successful careers in government often had undistinguished service records, which suggests that their entry into the public administration was the product of their unfailing loyalty to Pinochet. While undoubtedly the army’s organizational lines were substantially modified, it is important not to exaggerate the scale of the changes. Pinochet could not change the rules freely, because this would mean reforming the statutes of the armed forces, which would require the approval of the other branch chiefs. This became clear when Pinochet wanted to change the structure of the ranks and equivalencies among senior army officers in order to in-

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crease the number of officers available to fill government posts. He created the post of deputy commander in chief, with the rank of lieutenant-general, to oversee administrative work. The other branch chiefs opposed the change, which they found unnecessary, and did not adopt it themselves.66 Pinochet’s army command was thus institutional in character, although he introduced elements of personalized authority and power to benefit the officers he trusted. He was in constant touch with the Council of Generals: every Monday, after army business had been dealt with at the Zenteno Street building, a dozen generals were regularly invited to lunch at the Diego Portales building, and later at La Moneda. It was a way of reminding them, physically, of his double function as president and army commander in chief. His style of leadership excluded any possibility for the Council of Generals, as a body, to discuss the regime’s major political decisions—unlike the situation in the air force, where General Leigh regularly consulted his fellow generals prior to contentious decisions in the junta.

■

The Presidency: Institutional Foundations and Ratification by Plebiscite

Pinochet’s second source of authority and power was the presidency of the republic. He did not achieve it automatically after the coup, but had to work for it, in the face of opposition from the air force commander, General Leigh, and indifference on the part of the navy. He was not entirely trusted by the other junta members; they viewed him as a latecomer to the conspiracy and as an officer with a less than distinguished professional record. There was resistance to naming him president, a key appointment: the president had the power to name hundreds of senior officials, from ministers to mayors, under authority conferred by the 1925 constitution. Pinochet adopted a gradualist strategy to reach his goal. Immediately after the coup, he was named president of the junta as first among equals; it was a collective leadership. In the statutes of the junta of July 1974, his powers were widened; he was named “supreme head of the nation” in an allusion to the text of the 1925 constitution. His authority still depended, however, on the junta.67 Only in December 1974 did he formally receive the title of president of the republic, autonomous from the junta and superior to it in authority.68 Strengthening the Presidency Pinochet did not govern alone, unlike Argentina’s General Onganía, who never built a team of advisers to support his decisionmaking and thus had only a remote relationship with operation of the government. Pinochet ran the presidency through political advisers who were senior officers; they formed the Presidential General Staff. This further strengthened the presidency and allowed him to oversee management of the ministries. The adviser system meant he could simultaneously exercise command of the government and the army,

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unlike Spain’s General Franco, who was not directly involved in the government, and unlike Hitler, who hated dealing with government papers.69 Pinochet always carefully studied the issues he had to resolve, both as a member of the junta and as president. In October 1973 he called in a group of army officers, some with university degrees in economics or political science, to work as his advisers as president of the junta. They formed the basis of COAJ, the junta’s advisory committee, created in November 1973, whose members came from the three branches of the military and from the Carabineros, the national police force. The chairman of COAJ, who later acquired the rank of minister, was Colonel Julio Canessa, whose appointment was approved by the junta and Pinochet.70 Canessa also headed the National Commission for Administrative Reform (Comisión Nacional de la Reforma Administrativa [CONARA]), created in 1974, and worked on both committees simultaneously.71 Many of the officers who worked in COAJ went on to political positions.72 The Presidential General Staff, created to support Pinochet’s work as head of government, was set up in December 1974 when he became president of the republic. It was conceived as an advisory body exclusive to the presidency, separate from the junta and distinct from COAJ. Its organization was entrusted to Covarrubias, and it was modeled on the decisionmaking system of the army’s General Staff, which in turn had been modeled on decisionmaking systems in the Prussian army, whose structures were reflected in the modernization of the Chilean army at the end of the nineteenth century. An intelligent and sensible man, Covarrubias drew together a small team of officers whose task was to monitor the major policies coming out of the ministries and produce reports on key issues. He thus worked closely with Pinochet’s main civilian collaborators, particularly Jaime Guzmán, with whom he had a good relationship. He admired Guzmán’s intelligence and shared his political and religious views. This gave the Gremialistas substantial political capital and good access to Pinochet. Covarrubias was an opponent of General Contreras and believed it was a serious mistake to allow the latter such freedom.73 Covarrubias remained in the post for five years, after which he was replaced by General René Escauriaza, who had served as secretary to the junta.74 The function of the Presidential General Staff was to “act as permanent advisor, at national level, to the President of the Republic, in all aspects of the political conduct of the State, and to coordinate consultative information for the head of state from other public organizations.”75 All government agencies, whatever their legal status, were required to provide any reports, background material, and technical and administrative collaboration that the president of the republic might request, through the General Staff. One of its routine tasks was to review the texts of the numerous decrees produced by the ministries for Pinochet’s signature, and to maintain files on the work of the ministers. One of its main responsibilities was to preselect possible ministers and deputy ministers, because the president reshuffled his cabinet frequently.

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This military advisory staff not only was a source of support for Pinochet’s governing activities, but also strengthened the army. The formation of the Presidential General Staff concentrated political analysis outside the military, because the General Staff did not consult with the Council of Generals to obtain the institution’s views. Covarrubias had rejected the idea of consulting with the Council of Generals because of the risk of politicizing the council, as had happened under General Prats. He had gathered the generals frequently to inform them of developments and to solicit their opinions on governmental decisions, particularly in 1972 and 1973.76 General Leigh also consulted with his generals on issues facing the junta, which irritated both Pinochet and the navy commander, Admiral José Toribio Merino, who felt that this involved the armed forces in matters that should be left to the commanders in chief. After the approval of the 1980 constitution, Pinochet modified his presidential advisory team. He kept the Presidential General Staff and eliminated COAJ, merging it with CONARA to create the Presidential Advisory Committee (Comité Asesor Presidencial [COAP]). It was headed by then–brigadiergeneral Robert Guillard, who had ministerial rank.77 COAP’s mission was to continue to monitor the administrative reforms without interfering with the Presidential General Staff, which continued to advise the government on the more important issues. The reorganization lasted only briefly. On January 10, 1983, COAP was merged with the General Staff to create the Presidential Secretariat, which was consolidated in the following years and became a ministry in 1990 with the return to democracy. It depended directly on the head of state and was responsible for “advising in the exercise of administrative and co-legislative duties, and, when required, to provide the necessary information for making the right decisions.”78 At the same time, Pinochet concentrated his political advisers in La Moneda rather than in the Interior Ministry, where they had been located previously. It marked the declining influence of a ministry controlled by a Gremialista, Sergio Fernández (see Chapter 10). The Presidential Secretariat had wide-ranging powers and could demand “any information and background material it requires from all ministers, services and agencies of the civil administration of the state, its businesses, companies, or institutions that contribute to, participate in or represent the State.”79 Its head was in daily contact with Pinochet.80 This body was senior in status to other ministries and public departments; its head was Pinochet’s right-hand man, who was more influential than the interior minister, hardly surprising considering that senior army officers were appointed to the post. General Santiago Sinclair, its first head, for example, later became deputy commander of the army, in December 1985, and then an appointed senator, from 1990 to 1998.81 The secretariat had a large staff of eighty-seven people, with nine senior managers,82 four directors, and two chiefs. This reveals its organizational differentiation, established to attend to the various tasks of monitoring public policies and providing advice to Pinochet on decisionmaking.83 The personal

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and official functions of the Presidential Secretariat helped Pinochet maintain management coherence and overcome the risk he ran of weakening the secretariat through his habit of making frequent cabinet changes.84 Electoral Legitimation: Pinochet as Sole Candidate for President The presidency was strengthened not only through the legal-institutional structure of the 1925 constitution, but also, since Pinochet acted as the leader of a governing coalition, through political measures. Hence he resorted to national electoral tradition with a tactic used by other dictatorships: noncompetitive elections.85 This resource worked successfully on two occasions, the referendums of January 4, 1978, and September 11, 1980. The third attempt, on October 5, 1988, was a failure; Pinochet was defeated by his opponents. The first referendum was precipitated by a UN resolution that condemned the Chilean government for human rights abuses. Pinochet, however, turned the event to his own advantage.86 The idea came from a Gremialista, Eduardo Boetsch, who suggested holding a referendum to show the world Chile’s rejection of the condemnation and the enormous public support for its government, and thereby strengthen Pinochet’s leadership.87 To carry out this initiative, Pinochet had to push legality to its limits. There was no provision in the constitution for calling referendums, so he decided to give it the informal nature of a public “consultation,” which he claimed was within the president’s powers and had no legal implications. The comptroller-general of the republic, Héctor Humeres, questioned the legality of the decree that enabled the consultation.88 Pinochet solved the problem by ousting him from the post and replacing him with the minister of labor, Sergio Fernández, who duly approved the controversial legislation.89 There was opposition at first from the other members of the junta. The navy formally expressed its disapproval, an extraordinary action given that Admiral Merino had backed all of Pinochet’s major initiatives in previous years. The strongest opposition came from the air force, unsurprising given the constant tension between General Leigh and Pinochet. The referendum was also rejected by some of Pinochet’s civilian supporters, including former president Jorge Alessandri, chairman of the Council of State, which had not been consulted over the decision and saw it as a mistake, fearing the government would be defeated. To mobilize the widest possible public support, the government appealed to nationalist sentiments, claiming that Chile was facing “international aggression,” the result of “an international plot and the expression of moral decadence that seems to prevail in humanity today.” It called on the country to defend “national dignity and sovereignty.”90 The intention behind the initiative was quite explicit; it was presented as a vote in support of the government in its decision to advance “to full normality and a new institutional foundation, harmonizing freedom and security.”91 The text of the referendum question identified the defense of the nation with the figure of Pinochet, discreetly mod-

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ified, however, by an allusion to the process of institutionalization. This was the priority of the Gremialistas in the government coalition, as a way to consolidate the regime (see Chapter 5). The text read as follows: “In the face of the international aggression unleashed against our homeland, I support Present Pinochet in his defense of the dignity of Chile, and reaffirm the legitimacy of the Government of the Republic to act as sovereign head of the process of institutionalizing the country.”92 Though the opposition was firmly against the referendum, seeing it for the consolidation attempt it was,93 no electoral activities were allowed.94 The referendum was also rejected by the bishops’ conference of the Catholic Church. The government campaigned intensively through the media, and civil and military officials played an active part,95 led by the General Secretariat and its dependent civilian organizations. The Gremialista movement also played a leading role, mainly through its youth wing, the National Unity Youth Front (see Chapter 7), which brought forth hundreds of activists throughout the country and provided official observers at polling stations.96 To increase the volume of the electorate, foreigners were enfranchised, something not previously permitted under Chilean law. The majority supported the government.97 Polling was conducted without voter lists, since these had been destroyed after the coup. Nationalistic propaganda; full support from the media, which called without exception for a “yes” vote; the active role of the government’s various civilian support groups; and the campaigning of the officially sponsored youth, women’s, and workers’ organizations all helped generate a massive turnout and gave Pinochet the victory he sought. Of the 5,349,172 votes cast, 75 percent were in favor, 20 percent were against, and 5 percent were spoiled (see Table 3.3).98 The referendum gave Pinochet a new source of legitimacy from the public. He turned it against the opposition immediately with reprisals against the Christian Democratic Party; twelve of its political and union leaders were arrested and

Table 3.3

Outcome of Noncompetitive Elections Held Under the Pinochet Regime

Yes votes No votes Null and blank votes Total

1978 Referendum

%

1980 Plebiscite

%

1988 Plebiscite

%

4,012,023 1,092,226 244,921

75.00 20.20 4.80

4,204,879 1,893,420 172,569

67.00 30.00 3.00

3,119,110 3,967,579 165,254a

43.01 54.71 2.28

5,349,170

100.00

6,270,868

100.00

7,251,943

100.00

Source: Electoral Registry Directorate. Note: a. Includes 94,594 null votes (1.31%) and 70,660 blank votes (0.97%).

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sent into internal exile in the north.99 Some months later he made a drastic but long-planned move to consolidate his authority by removing General Leigh from the junta. His pretext was an interview the air force general had given to an Italian newspaper, in which Leigh had repeated his wish for a return to democracy.100 Leigh’s removal was backed by Admiral Merino and the police chief, General César Mendoza, who objected to his constant disapproval of the measures taken by Pinochet and the economic team. His dissidence created tension and slowed the administrative process. They also objected to his practice of discussing controversial government issues with his high command to obtain their support; the other junta members felt that this endangered the unity of the armed forces as a whole. The 1980 referendum was of a different nature. The ostensible purpose was not to elect Pinochet as president but to approve the new constitution drafted by a committee of experts, all of them supporters of the regime (see Chapter 5). One of the transitory articles, however, discreetly noted that he was being elected president. The referendum thus fulfilled the dual function of ratifying the new constitution and prolonging Pinochet’s mandate for eight years. But its duality was to be a source of conflict, for it created two legal authorities, which in turn gave rise to tension and problems (see Chapter 11). Pinochet used every political and economic resource at his disposal to create a favorable climate for a “yes” vote in 1980 and win an overwhelming victory. The Gremialistas again played a decisive role in the campaign,101 and the National Youth Secretariat (Secretaría Nacional de la Juventud) brought forth thousands of activists to organize the voter turnout in the working-class neighborhoods of Santiago and the provinces.102 Only the “yes” camp was allowed to mobilize politically; the opposition was banned from doing so, on punishment of arrest and internal exile.103 To distinguish this referendum from the 1978 ballot, the opposition was allowed to hold one mass meeting in Teatro Caupolicán, where the main speaker was former president Eduardo Frei Montalva, who called for a “no” vote.104 But the government took advantage of the presence of Communist Party supporters at the meeting, using this fact to discredit the opposition with a massive propaganda campaign calling on Chileans to prevent “the return of Popular Unity.” It was a good moment in Chile economically, and the referendum achieved a high turnout. Despite many irregularities at the polling stations,105 6,271,868 people voted, 67 percent in favor, 30 percent against, with only 3 percent of votes spoiled (see Table 3.3).106 This was the moment when Pinochet reached the zenith of his power, which was legitimized three ways: legally, by approval of the constitution; economically, by excellent national indicators; and politically, by major public support. According to the 1977 Chacarillas Plan, he should then have begun to apply his new institutional foundation, which meant reducing the level of

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coercion, liberalizing the regime, and bringing more civilians into the government (see Chapter 6). But the new constitution suspended this process for the following eight years; it marked the beginning of a period of “transition,” and its transitory articles bolstered the continuation of the dictatorship. For example, the government could detain people for a period of five days in their homes or in locales other than prisons, and extend the period to fifteen days “if there were serious terrorist acts.” It could also restrict freedoms of assembly and information, forbid citizens from entering the country, expel citizens from the country, and send citizens into internal exile for up to three months in an urban locale. These measures, signed by the interior minister “by order of the President of the Republic,” could not be blocked by the courts, for Transitory Article 24 of the constitution did not allow for appeals. Pinochet reverted to his true form. A few weeks after the referendum, he banned the return to Chile of the head of the Christian Democrats, Andrés Zaldívar,107 who had verbally attacked Pinochet and had tried to persuade Alessandri, president of the Council of State, to vote against the referendum. Zaldívar knew Alessandri had opposed the final draft of the constitution, because the text submitted to the referendum vote was not in line with a report by the Council of State on the matter. Pinochet did not enjoy his victory for long, however. Six months after the referendum, the first signs of deep-seated economic problems began to appear, followed by a serious economic crisis. This would cause major upheavals, forcing the regime to change its strategy of institutionalization (see Chapter 6).

■

Civilian Support

A third pillar of Pinochet’s leadership was support from various right-wing groups. As leader of the government coalition, he worked to retain their loyalty with considerable success. No right-wing figure broke with him, and their support for him continued even after the transfer of power in 1990. They defended him during his long detention in London and they challenged the process that stripped him of parliamentary privilege once he returned to Chile.108 Pinochet maintained close ties with all the civilian groups who supported the regime, a sign of limited pluralism within the government.109 At one extreme were the groups of the far right, Fatherland and Freedom and the nationalists, known as the “hard-liners,” who wanted the regime and Pinochet as its leader to stay in power indefinitely. At the other end of the spectrum were the politicians of the National Party, who backed his leadership conditionally and occasionally voiced criticisms that put them in semi-opposition.110 Then there was the economic team of the Chicago Boys, as well as Jaime Guzmán’s Gremialistas and the businessmen and professionals who had formed part of the Alessandri government and Alessandri’s subsequent 1970 presidential election campaign; these three sectors of the governing elite formed the core of the “soft-liners.” They supported Pinochet’s consolidation of power but

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wanted to limit his authority by establishing an institutional order that included civilians. Each of these civilian power groups was brought into the cabinet at some time, with the exception of the “hard-liners.” Pinochet followed a cautious policy with civilians, showing no favoritism to any group. His doors were open to all of them, creating insecurity; no one knew who would have the last word on an issue.111 From 1977 to 1980, the Gremialistas enjoyed the greatest influence, thanks to the presence of General Covarrubias in the Presidential General Staff and Sergio Fernández in the Interior Ministry. The civilian group with the most influence in the economic sphere was the Chicago Boys, a substantial number of like-minded professionals led by an economist, Sergio de Castro, during the 1970s, and by a civil engineer, Hernán Büchi, in the 1980s (see Chapter 8). During the 1982 economic crisis, Pinochet appeared to distance himself from them temporarily with the appointment of Luis Escobar Cerda as minister of finance. But he still identified with their monetary policies and trusted them. Maintaining ties with them was politically strategic, so he made the concessions necessary to allow them to regain legitimacy and return to head the economic team, as they did at the beginning of 1985 with the appointment of Büchi to the Ministry of Finance. Pinochet’s relationship with the supporters of former president Jorge Alessandri, the “Alessandristas,” was pragmatic. He needed the backing of the former president and his supporters because they were influential in the business community and right wing. He gave them an institutional role in the Council of State, although he ignored its work and dismissed the report it produced on the project for a new constitution, which mainly reflected Alessandri’s personal ideas. But Alessandri never broke with Pinochet and continued to support the military regime. This segment of the governing elite lent some historical legitimacy to the political designs of the authoritarian regime (see Chapter 5). Though he distrusted political parties generally, allowing them scant influence, Pinochet also had backing from figures in the National Party. At a difficult moment in 1983, when the worsening economic situation required an experienced politician, Pinochet turned to one of the National Party’s main leaders, former party president and former senator Sergio Onofre Jarpa, who was named interior minister and allowed to pursue a liberalization policy known as the apertura, or “opening” (see Chapter 10). Its scope was strictly limited, however, leading to Jarpa’s departure in early 1985. The civilian group Pinochet most relied on was the Gremialistas, led by Jaime Guzmán (see Chapter 7). Guzmán had a strategy for strengthening his power: he worked to get many of his associates into posts in government agencies and in the legislative commissions, and he influenced the regime’s ideological and political thinking. His aim was to use collaboration with the military regime to create a right-wing party that would be in a position of dominance when the military decided to return to barracks and leave power to

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the civilians, in which case the Gremialistas would be the decisive players in the new scenario. Pinochet was closer to Guzmán during the 1970s, while General Covarrubias was head of the Presidential General Staff. In those years, Guzmán wrote Pinochet’s main speeches, influenced important government decisions, and took part in drafting the 1980 constitution. After the 1980 referendum, Pinochet distanced himself from Guzmán and his group, feeling they had too much influence, and many of the Gremialistas lost their government positions.112 Pinochet had to turn to them again, however, beginning in 1986, in order to plan his “reelection” in the next referendum (see Chapter 11). While Pinochet’s tone toward the opposition and other countries was aggressive, the style he cultivated within the governing coalition and with his many collaborators was conciliatory. One of his former ministers remembers: “I can vouch for his respect for the formalities in personal relations, and his good manners are positively refined; he never uses bad language, even in private. I was always struck when he came into cabinet meetings by the way he took the time to shake hands and formally greet every single participant.”113 This conciliatory style toward members of his coalition recalls that of Spain’s General Franco, whose moderate tones softened the radical demands of some Franquista groups. A senior figure in Franco’s regime recalled: “The greatest moderate in the regime in the past 30 years has been [Franco] himself. [He] has been the great moderator of Franquismo. If Franco had ever let loose some of the figures who surround him, we would probably have had a passionately extremist regime.”114 Pinochet was influenced by his mistrust of his collaborators, particularly the civilians. He was suspicious of his ministers, and kept “parallel advisers” to cross-check information, “like a kind of parallel network to the cabinet; to the detriment of coordination and coherence in government work.”115 This meant he had extensive information on each minister’s work, and that nobody felt entirely secure in his post. He tolerated Sergio de Castro because he was a technocrat who did not meddle in political affairs, unlike his predecessor in the Ministry of Economy, Fernando Léniz, who had warned the junta about the negative impact of the human rights situation on economic relations with the United States and Europe.116 Pinochet delegated authority, but within very defined limits, and withdrew it without warning. When he named Sergio Fernández interior minister in 1978, he allowed him to select some of the civilian ministers.117 Fernández was duly dubbed “head of cabinet” by the official press.118 But Pinochet neutralized the ministers he did not care for through the deputy ministers, whom he dealt with directly. Among the neutralized were the minister of foreign affairs, Hernán Cubillos, a businessman with close ties to the navy,119 and the minister of education, Gonzalo Vial, the former editor of Portada. Both came from the weekly magazine Qué Pasa.120 In the Foreign Ministry the deputy minister was an army general, Enrique Valdés Puga, who ran its administrative

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side, and had his own information network in the embassies, through the military attachés. In the Education Ministry, Vial’s deputy minister was a lawyer, Alfredo Prieto. The parallel information networks led to serious problems, such as a thwarted Pinochet trip to the Philippines in March 1980, which had been promoted by the deputy minister and questioned by Cubillos. Pinochet held Cubillos responsible for the fiasco, and it cost him his post.121 Vial had been ousted three months earlier, replaced by his deputy.122 Pinochet’s treatment of Jarpa was even more aggressive. In mid-1983 he gave the minister a broad mandate to negotiate with the opposition, but shortly afterward withdrew it. He instructed Fernández to begin working on political legislation, the first step toward the “new institutional order,” whereas Jarpa believed the new political scenario—given the opposition protests and the fact that the regime was on the defensive for the first time—indicated the need to change the constitutional timetable. Pinochet then named ministers who opposed Jarpa’s apertura. In December 1983 he appointed Hugo Rosende, a lawyer and former congressman, to the Ministry of Justice; in cabinet meetings, Rosende was critical of Jarpa’s policies. At the end of 1984, Pinochet named Francisco Javier Cuadra head of the General Secretariat. Cuadra launched a confrontational policy with the opposition, in direct conflict with Jarpa’s strategy. Pinochet’s governing style created serious instability among his ministers. He carried out forty-nine cabinet reshuffles,123 of which at least thirteen were for political reasons. This style did not hurt the efficacy of government because, as Klaus von Beyme has noted,124 ministerial instability does not necessarily have negative consequences in public management; other elements, such as the civil service and the deputy ministers, can ensure continuity.125 In the Pinochet regime the deputy ministers were a major stabilizing factor, providing continuity in day-to-day business, unaffected by the changes of ministers. The work of the Presidential General Staff also helped secure effective governance. Also, positions in the vertical structure of the state—that is, among the heads of regional and provincial governments—were relatively stable. This number of cabinet shuffles is very high for a military regime that suffered no political or economic crises, with the exception of the recessions of 1975 and 1982 and the opposition mobilizations of 1983, the latter of which did not threaten the regime’s stability. Pinochet was served by a total of 133 ministers, of whom 66 were civilians and 67 were military officers. They averaged ten months in their posts.126 The longest-serving minister was Alfonso Márquez de la Plata, who served for 106 months (April 1977–November 1984) (see Table 3.4),127 followed by general and national police chief René Peri, who was minister of national properties for 91 months (December 1979–July 1987). Sergio de Castro was minister of finance for 64 months (December 1976–April 1982) and minister of economy for 20 months (April 1975–December 1976). General Bruno Siebert lasted 84 months as minister of

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public works (April 1982–March 1989), an unusually long period given that the army sets clear terms for promotions and retirements. Other long-serving ministers were Jorge Prado (78 months), Hugo Rosende (75 months), Samuel Lira (74 months), and General Santiago Sinclair, who was head of the Presidential Secretariat for 73 months.128 The high turnover is explained by Pinochet’s preference for bringing in new faces rather than switching ministers around in their posts.129 Only two men, Alfonso Márquez de la Plata130 and Hernán Felipe Errázuriz,131 served in three ministries. Quite a few served in two, including Mónica Madariaga, who served in Justice and Education; Sergio Fernández, who headed Labor and Interior, the latter on two occasions; José Piñera, in Labor and Mining; Sergio de Castro, in Economy and Finance; and Carlos Cáceres, in Finance and then Interior in the last cabinet. Pinochet did not appoint ministers who were related to him by friendship or family ties, and could not be accused of nepotism. The exceptions were justified. His cousin, Mónica Madariaga, who was his legal adviser, was an efficient official of the comptroller-general’s office and an academic in the University of Chile’s law school. Pinochet’s friend, businessman Manuel Martín, who was minister of economy for a few months, joined the cabinet when Pinochet had no trusted officials to take up jobs on the economic team, and Martín had a good reputation in the business community. Pinochet took care that his ministers left the cabinet on good terms and did not become disaffected; he kept them close to the government and maintained personal relationships with them, inviting them to major army ceremonies.132 If a minister’s departure had been contentious, he was offered another post, at an embassy, for example.133 These integration mechanisms were effective; none of Pinochet’s former ministers broke with him, as had happened in Franco’s Spain with, for example, Joaquín Ruiz Giménez,134 and in Brazil after 1964, when the ranks of the opposition were swelled by deserters from the government.135 Nor were there movements in the opposite direction; no one broke ranks in the opposition to join the Pinochet government. The impressive cohesion of the governing elite, a characteristic of the regime, came about not only because of the centripetal forces Pinochet created, but also because of his confrontational policy toward the opposition. He sought a radical separation between his supporters and his opponents, which prevented his supporters from leaving to join the opposition. The wide gap between the two sides meant there was no space in the administration for nonsupporters, who could be identified as supporting the opposition, as occurred in Franco’s Spain with the modernization of the public bureaucracy.136 This zone of political neutrality brought Franquist supporters and the democratic opposition together, allowing deserters from the regime to be received by the opposition, smoothing the way for Spain’s peaceful transition to democracy.137

The Thirteen Longest-Serving Ministers of the Pinochet Regime, by Profession and Political Profile

René Peri Sergio de Castro

91 84

Bruno Siebert

84

Sergio Fernández

Profession

Agriculture (44) Labor and Social Security (47) General Secretariat (15) National Properties Finance (64) Economy (20) Public Works

Apr. 1977–Dec. 1980 Nov. 1984–Oct. 1988

80

Interior (63) Labor (17)

Apr. 1978–Apr. 1982 July 1987–Oct. 1988 July 1976–Dec. 1977

Attorney

Mónica Madariaga

80 78

Apr. 1977–Feb. 1983 Feb. 1983–Oct. 1983 Apr. 1982–Oct. 1988

Attorney

Jorge Prado

Justice (72) Education (8) Agriculture

César Benavides

77

Interior (45) Defense (32)

July 1974–Apr. 1978 Apr. 1978–Dec. 1980

Army officer

Aug. 1983–Nov. 1984 Dec. 1979–July 1987 Dec. 1976–Apr. 1982 Apr. 1975–Dec. 1976 Apr. 1982–Mar. 1989

Agricultural engineer

President of the National Farmers Association

Agricultural businessman

Carabineros officer Economist

— Adviser to the minister of economy Member of COAJ (the advisory committee to the governing junta) General comptroller

— University professor

Army officer (military engineer)

Agricultural businessman

Legal adviser to General Pinochet President of the National Farmers Association —

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Period

Professional or Political Activity Before 1973

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Alfonso Márquez

Ministerial Post

Political Activity Before Joining the Cabinet

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Months in the Cabinet

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Table 3.4

—

University professor and lawyer for the Banking Pension Fund General comptroller employee Agricultural entrepreneur — continues

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Table 3.4

Continued

75

Hugo Rosende

Period

Profession

Professional or Political Activity Before 1973

Retired naval officer

Worked on preparing the economic program

Agricultural businessman

Dec. 1978–Dec. 1979 Dec. 1983–Mar. 1990

Attorney

Dean of law, University of Chile

Samuel Lira

74

Mining

Aug. 1982–Oct. 1988

Attorney

Santiago Sinclair

73

Presidential Secretariat

Oct. 1979–Nov. 1985

Army officer (armored cavalry)

Member of the first legislative commission Army brigadier-general

Conservative representative (1949–1965); civil law professor, University of Chile Deputy minister of mining (1962) —

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Sept. 1973–Dec. 1978

75

National Planning Office (63) Economy (12) Justice

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Roberto Kelly

Ministerial Post

Political Activity Before Joining the Cabinet

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Months in the Cabinet

Source: Author calculations.

95

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A Sultanistic Resource: The DINA

Pinochet’s fourth source of strong leadership was not rational, like the other three. It was the use of coercion against dissidents and opponents. The main responsibility for this task fell on the DINA, the secret police force created after the coup and led for four years by Colonel Manuel Contreras. This organization was specifically put in charge of the “war” against Marxism, which sprang from the conviction, widespread among the military at the time of the coup, that in Chile there were armed groups seeking to seize power (though, as we saw in Chapter 2, there were no such groups that threatened national stability). Pinochet created the DINA not only to act against the opposition, but also to keep watch on senior government officials, both civilian and military, and to prevent any dissidence from emerging to threaten the unity of the ruling elite. This angered some of his collaborators, though they blamed Contreras. Unlike “El Proceso” in Argentina, where each service acted autonomously against the terrorist organizations, in Chile the repression was centralized in one structure, the DINA, which drew on the three military branches, although army personnel soon became dominant. Officers sent to the DINA were handpicked for their excellent service records; the organization was to become the vanguard against the Marxists.138 The direction the DINA took led the other branches of the armed forces to withdraw, particularly when its role in strengthening Pinochet’s personal power became apparent. The army commander received personal daily briefings from Contreras on political developments, during which the commander must also have given Contreras instructions for action. The two officers shared a relationship of deep mutual trust, one of the darkest aspects of the military regime and one common to the relations in traditional regimes—sultanistic regimes in Juan Linz’s analysis139—in which the dictator wields broad powers at will against citizens. This power source was very important for Pinochet. It helped create the climate of war necessary to establish a full-scale rather than a softer dictatorship, which might have been possible if the regime had been launched without the DINA. But Pinochet’s intuition suggested that the anti-Marxist rhetoric must be converted into action against the left-wing organizations without worry about serious human costs. The violence spiraled brutally, a self-fulfilling prophecy of the state of war, with “casualties” and wounded.140 It will probably never be possible to establish the degree of Pinochet’s direct involvement in the orders given to assassinate political figures in Chile and abroad.141 But it is quite clear he was responsible for creating a climate that favored brutal repression by DINA personnel. His wishes were put into effect with great efficiency by Contreras, creating the dynamic of state terrorism, a result of deepening authoritarianism and the strengthening of Pinochet’s personal power. Contreras’s activities crossed the line with the assassination of Orlando Letelier, a former ambassador and minister. It was the highest expression of

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coercive irrationality to plan, in detail, a crime in the US capital and believe it would escape detection. It was the maximum expression, too, of the belief that Marxism and the communist movement had infiltrated the West. In the face of the pressure from the United States to determine responsibility for the Letelier murder, and the climate of opposition to Contreras and the DINA within the regime itself, Pinochet had no choice but to convert it into an organization within the Interior Ministry. It became the National Intelligence Center, and although Contreras was removed some months after the change, the new organization continued the ways of its predecessor and carried on with serious acts of repression. Pinochet failed to foresee the consequences of his decision to create a coercive organization with an all-powerful chief who acted in secret and with complete impunity. It was the actions of the DINA that created the lasting image of his regime and led to international condemnation of human rights abuses and ultimately his arrest in London.142 Pinochet had to pay the price of his coercive measures, and he ended up paying the price for other figures and institutions who shared responsibility for the repression, such as the judiciary and the civilians who helped refine the legal structures that made these restrictions on public freedoms possible. *

*

*

Pinochet was the regime’s strongman, but in the end he underestimated the weaknesses in the complex institutional framework he had fitted together. He failed to see that the powerful bases of his authority helped deter his goal of remaining in the presidency in the 1990s. The succession rules in the 1980 constitution undermined his personal power by setting a time limit on the presidential term and establishing a procedure for renewing his presidential mandate, the 1988 referendum, an obstacle he could not clear.143 Pinochet proved unable to define the best moment for a dignified withdrawal from the political scene. That would have meant handing over the presidency to the candidate who won the first general elections, leaving the army command, and giving up all further involvement in politics. Instead, he chose to stay on as army commander in chief and as an influence in national affairs. That decision kept alive his image as a dictator, an enemy of democracy, and the defender of General Contreras and the repression. His humiliating arrest in London came as the result of his determination to stay on the political stage. It would be confirmed by his loss of parliamentary privilege at the hands of the Chilean Supreme Court, in mid-2000, and his trial for responsibility in the deaths of the prisoners in the “caravan of death” case. Pinochet has come to a bad end. Pursued by international justice as he visited the country he most admired, he was stripped of parliamentary immunity by the Supreme Court and subjected to interrogation by Judge Juan Guzmán, before whom he was forced to appear in January 2001. He was not sentenced,

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but his political and ethical responsibility in the acts he is accused of is abundantly clear. This does not mean his influence will disappear upon his death, although right-wing leaders who previously defended him have remained silent during the legal proceedings for political reasons. His influence will last among Chileans; a substantial segment of the population will remember him with affection and admiration, while the rest repudiate him. Opinions on the man will continue to be divided in Chile, although the modernization of the economy during his regime allowed it to develop and take off, providing material benefit to many.

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Notes

1. One of the experts on this issue has noted that it was very rare for a military officer to retain both the loyalty of his institution and the support of the people: Finer (1962), p. 194. 2. Pinochet ran the government eight months longer than did Governor Gabriel Cano de Aponte (1717–1733); Collier and Sater (1996), p. 358. 3. In both cases, the pressure from Pinochet was triggered by an investigation conducted by Chile’s Chamber of Deputies on the sale of a company directed by one of his sons. On the treatment of human rights under democracy, see the excellent article by Correa Sutil (1997). See Chapter 13. 4. He agreed with Andrés Zaldívar (PDC), president of the Senate, on the canceling of September 11 as a holiday, a long-standing goal of the Concertación parliamentarians; this had always been opposed by the right, even up to the moment just before General Pinochet took steps on the matter. 5. Valenzuela (1999), esp. p. 119. 6. Lowenthal (1975), McClintock (1981), Stepan (1978). 7. Acuña and Smulovitz (1995). 8. Rouquié (1982c), Potash (1994). 9. Perina (1983). 10. Stepan (1971, 1973), Skidmore (1988). 11. He had seized power in 1958. On the political regime, see Lewis (1980), Miranda (1990). 12. Blondel (1995), p. 334. 13. Capital no. 12, July 1997, pp. 33–37. 14. I use this concept as defined by O’Donnell (1973). 15. On the Perón regime, see Rouquié (1981); on Vargas, see Skidmore (1967). 16. Varas (1987), chap. 8. 17. His anticommunism remained consistent after he consolidated his power. In 1980, Pinochet and his closest associates attended eight lectures on Marxism given at the Diego Portales building by Catholic priest José Miguel Ibáñez, an expert on Marxist ideas; Rojas Sánchez (1998), p. 255, n. 49. 18. Remmer (1989b). A different interpretation was developed by Valenzuela (1991), pp. 22, 36. 19. Remmer (1989a), p. 166. Valenzuela (1991) examines the development of the regime under the telling title of “the consolidation of one-man rule.” 20. Philip (1985), p. 141. 21. Friedrich and Brzezinski (1965), p. 31. 22. The major work by Peterson (1969) addresses the limits of Hitler’s power.

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23. Mommsen (1971), p. 702. Political scientist Funke (1989) criticizes this interpretation. 24. Kershaw (1995), p. 148. For another criticism of the thesis of the “weak dictator,” see Bracher (1976), chap. 4. 25. For example, he resisted allowing women to work in factories during the war and refused to permit price increases; Kershaw (1993), p. 77. 26. I have discussed this in Huneeus (1985a). 27. I take this double view from Beyme (1971b), p. 28. 28. Fraenkel (1984). 29. He had become a legend as the youngest general in Europe for his service in the war in Africa. See, for example, Payne (1994a). On his role in the civil war, see Tusell (1992). 30. See Huidobro (1989) for an account of a high-ranking naval officer referring to active participation in planning the coup. The opposite view, which places Pinochet as the main author of the coup d’état, is presented in Whelan (1993). Pinochet (1990) has written about his participation in his memoirs. 31. Rouquié (1982c); Potash (1984). 32. In Iquique and Pisagua, while the Law for Permanent Defense of the Democracy was in effect, and in the coal-mining zone, Coronel, as chief delegate of the zone under the state of emergency. He was also stationed in the infantry school in San Bernardo; Pinochet (1990), chap. 5. 33. Prats (1985), pp. 109–111. 34. Pinochet has evoked this event: “Once more, fate got me out of a spot that could well have been the end of my career, as happened to the director, because that year academy officers resigned to protest difficult conditions they were living in given their low salaries, and the high command later held the director responsible. I have often thought that if I had stayed there, my promotion to general could have been affected”; Pinochet (1990), p. 170. 35. Pinochet briefly recalls the period from April to early October 1969 in his memoirs; Pinochet (1990), p. 193. 36. Pinochet (1990), p. 209. He was succeeded in the Sixth Division by General Herman Brady. He received his command from General Orlando Urbina; Pinochet (1990), p. 220. 37. Pinochet (1990), pp. 209–210. 38. The political upheaval led him to act as the military head of the state of emergency decreed by the government in Santiago on four occasions that year, a post that he executed with military professionalism and loyalty toward the civilian authorities. 39. See González (2000). 40. Pinochet demanded that Prats issue a public statement denying his participation in the alleged uprising, which had been publicized abroad. 41. When the family repatriated his remains, no authorities showed up at the airport and he was buried with the utmost discretion. The army never conducted an investigation (during the regime or after) into the attack on its former commander in chief. Pinochet could not conceal his mistrust of his predecessor, implying in his memoirs that he had been politically committed to President Allende: “I do not want to believe that there could have been an understanding between Mr. Allende and General Prats, which would have meant a betrayal of the people”; Pinochet (1990), p. 236. 42. In January 1948, Pinochet headed the Pisagua detention camp, an experience that he looked back on as influential to his anticommunist position, even though he states in his memoirs that he was on good terms with some of the prisoners. He was chief of the state-of-emergency zone of the province of Coronel following a strike or-

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ganized by the coal miner’s union, which was controlled by the Communist Party. See Pinochet (1990), pp. 114–122. 43. This is the common conclusion of studies on the military and politics: Huntington (1957), Janowitz (1960, 1964), Finer (1962). 44. The navy had previously done the same; Rojas Sánchez (1998), p. 46. 45. Pinochet had sent a letter on September 18, 1973, demanding the resignation of all generals so he could dispatch them at will; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 23. 46. General Manuel Torres de la Cruz was removed from the army basically because of his poor judgment on the day of the coup. He was chief of the southern military region, based in Punta Arenas. 47. Pinochet, aware that General Orlando Urbina had not been informed of the plans for the coup, sent him to the south on other official business that day. 48. Baeza was an intelligence officer who opposed Contreras’s appointment to the DINA, because he believed that the DINA should be an intelligence body with limited goals; Marras (1989), pp. 32–33. 49. His friendship with the president of the Christian Democratic Party, Patricio Aylwin, whom he welcomed in Washington, D.C., when he passed through on his way back from an annual top-level meeting of the German Christian Democratic Union held in Hanover in 1973, must have had an effect on this. The situation is described by Aylwin (1998), p. 48. General Rolando González, who had been the minister of economy for a few days, had left the army earlier. 50. Brigadier-Generals Raúl Contreras, Sergio Nuño, and Carlos Araya, who showed “major participation in the movement against Allende,” were also removed; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 24. 51. Bonilla, an opponent of Contreras, had distanced himself from the DINA, exhibiting a moderate political profile during his visits to poblaciones, which was not consistent with Pinochet’s conservative-neoliberal position. He died in a plane crash in early March 1975 under circumstances that were never clarified. That occurrence has been blamed on the DINA, whose involvement is conceivable considering the terrorist actions it had carried out before then. There is a good account of the circumstances that surrounded the accident in Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), pp. 68–70. 52. It was interpreted as a “displacement, in military language, a huesera [bone deposit, a political graveyard]”; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 66. 53. It is not often remembered that the DINE arrested the secretary-general of the Communist Party, Luis Corvalán, on September 27, 1973, which was a great achievement for the DINE. Corvalán described this in his memoirs; Corvalán (1997), p. 185. 54. He died under strange circumstances in November 1974 at the military hospital in Santiago, where he had been taken after suffering health problems. General René Escauriaza, head of the Presidential General Staff, also acted as secretary of the junta. 55. Among those removed were Major-General Pedro Palacios, who led the takeover of the presidential palace, La Moneda, on the day of the coup, and BrigadierGeneral Joaquín Lagos, who opposed the actions of General Sergio Arellano in October 1973 during the “caravan of death.” The list is presented in Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989). One of the new brigadier-generals was Carlos Forestier, and among the major-generals were Fernando Paredes, director of the Investigaciones (the civilian police force), and Enrique Morel, Pinochet’s aide-de-camp after the coup and later minister of the General Secretariat. 56. On the accident that took Bonilla’s life and the restructuring of the army, see González (2000), pp. 469–471. 57. Gustavo Álvarez was appointed chief of the army’s General Staff, and Carlos Forestier, deputy chief; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 70.

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58. Pinochet took him along when he traveled to Spain to attend Franco’s funeral in late November 1975, fearing that he might seize power during his absence; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 105. 59. This difficult situation continued until a peace treaty was signed after the Vatican’s mediation in 1983. 60. There is extensive analysis of this in Arriagada (1985), pp. 173ff. General Ernesto Baeza stated: “It seems that he [Pinochet] did not like the generals who supported him on September 11 to feel confident enough to tell him what was really happening. This sometimes upset him. It seems that General Pinochet preferred to hear only pleasant things, and that is a mistake”; Marras (1989), pp. 15–16. 61. Pinochet kept him in both posts, which were usually two-year appointments, longer than usual. 62. Since February 1988. During his stay in Spain, Ballerino criticized the performance of the Chilean ambassador at the time, Fernando Zegers, a career diplomat, accusing him of weakness in defending the government from the criticism of Spanish politicians. Zegers was removed from his post. 63. This is one of the most important postings in the army, because the person in this position is in charge of the schools and academies (military, noncommissioned officers, and special schools, such as the War Academy, etc.). To illustrate the importance of the post, in 1973 it was held by Major-General Guillermo Pickering, an outstanding officer who was the fourth in seniority in the army and the closest associate of commander in chief General Carlos Prats. 64. He did so along with Major-General Osvaldo Hernández Pedreros, who had earlier been administrator of the Metropolitan Region. The text of the action plan was published as an insert in the magazine Hoy, November 2–8, 1987. 65. He was a military attaché in Spain when he was appointed to create this body. 66. The new post of deputy commander was created in March 1977 for the three branches, but only the army implemented it. Its powers were not different from those of the head of the army’s General Staff. That is why the first two deputy commanders in chief, Lieutenant-Generals Carlos Forestier and Washington Carrasco, held both posts simultaneously. 67. Decree Law no. 527, June 25, 1974. 68. After convincing Admiral Merino and General Mendoza that it was advisable for him to hold the title of president of the republic, Pinochet made them sign the corresponding decree, Decree Law no. 806, of December 17, 1974, thus forcing General Leigh to do likewise. Pinochet convened a solemn session in the plenary room of the Diego Portales building, where the president of the Supreme Court was to award him the presidential symbol. Leigh did not dare to exercise his right to veto and described the meeting as “dramatic and harsh” in his interview with journalist Florencia Varas (1979), pp. 59–60. 69. Mommsen (1977), p. 81, notes that Hitler “saw the task of the statesman as the setting of visionary goals rather than the handling of detailed matters of government.” 70. Article 1 of Decree Law no. 460, of May 13, 1974, which created the advisory committee to the governing junta, COAJ. For a detailed description of its work during the first year, see Un año de reconstrucción: el jefe supremo de la nación, general Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, informa al país (Santiago, 1974); “El equipo militar,” El Mercurio, March 2, 1982. COAJ included Colonel Canessa at its head; a secretariat headed by Commander Berríos; and two deputy chiefs, one for political affairs, Colonel Horacio Toro Iturra, and one for economic and social affairs, Captain Ladislao d’Hainaut, former deputy head of the navy’s General Staff; “El estado mayor técnico de la junta,” Qué Pasa, March 2, 1974, pp. 32–33. 71. Along with Canessa, who remained until 1975, COAJ was headed by army generals Patricio Torres, Alejandro Medina, Julio Fernández, and Roberto Guillard.

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72. Generals Julio Canessa, Luis Danús, Gastón Frez, Jorge Ballerino, Bruno Siebert, Fernando Lyon Salcedo, Luis Alberto Reyes, Roberto Soto Mackeney, Miguel Espinoza, Guillermo Garín, and Renato Varela; “El equipo militar,” El Mercurio, March 2, 1982, p. D3. Canessa later became deputy commander in chief of the army; Frez and Siebert became ministers; Soto Mackeney was a regional administrator and later president of the University of Chile; Garín was aide-de-camp, chief of military attachés, and head of the military mission in Spain; Ballerino followed in the same jobs as Garín and became minister of the Presidential Secretariat after the 1988 plebiscite. 73. Covarrubias states this in a video interview with CIDOC. He is claimed to have expelled Contreras; Finis Terrae University (1994), transcript of video no. 13, p. 33. 74. Covarrubias was appointed chief of the southern military zone, based in Punta Arenas, in February 1979. Escauriaza died prematurely in October of that year, and was succeeded by General Santiago Sinclair. 75. Article 1 of Decree Law no. 233, of March 26, 1977. COAJ continued to exist and focused on advising the junta. The text is also published in El Mercurio, March 27, 1977. 76. He admitted this in an interview in Finis Terrae University (1994), p. 32. 77. It materialized on December 9, 1981. Guillard remained in the post until April 22, 1982, and was succeeded by General Santiago Sinclair. COAJ continued to exist, and continued to focus on advising the junta. 78. Article 1 of Law no. 18201, of January 27, 1983. 79. Article 2 of Law no. 18201. 80. It refers to the Social and Economic Council (Consejo Económico Social), the Social Development Secretariat (Secretaría de Desarrollo Social), and the Office of Affairs Bureau (Oficina de Asuntos Especiales). The council was headed by businessman Beltrán Urenda and was an advisory body to the president. The secretariat was created in 1986 and was directed by sociologist Patricia Matte. The office was headed by Captain Sergio Rillón and focused mainly on government–Catholic Church relations. 81. He was succeeded as head of the Presidential Secretariat by Brigadier-General Sergio Valenzuela, who was minister of ODEPLAN for a few months in 1985. 82. Three were management chiefs and six were department heads. 83. Diario Oficial, April 5, 1983. In practice, the staff was even more numerous, because it included employees of other public offices and army staff on service assignments, and there were also external consultants. The Presidential Secretariat had an executive division and a research division. The first took care of the most pressing issues in General Pinochet’s agenda, such as writing his speeches, reviewing the decrees submitted by the ministries, planning Pinochet’s travel to regions, and compiling the lists of possible ministers, undersecretaries, and other high officials. A small number of people worked in the executive division, mostly military men, and it was headed by an army colonel. The research division analyzed medium- and long-term issues with a team of military officers and civilians. 84. This secretariat also took part in the campaign for the 1988 plebiscite. Its minister, Sergio Valenzuela, was part of the team that designed the electoral campaign under the supervision of the interior minister, Sergio Fernández, together with the minister of the General Secretariat, Orlando Poblete; the minister of labor, Alfonso Márquez de la Plata; and Lieutenant-General Santiago Sinclair. See Grace Gibson, “La ley del silencio,” Qué Pasa, February 18, 1988, p. 9. 85. Hermet, Rouquié, and Linz (1982). 86. The resolution of condemnation was approved by ninety-six countries, including the United States, with fourteen negative votes and twenty-six abstentions; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 179. 87. He tells about this in Boetsch (1998), pp. 168–171.

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88. “Contralor rechazó el decreto sobre Consulta,” La Tercera de la Hora, December 29, 1977, p. 2. 89. Humeres had filed for retirement. His application was quickly approved so that he would leave. 90. Decree no. 1308, January 3, 1978, of the Interior Ministry, which gave official status to the call for the referendum (consulta); the full text is presented in La Tercera de la Hora, December 28, 1977, p. 2, paras. 4–6. 91. As expressed in the call for the consulta, para. 5. 92. As if this were not enough, the ballot paper was printed with a Chilean flag in front of the option “yes” and a black square in front of the option “no.” 93. Hernán Millas, “Respuesta con Consulta,” Hoy, December 28–January 3, 1978, pp. 16–17. Those in favor of the “yes” option included ultra-right-wing lawyer Pablo Rodríguez, the national manufacturers’ association progovernment union leaders such as Guillermo Medina, and various Gremialista movement groups who were in favor of the military regime. 94. The rejection of former president Eduardo Frei Montalva is presented in Hoy, January 4–10, 1978, p. 10. On the position of the opposition, see Aylwin (1998), pp. 141–144; Zaldívar (1995), chap. 2. 95. There is information on the progovernment campaign in “Contra viento y marea,” Hoy, January 4–10, 1978, pp. 8–11. 96. The general secretary was Juan Antonio Coloma. The text of the statement in favor of the “yes” option is presented in “En marcha juvenil dan el ‘sí’ al gobierno,” La Tercera de la Hora, December 29, 1977, p. 2. 97. Article 2 of Decree no. 1308. 98. The results and the opinions of government officials and opposition spokespersons are in Abraham Santibáñez, “El triunfo de Pinochet,” Hoy, January 11–17, 1978, along with the opinions of former senator Pedro Ibáñez and Christian Democratic Party leader Andrés Zaldívar. Also see Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 185. 99. Among them were Ignacio Balbontín, Belisario Velasco, Juan Manuel Sepúlveda, and Andrés Aylwin. The latter has described the experience; Aylwin (1989). 100. Leigh had voiced the need to return to democracy in his speech inaugurating the Aviation School’s activities in March 1978, which is reproduced in Varas (1979), pp. 159–165. Leigh later wrote Pinochet a memorandum specifying the need for a fiveyear period to establish a new institutional order in which new political laws would be passed, which is reproduced in Varas (1979), pp. 153–157. 101. Jovino Novoa, deputy minister of the General Secretariat and a founder of the Gremialista movement, stood out in this. He was elected senator in 1997, while he was also serving as president of the Independent Democratic Union, UDI (1994–1998). He was elected again in 2004. 102. They also convened hundreds of professionals to set up voting tables and watch the polls. On August 21, 1980, an organization of proregime young professionals was set up (Comando de Profesionales Jóvenes 11 de Septiembre), consisting mainly of Gremialistas. Public figures and organizations made multiple statements in the media, among them professors from Catholic University’s law school, signed by Dean Sergio Gaete, who would later become minister of education, and by the main figures of the Gremialista movement: Jaime Guzmán, Hernán Larraín, Raúl Lecaros, Andrés Chadwick, and Jaime del Valle. See El Mercurio, August 24, 1980. 103. People were detained throughout the country. A summary of events and a list of those who were detained are in Zaldívar (1995), pp. 238–243. 104. His speech was broadcast nationwide on several radio stations. Good descriptions of the atmosphere surrounding the event can be found in Aylwin (1998), Zaldívar (1995).

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105. The major irregularities were denounced in a document signed by public figures of the democratic opposition and submitted to the national electoral college; printed in Zaldívar (1995), pp. 277–290. 106. Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 330. 107. He had traveled to Italy after being invited by that country’s Christian Democratic Party. Zaldívar explains that the decision was based on an interview that was altered by the Mexican newspaper that published it, Uno Más Uno, and does not rule out the possibility that it may have been a move by the CNI; Zaldívar (1995), p. 299. 108. They contributed, together with the army, to cover the expenses of his stay in the British capital, as well as lawyers’ and physicians’ fees. 109. Limited pluralism and its relevance under the authoritarian regime were originally raised by Juan Linz (1964) and are discussed in Chapter 1. 110. I use the concept of Linz (1973b). 111. His style was to maintain “parallel consultancies”; Fernández (1994), p. 180. 112. Tensions between Pinochet and the Gremialista movement are examined in Chapter 10. 113. Errázuriz (1998), p. 278. 114. Interview with José María Areilza by Paniker (1969), p. 305. 115. “Parallel advisers” is the term used by the former interior minister; Fernández (1994), p. 180. 116. AHJG, sess. 177, December 11, 1974. We will return to this issue in Chapter 8. 117. “I asked the President to allow me the freedom to make the appointments for some positions in the ministry”; Fernández (1994), p. 28. 118. “Sergio Fernández nuevo ministro del interior,” La Tercera, April 13, 1978, p. 11; “Superministro es ex Contralor,” La Tercera, April 14, 1978, p. 2; “Superministro ‘Fernández’ elogió equipo para nueva etapa,” La Tercera, April 15, 1978, p. 1; “Sergio Fernández: ‘el premier’ chileno,” Qué Pasa, April 20–26, 1978, p. 5. 119. He reached the rank of naval lieutenant and later became a top executive with the El Mercurio publishing company. His father had been a rear admiral and ambassador in Brazil during the regime’s early years. 120. This weekly had criticized the DINA’s actions since late 1975, and provided extensive coverage of the Letelier-Moffit case. 121. As told by Fernández (1994), pp. 124–125. 122. Fernández (1994), p. 99, does not hide his disappointment with this decision. 123. There was only one change in his ministers in 1981, 1986, and 1989. In early November 1984, a morning paper headline announced that the cabinet had seen thirtysix changes in eleven years; “36 cambios ha tenido el gabinete en 11 años,” El Mercurio, November 6, 1984. 124. Beyme (1978). 125. The military is accustomed to continuity in administrative management, which is independent of changes in the officer staff that occur, given that military careers are highly unstable, with frequent posting changes. 126. Las ideas (1990) lists all ministers, with brief biographical data on each. For the period ending with the 1988 plebiscite, the table “Los ministros y la evolución del régimen,” in El Mercurio, October 23, 1988, p. D2, is quite useful. My count of ministers does not include the vice presidents of CORFO or the secretary of energy, who had ministerial standing. 127. He was initially minister of agriculture (April 1977–December 1980), later minister of the General Secretariat (August 1983–November 1984), and finally minister of labor and social security (November 1984–October 1988).

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128. He later became deputy commander in chief of the army and member of the junta, from November 1988 to December 1989, and was appointed senator by the National Security Council in 1989, representing the army. 129. He made an exception in this matter with military ministers General Óscar Bonilla and General César Raúl Benavides, both in Interior and later Defense; General Luis Danús, in Economy for a few months and then in ODEPLAN; General Sergio Valenzuela, in ODEPLAN and then in the Presidential Secretariat; and Rear Admiral Patricio Carvajal, in Foreign Affairs and later Defense. 130. He was a minister in three ministries: Agriculture, Labor and Social Security, and the General Secretariat. He was not an influential person in the government. He is the president of the Augusto Pinochet Foundation, created by his partisans to disseminate the work of his government. 131. Mining, General Secretariat, and Foreign Affairs. He was ambassador to the United States in the 1980s, until the 1988 plebiscite. Pinochet valued his intelligence and loyalty; having been a cadet at the Military School, he belonged to the “military family,” which was also a point in his favor. He had worked closely with the Chicago Boys since joining the Central Bank in 1977. He was one of the few who had not belonged to the Gremialista movement in his college years. 132. The former minister of education, Gonzalo Vial Correa, who was fired by Pinochet, has a different view on this. See Vial Correa (1998b), p. 266. 133. Francisco Javier Cuadra, minister of the General Secretariat, was appointed ambassador to the Vatican when Sergio Fernández was sworn in as interior minister in 1987. Mónica Madariaga, who had been in the Ministries of Justice and Education, also went off to an embassy, moving into the Organization of American States after making enemies of numerous members of the military during her brief administration of the Ministry of Education. Some examples of exits without conflict were Juan Carlos Délano, former minister of economy, who was sent to the United Kingdom, and Alfredo Prieto, former minister of education, who was appointed to the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in Paris. 134. He was minister of education from 1953 to 1956, and left the government due to the upheaval in the universities; Tusell (1984). 135. The only exception was Raúl Sáez: he was not exactly a minister, but rather an economic adviser to the governing junta. Gonzalo Vial voted for the “yes” option in the 1988 plebiscite, and was later a member of the Rettig Commission, but he did not break with Pinochet and publicly defended him when he was arrested in London. 136. Analyzed in Nohlen and Huneeus (1984), on Spain under Franco. 137. I examined this issue in Huneeus (1985b), chap. 1. 138. Contreras involved the prestigious War Academy in the establishment of this repressive body. When he faced justice for the assassination of Letelier, he stated that he was appointed director (of the academy) after the military coup and that he began to plan the DINA with officers who were professors or students there; González (2000), p. 437. 139. It is a traditional society and has a political system with no institutional participation by the military; Chehabi and Linz (1998). 140. Gellately (1990) is an interesting study of the actions of the Gestapo, the functional equivalent of the DINA under the Nazi regime. 141. Former army commander in chief General Carlos Prats and his wife, assassinated in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974; Allende’s former minister, Orlando Letelier, killed on September 21, 1976, in Washington, D.C., along with a US citizen, Ronni Moffit; and the failed attempt to murder former interior minister and former vice

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president of Chile, Christian Democrat Bernardo Leighton and his wife, Ana Fresno, in Rome in September 1975. 142. The Supreme Court sentenced Contreras to eight years in prison for his responsibility in the murders of Letelier and Moffit. Pinochet tried everything in his power to prevent the sentence from being applied, but Contreras did go to prison and served his sentence. 143. I have analyzed this in Huneeus (1987).

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4 The Role of the Military

The case of Chile stands out among military regimes due to the extensive participation of military personnel, especially army officers, in key positions of authority. Members of the military considered themselves the sole elite capable of pushing through the economic and political changes that the country required,1 taking their participation in the executive and legalization of powers to considerable lengths and taking major positions in much of the political system.2 The level of military participation went well beyond that in other Latin American cases in every sense;3 military officers became ministers and deputy ministers, ambassadors, regional administrators and provincial governors, and even university presidents. Officers held political portfolios, such as interior minister or minister of the General Secretariat, and also participated heavily in governing the economic sector, in positions such as minister and especially deputy minister of finance and of economy. After some initial hesitation, officers learned to share power with the various civilian groups involved in running the government. Relationships with civilians weren’t always smooth, with major friction in the early years arising with the Chicago Boys, because the military mistrusted the neoliberal policies that favored the concentration of power in a handful of economic groups. General Pinochet played an important role mediating between the military and civilian interests, and managed to win the support of both, keeping the governing elite united. Military officers exercised legislative powers through the governing junta, composed of the commanders in chief of the three branches of the military and the general director of the Carabineros. This was the sole governing body in which the branches of the armed forces participated as equals. From the moment the 1980 constitution came into effect, the navy held the presidency of the junta through its commander in chief, Admiral José Toribio Merino. The executive branch, however, was clearly ruled by the army, especially after 1978, when General Pinochet forced air force commander in chief General 107

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Gustavo Leigh to resign, and after the 1980 constitution came into effect, which declared Pinochet a constitutionally elected president. Changes in the political order clearly favored a regime run by the army rather than the armed forces as a whole. Several factors, examined in this chapter, contributed to the army’s rise to supremacy: the nature of the regime, particularly its high level of personalization in the figure of General Pinochet and the lack of institutionalization of power; the historical reality of the army as the most important branch among national defense institutions; and the fact that the army had the most personnel of all the branches, which allowed it to place its officers in key advisory and administrative positions without weakening itself. This last point was a major factor in dissuading the navy from playing a more leading role, despite the fact that it planned the coup. The navy was a smaller institution, and its officers were busy in the various naval zones in Valparaiso and the south, limiting its ability to participate in the government.4 The military’s support was decisive in consolidating General Pinochet’s leadership, as the preceding chapter showed. He held on to the position of army commander in chief precisely because it served as a solid foundation for his authority and power, and he actively exercised this role, dedicating one day a week exclusively to army affairs. Moreover, his style of political leadership was marked by the principles of military strategy, and he constantly insisted on the idea that the country was at war. What was the basis for the military’s participation in the exercise of power? What were the main characteristics of its presence in and influence on the political system? What were the consequences of the military’s participation in politics, and how did it influence political developments? What consequences did political participation have on the professionalism of the armed forces? The answers to these questions are essential to understanding the character and long life of the Pinochet regime.

■

Military Participation Without Politicization

The military’s participation in power positions occurred in such a way that it did not politicize the armed forces, nor did it produce the internal divisions and struggles typical of military involvement in other Latin American countries. Several mechanisms prevented the military from becoming politicized. The first was that political decisions were centralized in the commanders in chief of the three branches of the armed forces and in the junta. Within the branches themselves, there was no discussion of or participation in political decisions, since General Pinochet did not consult the Council of Generals when it came to making a decision; nor did Admiral José Toribio Merino in the case of the navy.5 Only in the case of the air force, under General Gustavo Leigh, were generals regularly consulted.6 Leigh sought to secure the generals’ support for his positions that were critical of Pinochet, though the other commanders in chief objected, concerned that it would damage the unity of the armed forces.

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Second, officers in political positions functioned as individuals, and their posts did not reflect their military rank. Thus a general could be a regional administrator and a colonel, and an undersecretary in a ministry, a post that, administratively speaking, was higher in the hierarchy. Upon leaving the government and resuming their professional military roles, these officers would maintain their seniority, but receive no additional benefits on their military résumés. Third, the armed forces remained professional, and within the branches military subordination and solid respect for command were maintained. Discipline was generally good, encouraged by the refined level of administrative development in the armed forces. The military had a strong esprit de corps and a powerful sense of internal cohesion that helped its members to resist political tensions arising from running the government. This professionalism made their performance in the government viable. In a semimodern or traditional army, by contrast, officers would not have had suitable preparation and would have suffered from a weak esprit de corps and a limited sense of discipline and respect for command. In line with H. E. Chehabi and Juan Linz, however, we must distinguish analytically between professionalization and autonomy, because it is possible to have a highly professional army with little autonomy, a situation that arises when officer appointments are subject to the personal whims of the commander in chief or head of government.7 The armed forces in Chile were both professional and autonomous. Pinochet had no authority over the other branches, and in each, generally speaking, the traditional rules for promoting and retiring members, according to established criteria involving objective evaluations of their professional performance, were maintained. The unity of the armed forces was a priority for the commanders in chief, whose support increased the regime’s stability and helped allow General Pinochet to remain as head of state. This support base was even decisive at critical moments, such as in 1983, when serious crisis provoked a massive citizen protest (see Chapter 10), and in 1988, during the plebiscite, when there was major disagreement about Pinochet’s candidacy among the regime’s civilian groups and some reluctance within the navy. Military personnel participated in government during the entire time the regime existed, a fact that contradicts the common view in studies about the military that officers participate in government only during an initial phase, until they are replaced by civilian officials or by technocrats with no clear political party affiliation. Political scientist Amos Perlmutter maintains that military officers may be the center of power, yet only a few officers are visible, and the military does not interfere in policy and in the administration of the state and the economy.8 Linz describes this dynamics: In regimes arising from military action, the army enjoys a privileged position and remains in the main positions, but it soon co-opts politicians, functionar-

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The Pinochet Regime ies and technicians, who increasingly become the ones making most decisions. The more consolidated a regime, the fewer the number of strictly military personages involved in the government. In this sense, it may be a mistake to speak of a military dictatorship, even when the head-of-state is a military officer. In fact, it is likely that [he] will carry out a careful program of depoliticizing and professionalizing the Army at the same time as he maintains close ties with the officers’ corps, in order to retain their loyalty.9

Another important analytical approach ascribes military involvement in politics and the military’s use of extreme coercion to the influence of national security doctrine, which the United States taught Latin American armies through courses as part of support programs, especially courses on increasing the ability to fight guerrilla organizations, in the 1960s.10 The ostensible reason for this training was the presence of paramilitary movements aiming to overthrow governments throughout the region, especially in Central America, Colombia, and Venezuela. The doctrine spelled out ways to combat the groups and spelled out a number of reasons for the groups’ arrival on the scene, citing economic, political, and social conditions that needed to change in order to prevent the groups from spreading. According to the thinking encouraged by the doctrine, the armed forces should have an overview of the country’s development and become involved in its progress, and thus expand their professional role.11 War academies were created to study these issues and train members of the military, civilians working in public service, and private companies on extensive matters related to national security. Brazil’s Superior War School (Escola Superior de Guerra [ESG])12 and Peru’s Center for Advanced Military Studies (Centro de Altos Estudios Militares [CAEM])13 were the main institutions along this line. They helped military officers develop clearly defined positions on economic and social issues, and helped shape their message while they held power. The ESG and CAEM gave the military and its branches a broader view of their mission, strengthening their self-awareness as institutions and giving them more autonomy from civilian groups. Latin American militaries received training in politics and economics, training that was put to use when they took power and formed governments. Similarly, the program allowed members of the military to develop a closer relationship with civilians coming from public administration and from business, facilitating cooperation when military officers later took over the government. The Chilean military, unlike the militaries of Brazil and Peru, did not follow national security doctrine in the 1960s, but rather remained relatively immune to it. Its influence is not apparent in Chilean military speeches or professional publications.14 It was only after the 1973 coup that this doctrine was introduced, through close cooperation with the Brazilian military, which helped the Chilean government to organize itself especially in terms of intelligence and security services.15 The impact of this doctrine was behind the creation of the National Academy for Political and Strategic Studies (Academia Nacional de Estudios Políticos y Estratégicos [ANEPE]), which trained

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Chile’s upper-level public service personnel and military officers, similar to training undertaken by the ESG and CAEM. However, ANEPE had little influence on the authoritarian regime’s policies and was marginal. Strong military tradition, fostered in the Prussian modernization of the Chilean army in the late nineteenth century,16 protected the country from ideological influence from the national security programs run by the United States. The coercion applied during the early years of the Pinochet regime should not be attributed so much to national security doctrine but rather to the rules of military conduct, which officers adhered to with singular vehemence when it came to maintaining the state of “war” against Marxism. The declaration of war was based more on political and ideological fundamentals already present within Chile’s military tradition than on external factors. There was already an anticommunist tradition prior to World War II, which reemerged in the regime’s actions against left-wing organizations. Very important in the anticommunist tradition of the Chilean military was the targeting of communists carried out by the government of Gabriel González Videla (Radical Party, 1946–1952). The government brought the military into active participation in its anticommunist activity. Although the support of the Communist Party was key to his election and he appointed three communist leaders as cabinet ministers, González Videla broke with them in 1947 and launched a campaign of persecution against the party. He targeted its union leaders through states of exception, a constitutional tool he used to restrict people’s political and civil rights. This policy began in August 1947 and lasted until February 1950, when a cabinet known for being “socially sensitive,” made up of Radical Party ministers from the Falange and social conservative Christians, was formed. The coal unions of Lota and Coronel in southern Chile, as well as workers at the big copper companies and in manufacturing and transportation in central and northern Chile, suffered this persecution. With the Law for Permanent Defense of the Democracy (known as la ley maldita, “the accursed law”) of September 3, 1948, González Videla stripped the communists from the electoral rolls and purged hundreds of militants from the civil service. Through numerous speeches in Santiago and provincial cities, the president spread this anticommunism, which dominated the national scene for almost three years, leaving its mark on right-wing elites and the army as well as segments of the working class. A large number of military officers were involved in the maintenance of public order and in repressive measures as heads of zones where states of emergency had been declared. Pinochet was among them, as a captain in Pisagua and Lota. This experience had great influence on the formation of his political ideas. The minister of defense throughout González Videla’s government was the commander in chief of the army, General Guillermo Barrios Tirado. The interior minister, until February 1950, was a military officer as well, Vice Admiral Inmanuel Holger.

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Hundreds of union and Communist Party leaders were sent to detention camps in Pisagua and to sites outside the country. The great majority of generals who were part of the Pinochet regime in the 1970s were personally involved in this anticommunist period of Chilean history, a fact that one must keep in mind to understand the virulence of the anticommunist rhetoric and actions of the regime. Military officers could not remain neutral, or outside the political conflict, despite their claims of distance from society and politics.17

■

Worsening Civilian-Military Relations

The magnitude and depth of military participation in the authoritarian regime are explained by a radical and critical view of the Chilean political scene, a view that prevailed among officers prior to the military coup. Its roots lie in the critique of the country’s political direction, in officers’ discontent with civilian disinterest in the problems threatening national defense, and above all, in poor financial conditions affecting the armed forces, particularly low wages. Recent administrations, from the government of Carlos Ibáñez de Campo (1952–1958) onward, did not increase the defense budget to match inflation, so military institutions were unable to upgrade their weaponry or ensure that their wages maintained their real value. The military viewed the governments of the various parties as indifferent to their ability to defend the country. This situation worsened during the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970),18 during which members of the military watched as various segments of society, students, urban workers, campesinos (rural people), and even shantytown dwellers received economic advantages, while their own demands went unanswered.19 The military’s displeasure was conveyed to the high command in 1968, when three classes of officers of the army’s War Academy presented the academy director with their resignations, arguing that their wages were not enough to maintain their families.20 This act of protest created a delicate political situation in the government, which led to the resignation of the army commander in chief and the minister of defense, Juan de Dios Carmona (PDC),21 the latter of whom was replaced by retired general Tulio Marambio, under the belief that this measure would allow President Frei to regain the military’s trust. The army’s concerns, however, did not disappear, because expected solutions were slow to materialize. There was a breakdown of discipline during the 1969 military parade,22 and some weeks later, on October 21, 1969, a serious act of rebellion, when General Roberto Viaux seized control of the Tacna regiment in an incident that became known as the tacnazo.23 The general received expressions of support from many army officers, who refused to act when required by the government. His action excited sympathy in the other branches of the military as well. This situation did not develop into a full-blown coup, because the rebel officers had no such intention, given the loyalty to the constitution within the army’s rank and file.24 The seriousness of this event was amplified by the ambiguous responses from opposition politicians, who did

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not unanimously condemn Viaux’s stance and support the constitutional order that he was threatening. The general received understanding from the leadership of the National Party and from some Socialist Party leaders, including a senator who visited him. Socialists interpreted the tacnazo as a progressive gesture from a sector within the army, similar to the situation in Peru one year earlier.25 This event seriously damaged civilian-military relations, especially between military officers and the Christian Democratic Party, and its consequences were felt in the years to follow and during the Pinochet regime. This incident precipitated the removal of the minister of defense and the army commander in chief, General Sergio Castillo Aránguiz. Frei appointed Sergio Ossa Pretot to the defense post. He was an engineer and a successful businessman who had organized a new government office to promote the rights of the popular sectors (Oficina de Promoción Popular). General René Schneider became army commander in chief. Schneider was seventh in terms of seniority, forcing the retirement of another six generals.26 General Carlos Prats, who was next in seniority, was appointed head of the army’s General Staff. Complaints came from the military that the Frei government had neglected the economic and professional needs of national defense institutions, which took a heavy toll on the image of the top government ministers and leaders in the military’s eyes. General Prats expressed this clearly: “The [Christian Democratic Party] is committing a serious historical error in treating the armed forces with contempt, with an attitude that has given rise to thirty-five years of growing professional frustration with the neglect of their [the military’s] technical and professional development and their social needs by one government after another.”27 Tension again rippled through the military in 1970, when the possible election of Salvador Allende, Popular Unity’s socialist candidate for the presidency, gave rise to concern in some sectors about the military’s possible attitude toward a left-wing government supported by the Communist and Socialist Parties. The army commander in chief, General René Schneider, declared that the institution would respect the constitution, which meant that the military would heed citizens’ decision, whatever the results of the election.28 However, pressure from the extreme right to prevent Allende from becoming president broke through normal institutional limits, apparent in, among other things, the action of a commando unit supported by General Viaux that kidnapped General Schneider on October 22. Schneider was badly wounded and died three days later. This was an extraordinarily serious event at a very delicate point. Schneider was highly respected throughout his institution for his distinguished career and his effective work as army commander in restoring discipline and spirit.29 He had become a symbol of the professional officer, and his death was the first act of violence against a high-ranking government official since the assassination of minister Diego Portales in 1837. The killing of Schneider would be followed by that of the former vice president of Chile, Edmundo Pérez Zujovic (PDC), assassinated by an ultra-left-wing group in 1971, and that of General Carlos Prats, murdered by DINA agents in 1974.

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Growing Military Political Participation Under Allende

Military officers were no strangers to public sector management; in fact, they had been drawn into government under Allende, working in various capacities linked to political ends and receiving a favorable reception from the opposition media. In early November 1972, army commander in chief General Carlos Prats became interior minister, accompanied by Vice Admiral Ismael Huerta as minister of public works and transportation and General Claudio Sepúlveda as minister of mining. They remained in those positions until after the March 3, 1973, congressional elections. Officers were then called upon to participate in the Ministry of Economy. In fact, by late January 1973, the economy minister, Orlando Millas, a communist, resorted to military support to deal with the distribution of articles of basic necessity, given serious shortages throughout the country that had grown worse due to conflicts with the wholesale and retail store owner associations. For this purpose, he appointed an air force general, Alberto Bachelet Martínez, as director of the National Distribution and Commercialization Secretariat (Secretaría Nacional de Distribucion y Comercializacion).30 One event that increased opposition to the government was the educational reform known as Unified National School (Escuela Nacional Unificada [ENU]). This initiative was criticized by the opposition and the Catholic Church, who said it did not guarantee pluralism. Criticism within the military led to sharp questions from officers of the three military branches to education minister Jorge Tapia Valdés (Radical Party), after a presentation in the defense ministry’s auditorium on April 11, 1973. Rear Admiral Ismael Huerta, who had resigned some weeks earlier as public works minister, was particularly harsh, accusing the government of using this initiative to brainwash young people with Marxist ideology, and garnering applause from those present, including sixty officers.31 In a later meeting with officers from the Santiago garrison, General Prats was subject to clear disrespect when he criticized the behavior of the officers present in the meeting with Tapia.32 The ENU program became an issue that further radicalized the officers who were most critical of Popular Unity, those who saw the government as becoming increasingly totalitarian. Another aspect of the military’s growing involvement in politics was the military justice system’s application of the 1972 weapons control law, promoted by the opposition and supported by the executive branch.33 Supporters of this legal measure argued that it was justified by evidence that Popular Unity party members had many weapons. The law gave the Defense Ministry, through the general recruitment office, control over weapons, and strictly prohibited nonmilitary weapon possession. The military justice system could order searches of companies and homes where there were signs of weapons, based on reports or investigations. During the months prior to the coup, many searches were conducted in Santiago and other cities, which were covered in

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depth by the press.34 The weapons that had been reported were not always found, but these searches were very important, because they allowed the military to expand its information about the level of organization of the most radical left-wing groups. The military also acquired experience in maintaining public order, which was very useful at the time of the coup. These searches, conducted by many soldiers in various parts of the country, grew more frequent as September 11, 1973, neared, with the military attempting to strip leftwing groups of their supposed weaponry. In early July 1973, air force regulars carried out a massive search in Santiago’s city cemetery.35 That same day, navy regulars conducted another search, in Valparaiso, in warehouses belonging to the state-owned company National Distribution (Distribuidora Nacional).36 The next day, the army and the Carabineros together searched the home of a member of the United People’s Action Movement (Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria [MAPU]).37 Some searches involved large contingents of soldiers, and made an enormous impact on the population. In July 1973, the Normal School in Angol was searched by troops from the Húsares cavalry regiment, headed by the unit commander.38 That same day there were two more searches in Valparaiso: one of the premises of the National Company for Distribution (Empresa Nacional de Distribución [Enadi]), by 200 navy infantrymen; and another of a plant belonging to the United Brewing Company (Compañía de Cervecerías Unidas [CCU]), by 350 soldiers from the Quillota cavalry school, ordered by the school’s deputy director.39 One month later, there was a search in Quillota.40 These activities continued in the weeks that followed in various places, among them the Van Buren hospital in Valparaiso and parts of the nearby city of Viña del Mar, revealing an enormous amount of navy involvement in the searches. In early September 1973, army soldiers, under the command of the Tucapel Eighth Regiment in Cautín, with support from the air force Third Group, also with the knowledge and under the supervision of their commander, searched a guerrilla camp in the mountains in that province, without reporting the number of guerrillas or weapons found.41 So irrelevant were the findings that the operation was never mentioned again. It was clear that Chile at that time did not offer the political and geographical conditions required for a guerrilla movement, such as those of Venezuela, Colombia, or Bolivia. A few days later, regulars from the navy’s Second Zone, based in Talcahuano, searched the premises of the San Vicente Petroquímica and Petrodow companies.42 Soldiers and police unblocked several roads around Chillán that had been held by workers.43 In Santiago, the Sumar plant, whose workers were open supporters of the Popular Unity government and the main force in the industrial belts, was searched on September 7 by members of Santiago’s air force garrison, an operation that the workers resisted, resulting in several minor skirmishes.44 Such massive searches clearly indicated the military’s decision to apply the weapons control law with no exceptions, even in plants that were part of

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the industrial belt. A few days before the coup, soldiers from the Tacna regiment entered a well-known Santiago high school, arguing they had been attacked by students. On the night of September 9, 1973, the military was more direct in its application of the law, sending soldiers from the Buin regiment to stop and search vehicles in one sector of the city.45 The operations also created tension between the military and government parties, especially the Socialist Party, whose members could not accept the military’s actions because they felt directly attacked by them, as had occurred before in the city of Rancagua,46 although at the same time the Socialist Party criticized opposition strikes and protests, calling them procoup initiatives.47 With these operations, the military developed a relatively clear view of its ability to act against the more radical sectors within Popular Unity, acquiring the experience necessary to act against potential armed civilian groups when it staged the coup. They knew that the left did not have a significant number of weapons, and that there were no movements militarily prepared to resist a well-organized coup led by the military high command. Nonetheless, these incidents created a climate of confrontation with left-wing groups that justified the use of violence once power was seized, and help explain how the military came to participate in the authoritarian regime and reject the political scene in Chile during the years prior to the coup.

■

Military Participation in Government Ministries

The unique nature of the Chilean case, in terms of broad participation by many officers, becomes clearer when compared to other authoritarian experiences. In the Argentine regimes, headed by General Juan Carlos Onganía, Roberto Levingston, and Alejandro Lanusse (1966–1973)48 and then by the “El Proceso” officers (1976–1983), and in those of Brazil (1964–1985), the military’s presence at the head of ministries was very limited (see Table 4.1), with a few exceptions. In both countries, military officers never headed economic, agricultural, or health ministries, as occurred during the Pinochet regime. In the case of Argentina, the military’s participation in the labor and social security portfolios was an exception, reflecting the regime’s need to obtain cooperation from the Peronist union movement, based on respect for the movement’s political and economic power in those areas, particularly concerning social security.49 During the seventeen years that Chile’s military regime ruled, military personnel were present in all ministries, including Justice, which was headed by a Carabineros general for nine months, from 1974 to 1975.50 Of the 133 ministers in office during the military regime, 67 were from the military, with 37 from the army (55 percent of military ministers), 11 from the navy (16 percent), 11 from the air force (16 percent), and 8 from the Carabineros (12 percent). During the early years of the military regime, the level of military participation in the government was very high, with each branch of the armed forces and the Carabineros controlling a specific sector of governmental activ-

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The Role of the Military Table 4.1

Structure of Ruling Coalitions in Military Regimes in Argentina, 1966–1973 and 1976–1986, and Brazil, 1964–1983

Argentina Interior Foreign Affairs Justice Economy Labor Agriculture Finance Industry and Commerce Energy and Mining Public Works Transportation Defense Social Security Education Planning Health and Environment Housing Information General Secretariat

Total

117

Military Officers

Total Personnel

6 3 1 — 4 — — —

11 10 11 6 8 2 9 4

— — 1 3 5 1 1 1

3 6 2 8 13 11 3 3

— 1 3

3 2 3

30

118

Brazil

Military Officers

Interior Justice Foreign Affairs War Navy Air Force Finance Transportation and Public Works Industry and Commerce Agriculture Education Labor and Social Security Economic Planning and Coordination Communications Health Information Agrarian Reform Military Affairs Civilian Affairs National Information Service Presidential Secretariat Mining and Energy Social Welfare

Total Personnel

3 — — 7 6 5 —

5 10 6 7 6 5 5

3 1

4 8

— 2

8 8

1

6

— 2 — — 1 6 2

5 4 7 1 1 6 4

5 —

5 1

— — 44

5 3 120

Source: Keesings’ Contemporary Archives.

ity, roughly following a balanced distribution of ministerial positions, with most going to the army.51 The army took charge of the portfolios of Interior, Defense, and Public Works, the navy headed Foreign Affairs and Education, the Air Force was involved in Labor and Social Security, Health, and Transportation and Communication, and the Carabineros headed National Properties (formerly known as Lands and Colonization). In the first year of the regime, this level of military involvement rested on a weak presidential authority, since General Pinochet had not yet consolidated himself in his role as

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president of the republic. His power became more consolidated in late 1974, when he was formally designated president. Civilian-military integration also occurred in the economic sector, dominated by the Chicago Boys. Some months before the 1988 plebiscite, the top economic sector positions, except for the Finance Ministry, were run by army officers; the minister of economy was Brigadier-General Manuel Concha; the ministry’s general coordinator was Colonel Julio Amigo and the deputy minister was Colonel Darío Santoni; the Copper Corporation (CODELCO) was run by Brigadier-General Fernando Hormazábal, with Colonel Guillermo Letelier running the other major state corporation, CORFO; high-ranking army officers were running the army’s major state-owned firms; and the Central Bank president was Brigadier-General Enrique Seguel. A quota system arose similar to that used by coalition governments and the Popular Unity government. That is, a minister from one military branch would have a deputy minister from another military branch, or a civilian; when the minister was a civilian, the deputy minister was often a military officer. Thus, for example, while the navy was running the Foreign Affairs Ministry (1973–1978), the deputy minister was an army officer.52 This officer had enormous influence on foreign policy, because he always maintained a direct relationship with General Pinochet through the military attachés (the Casa Militar), sometimes making decisions contrary to those proposed by the minister, as occurred with Pinochet’s failed visit to the Philippines in March 1980.53 This position was later held by several generals, among them Ramón Valdés, Sergio Covarrubias, and Ernesto Videla.54 The army’s influence also explains why some civilians were granted posts. For example, housing minister and Gremialista Miguel Angel Poduje (1984–1988) had worked as an adviser to the army on housing issues since 1974, then went on to work with COAJ (the advisory committee to the junta), and from there was appointed deputy housing minister in 1983, before becoming minister. All this allowed him to win the army’s confidence. Military personnel’s presence in deputy minister positions had important political ramifications, providing stability when there was high turnover at the ministerial level, as occurred with the Finance Ministry from 1982 to February 1985, during which there were six ministers,55 but just two deputy ministers, Colonels Enrique Seguel (December 1979–December 1983) and Manuel Concha (December 1983–July 1987).56 The army’s presence was very important in the Ministry of Transportation and Telecommunications, which in 1987 was headed by an air force officer, General José Massa. The two deputy minister positions were in the hands of army colonels, Manuel Gárate and Gustavo Arenas. The army was also running two CORFO-controlled firms that were important in the telecommunications sector, the National Telecommunications Industry (Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones [Entel]) and the Telephone Company of Chile (Compañía de Teléfonos de Chile [CTC]).57

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The army’s importance as part of the ministerial elite was clear during the 1982–1983 economic crisis. Then, Pinochet dealt with the resignation of finance minister Sergio de Castro by choosing two high-ranking officers who had been members of COAJ and held several posts since the start of the military regime, Generals Gastón Frez and Luis Danús, appointing them to the Ministry of Planning and the Ministry of Economy, respectively.58 They proved unable to fully operate in their positions—because other senior posts remained in the hands of the Chicago Boys, who fought any policy changes, and because Pinochet did not back them much either, since they were simply a stopgap solution to buy time—and lasted only a few months.59 Some military officers lasted longer, among them General Bruno Siebert, in public works from April 1982 to the regime’s end.60 Moreover, he was a member of COAJ from the start, and went on to become deputy chief of the Presidential General Staff and military attaché in Germany. The deputy minister of public works also came from the army, a post that toward the regime’s end was occupied by Lieutenant-Colonel Germán García, who also held other government positions.61 The army played a constant role in a key political ministry, the General Secretariat, which not only controlled the media through its communications department, DINACOS, but also ran Chile’s national television channel and was in charge of mobilizing political support for the regime through its Civilian Organizations Directorate (Dirección de Organizaciones Civiles) (see Chapter 7). From the start, a high-ranking officer ran the ministry, which also controlled the women’s, youth, labor union, and cultural relations secretariats. A year before the 1988 plebiscite, army officers were serving as deputy minister, director of civilian organizations, and director of national television.62 These officers worked on Pinochet’s electoral campaign, although the main responsibilities fell to the mayors and regional leaders, coordinated by the interior minister, Sergio Fernández, a Gremialista. The military’s participation in government meant that a whole group of officers spent most of their careers in these posts, becoming very experienced in political and administrative affairs. These officers ended up somewhat removed from specifically military tasks. For example, Brigadier-General Sergio Valenzuela Ramírez was one of many officers whose entire military career was spent in government. Until 1977 he headed the army’s industrial chemical complex. From 1978 to March 1984 he headed the National Coal Industry (Empresa Nacional del Carbón [Enacar]), from there moving to general management of CORFO. In 1985 he was appointed minister and director of ODEPLAN, which was followed by a stint as a member of the CTC’s board, before rising to the Presidential Secretariat. However, most high-ranking officers did not linger long in government posts, staying for a while when their military positions were in some way tied to a specific political responsibility. For example, army division commanders

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were appointed administrators of the regions where they were posted, as were regiment commanders in provincial capitals.

■

Military Participation in Regional and Provincial Governments

The fact that the regime was run more by the army than by the armed forces as a whole was clear in the vertical hierarchy of the Chilean government. Until the 1988 plebiscite, members of the military were the only ones involved in the vertical positions of the state through regional leadership posts (intendentes) and provincial governorships (gobernadores). By overwhelming majority, the army held most of these positions. The army showed its interest in controlling this level of government from early on, when it set up a commission to study the administrative reorganization of the state and prepared an ambitious administrative reform proposal that would change Chile’s political-administrative structure, creating its current thirteen regions (twelve geographical regions, plus the Metropolitan Region, the latter of which comprised Greater Santiago).63 The army’s predominance in the posts of regional administrators and provincial governors can also be considered the natural consequence of the fact that the nation’s president was also the nation’s administrative head, according to the 1925 constitution and Article 100 of the 1980 constitution: “[Control of] the government and the upper level administration of each region lie with the regional administrator [intendente] who will be appointed by personal authority of the president of the Republic. The regional administrator will exercise these functions according to the law, and orders and instructions from the president, of whom he is the natural and immediate agent in the territory under his jurisdiction.” The army exercised a virtual monopoly on the regional governments, holding eleven of the thirteen regions, including the important Metropolitan Region.64 Regional administrators were officers in active service who remained in the army, just as General Pinochet did. One exception was the Fifth Region, with Valparaiso as capital, which was headed by a retired naval officer, since this is the country’s most important port and the site of naval headquarters. The Tenth Region, with Puerto Montt as capital, was another exception, as the regional administrator was an air force officer, since this was the branch of the armed forces with the most manpower in the region. There was some balance, however, since an army general headed the important provinces of Osorno and Llanquihue, given that the army had a major presence in Valdivia, headquarters of its Fourth Division. In Santiago, the army had the most authority, since it was in charge of the capital zone during states of emergency and therefore had control over the armed forces as a whole and the Carabineros in matters of public order. This allowed the army to play a political role, as it did during the 1983–1984 protests.

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The regional administrators had various ranks. In 1976, five were generals, four were lieutenant-colonels, and two were colonels; in 1988, at the regime’s end, nine were generals, and just two were lieutenant-colonels. At the time, the Council of Generals was larger, so its members could assume political posts. The importance of the plebiscite led General Pinochet to appoint the top-ranking officers to the regions full-time; that is, he freed them of their military responsibilities so they could concentrate on the tasks of government in preparation for the plebiscite campaign.65 The Third and Fourth Regions were exceptions to this rule, and the ranks of their regional administrators did not change. This reflected the smaller presence of the army in these areas—in 1988 there was only one regiment in the Third Region, and there were only three in the Fourth Region (see Table 4.2)— and their small population meant their impact on the plebiscite would be less. Both regional administrators were lieutenant-colonels.66 Their military career allowed officers to hold political positions more than once. Officers became regional administrators after having served at the provincial level, during which time they also commanded a regiment, which allowed them to bring greater political experience to bear in their second posting. For example, the regional administrator of the Seventh Region, BrigadierGeneral Patricio Gualda, was administrator of Linares, as director of its artillery school from 1977 to 1981, and also held other institutional positions, finally ending his career as president at the University of Santiago.67 Another individual with lengthy experience in territorial government was Brigadier-General Alejandro González. After being part of CONARA in 1976, he was appointed to the Third Region as administrator in 1981, when he was Table 4.2

Distribution of Regiments by Region, 1988 Region First Second Third Fourth Fifth Sixth Seventh Eighth Ninth Tenth Eleventh Twelfth Metropolitan Total

Regiments 9 5 1 3 8 4 5 6 4 8 3 4 5 65

Source: Telephone Company of Chile (CTC), directories for the corresponding regions.

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also commander of the Twenty-Third Infantry Regiment in Copiapo; from 1985 to 1986 he was governor of the province of Melipilla, before becoming chief of staff to the Fourth Legislative Commission. In 1987 he became head of telecommunications of the army. Since military positions were among the regular destinations in the armed forces, for a fixed period officers remained in control of the regional government during their military stationing. There were exceptions, however, with some officers remaining longer in their political posts. Major General Eduardo Ibáñez Tilleria (see Table 4.3), who in June 1988 had spent four and a half years heading the Eighth Region and the army’s Third Division, had previously been director of the infantry school in San Bernardo, where he had also served as governor of Cordillera province. Ibáñez showed enormous political skill during his lengthy stint in this post, pragmatically resolving a major university conflict in Concepción in 1985. He also performed well, maintaining relative social peace while creating employment programs through the regional and municipal governments. General Patricio Serré also lasted for longer than usual, five years as administrator of the Fourth Region, before moving on to become deputy minister of regional development, under the Interior Ministry. The army’s dominant presence in the vertical organization of the state was also apparent in provincial-level governments. Article 105 of the 1980 constitution established that governors be responsible for the government and upperlevel administration of each province, under the corresponding regional administrator, and be appointed on the personal authority of the president of Chile. Of the fifty provincial governors in their posts in 1986, forty-two were military officers; of these, twenty-eight were from the army (two were retired), twelve were from the Carabineros (three retired), and two were from the navy (one retired), with the air force holding no positions at this level.68 Table 4.3

Military Officers as Regional Governors, June 1988

BG Patricio Serré MG Roberto Guillard BG Alejandro González BG Mario Navarrete MG Eduardo Ibáñez Tilleria BG Miguel Espinoza BG Julio Bravo BG Helmut Krauschaar MG Sergio Badiola LC Juan Emilio Cheyre

Region

Date

Period

Fourth Metropolitan Third Ninth Twelfth Eighth Ninth Sixth First Second Metropolitan Third

2/77–2/82 12/80–8/83 1/81–1/82 7/82–2/84 3/88 12/82–8/87 2/84–12/86 1/88 11/86–3/88 11/86–5/89 6/87–5/88 12/87–5/88

5 years 2 years, 4 months 3 years, 7 months 1 year, 11 months

Note: BG = brigadier-general; MG = major-general; LC = lieutenant-colonel.

4 years, 7 months 2 years, 9 months 6 months 1 year, 4 months 1 year, 7 months 11 months 5 months

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The number of Carabineros officers in charge of provincial governments was small, as they participated in provinces that had no military presence or that were not relevant from the point of view of external defense. Chiloé (Tenth Region) is a case in point, since the military leadership was in Punta Arenas and the region’s defense was essentially in the navy’s hands. The other provinces with governors from the uniformed police were Tocopilla (Second Region), Chañaral and Huasco (Third Region), Limari (Fourth Region), Petorca (Fifth Region), Chiloé (Tenth Region), and Aysén, General Carrera, and Capitán Prat (Eleventh Region). This analysis of governors is interesting, since this responsibility was a compulsory part of the role of regiment commanders. About half of the officers commanding a regiment or school in June 1988 were governors, and almost all belonged to the army (see Table 4.4). In effect, of twenty-eight military governors out of a total of fifty-one, twenty-four were army officers in charge of troops: one was a brigadier-general, commander of the Valdiviabased Fourth Division; five were lieutenant-colonels;69 and eighteen were regiment commanders based in the respective provincial capitals.

■

The Importance of Military Participation in Government

Military participation in government increased before the 1988 plebiscite. By midyear, 24 percent of the commanders of sixty-four regiments or schools Table 4.4

Distribution of Provincial Governors, June 1988 Army

Region

Provinces

Active

Retired

1 1 — — 4 2 4 2 1 4 1 2 6 28

— 1 1 — — — — 1 — — — 1 — 4

First 3 Second 3 Third 3 Fourth 3 Fifth 7 Sixth 3 Seventh 4 Eighth 4 Ninth 2 Tenth 5 Eleventh 4 Twelfth 4 Metropolitan 6 Total 51 Source: Diario Oficial.

Navy Air Force Carabineros Civilians — — — — 1 — — — — — — 1 — 2

— — — — — — — — — — — — — —

— 1 2 2 1 — — — — 1 3 — — 10

2 — — 1 1 1 — 1 1 — — — — 7

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throughout the country were provincial governors, thus revealing the full extent of institutional involvement in political power, since the most outstanding officers were always appointed to head these units. Participation of members of the Council of Generals was also very high. Of the council’s forty-eight generals (excluding General Pinochet; the military bishop, Monsignor Joaquín Matte; the auditor general, Eduardo Avello; and the director of health, Jorge Castro), nineteen held government posts (see Table 4.5): Sergio Valenzuela, secretary-general of the Presidential Secretariat; Bruno Siebert, minister of public works; Manuel Concha, minister of economy; Enrique Seguel, president of the Central Bank; Fernando Hormazábal, vice president of CODELCO; Patricio Serré, deputy minister of regional development; and Ernesto Videla, deputy minister of foreign affairs, with the rank of vice minister; plus nine regional administrators, one governor, the director of the CNI, and the director of the government’s Department of Sports (Digeder), whose purpose was to promote sports and recreation. Lieutenant-General Santiago Sinclair was deputy commander in chief of the army and a junta member. For the army to assume public management responsibilities without neglecting its institutional duties, the number of officers had to rise. The size of the Council of Generals doubled between 1973 and 1988, from twenty-five members in 1973 to forty in 1980, to fifty-four in 1984–1988, after which membership fell to forty-nine as a result of the decision to return to traditional functions after the defeat in the October 5 plebiscite. The army’s heavy participation in government is also apparent upon examining the postings of generals prior to the plebiscite campaign. If we examine the twenty-nine generals with institutional postings in June 1988 (see Table 4.6), twenty-two had participated politically, whether as advisers in COAJ during the early years of the regime or later as regional administrators and provincial governors and even university presidents. Some generals had also worked closely with General Pinochet, aiding and heading the military attachés, among them Jorge Ballerino, who worked with Pinochet for almost twelve years, and Guillermo Garín, who worked with Pinochet for a total of fourteen years (the longest political posting for a general), interrupted only by a stint as military attaché in Spain. Major-General Roberto Soto, who held third place in seniority, spent twelve years and three months in government posts, including president of CONARA, administrator of the Eighth Region, and president of the University of Chile. Only seven generals did not hold a government post,70 while three held their posts just briefly.71 The generals who held these political posts were not the best in their classes, with the majority not holding top spots upon graduation from the Military School, except for Generals Sergio Badiola (fourth place), Julio Bravo (seventh place), and Raúl Iturriaga (eighth place). Table 4.7 shows total military personnel in senior governmental positions, including ministers and deputy ministers, and those who headed CORFO companies. The prevalence of the army is overwhelming, comprising 72 officers in

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Table 4.5

Generals in Government Positions During the 1988 Plebiscite Rank

Seniority

53 55 53 50 58 56 53 50 53 50 50 56 51 54 53 54 55 53 50

1955 1953 1955 1958 1951 1951 1951 1958 1956 1958 1958 1952 1957 1957 1956 1954 1959 1955 1958

23rd 9th 30th 38th 4th 7th 22nd 42nd 26th 41st 39th 8th 33rd 16th 27th 12th 52nd 18th 45th

Branch Artillery Engineering Artillery Engineering Telecommunications Engineering Cavalry Infantry Artillery Infantry Artillery Infantry Engineering Infantry Infantry Cavalry Artillery Cavalry Service corps

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Secretary-general, Presidential Secretariat Minister of public works Undersecretary of regional development Undersecretary of foreign affairs Administrator, Metropolitan Region Administrator, First Region Administrator, Second Region Administrator, Sixth Region Administrator, Seventh Region Administrator, Ninth Region Administrator, Valdivia Administrator, Eighth Region Administrator, Eleventh Region Administrator, Twelfth Region Director, National Intelligence Center Director, Department of Sports Minister of economy Vice president, Copper Corporation President, Central Bank

Classa

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BG MG BG BG MG MG BG BG BG BG BG MG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG

Age

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Sergio Valenzuela Bruno Siebert Patricio Serré Ernesto Videla Sergio Badiola Julio Bravo Helmut Krauschaar Miguel Espinoza Patricio Gualda Alejandro González Raúl Iturriaga Eduardo Ibáñez Rodrigo Sánchez Mario Navarrete Hugo Salas Carlos Ojeda Manuel Concha Fernando Hormazábal Enrique Seguel

Position

Sources: Diario Oficial, El Mercurio. Notes: BG = brigadier-general; MG = major-general. a. Year of graduation from the Military Academy as a second-lieutenant.

125

Army Generals Not Holding Government Posts in 1988: Time Spent on Military Assignments and in Government Posts, September 1973–June 1988

3rd 5th 6th 10th 13th 14th 15th 16th 19th 20th 24th 25th 28th 31st 32nd 34th 35th 36th 37th

Artillery Infantry Infantry Artillery Cavalry Artillery Cavalry Engineering Cavalry Telecommunications Infantry Telecommunications Infantry Artillery Artillery Cavalry Engineering Infantry Cavalry

Retirement Year 1988 1988 1988 1990 1991 1992 1992 1992 1992 1992 1992 1993 1993 1994 1994 1994 1995 1995 1995

Time Spent on Military Assignmentsb 2 years, 6 months 8 years, 7 months 11 years, 6 months 6 years, 9 months 14 years, 9 months 12 years, 3 months 9 years, 7 months 12 years, 5 months 11 years, 9 months 10 years, 9 months 11 years, 7 months 14 years, 9 months 8 years, 8 months 7 years, 9 months 14 years, 9 months 13 years, 1 months 6 years 11 years, 3 months 3 years

Time Spent in Government Postsb 12 years, 3 months 6 years, 2 months 3 years, 3 months 8 years — 2 years, 6 months 5 years, 2 months 2 years, 4 months 3 years 4 years 3 years, 2 months — 6 years, 1 month 7 years — 1 years, 8 months 8 years, 9 months 3 years, 6 months 11 years, 9 months continues

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MG MG MG MG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG

Branch

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Senioritya

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Roberto Soto Roberto Guillard Alfredo Calderón Washington García Manuel Matas Jorge Zincke Jaime González Francisco Martínez Eduardo Castellón Julio Andrade Aureliano Tello Jorge Lúcar Hugo Prado Francisco Ramírez Luis Henríquez Renato Fuenzalida Mario Varela Jaime Núñez Jorge Ballerino

Rank

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Table 4.6

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Table 4.6

Continued

40th 43rd 44th 46th 47th 48th 49th 50th 51st 53rd

Artillery Infantry Artillery Infantry Infantry Artillery Cavalry Cavalry Artillery Transportation

Retirement Year 1995 1995 1995 1995 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996 1996

Time Spent on Military Assignmentsb 14 years, 9 months 12 years, 9 months 12 years, 3 months 10 years, 1 month 14 years, 9 months 14 years, 9 months 9 months 11 years, 9 months 11 years, 9 months 14 years, 9 months

Time Spent in Government Postsb — 2 years 2 years, 6 months 4 years, 8 months — — 14 years 3 years 3 years —

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BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG BG

Branch

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Senioritya

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Enrique López Héctor Darrigrandi Carlos Parera Óscar Vargas Miguel Sánchez Gustavo Abarzúa Guillermo Garín Richard Quaas Ramón Castro Florencio Tejos

Rank

Sources: Diario Oficial, El Mercurio, La Tercera de la Hora, La Nación, Hoy, Qué Pasa. Notes: BG = brigadier-general; MG = major-general. a. As of May 25, 1988, including the head of health, the auditor-general, and the military chaplain. b. May vary according to different sources. Average time spent on military assignments = 10 years, 8 months. Average time spent in government posts = 4 years, 1 month.

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Military Participation in Government, July 1988 Army Retired

MG

BG

B

C

LC

LG

MG

BG

B

C

LC Navy Air Force Carabineros Civilians

Politicala Economicb Technicalc Subtotal Total

— — — —

2 1 2 5

12 6 1 19

1 — 1 2

13 5 5 23

22 — 1 23

— 1 — 1

— 1 — 1

2 3 2 7

— — — —

4 4 1 9

— — — —

72

18

4 3 5 12

1 — 1 2 25

10 — 1 11 95

Total

22 93 (44%) 10 34 (16%) 63 83 (40%) 95 210 (100%) 210 (100%)

Source: Author calculations. Notes: B = brigadier; BG = brigadier-general; C = colonel; LC = lieutenant-colonel; LG = lieutenant-general; MG = major-general. a. Includes the Ministries of Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Labor, the Presidential and General Secretariats, and their dependent bodies, administrators, and governors. b. Includes the Ministries of Finance and Economy, the Development Corporation (CORFO), the National Energy Commission (CNE), the Copper Corporation (CODELCO), and their dependent bodies. c. Includes the Ministries of Public Works, Housing, Defense, Mining, Agriculture, Education, Justice, Health, Transportation and Telecommunications, and National Properties, the National Planning Office (ODEPLAN), and their dependent bodies. The undersecretaries of the War and Naval Academies, the Carabineros and the Investigaciones, are excluded.

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LG

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Sector

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Active

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Table 4.7

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active service and 18 retirees, while the navy had just 12, the Carabineros, 11, and the air force, 2, for a total of 115 (55 percent) versus 95 civilians (45 percent). The total number of positions is higher, since some military officers held two or more posts, as occurred in the economic sector, in which the minister who served as executive vice president of CORFO was also president of the electrical industry (Empresa Nacional de Electricidad [Endesa]), of the fisheries institute (Instituto de Fomento Pesquero [IFOP]), and of the transportation credit management company (Sociedad Administradora de Créditos de Transporte [SACRET]). The minister of economy, Manuel Concha, was also president of the electrical company Pehuenche, and of the airline LanChile.72 Confirming the army’s dominant role, the navy’s participation in government was minimal: three retired officers, one of whom, Patricio Carvajal, was minister of foreign affairs; an officer in active service who was administrator of the Fifth Region; and other officers who held less important posts, such as director of the Chilean Antarctic Institute (Instituto Antártico Chileno), under the Foreign Affairs Ministry, and provincial governor of Valparaiso. The low participation of the air force, with two positions—administrator of the Tenth Region and deputy minister of transportation and telecommunications—resulted from the personality and power conflicts between General Pinochet and General Leigh, which culminated in the latter’s expulsion from the junta in 1978. This rupture affected officers of this branch, to the point where many generals resigned out of loyalty to Leigh.73 Leigh’s successor, Fernando Matthei, joined the junta in a weak position next to Pinochet, so he tried to strengthen his personal influence through a style that suggested autonomy from the head of state, without being much concerned with increasing the participation of his officers in government. The abundant inclusion of army officers in government declined only following the plebiscite of October 5, 1988, after which they prepared to return to their barracks. The army took measures to correct the distortions that had arisen from their political participation and the new circumstances, and reduced the Council of Generals from fifty-four to forty-nine members, retiring thirteen.74 The number of military governors and administrators also fell drastically after the plebiscite, with civilians taking their place. In early December 1988, just nineteen of the thirty-nine military provincial governors from before the plebiscite and just four of the twelve military regional administrators remained; the other positions had been filled by local civilians, a move to support official candidates in the first parliamentary elections, scheduled for the end of 1989, when the military was returning to their barracks. This low participation of naval officers in the military regime reflects several factors, particularly the decision by Admiral José Toribio Merino to limit the navy’s participation in government and to keep it focused on its institutional tasks. In practice, the navy’s participation was reduced to supporting Merino’s role in the junta, which accentuated this responsibility and gave it

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greater public visibility. He was the only junta member who used the less formal pronoun tú (you) with General Pinochet (Spanish uses the usted form of “you” in more formal relationships), even in front of journalists, thus demonstrating his position as first among equals. Merino was a loyal collaborator with General Pinochet, and this background provides some insight into Merino’s strong influence on Pinochet, which was apparent the night of October 5, 1988, when the junta recognized the defeat of the plebiscite’s “yes” vote, even as General Pinochet hesitated to do so.75 Merino’s good relations with Pinochet explain why he resigned before the military regime ended, to allow Pinochet to appoint his successor as navy commander in chief, an officer Merino had proposed: Admiral Jorge Martínez Busch, a choice much to Pinochet’s liking, since the dictator knew Busch’s father, army general Héctor Martínez.76 Martínez Busch was very loyal to the army and to General Pinochet. In March 1991, the navy produced a document that was very critical of the Rettig Commission’s February 1991 report. The document noted that the navy was the branch of the armed forces least involved in the acts of state terrorism mentioned in the Rettig report. On many occasions during the second elected government, Martínez Busch had expressed his commitment to the military regime, stressing his rejection of the government’s position when it requested the resignation of the director of the Carabineros, Rodolfo Stange, in April 1994.77 He had been very critical when a legal decision adverse to Chile was announced in the Laguna del Desierto border dispute with Argentina, and he had taken a very hard-line position in the Letelier-Moffit case, cooperating with the army to postpone compliance with the sentence of eight years in prison given to General Manuel Contreras.78

■

Military Participation in the University System

One expression of the military’s extensive institutional participation in tasks of government was its control over universities through military-appointed presidents, who were officers in active service and retirees.79 This was unheard of among authoritarian governments, in which the military did not generally take over universities directly, but rather appointed supportive academics to university posts, as occurred in Franco’s Spain. In Chile, the perception that the universities had been infiltrated by Marxist professors and that their presidents would support them led the military to reject a proposal from the Council of Presidents (Consejo de Rectores) that university leaders who were in place before military appointees took over handle the reorganization of the universities; instead the military directly assumed the task of “normalizing” the university system.80 The appointments went to officers who had some academic background, such as individuals who had been directors of the War Academy in any of the three branches of the armed forces. At the time, the university system consisted of eight institutions: the University of Chile, with eight campuses throughout the country; the State Tech-

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nical University, which also had campuses outside of Santiago (would later be renamed the University of Santiago); Austral University of Valdivia; the three Catholic universities (the Catholic University of Chile, based in Santiago; the Catholic University of Valparaiso; and the Catholic University of the North, based in Antofagasta); the University of Concepción, created by the Masons, who ran it without interruption until the coup; and the Federico Santa María Technical University, based in Valparaiso and financed privately by Federico Santa María. The latter two were lay universities. The Universities of Chile and Santiago were run by the army, except that the University of Chile, for the first three years of the regime, was run by a retired air force general, César Ruiz Danyau, who had been a minister in the Allende government for a few weeks in 1973. This reflects the fact that the University of Chile was the most important institution, and that its student organizations were headed by the left wing in the years prior to the coup. This university had a long history of student politics and underwent a reform in 1968, during which, after some vacillation, Edgardo Boeninger was elected president. He was a former director of the Frei government’s budget office and then dean of the economic sciences department. His election received support from the Christian Democratic Party, the National Party, and independent academics.81 The University of Santiago, meanwhile, was run by the Communist Party. Military officers who served as university presidents (see Table 4.8) continued their military careers. General Alejandro Medina Lois, who was presiTable 4.8

Military Officers Appointed University Presidents, 1973–1986 Active Armed Forces

University University of Chile Catholic University of Chile University of Concepción Catholic University of Valparaiso Federico Santa María Technical University University of Santiagoa Austral University of Valdivia Catholic University of the North Total

Retired Armed Forces Navy Air Force

Total Presidents

Army

Air Force

Army

4 —

1 —

— —

— 1

2 —

7 1

—

—

2

1

—

3

—

—

—

5

—

5

—

—

—

2

—

2

2 —

— —

1 3

— —

— —

3 3

—

—

2

1

—

3

6

1

8

10

2

27

Sources: El Mercurio, Hoy, La Tercera de la Hora, and Las Últimas Noticias. Note: a. Formerly the State Technical University.

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dent of the University of Chile from 1981 to 1982, ended his military career in 1986 as head of the General Staff of National Defense. A former president of the State Technical University, General Jorge O’Ryan, was appointed head of the army’s General Staff and, after retirement, became Chile’s ambassador to Paraguay. General Agustin Toro Dávila, president of the University of Chile from 1976 to 1979, retired and was appointed ambassador to the Philippines, as was the former president of the University of Santiago. The universities in Valparaiso were headed by retired naval officers. The Catholic University of Valparaiso was the first to achieve a civilian presidency, as the result of efforts made by its grand chancellor, Archbishop Francisco de Borja Valenzuela. The appointment went to Raúl Bertelsen, a professor of constitutional law and member of the commission that drafted the new constitution. Bertelsen resigned after two years and was replaced by retired frigate captain Juan Enrique Froemmel, who had a doctorate in education. The University of Concepción started with a retired ship’s captain, Guillermo González, as its president. He was followed by retired army officers Colonel Heinrich Rochner (1975–1980) and Major Guillermo Clericus (1980–1986). This latter, who had been in General Pinochet’s graduating class from the Military School, had to resign as a result of strong opposition from academics and students, supported by important sectors of the population of Concepción. He was replaced by Vice President Carlos von Plessing, who was elected by the university community and held the job from January to October 1973. The University of Valdivia had three presidents from the ranks of the army: retired colonel Gustavo Dupuis; retired general Pedro Palacios (1976–1980), who had been President Allende’s mining minister for a few months and who had entered La Moneda palace after the bombing; and retired colonel Jaime Ferrer (1980–1986). Ferrer, another from Pinochet’s graduating class, followed a very authoritarian policy, closing schools, expelling professors, and suspending students. The academic community opposed him based on these actions, and were supported in their opposition by the population of Valdivia, triggering a student strike in 1986 that lasted for several weeks. This forced the minister of education, Sergio Gaete, to intervene. He gave in to some of the strikers’ demands and fired the president, replacing him with an academic. As a result, the universities began to see the end of military presidents, returning to appointments by their academic communities. Of the twenty-seven presidents heading universities between February 1981 and August 1986, ten were retired military officers and seventeen were civilians. Among the former, eight were from the army, one was from the navy, and one was from the air force. A university presidency was not a posting for officers in active service, which is understandable since these were educational institutions with limited academic capacity and little professional prestige. *

*

*

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This chapter has analyzed the military’s participation in the Pinochet regime, showing the positions within the political system that were held by officers of all branches and underlining the majority presence of the army. These officers held multiple positions of power, from the junta, which exercised legislative and constituent powers, down to the main positions of authority within local governments, including at universities. This high degree of military involvement made the political system itself a power base, providing the governing elite with cohesion based on the unity of the military institutions, and with support key to General Pinochet’s leadership. Ultimately, this power base proved to be a necessary resource in overcoming the political difficulties that arose from the 1982–1983 economic crisis. The importance of the military factor in the stability of the Pinochet regime cannot be exaggerated. It provided a broad and stable social support base and the bureaucratic and political personnel necessary to fill the main positions of authority. The regime implemented a diversified legitimation strategy and enjoyed the support of a significant part of the country’s population, who accepted the regime and supported the economic and political reforms that were part of its ambitious agenda. The regime’s multiple power bases will be analyzed in the coming chapters.

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Notes

1. Varas (1987), Constable and Valenzuela (1991). 2. The Chilean case was the most obvious with respect to the participation of the military in power, as conceptualized by Stepan (1973). 3. This refers most particularly to the regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, as seen in Collier (1979), O‘Donnell (1973). 4. Most work on military regimes does not highlight the army’s broader participation in political power: Huntington (1957), Janowitz (1960, 1964), Finer (1962), Johnson (1962, 1964), Needler (1966). For more on the army’s role, see the classic book by Stepan (1971). 5. There were exceptions, such as the opposition of the Council of Admirals to the 1978 referendum (consulta). 6. The most controversial case was the opposition to the 1978 referendum; Varas (1979), p. 35. 7. Chehabi and Linz (1998), p. 13, provide the example of the army under the Shah’s regime in Iran, which was highly professional but had very little autonomy. 8. Perlmutter (1981). 9. Linz (1964), p. 310. 10. The classic work on this is Stepan (1973). Also see Stepan (1971). 11. Stepan (1973). 12. Stepan (1971). 13. Villanueva (1969, 1972). 14. I examined the army publication Memorial del Ejército, of the 1960s, and found no articles referring to the national security doctrine. Arriagada and Garretón (1978) argued that this doctrine has a strong influence. 15. This is confirmed by Whelan (1993). 16. Nunn (1970a).

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17. Bicheno (1972). I do not share the interpretation of Vial (1984), which plays down the singularity of the 1973 coup, an argument that holds that the military always gets into politics when this type of conflict arises. 18. For more information on the Frei Montalva administration, see Molina (1971), an interesting book written by Frei’s former minister of finance. 19. There is plenty of information on this matter in Prats (1985), esp. chap. 2, a remarkable book by the former commander of the army. 20. It was described as an implied act of indiscipline; Prats (1985), p. 110. 21. Juan de Dios Carmona would abandon the Christian Democratic Party in 1976 to work with the Pinochet regime, joining the Council of State; he would later be appointed ambassador to Spain. 22. The troops led by the second in command of the Yungay regiment of San Felipe, Major Arturo Marshall, did not arrive in time for the parade. 23. Viaux explains the reasons behind these actions in Varas (1972). General Prats describes this episode as follows: “The seizure of the Tacna regiment barracks had a clear political purpose, conceived in various corridors in the immediately preceding months. Obscure characters, both civilian and military, prepared to move the chess pieces, using Viaux as a pawn”; Prats (1985), p. 127. 24. Viaux was forced to retire by the commander in chief, precisely because he was considered to have compromised discipline. Viaux wrote a letter to President Frei listing the military’s demands; its text is reproduced in Varas (1972), pp. 55–67. 25. In October 1968 the military staged a coup that overthrew the centrist government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry, establishing a revolutionary government run by the military that implemented a policy of nationalization of oil, corporations, and banks, which was received with sympathy by the most leftist sector of the Socialist Party. Those leftists interpreted the nationalizations as a sign that the military was not an expression of the oligarchy. Much has been written on this regime: Lowenthal (1975), McClintock (1981), Stepan (1978). 26. Among them were General Emilio Cheyre and General Alfredo Mahn, commander of the Santiago garrison; Prats (1985), p. 128. 27. Prats (1985), p. 103. 28. Known as the “Schneider doctrine.” 29. General Carlos Prats took part in this work and reports on the task in detail in his memoirs; Prats (1982), chaps. 2–3. 30. El Siglo, January 23, 1973, cited in González Pino and Fontaine Talavera (1997). This decision was interpreted as a political-electoral move intended to transfer the responsibility of solving this serious problem to the military, thus freeing the communist minister of responsibility, an important issue during a decisive electoral campaign. 31. Huidobro (1989), pp. 100–101. 32. “There was ‘coughing and throat clearing,’ forcing me to bang on the table loudly”; Prats (1985), p. 380. 33. Law no. 17798, of October 22, 1972, initiated by Senator Juan de Dios Carmona (PDC). During the Senate debate, the high commands of the three branches of the armed forces expressed their support for the initiative. 34. The government also turned to the military’s support to normalize public utility services. It took control, for example, of a state-owned public transportation company in the capital (Empresa de Transportes Colectivos del Estado) in April 1973, and appointed General Herman Brady its manager. He was considered a loyal soldier within the government, which is why he was not forced to retire in 1972, when General Prats left him off the list of promotions, irritating Allende. He was minister of defense and secretary of the National Energy Commission under the Pinochet regime.

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35. The operation was led by General Gabriel von Schouwen, combat commander and aviation judge; La Segunda, July 9, 1973. 36. La Segunda, July 9, 1973. 37. Ibid., July 10, 1973. 38. Ibid., July 17, 1973. 39. Ibid., July 19, 1973. 40. Ibid., August 9, 1973. 41. El Mercurio, September 3, 1973. 42. Ibid., September 6, 1973. 43. La Segunda, August 18, 1973. 44. El Mercurio, September 8, 1973. 45. In the Bellavista area; El Mercurio, September 10, 1973. 46. A detachment from the Rancagua regiment, led by the chief of the emergency zone and unit commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Christian Ackercknecht, raided the headquarters of the Socialist Party, because shots had allegedly been fired against students and workers of the El Teniente mine, who were marching in protest against the government; El Mercurio, May 24, 1973. The officer was backed by the army against the strong criticism of the Socialist Party; El Mercurio, September 6, 1973. 47. Two days later, military forces were deployed in the streets of Rancagua to restore order after confrontations sparked by government supporters who attacked the demonstrators, mobilized in support of the striking workers of El Teniente mining company; El Mercurio, May 26, 1973. 48. “Even at the peak of military power, civilians held two-thirds of the major governmental posts”; Ricci and Fitch (1990), p. 111. For a general analysis of these military governments, see Perina (1983). 49. There is a study on this: García-Delgado and Stiletano (1988). 50. General Hugo Mussante, from July 11, 1974, to April 14, 1975. 51. I use the concept of proportional conflict regulation in the sense defined by Lehmbruch (1967). 52. In the 1970s, the undersecretaries of finance and economy were army officers. 53. Pinochet made the decision to go. The undersecretary of foreign affairs, Enrique Valdés, had advised Pinochet to travel based on the information that was available. The minister of foreign affairs, Hernán Cubillos, was against the trip. 54. Covarrubias was chief of the Presidential General Staff. Videla had a long career in this ministry: he was the first director of the planning department, serving first as undersecretary (1979–1983) and later as head of the secretariat in charge of mediation after the peace treaty with Argentina was signed. 55. Sergio de Castro, Sergio de la Cuadra, Rolf Lüders, Carlos Cáceres, Luis Escobar, and Hernán Büchi. 56. Stability in the undersecretary positions helped stabilize the ministries, as was the case in European democracies, where ministries were highly unstable; Beyme (1971a). 57. In 1987 the boards were chaired by Brigadier-General Jorge Lúcar and Sergio Badiola, respectively. Brigadier-General Gerson Echeverría was general manager of the national telecommunications company (Entel) for several years. 58. Danús was responsible for publicly announcing the devaluation of the dollar, which had been set at 39 pesos in 1979, one of the main symbols of the monetarist policies of the Chicago Boys. This act was intentional: he freed the Chicago economists from facing public scrutiny and admitting the failure of their policy. 59. Pinochet’s policy in the face of the economic crisis is examined in Chapters 8 and 10. 60. He was elected senator among the National Renewal candidates in the 1989 elections.

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61. He was the deputy director of the directorate for civilian organizations of the government’s General Secretariat Ministry, and held a master’s degree in political science from Catholic University. 62. These were Colonel Luis Rivas Otárola, Lieutenant-Colonel Hernán Núñez, and Brigadier-General Carlos Krumm, respectively. 63. It was headed by Julio Canessa, then a colonel, later a general. 64. The army was organized into six divisions: the first based in Antofagasta, capital of the Second Region; the second in Santiago; the third in Concepción, capital of the Eighth Region; the fourth in Valdivia, the only city that is not a regional capital; the fifth in Punta Arenas; and the sixth in Iquique, capital of the First Region. Division commanders were the administrators of the respective regions. 65. See statements by Brigadier-General Alejandro González in La Tercera de la Hora, January 6, 1988. 66. Juan Emilio Cheyre was sworn in as administrator of the Third Region in 1987, succeeding Gabriel Alliende, an officer of equal rank. In the Fourth Region, Lieutenant-Colonel Hernán Reyes succeeded Hernán Ramírez Rurange, an officer of the same rank, in January 1987. In 2002 he was appointed commander in chief of the army. 67. He was the last active military officer to occupy the post of military-appointed president in that educational institution. 68. There were civilian governors in some provinces: Arica and Iquique (First Region), where the post had no major political influence due to the strong presence of the army with its Second Division and its massive presence in Iquique; Choapa (Third Region); Easter Island (Fifth Region); Cardenal Caro (Sixth Region); Talca (Seventh Region); Arauco (Eighth Region); and Cautín (Ninth Region). 69. Each one headed the corresponding armed services college: artillery in Linares, cavalry in Quillota, military engineering in San Antonio, special forces and parachutists in Colina, and infantry in San Bernardo. 70. Brigadier-Generals Manuel Matas, Jorge Lúcar, Luis Henríquez, Enrique López, Miguel Sánchez, Gustavo Abarzúa, and Florencio Tejos. 71. Major-General Alfredo Calderón (sixth in seniority), for only three years and three months, and the two most senior brigadier-generals, Jorge Zincke (fourteenth in seniority), for only two and a half years, and Francisco Martínez (sixteenth in seniority), for only two years and four months. 72. I do not claim to have reached a precise quantification of the military presence in the political system, as information is not a feature of authoritarian regimes, which is why I have resorted to several indirect sources, mainly the press and publications or annual reports of companies in the government development corporation (CORFO). 73. Leigh preserved the recognition of his institution and continued to be invited to official events. 74. Lieutenant-General Santiago Sinclair was appointed General Pinochet’s representative in the governing junta. 75. General Fernando Matthei, air force commander in chief, stated in an interview on national television that Pinochet had asked for the approval of the junta that night to deploy troops in the streets, and that he had submitted for their signature a decree granting him extensive powers. The requests were rejected by the members of the junta. See “Las incógnitas que revivió el general Fernando Matthei,” La Tercera, October 8, 2000, p. 9. 76. Martínez’s father had been Pinochet’s professor in the War Academy and would later become Pinochet’s superior officer in the First Division. 77. As a consequence of the “case of the men with their throats cut” (el caso de los degollados), which involved the high command of the institution and which is examined in Chapter 10.

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78. In the winter of 1995 an army helicopter transferred him to the navy hospital in Talcahuano on the pretext that he was seriously ill; “El gran aliado,” Qué Pasa, June 1995, p. 21. On the transfer of Contreras to the navy hospital, a delaying tactic in an attempt to reach an agreement with the government and thus prevent him from going to the prison of Punta Peuco, see “El martes negro del gobierno,” Qué Pasa, June 1995, pp. 16–21. 79. The government did not appoint presidents at private universities established under a new postsecondary education law passed in 1980. 80. The proposal was submitted in writing by the University of Chile’s president, Edgardo Boeninger, as head of the university system’s Council of Presidents, in a memorandum on “government-university relations”; examined in AHJG sess. 10, September 27, 1973. The junta called the full presidential council to a meeting on September 28, in which only William Thayer, president of the Austral University of Valdivia, was absent. In this session, “the Minister of Education reported that the Junta had rejected the memorandum submitted by president Boeninger. It was stated that, during the transition period, the administration of the various universities would have to be restructured and (it was precisely stated) that this would not, in any case, involve ideological persecution, except for Marxist and extremist elements and/or theories”; AHJG, sess. 11, September 28, 1973, para. 10. 81. Huneeus (1973a, 1988b).

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5 The Legitimation Strategy

For Chile’s newly established military regime to justify a lengthy stay in power, it was not enough to use the crisis in democracy and the circumstances leading up to the coup; positive arguments were necessary to provide a solid foundation to the authoritarian regime. Two tasks were therefore fundamental to setting up the new regime: first, ensuring the legitimacy of the political order to achieve citizens’ voluntary support;1 and second, to establish an institutional order with deliberating and decisionmaking bodies to ensure the government’s effective performance and to open up opportunities for civilian participation. This chapter analyzes legitimacy; the next chapter analyzes organization of the political regime. Generally speaking, legitimacy serves three basic purposes.2 It makes it possible to reduce the resources directed toward coercion, by encouraging individuals to voluntarily submit to the authorities. No authoritarian regime wants to be obeyed solely through fear, and dictators also need to feel loved by their citizens. Second, the more legitimate a political order, the more likely it is to optimize the implementation of its policies. Its decisions are implemented more easily by civil service staff, and citizens and leaders of interest groups are also better disposed toward them, allowing the political system to function more efficiently. Third, legitimacy helps to establish an institutional order that integrates the different groups that support it, becoming a key factor in the regime’s stability, since it prevents the sudden fall of support that is common to personalist regimes. German sociologist Max Weber identified three sources of legitimacy: tradition, legality, and charisma. These features do not occur in isolation, but rather together, with a varying emphasis on each, as they contribute to the legitimacy of political authority.3 Legal legitimacy is the backbone of modern societies, because it provides a rational justification for the authorities within clearly established rules, although it may be reinforced by some traditional resources as well. 139

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In his analysis of the crises affecting democratic regimes, Juan Linz expanded Weber’s analytical distinctions regarding the sources of legitimacy, highlighting the importance of effective governmental performance, expressed as the ability to resolve the population’s socioeconomic problems,4 which helps to maintain citizens’ support. This dimension is also present in authoritarian regimes, which aspire to demonstrate better management abilities than democratic governments. This was clear in Chile, where the coup occurred in the context of a serious economic crisis. The military resorted to a multitiered strategy of legitimation to establish a new political order. It started by appealing to historical legitimacy, based on the condemnation of the Popular Unity government, which it accused of trying to establish a Marxist dictatorship, and of Chile’s political development in the decades prior to the coup. The element common to both was the rejection of political parties and Congress. Similarly, the military aimed to seek legalconstitutional legitimation by establishing a juridical structure that justified the authoritarian use of power, through a new constitution that established the decisionmaking bodies and envisioned a new political order that would eventually rule the country once the military left power: a so-called protected and authoritarian democracy. The military regime sought another kind of legitimation based on economic success, proposing an ambitious program of radical reforms whose purpose was to overcome the serious crisis inherited from the Popular Unity government. This was intended to produce an economic boom based on a new institutional foundation: a market-based economy and a new relationship between the state and society. The market-based economy and the newly conceived relationship were intended to eradicate poverty and achieve development, but also to serve as the basis for the new political system.5

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The Military’s Early Decision to Retain Power

Initially, the military authorities declared that they would quickly hand over power, announcing that the purpose of the coup was to reestablish political normalcy and overcome the economic crisis.6 This was explicitly stated in a communiqué issued on the day of the coup, in which the military authorities stated that they would remain in power “for just as long as the circumstances required.”7 The junta, formed on September 12, 1973, was legally established on September 18, after which it was announced that the armed forces would assume “their patriotic commitment to restore Chileanness, justice and the institutions that had broken down.”8 However, very soon after that date the military decided to retain its power for an extended period, proposing more ambitious objectives.9 This new position received support from right-wing groups that supported the coup; prior to the event, they had expressed profound pessimism about the state of democracy in Chile, arguing the need to radically change its fundamentals. While

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they had not explicitly stated that these changes should be applied through a military regime, they now saw their chance. Jaime Guzmán, founder of the powerful Gremialista movement (see Chapter 7), succinctly summarized the arguments for the military remaining in power in a memorandum produced for the junta a few days after the coup. He argued that if the armed forces remained just a “parenthesis,” a footnote, just a transitional government, they would be opening the way for the establishment of a government of political parties.10 In his view, the military should “mark the start of a new phase in the country’s history,” and establish a political support base through a “civil movement” (a subtle reference to the possibility of creating a single party), in order to create a new political order that would ensure retention of the changes after the military left power: Either the Junta limits itself to being a mere historical footnote in the country’s life, quickly restoring power to the struggle between the same party groupings that existed before September 11, [or by] officially excluding the Marxists, the Junta takes on the mission of creating a new stage in the country’s history, planning its action through a regime that for a long time will perpetuate the philosophy, the spirit and the style of the armed forces, all this through a new civic movement that could be the link to future support for the current government and an expression of the [will of] a majority of citizens when the country returns to democratic rule.11

The decision to remain in power for an indefinite period was communicated to the country in a solemn event held in the plenary room of the Diego Portales building on October 11, 1973, in the presence of ambassadors and authorities from the judiciary.12 Inspired by the language of the Argentine military, who had distinguished between “objectives and not deadlines,”13 the Chilean military spoke of “goals,” understood as long-term political and economic objectives, and “deadlines” for achieving them. General Pinochet, the sole speaker at this event, expressed it this way: “To rebuild is always slower and more arduous than to destroy. Because of this, we know that our mission will not be as temporary as we would have liked, and thus we provide no deadlines and set no dates. Only when the country has achieved the social peace necessary for the true economic development and progress to which it is entitled and Chile shows no faces with reflections of hatred will our mission have ended.”14 This speech was important not only because it defined the nature of the new rulers for the first time, but also because it explicitly revealed the influence of the political ideas of certain key people from right-wing groups who had encouraged the coup and were participating with the military from day one, particularly the Gremialistas, supporters of former president Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964), and the editorial writers of the magazine Portada. These ideas reached Pinochet by way of Jaime Guzmán’s pen. Guzmán had written Pinochet’s speech, as is reflected in the use of terms typical of these

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groups, such as “vices and bad habits,” “politiquería” (political manipulation), and “demagoguery,” terms that would quickly become permanent fixtures in the new regime’s vocabulary. Pinochet laid out an ambitious agenda that included major political, economic, social, and cultural objectives that would only be achieved if the military remained in power for many years. The main purpose of the new order was not only to achieve political-institutional goals, but also to change Chileans’ values: Once these goals [to profoundly change Chileans’ mentality] are achieved, the armed forces and police will open the way to establishing a new democracy, that must be a rebirth, purified of the vices and bad habits that ended up destroying our institutions. A new constitution of the republic must allow for the dynamic development that today’s world demands, moving away forever from the politiquería, the sectarianism and the demagoguery of Chilean life, so that it is the supreme expression of this new institutional foundation and it is within these molds that Chile’s destiny is formed.15

Pinochet was referring to a new political order, based on universal suffrage but without the leadership of political parties. His sole institutional reference was to the need for a new national constitution, but he did not shed any light on what its contents should be, because until that time there had been no clarity among the new government members on the type of political system that should be established, aside from general negative ideas about democracy. The junta formally expressed its will to remain in power in its Declaration of Principles, published on March 11, 1974.16 This was the first and the main document of the new regime that defined its ideological bases and agenda, thus outlining its general approach. Its agenda was very general and heterogeneous, revealing the range of positions among the junta members and their civilian supporters. The military would be more than a “mere administration” and would not hand power over “to the same politicians”; quite the contrary, it would seek out “new generations” to take over when the armed forces eventually left power: The armed forces and police set no endpoint for their government because the task of morally, institutionally and materially rebuilding the country requires a profound and lengthy effort. In short, it is vital that we change Chileans’ mentality. The current government has been categorical in asserting that it has no intention of limiting itself to being a mere administration, a parenthesis between two similar, party-based governments, or, in other words, this is not a “truce” for reordering and then returning power to the same politicians so much to blame, by action or omission, for the virtual destruction of the country. The government of the armed forces and police aspires to begin a new phase in the national destiny, opening the way to a new generation of Chileans formed in a school of healthy civic habits.17

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The military had no intention of simply leaving power and returning to its barracks after accomplishing its mission, since it had decided to “supervise national security,” which was understood in its broadest sense to refer not only to the country’s external defense, but also to the military’s mission of carefully monitoring domestic political developments, to prevent any chance of the structural changes introduced during the regime from being later modified by civilians. It was no coincidence that this major document of the junta made no reference to “democracy,” a term completely absent from the text, since junta members had no interest in instating this form of government: Nonetheless, although it sets no deadline, the Junta will, at the right time, hand Political Power over to those the people have elected through free, secret and informed universal suffrage. The armed forces and police will then assume the task of the specifically institutional participation that the new Constitution assigns them, which will involve maintaining National Security, as we understand it today, in the broad sense of this concept.18

This supervisory role was worked into the 1980 constitution through various means, such as appointed senators, the presence of the armed forces in the National Security Council (Consejo de Seguridad Nacional [CSN]), and the accordance of limited pluralism to political parties.

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Historical Legitimacy and Chilean “Decadence”

The first source of legitimation was of a historical nature, a “looking back,” as the concept is conceived of by Giuseppe di Palma,19 and its purpose was to justify the new regime in the context of the political and economic crisis apparent at the time of the coup. This legitimation was based on condemning the Popular Unity government, which was characterized as a Marxist-Leninist coalition that was attempting to impose a totalitarian dictatorship. The parties and the government, starting with President Salvador Allende himself, were all trying to create the conditions necessary for a violent seizure of total power,20 training thousands of guerrillas to create an unconventional civil war that could only be dealt with through violence. The historical legitimation was an attempt to keep alive a dark, negative view of the thousand days of Popular Unity, triggering a sense of gratitude to the military for having saved the country from a coup similar to the leftist coup in Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s, and pulling together civilians who supported the coup that did occur. This historical legitimation took on heavy anti-Marxist and anticommunist tones for three reasons. The first was to justify the use of repression against opponents and dissidents, and to create a police state to effectively carry out this fight, without concern about the human costs involved. The second consisted of keeping alive the memory of the time of the Popular Unity

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government, to maintain the unity of the civilian groups who supported the military and prevent their moving away into the semi-opposition or opposition.21 This meant ensuring that the opposition did not lose perspective on what had occurred before the coup, when they experienced the harsh consequences of the restrictions on human rights. The third was to leave little room for any democratic opposition that might arise through the efforts of left-wing parties and the Christian Democrats, since they would only seek to “return” to the past. This condemnation of Popular Unity, however, only provided a short-term foundation for historical legitimation, since it was an attack on the failure of a particular government and on the left-wing parties in general, which was not enough to justify lengthy authoritarian rule. Therefore the critique had to go beyond that particular government and question the country’s economic and political development throughout the twentieth century, to thereby provide the justification for the full-blown reconstruction of the state and the economy. The coup had therefore occurred more due to the failure of democracy and especially the negative role played by political parties, rather than simply as the result of a single government’s poor performance. This analysis justified the establishment of new foundations for the republic, so that the new regime would be of a foundational nature.22 The only moment supposedly worth rescuing in the country’s history occurred just after independence from Spain, during the so-called Authoritarian Republic. This long-term historical legitimation found broad support in the political thought of several major right-wing groups who backed the coup and helped the military after the seizure of power. Since long before September 11, 1973, these groups had sharply criticized the state of democracy in Chile; they even expressed doubts about democracy’s viability in the contemporary world, which they based on sharp criticism of the political development of advanced democracies. The interests of the military, which considered itself the nation’s ultimate moral reserve, therefore coincided with those of these civilians, who considered it vital to reconstruct the country’s social and economic foundations, so as to recover the political influence lost in the 1960s. These criticisms of the state of democracy began with ideas expressed in editorials in the magazine Estanquero, which began publishing in the late 1940s, and were later taken up by intellectuals and politicians involved with Portada.23 Portada’s articles and especially its editorials contained the main themes and concepts that became part of the military regime’s core concepts, starting with the junta’s Declaration of Principles and extending to General Pinochet’s major speeches. The radical critique of politics and parties based on the prominence assigned to “national unity,” the valuing of nationalism as the fundamental axis of the institutional order, the corresponding rejection of “foreign” ideas, the endorsement of a president through a plebiscite, with no limits from Congress or parties, the appeal to order, and the exercise of firm authority were not ideas that suddenly appeared after the coup as the result of the

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political conflicts occurring during the Popular Unity government, but rather had been developed previously in Portada. Estanquero was edited by Jorge Prat, and its editorial line idealized Diego Portales, emphasizing the need for an impersonal and authoritarian government. It harshly criticized the state of parties, politics, and Congress.24 Its editorial line reflected a different view of democracy than that prevailing in the Western world, exhibiting a clear preference for a more functional version.25 Its editorialists constantly argued that parties represented little more than currents of opinion.26 Finally, it defined the political crisis as a moral crisis, a view taken up by Portada and by the new government after 1973.27 Portada appeared in early 1969, that is, during the last phase of the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970), when the 1970 presidential campaign had just begun. It was founded by a group of university professors and journalists who shared some general ideas about politics, religion, and society.28 Founding editor Gonzalo Vial Correa was a lawyer and law history professor at Catholic University. He exercised the most influence in determining the magazine’s political ideas, and later played an important role in the editorials of the weekly magazine Qué Pasa, especially during the first years of the military regime. Vial, who also worked closely with Jorge Prat for Estanquero, was critical of the state of Chile’s democracy, but did not promote the military’s involvement in politics and the creation of an authoritarian regime. His pessimism regarding the country’s development during the twentieth century led him to develop an idealistic view of the country’s political development during the nineteenth century, particularly of the achievements of the so-called Authoritarian Republic (1831–1861). He preferred a regime that restricted public freedoms, without parties and under the strong authority of a president. These were the institutional features of the epoch that Vial most admired. After the time of the Authoritarian Republic, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the country was supposed to have fallen into decadence, the result of the rupture of “national unity.” During those years, three basic points of consensus that had provided the foundations for the Authoritarian Republic were destroyed: the “doctrinal consensus,” based on support for a common vision of life “rooted in traditional Catholicism of Spanish origin,” which had been broken by the development of secularization in the 1880s; the “political consensus,” expressed in a strong presidentialism with the power to act without interference from Congress or parties, abandoned by the adoption of parliamentarism after 1891; and the “social consensus,” sustained by the dominance of an aristocratic upper class, who were displaced in the early twentieth century by the growth of the middle class, the strengthening of the working class, and the development of the union movement.29 This interpretation of political and institutional fundamentals regarding the creation and development of the state in the nineteenth century reflected a kind of conservative thinking inspired by Spanish intellectuals and politicians,

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who were critical of the liberal state’s promotion of a political system of corporativist or functional democracy, which was very influential in General Franco’s authoritarian regime in Spain (1936–1975) (see Chapter 7). Portada questioned the quality of politics and democracy in Chile, and provided a radical critique of President Frei’s government.30 It raised doubts about government policies such as the agrarian and university reforms, and the organization of campesinos (rural people) and pobladores (poor residents of shantytowns). It denounced a crisis of authority, expressed in the proliferation of strikes and protests by unions and student organizations.31 It particularly rejected the agrarian reform of the early 1960s, carried out on estates belonging to the diocese of Talca, whose bishop was Monsignor Manuel Larraín, and the diocese of Santiago, headed by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez;32 it also rejected the occupation of Santiago Cathedral in 1968, and the outrageous actions of high-ranking army officer General Roberto Viaux, who seized command of Tacna regiment troops in October 1969 (see Chapter 4). “All of them—students, professors, clergymen, intellectuals, politicians—have preached violence, have called for revolution, have practiced disobedience and wallowed in disorder! So, why shouldn’t the Army?”33 This situation had brought the country to a state of “anarchy”: “The truth is that the country has gone through a rapid process of [turning to] indiscipline, disobedience to authority and disregard for the law.”34 A constant theme in Portada’s editorials was criticism of parties and Congress. The former were contemptuously referred to as “a living anachronism,”35 since “behind their antique façade, they hide very modern corruption and degeneration,” which spreads “like cancer” into every sphere.36 The criticism did not spare right-wing groups, questioning their lack of consistency and their use of practices common to centrist and leftist parties: “the defense they make of ‘free enterprise’ has often masked the protection of their worst enemies, monopolies. And in every party there are entrenched electoral bosses and economic pressure groups.”37 The parties, in short, “have made politics petty and have brought division to every sphere.”38 According to Portada, the parties’ unfortunate state was the fault of politicians, who had let themselves become carried away by irresponsible demagoguery, leading them to make unrealistic promises during electoral campaigns and thus deceive citizens: “Once the electoral frenzy is over, society discovers that the candidate—any candidate—now transformed into the government, deceived everyone. Thus the first step has been taken toward the authorities losing their prestige, as they cannot keep the promises they made to win. The authorities in our country are under a moral cloud: they have lied. And the foundation for obedience to authority is its moral grounding.”39 The alternative that Portada proposed was a very strong presidential system, including a significant role for plebiscites, which would allow the president to govern over and above parties and Congress, providing him with full powers: “All these problems require a forceful and un-self-conscious leader-

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ship. The only one who can provide this is the president of the Republic, provided they grant him the necessary powers.”40 The president had to be above all political differences, not representing any social, political, or economic group, which required that he have enormous moral authority that would make it possible for him to arbitrate conflicts of interest: “[The president must be an] impartial arbitrator, above groups and bands, an outstanding characteristic of our former heads of state.”41 Thus, Portada’s view of political representation was different from the view that prevailed in Western democracy, since it harshly criticized universal suffrage and promoted the participation of interest groups and the family in representative bodies. Political representation, according to Portada, was not the sole domain of parties; it should be expanded to every political group and segment of society. Political representation should be available to “natural organizations or intermediary groups, which today are not represented: the family, associations and unions—both those of employers and workers—the armed forces, churches, municipal governments and neighborhood associations, universities and cultural institutions and, ultimately all groups and institutions (involved in) social progress.”42 In this sense, it drew on the Franco regime’s “family third” in Las Cortes (parliament).43 Advocates of this new concept had no need to look to Europe or the United States in search of inspiration. It was enough to look at Chile’s own history and particularly the figures of the nineteenth century, above all Diego Portales. In a word, they supported a determined nationalism: “We need a new Portales to displace these modern babes in the woods, drunk on ideas and ignorant of Chile’s present and past.”44 The refusal to look abroad was also explained by criticizing left-wing parties and the PDC, whose thinking was inspired by the ideas of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain and coincided with the development of the European Christian Democratic parties.45 Portada thought it necessary to be “nationalist” and critical of parties with “foreign” ideologies, although nationalism did not involve rejecting foreign investment, provided investors did not undermine political stability or exhibit monopolistic tendencies.46 As a result, when the military decided to establish a new regime and sought to give it legitimacy, it took refuge in a political analysis inspired by the corporativist ideas of Franco’s authoritarian regime in Spain as adapted by the editorialists of Portada. Moreover, this circle of academics and journalists made an additional contribution to the establishment of the new political order: it became an efficient bridge for communication among major rightwing sectors, including businesspeople, intellectuals, and the new government, thus softening the rupturist nature of the military regime. This meant that there were elements of continuity between the democratic and authoritarian phases, a structural characteristic found in other experiences where the pluralist order collapsed and was followed by an antifreedom regime, as occurred in Germany in 1933.47

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Portada’s influence was very evident in the new rulers’ references to the need to seek inspiration in the Authoritarian Republic and its idealization of the figure of Diego Portales, as General Pinochet said in his first speech, on October 11, 1973: “All [these tasks] require efforts and sacrifices that we are willing to make, trusting in the ultimate success of the mission that we have involved ourselves in, inspired by the spirit of Portales that lights our way today, in which the people have combined their longing for peace and progress.”48 Pinochet again evoked Portales when he announced the regime’s plans for a new institutional initiative in 1977. In his presidential message, of September 11 that year, he gave an impassioned defense of the Authoritarian Republic and the concept of “authoritarian democracy”: When we speak of the regime, we are of course referring to a concept deeply rooted in our national tradition, expressed in the Portalian regime, which history refers to as the authoritarian Republic. From this root comes our current concept of authoritarian democracy, which is exactly the opposite of arbitrary tyranny. Authority is the juridical and moral force for ensuring [the application of] the law in an objective and impersonal fashion. . . . Authoritarianism is therefore not in opposition to democracy, but rather complements it.49

Pinochet’s most articulate version of historical legitimation came on April 6, 1979, in an extensive speech, written by Jaime Guzmán, that opened the University of Chile’s academic year. Pinochet outlined in detail the concepts he had mentioned earlier regarding the Authoritarian Republic and the role of Portales. He also spoke on the reasons why that glorious stage in Chile’s history had ended: at that time, there was “a strong centralist government, whose men were models of prudence, dignity and firmness, ruthlessly repressing abuse and disorder.”50 This era of Chile’s history was defined by a strong president: The existence of a president of the Republic in the Portalian sense (1831– 1891) occurred during the most brilliant period in the history of Chile. There were stability and progress in economic terms; noteworthy progress in culture and education; two extremely difficult foreign wars were won; the Araucanian territory [held by the Mapuche, today southern Chile] was pacified and colonized; nitrates were acquired and exploited; throughout the country order and peace reigned.51

This “most brilliant period” was interrupted by the so-called Parliamentarian Republic (1891–1924). According to Pinochet, it was in those years—a period he described as the “most fruitless phase of our history”52—that political decadence began, thanks to pressure groups and new oligarchies who opposed presidential power. In his interpretation of the post-1925 period, Pinochet focused his attacks on political parties as the force responsible for the country’s evils, without exception, although he indicated that even more responsibility lay with the parties on the left. They led to “new oligarchies that started to fight and divvy up power with the former dominant body.”53 To con-

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quer votes, these parties resorted to “demagoguery,” which encouraged unrealistic hopes that led those in government to offer “impossible paradises.”54 This decadence culminated in 1970 with the “appearance of a strongly centralized statist system, which achieved power by the electoral route with minority support.”55 The 1973 crisis revealed the weaknesses of a political and social system that required no partial fix, but rather a profound reworking:56 The 1925 constitution represented a serious effort to return to the traditional presidential system, but it failed because it did not effectively regulate the performance of political parties. These puffed up their power to an exaggerated degree, even prevailing over the president and Congress itself, since neither the constitution nor the laws set limits on these groups. Nor was [their] internal discipline controlled, so that each time they achieved power, they presented a spectacle of instability, frivolity and pettiness, worse than even that offered by parliamentarianism up to 1925. . . . Finally, political parties’ finances weren’t controlled either, opening the doors to the darkest corruption.57

Ultimately, historical legitimacy was based on the ideas developed in Portada. But this legitimation was only part of the process; it was also necessary to resort to another, more political method, through a legal-constitutional strategy and through the efficacy of the government’s economic policy.

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Legal-Constitutional Legitimacy

The second source of legitimation was legal-constitutional and started from day one. Chile’s long and strong legal tradition, which dated back to its independence from Spain, was a required reference point for the new rulers, since the country’s independence was built on a state of law and judicial order, the source of enormous pride. Jurists encouraged the development of democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was impossible to simply break with this tradition; rather it was necessary to absorb it with new energy, especially since it had come under pressure during the Popular Unity government.58 Thus one of the government’s first matters of concern was to establish the foundations of a state of law. This legitimation was expressed through a range of initiatives. The first was to make use of the states of exception provided for in the 1925 constitution, which made it possible to establish a legal dictatorship by applying Clinton Rossiter’s concepts.59 The formula used was to declare a state of siege in a time of war, allowing the junta to assume broad powers and making the judiciary subordinate to decisions made by the government or the junta. The country lived five years under a state of siege. When it ended, in April 1978, it was replaced by a state of emergency, which was more of a semantic change than anything else, since the main measures from the former were maintained. The state of siege was applied again in later years: in 1982 in the northern part of the country, and in late 1984, in 1985, and in 1986 for several

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months, moments that coincided with situations affecting the regime’s stability. The use of the state of exception was only suspended in August 1988, when General Pinochet was appointed candidate in the plebiscite. It was stopped to establish a climate of electoral competition favorable to his victory. In the long years under the state of siege, the regime never faced enough turmoil that would justify the measure or constitute a genuine “crisis,” a fundamental condition for its use. A state of siege is essentially temporary and, as Rossiter maintains, its end is not to establish an authoritarian regime, but to facilitate the functioning of democracy: “The decision to establish a constitutional dictatorship should never be in the hands of the man or men who will make himself into a dictator.”60 The second resource used to establish legal legitimation was based on ensuring the support of the Chilean Supreme Court, which was easily achieved thanks to the judges’ favorable attitude toward the military, based on their negative experience with the Popular Unity government. The court had looked at the leftist administration, some of whose members were denouncing the existence of “class justice” with mistrust. This adverse attitude was reinforced by decisions made by the Allende government that impacted functioning of the courts and placed the efficacy of the state of law at risk. This occurred when the government decided not to allow the police to enforce court rulings on the eviction of illegal occupants of housing, companies, or agricultural properties whose owners had demanded their restitution.61 The government argued that to authorize this, it would first have to carefully analyze the consequences, because an incident could occur that would “damage social peace and public order. Thus, these administrative and political authorities often find themselves constrained to formulate judgments on the merit or appropriateness of providing the police force.”62 This interpretation was unsustainable in a democracy with separation of powers, because it meant subordinating court decisions to the political considerations of the executive branch.63 Some months before the coup, the Supreme Court had decided that the separation of powers established by the constitution no longer existed, and that it was necessary to correct this situation. Some harsh communications occurred between the Supreme Court and the minister of justice, and between the court and President Allende, creating a delicate conflict between the two branches of the state. In a reply to a memorandum from the Supreme Court, President Allende severely reproached the judiciary for its performance, concluding that the courts had “shown neglect in punishing those responsible for sedition; extreme touchiness, to say the least, regarding the authorities’ efforts to defend public order and security in the country.”64 These accusations were categorically rejected by the Supreme Court, which stated that “no sociological disquisition, or legal subtlety, or demagogic strategy, or malicious quoting of past political regimes is capable of derogating the legal precepts copied out here, which were copied so that your Excellency may read them with your

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own eyes and appreciate for yourself their clarity and precision, which is such that they do not admit elusive interpretation.”65 Regarding the conflicts between the executive and the judicial branches prior to the coup, the junta made a solemn declaration recognizing the autonomy of the courts. The text, however, was ambiguous, since it specified that autonomy was to be understood within the new legal order, that is, within the framework of the restrictions imposed by the state of siege. As a result, the courts were limited in their freedom. To reaffirm its recognition of the autonomy of the judicial branch, the junta made a formal visit to the Supreme Court, whose president, Enrique Urrutia Manzano, announced the court’s political support for the new rulers. The third and most important resource used to achieve legal legitimation was the writing of a new constitution. This was not presented as a reform to the 1925 constitution, which would have been the simplest, most straightforward way to effect it, but rather involved writing an entirely new text, with different doctrinal and political foundations, allowing the military authorities to present themselves as the creators of a new founding charter, which would be one of their major legacies in the history of Chile.66

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Drafting the New Constitution

On September 24, 1973, as proposed by the minister of justice, Gonzalo Prieto Gándara,67 a commission of jurists was set up to draft the new constitution.68 Its members were politicians and professors of constitutional law: Enrique Ortúzar Escobar, a former minister of justice in Jorge Alessandri’s government; Sergio Diez, a former senator of the National Party;69 Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz, a Gremialista leader and associate professor of constitutional law at Catholic University; and Jorge Ovalle, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chile and a former member of the Radical Party.70 They chose Ortúzar as president of the commission.71 Except for Ovalle, all were associated with the “Alessandristas,” the political movement that backed former president Jorge Alessandri. The ideological bias of the commission assigned to work on the new constitution was somewhat mitigated a few weeks later with the appointment of Alejandro Silva Bascuñán and Enrique Evans de la Cuadra, professors of constitutional law who belonged to the PDC.72 A former Liberal Party member of parliament, Gustavo Lorca, also joined them.73 At year’s end, a lawyer, Alicia Romo, was appointed to provide some representation for women.74 The broad right-wing majority was a clear sign of the new government’s political orientation. The decree that created the constituent commission showed that the goal was profound institutional change. It called for a new constitution, “given the need to reconstitute, renew and perfect the Republic’s fundamental institutions, to ensure full consistency with the postulates included in the constitution estab-

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lishing the Junta.”75 The commission was charged with researching and drafting the new constitution and submitting the draft to the governing junta. The commission’s work went slowly, since the junta did not set out fundamental criteria to guide its efforts. The military, moreover, had no interest in seeing the commission finish its work quickly, because this would have meant immediate implementation of the new constitution and their return to their barracks. The commission worked in regular sessions and initially relied on the efforts of numerous professionals who had opposed the Popular Unity government; they participated in subcommissions.76 The basic outline for the new constitution was agreed upon relatively quickly.77 Members then began to write the articles, based on a document (Bases de la Institucionalidad, approved in June 1974) that described, in a very general way, the ground rules for the new institutional foundation. They then worked on the issues of nationality and citizenship, approved in October 1974, and on constitutional rights and duties, which took a long time due to their addressing other tasks in the interim. To apply legal legitimacy to its running of the government, the military needed to reform the 1925 constitution, which was still in effect. For this purpose, it charged the constituent commission with making the necessary changes, interrupting the original purpose for which the commission was created. In April 1974 the commission received instructions to create a draft amendment to the 1925 constitution that would make administrative reforms possible, which was considered a priority by the army. This was considered the most important change in the country’s history, because it would end the united and centralized state established after the Spanish conquest, and would permit the creation of a modern political system.

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The Constitutional Acts

The military did not hold to its initial decision of passing a new constitution, but rather in 1975 opted for a different path: to establish constitutional acts that, one by one, would become articles of the new constitution (this course would be changed again by the Chacarillas Plan; see Chapter 6). This change reflected several factors, particularly the need to show some progress on the new constitution without having to await a complete text. Another factor was the impossibility of defining the institutional order, due to disagreement on its basic elements. The junta’s advisers admired Franco’s regime in Spain, but this view was not shared by the constitutionalists on the constituent commission, with the exception of Jaime Guzmán. For that reason, the advisers did not dare propose the adoption of corporatist institutions. The Franquist idea of having a constitution composed of several laws—fundamental laws—and the influence of the Uruguayan military and its president, Juan María Bordaberry, who was much admired by the new Chilean government, were also apparent.78

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Another factor in the promulgation of these constitutional acts was of a political nature: the need to create an institution that would allow for some civilian participation, which until that time had been limited to a few ministries. There was considerable irritation among the regime’s supporters, expressed especially through the weekly magazine Qué Pasa, whose editorialists argued that it was necessary to establish a “new institutional foundation” with broad participation from civilians. This explains the first act of the new constitution, which referred to the creation of a “council of state” in order to empower civilians to participate in decisionmaking.79 This new policy was put forward by General Pinochet in his presidential message of September 11, 1975, in which he announced the “new institutional foundation.” The first constitutional act would create a “council of state,” whose role would be to advise the junta. The second act would establish the essential foundations for Chile’s institutions.80 The third act would address constitutional rights and duties.81 And the fourth act would address states of emergency.82 This was not the only change in the work of the constituent commission. The elimination of political parties, decreed by the government in March 1977, with the purpose of dismantling the PDC, led the commission’s two PDC members, Alejandro Silva Bascuñán and Enrique Evans, to resign. Some weeks later the government expelled Jorge Ovalle, leaving a commission comprising only regime supporters.83 They were replaced by three supporters of the military: Luz Bulnes and Raúl Bertelsen, constitutional law professors; and Juan de Dios Carmona, a former minister of defense, a former parliamentarian of the PDC (he had left the party) and a member of the Council of State.84 The constituent commission’s progress depended on consensus within the junta on the new institutional order.85 Only in 1977 was the general framework of the new political regime defined, thanks to a combination of national and international factors. First, the political formula used in those years, of the traditional military regime, was losing strength, a weakening that implied a failure in the performance of the interior minister, General César Raúl Benavides. Second, civilians were upset by the lack of channels for participation, which had been understandable at the beginning of the regime, but was becoming unacceptable. Third, there was uncertainty about the future, due to international isolation, aggravated by the position of the US government, once it had demonstrated the DINA’s participation in the killing of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. Finally, relations with Argentina were delicate, due to the conflict over the Beagle Channel islands. Pinochet presented his new institutional proposal in his “Youth Day” speech, in Chacarillas, on July 9, 1977.86 For the first time, he clearly recognized that there would be a path to democracy. A different regime was to be established, his “protected and authoritarian democracy,” which was closer to a corporativist-style governmental regime: “Our duty is to shape to a new democracy that will be authoritarian, protected, integrated, technified and [involve]

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authentic social participation, characteristics that can be better understood when the individual is stripped of self-worship, ambition and egotism.”87 The new democracy would be authoritarian because it would establish a “strong and vigorous authority to defend citizens from demagoguery and violence.” It would be protected because it would replace the “classic liberal State, naïve and unprotected, by a new one that is committed to man’s freedom and dignity and with the essential values of Chilean-ness.” Its supporters also sought to break with the tradition of traditional democracy by creating a “technified” democracy, which would permit more participation from specialists and technocrats and reduce the role of the politicians. It was considered essential to include “the voice of those who are knowledgeable in the practice of [making] decisions. Only this would make it possible to handle the discussion from the right angle and to the right degree, to reduce the level of ideological debate to its correct level, taking advantage of the work of those most capable, and lending stability to the system.”88 The Chacarillas speech was very important, because it set an endpoint for the military regime and outlined an itinerary for establishing an institutional order. This endpoint was distant enough to allow the regime’s civilian supporters to continue in power. The military’s return to the barracks would not be a complete return, because it would continue to supervise and tutor the entire political system, as granted by the new constitution. The institutionalization process was defined in three stages—“recovery,” “transition,” and “normalcy”—which were supposed to culminate toward 1985. During the first, which represented conditions in the country at that time, political power lay exclusively with the armed forces, “with cooperation from civilians.” The constitutional acts were to be completed, and some very important laws were to be dictated (concerning security, work, social benefits, and education); thus “the 1925 constitution, which in practice had already died but judicially some small parts remained in effect, which was not advisable, would be definitively repealed.” This stage was supposed to end on December 31, 1980, giving way to the transitional period, with “its start coinciding with the full coming into effect of all the judicial institutions contemplated in the Acts.”89 Pinochet remained attached to the idea of dictating a constitution through constitutional acts, adding that when “normalcy” was reached, a final version would be dictated, after the acts had been in effect for a while, so that experiences and material that would enrich the text of the constitution could be retained. During the transition, there was to be a “legislative chamber,” whose members were to be appointed. One-third would consist of “persons of national importance, who will belong by their own right or through presidential appointment; the other two-thirds would represent regions or groups of regions, in a number proportional to the population,” and would be appointed by the junta. The executive branch would remain based in the president of the republic, but the constituent power would be in the junta’s hands, with an impor-

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tant limitation: “this will normally be exercised with prior consultation of the Council of State.” The legislative branch would be in the hands of two “colegislators”: the president of the republic and the legislative chamber. The legislative chamber was to be set up during 1980, and its first period would last four to five years, after which regional representatives would be elected by “direct popular vote.” However, political parties would not be reestablished, since these would only represent “currents of opinion,” to use the term employed by Franco’s regime in Spain. Parties could participate in elections, but the electoral system would prevent them from being the main channel for electing candidates; thus the conditions necessary to favor “the selection of the most capable and to avoid political parties once again becoming machines monopolizing citizens’ participation” would be established.90 The legislative chamber would have the power to “designate the citizen who would be the President of the Republic for a period of six years,” after which the legislature would end its activities in 1985. There was no mention of whether the chamber was to be elected by citizens. This meant that by 1985 the “protected and authoritarian democracy” was supposed to have been established, beginning a phase of “normalcy or consolidation.” During this phase, political power was to be exercised by civilians, but the military would continue to supervise, reserving via the constitution “the role of supervising the essential foundations of these institutions and National Security, in their broad and modern scope.” Four months later, Pinochet developed the ideas from his Chacarillas speech and put them into a memorandum to the constituent commission to establish an agenda for their work in drafting the new constitutional text.91 His main proposals were as follows: 1. The armed forces would not return to their barracks once their participation in the government had ended, but rather would remain in the political system at a higher level. This was expressed in the creation of a “security power” that would grant military bodies the role of “guaranteeing the survival of the State, the basic principles of its institutions, and the grand and permanent objectives of the nation.”92 2. There would be no broad pluralism. Pluralism would be limited, and “information about and actions based on doctrines, groups and persons with totalitarian inclinations would be legally prohibited.”93 This meant that the Communist Party would be banned, although the text was vague enough to cover other left-wing groups as well. 3. The new political order would not be based on the separation of powers, as occurs in a democracy, which seeks to avoid excesses through balanced control; rather, an oversized presidentialism would be established to subordinate the legislature and the judiciary to the executive. The president would exercise not only executive functions, but also colegislative functions; he would be endowed with a “strong authority

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for enforcing law and order,”94 assuming the role of protector of the constitution, to use Carl Schmitt’s term.95 This language demonstrates that this was to be a constitution made to order for General Pinochet, since he would be the president. 4. Because of the above, the nature of Congress would be changed radically, since it would not be the result of universal suffrage, but rather would have a “mixed composition.” Along with legislators elected by universal suffrage, there would be a “quota that would belong by their own right or by presidential appointment,”96 which would later give rise to the “appointed senators.” In any case, holders of public positions would have to meet “basic requirements of suitability,” which meant that parties’ influence on the appointment or election of parliamentarians would be secondary; the fundamental issue would be the personal background of the legislator and not the legitimacy provided by a universal vote. 5. The parties would not have the same role that they do in democracies, which were negatively described as “monopolistic conduits for citizens’ participation and . . . gigantic power machines that subordinate legislators to ‘party orders’ imparted by small oligarchies that direct parties with no real right or responsibility, and that have at their disposition enormous funds from unknown sources.”97 The memorandum conceived of political representation without parties, echoing ideas expressed in Portada and by Franquist corporativism.98 This was confirmed in the proposal, in that the electoral system would seek to establish organizations that were generators of “currents of opinion,” formed by selected groups of citizens whose value lay in the “quality of their members and the seriousness of their doctrinaire and practical proposals.”99 The idea of institutional or appointed senators was not new; it had been proposed before by the former president of Chile, Jorge Alessandri, in his constitutional drafting project, announced some weeks before the 1964 presidential election. That initiative established a mixed senate, consisting of senators elected by universal suffrage in the existing districts (forty-five) and a large number of nonelected members (seventeen), who would join the Senate by one of two routes: some would do so in their own right as former presidents, while others would be appointed by specific bodies, such as the Supreme Court, the Council of University Presidents (Consejo de Rectores), the president of the republic, and the Senate itself. These senators would represent different interest groups: businesses and unions, universities, and the Supreme Court.100 With this proposal, Alessandri sought to reduce the influence of universal suffrage and the weight of elected senators and, at the same time, to minimize the role of parties and elections. Pinochet would add representatives of the armed forces, not considered in Alessandri’s initial proposal.

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In short, this was no attempt to restore the democracy that had existed in Chile until 1973, nor to create a renewed democracy free of the faults that had provoked its collapse. Quite the contrary, the objective was to establish a different political order, a limited democracy, not based on popular sovereignty, with no respect for separation of powers, and with the military in charge of the political authorities. The ideas from the Chacarillas speech considerably simplified the writing of the constitution. In less than a year, on October 30, 1978, the commission presented its draft to Pinochet.101

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Constitutional Debates in the Council of State

Debate over aspects of the transition and the future new political order took place in the Council of State, which reflected the heterogeneous nature of the positions taken by the government’s supporting groups. Alessandri, who had accepted his appointment to sit in this body to influence the contents of the new constitution,102 took his new post very seriously, because he considered it the chance to see his constitutional ideas put into effect.103 The draft constitution produced by the Ortúzar Commission was discussed by the Council of State at fifty-seven plenary sessions over twenty months, and presented to Pinochet on July 8, 1980. Three issues were debated at these sessions: universal suffrage, the president’s powers over the military, and the transition period. A former Liberal Party senator, Pedro Ibáñez, opposed universal suffrage. He thought political power “should be the result of a system that operates from the top down and not in the opposite direction”; mayors and regional administrators should be presidential appointees; the “legislative chamber” should be elected, with representatives to the Chamber of Deputies elected through a “popular vote” in uninominal districts corresponding to each province, while senators, who would represent the regions, should be elected by “regional [electoral] colleges.”104 In terms of electing the president of the republic, Ibáñez opposed an election by “popular vote.”105 He added that the purpose of his proposal was “to make it as difficult as possible for parties to form, diversifying the sources or [electoral] colleges involved in the appointment or the election.”106 Carlos Cáceres, an economist and professor at Adolfo Ibáñez University, supported Ibáñez’s arguments. He argued that the 1973 crisis had occurred because democracy was understood as “an end in itself and not as a means to achieve good government,” so “everything was submitted to a vote” and the majority determined what was good for the country, without letting principles direct public action.107 The result of this, he believed, was that candidates resorted to demagoguery, which ultimately led them to “offer utopias, illusions.”108 Ibáñez and Cáceres were not alone in their opposition to suffrage,109 enjoying support from Alessandri. However, Alessandri finally opted for keeping the

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universal vote, because he considered its elimination unviable for lack of a better alternative.110 Former president Gabriel González Videla (1946–1952) harshly criticized the proposals of Ibáñez and Cáceres, calling them “totalitarian and fascist ideas that will be exploited not only in Chile but worldwide. Supporting them would lead to political disaster.”111 Ibáñez and Cáceres wrote a minority opinion in a Council of State report in which they presented the basis for their criticism of universal suffrage and parties. Their proposal was rejected by a vote of fifteen to two. The second issue that triggered extensive debate in the Council of State was the president’s powers over the military, including the right to appoint and remove the high commands of the armed forces. Alessandri believed the president should retain the powers from the 1925 constitution, which allowed him to appoint, with the Senate’s approval, the high command of the armed forces and the commanders of the three military branches. This proposal differed from that presented in the Ortúzar draft constitution, which specified that the commanders in chief could not be removed, limiting the president’s powers to ratify the decision of each branch of the armed forces.112 Alessandri’s position was supported by the military’s former commanders in chief, who were members of the Council of State and spoke at length on this issue.113 Retired general Óscar Izurieta, who had been army commander in chief for six years during the Alessandri government, was very favorable toward appointing the high command as set out in the 1925 constitution, stating that “personally I have always liked the fact that it required the Senate’s approval, because it made the process of obtaining a high rank more rigorous and really distinguished the appointment, as it had to have the support of two powers of the State.”114 The third issue of importance was the transitional phase for implementing the new constitution and, along the way, ending the military regime. Alessandri raised the point, considering it essential to set a date for the military’s return to their barracks, but it was not dealt with in the constituent commission’s draft. Ibáñez did not agree with moving toward a democratic government, even though this idea had been mentioned in the Chacarillas speech. In his minority vote, he proposed that the military regime continue, arguing that it was enough “to legalize the existing governmental regime, which is not arbitrary, because it responds to a very deep reality and a need profoundly felt by the country.”115 He also rejected the idea of returning to the 1925 constitution, which he considered an “anachronism.”116 In his opinion, the main task of the moment was “to seek formulae for approaching governments similar to those of the decades of the 19th century, dressed in reasonably acceptable ‘clothing.’”117 He considered it absurd to approve a transition period that in practice would mean “keeping it hidden away for six or eight years with the idea that this isn’t the right moment for it to come into effect.”118

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The transition period established by the Council of State was in line with Alessandri’s ideas. The council stipulated that the country was in no condition to “immediately reestablish the regime of universal suffrage,”119 so it established a five-year transition period, starting with the plebiscite, to approve the constitution. In this period, Pinochet would remain president and the junta would hand legislative authority over to a bicameral congress, whose members would be appointed. The deputies would be chosen by the junta, and the senators by the president. The junta members would become lifelong senators, as would former presidents of the republic. This congress would contain a “suitable and appropriate representation of the different democratic currents of opinion existing in the country.”120 This meant that the junta would have to give up most of its authority, becoming an advisory body to the president on issues of national defense and anything else he wanted guidance on.

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A Constitution for Pinochet

The Council of State’s report did not please General Pinochet, mainly because of a transition period that would impose a deadline on his remaining in his position, and because the president’s powers over the military would be diminished compared to those proposed in the Ortúzar draft constitution. Nor did the junta like the idea of ceasing to function as the legislative branch.121 These differences produced a conflict between Pinochet and the former head of state, since Pinochet did not respect the conditions that Alessandri had put forward for assuming the presidency of the Council of State: the report on the draft constitution was not published in the press, and Alessandri was unable to defend his proposals before the junta.122 A few days later, Alessandri resigned as president of the Council of State.123 He remained very angry with Pinochet, but he did not let his feelings be known. Only in April 1982 did he publicly express his criticism of economic policy—during the crisis—at a shareholder meeting of Chile’s Paper and Carton Manufacturing Company (Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones), of which Alessandri was president. There, Alessandri gave free rein to his rage against then–minister of finance Sergio de Castro, but not against Pinochet.124 The differences between the Ortúzar Commission’s draft and the Council of State’s draft were not major. There were some differences regarding the number of members of the Chamber of Deputies (reduced from 150 to 120 in the latter), the length of the presidential period (reduced from eight to six years), and the presence of appointed senators in the Senate (reduced from twelve to nine).125 But the fundamental differences all concerned the armed forces.126 The Council of State draft established that officer appointments, promotions, and retirements be undertaken through supreme decree, without mentioning the proposals from the commanders of the respective military branches. It did not retain the provision from the commission’s draft that established the proposals could not be changed, nor did it specify the length of

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time that officers would remain in their posts. Rather, it gave the president the power to appoint and remove them. The 1980 constitution was finally written by a team of jurists that took the Ortúzar Commission’s draft and included new concepts suggested by General Pinochet’s advisers to strengthen the president’s authority and more precisely define the transition period.127 There are different opinions about who wrote the final draft of the 1980 constitution.128 Most say the lion’s share was done by General Pinochet, which appears to be the most convincing interpretation in light of the transitory clauses and the strong centralization of authority in the president established in its permanent articles, which seemed made to order for Pinochet. Another interpretation considers Pinochet’s importance to the final text more distant, and stresses the influence of the navy, especially Admiral Merino.129 Political scientist Robert Barros concludes that “neither in its genesis nor in its content was the 1980 constitution Pinochet’s constitution. The constitution was not designed taking into account his future presidency,” although he softens this affirmation by adding that “these aspects of the constitution hardly precluded Pinochet from considering it a vehicle for his ambition.”130 The constitution established the institutional architecture of a “protected and authoritarian democracy,” limited and supervised by the military. It would be instated eight years after the constitution’s ratification in a plebiscite, with a transition period during which the institutions would be established and the economic model consolidated.131 The constitution’s institutional content was based on the objective of establishing an order different from that of Western democracy, considered decadent and in crisis. Its key components reflected a negative approach: mistrust of universal suffrage as the source of representation, which was long the subject of consensus in the governing coalition.132 This explains why an electoral system that ensured a clear majority to the governing coalition through a majority system was established. Moreover, the suspicion toward political parties was reaffirmed; it was argued that parties should not “monopolize” representation and that their candidates should compete, under equal conditions, with “independents.” Finally, the constitution established a limited pluralism (Article 8) that excluded Marxist parties, particularly the Communist Party. The second key component of the constitution was the supervisory role assigned to the military through two institutions: the National Security Council and the appointed senators. The CSN was to comprise the commanders of the three branches of the armed forces and the director of the Carabineros, and would have broad powers, being able to represent its opinions to any authority established by the constitution. The appointed senators would comprise former commanders of the armed forces and the Carabineros, chosen by the CSN; two former judges of the Supreme Court, chosen by the court itself; a former comptroller-general of the republic, also chosen by the Supreme Court; and a former university president and a former minister, appointed by the president.133 The armed forces would have broad autonomy with regard to the gov-

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ernment and Congress, through a hierarchical structure under the commander in chief, who could not be removed from his post and who determined all promotions and retirements. The third component comprised the constitutional guarantees that would ensure the continuity of the institutional order over time, to prevent a congressional majority that rejected the principles from changing them. To do so, a complex mechanism for constitutional reform was established that made changing the constitution impossible without the support of the main political parties, because it would require the approval of two successive congresses, with a three-fifths majority of their members. A fourth component was the lengthy transition period, which would permit solidification of the political and economic conditions and serve to prepare right-wing groups for the congressional elections, to be called after the 1988 plebiscite, which was treated as a mere formality to ratify General Pinochet’s presidency for another eight years. His advisers ended up accepting the transition period proposed by Alessandri, but they changed it to favor Pinochet. The commanders or the armed forces and the director of the Carabineros were to “propose to the country, unanimously, subject to ratification by citizens, the person to hold the position of President of the Republic during the next presidential term.” This was to be done at least ninety days before the date on which his mandate was to end, and citizens were to “approve” or “disapprove” this proposal.134 As political institutionalization had gone hand in hand with consolidation of General Pinochet’s leadership, it was obvious that he would be the candidate for reelection. Mónica Madariaga, minister of justice in 1980, recalled that the original transition period, approved in a working group, was sixteen years, but that this was considered counterproductive to winning the plebiscite to approve the constitution, so the original period was divided into two eight-year periods.135 During this lengthy eight-year “transition,” the rules of the states of exception were to remain in effect. Interior minister Sergio Fernández justified this by arguing that “it was indispensable to carry out the modernizations, consolidate economic recovery, strengthen the new democratic regime, permit the institutional reincorporation of the opposition into political life. [It would be a lengthy process] to make room for all non-totalitarian forces that had influenced the serious 1973 crisis and to ensure that the major divisions would fade over time.”136 The transitory articles reaffirmed General Pinochet’s broad powers. In effect, he could “arrest people for up to five days in their homes or places that were not prisons,”137 restrict their freedoms of assembly and information, prohibit citizens’ entry into the country or expel them from it, and relegate citizens for up to three months to any urban location within the national territory.138 The other objective of the transition was to organize the succession to ensure Pinochet’s reelection after the eight-year transition period, so that he would remain president for a total of sixteen years, starting on March 11, 1981. Those working on the 1980 constitution made the decision to resolve the issue

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of succession in advance, a subject that is the Achilles heel of dictatorships.139 However, Pinochet would not win the 1988 plebiscite, and his defeat would trigger the end of the authoritarian regime (see Chapter 11).

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Legitimacy Through Efficacy: The Neoliberal Model

The new regime not only had to legitimize itself in terms of the past and through a new legal-constitutional order, but also had to legitimize itself through economic efficacy. To do so, it proposed solving the serious crisis left by the Popular Unity government and introducing institutional changes that would allow the economy to take off. People would value successes not achieved by democratic governments: overcoming poverty and ensuring economic stability. This type of legitimation is recurrent in military regimes that arise after the collapse of democratic governments whose economic performance was a failure, although normally the outcome is negative. The Pinochet regime is an exception.140 Difficult economic conditions in September 1973 offered optimum conditions for introducing profound changes into the structure of production.141 Hyperinflation was acute, badly hurting wage earners’ income; basic necessities were in seriously short supply, impacting the daily life of families and forcing people to line up for hours or resort to the black market; parts were in short supply, hurting manufacturing companies and slowing production; international reserves were threatened, aggravated by the conflict with the United States over the nationalization of copper companies.142 The economic reforms were neoliberal in orientation and implemented by a group of technocrats known as the Chicago Boys.143 These reforms were based on a complete approach that brought into play their political views. They saw politics as an activity completely governed by market rules, and treated citizens as consumers who would be guided by product appearances and material interests, with no concern for nonmaterial assets. While these ideas were not original, since they were based on monetarist views from the Chicago School of Economics, the specific proposals and policy approaches for Chile were a Chilean contribution.144 It could be said that if Milton Friedman, the emblematic figure of monetarism, who is considered the father of the neoliberal model, had not existed, the Chicago Boys would have pushed through the same policy with the same determination.145 Their approach was applied in every public policy sphere, from higher education, where competition was introduced by creating private universities, to interest groups, in which professional organizations with substantial authority over their members were reduced to mere gatherings of similarly trained individuals, losing compulsory affiliation and their authority to judge their affiliates’ performance, and thus losing the main reasons for their existence. The Chicago Boys

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also applied their approach to urban development, liberalizing land use and allowing cities to grow without planning. The Chicago Boys applied their policies very consistently, under the Ministries of Finance and Economy and under ODEPLAN, and were supported by all the sectoral ministries, including Health, Housing, and Labor. Pinochet decided to strictly follow the neoliberal economic model, even when difficulties arose, particularly during the 1982–1983 crisis. The Chicago Boys controlled the country’s economic ministries and enjoyed the support of a media very favorable to their proposals. They believed they had a monopoly on the truth, accepted no critical or divergent views, and lacked the ability to foresee problems. The arrogant style of their major figures became an additional irritant to those who did not share their neoliberal fundamentals. The economy, according to the Chicago Boys, was like natural science: it provided the only answers, regardless of political factors. Miguel Kast, a spokesman for the neoliberal model, explained it this way: “The economy offers the possibility of presenting a complete model of people’s behavior. We do not feel we hold the absolute truth, but there is a range within which we can predict human behavior without making any mistake.”146 The Chicago Boys introduced a very broad, consistent set of policies that constituted profound economic reforms,147 including opening the country to trade, with a single 10 percent tariff for all imports; liberalization of markets, especially financial ones; deregulation; stabilization, which involved drastic economic adjustment that caused spending to plunge and involved public service layoffs and a reduction in the state’s contribution to healthcare and education; and finally, privatization of public companies, which reduced the state’s role in the economy, opening the management of pensions and healthcare to the private sector. In 1979 the government applied its monetary approach to the balance of payments, thus seeking to tie domestic inflation to international trends, a move that became one of the untouchable hallmarks of the neoliberal model.148 The Chicago Boys tried to establish a new economic order that would put the initiative squarely in the hands of the private sector and relegate the state to a “subsidiary” role. They were convinced that the market efficiently assigned resources, and they had an idealistic view of businesspeople, believing they would support the economic team in good faith, without committing any irregularities or excesses. Thus, regulations were rejected. From the start, new institutional criteria were applied to establish this new economy. The framework in which public firms functioned was changed to make them work like private companies, with no state subsidy. The companies that had been illegally seized by the Popular Unity government were returned to their previous owners or reprivatized. The authoritarian context made it easier to apply these neoliberal policies. The technocrats could act within a simplified political scenario, with a centralized structure of authority, which gave them plenty of room to maneuver. They

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did not have to deal with opposition from workers and unions, as these were strictly controlled by the authorities. They were free of the difficulties involved in the complex decisionmaking of a democracy, which requires lengthy negotiations between the government and the opposition; and they enjoyed the full support of the media, which worked to report on these initiatives in a positive light, hiding weaknesses and ignoring criticism from some business and opposition circles. The authoritarian context ensured the continuity of the economic reforms, even when their efficacy was placed in doubt by the 1982–1983 crisis. Chile was a dual state that sought to promote economic freedom through a regime that suppressed political freedom.149 One of the main measures of the new economic model was privatization, with the dual purpose of eliminating the state’s entrepreneurial role and strengthening the position of private business.150 During the early years, there was no talk of “privatization,” but rather of the establishment of an institutional order that would force the state to withdraw from the economy. The minister of finance, Sergio de Castro, did not fail to recognize the good results achieved by public companies, because he could attribute these results to the new institutional order.151 He said that public firms would become efficient only if they were allowed to function in the context of a market-based economy, compatible with an entrepreneurial role of the state.152 The privatization policy involved two stages. During the first, in the 1970s, there was a reprivatization, in which companies that had been nationalized in an irregular manner by the Popular Unity government were restored to their former owners or sold off. The second, during the 1980s, involved the sale of public firms or companies taken over by the state during the 1982–1983 crisis (see Chapter 10). At the time of the 1973 coup, the state had 596 companies under its administration, of which the vast majority (533) had been taken over or acquired by the government.153 These represented 39 percent of gross geographic product (GGP).154 Buyers received no support from the government to cover the expenses of companies in poor economic condition, which prevented many former owners from buying back their firms. This benefited other businesspeople, especially the conglomerates with the financial resources to buy them.155 In 1974 the government development corporation (CORFO) proceeded to return a total of 325 companies, worth about US$1 billion, to their original owners.156 This return came without charge, but owners were responsible for maintaining jobs, contributing to ventures, and other requirements.157 The owners demanded special credit arrangements, arguing that the companies in question had suffered serious damage due to poor management.158 This first round of privatizations went ahead quickly, with little attention to detail, producing much abuse. From 1975 to 1980, CORFO continued to reprivatize everything from banks and finance companies to manufacturing and wholesale firms. A total of 207 companies were sold, for about US$1.2 billion.

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A tight network of interests was woven among banks and companies acquired by investment groups, enhanced by weak financial regulations and passive regulatory bodies that trusted in people’s good faith and market efficacy. All this favored two investment groups: one headed by Javier Vial, who controlled the Bank of Chile, and another headed by Manuel Cruzat, who owned the Bank of Santiago.159 Economic liberalization began immediately after the coup, following the ideas laid out in the economic program known as “The Brick” (El Ladrillo), written by mostly right-wing opposition economists at the navy’s initiative.160 The reforms were applied gradually at first, to control macroeconomic imbalances and particularly the hyperinflation they had inherited. This policy was unsuccessful, as inflation didn’t fall below 300 percent per year during the first three years,161 although it later saw better results, but these were boosted by manipulating the consumer price index, which from 1976 to 1978 underestimated monthly inflation.162 The Chicago Boys were doubly pressured to show good results; on the one hand, anti-inflationary policy was supposed to mark a rupture with the deposed government, and on the other, they had to reduce indices to introduce the adjustment, since pensions, wages, and product prices were indexed to inflation. During the first twelve months after the coup, inflation reduction came with some economic recovery, as a result of the various measures applied, which included disciplining labor by repressing unions, bringing lagging prices and rates up-to-date, devaluing the exchange rate, and substantially increasing public investment and making the most of the high copper price. All these factors removed bottlenecks that had hampered the economy’s capacity. However, the sharp decline in the copper price during the second half of 1974 and the rise in the oil price, combined with persistent inflation, produced a recession in 1975, which drove down gross domestic product (GDP) by 17 percent. This recession was dealt with through an “automatic” adjustment, by reducing aggregate demand through fiscal and monetary contraction. The economy’s recovery was slow, since productive capacity was underused, generating high employment, depressed wages, and low investment.163 The Chicago Boys were able to produce positive results, and quickly, because their starting point was the grave economic crisis at the time of the coup; any improvement, such as controlling hyperinflation, was a significant achievement. Skilled technocrats showed off their results at the end of the 1970s by contrasting them with the 1975 recession, which was blamed on external factors, even though it had been aggravated by neoliberal policies. When the 1980 plebiscite was called, the economic team could show Pinochet’s positive results. A similar strategy was used going into the 1988 plebiscite, with economic results being compared to the state of the economy during the serious 1982–1983 crisis, hiding the fact that only in 1989 did the country again reach full production capacity.164 To show good macroeconomic performance, the technocrats resorted to political maneuvers that were only possible in an authoritarian regime,

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such as delaying wage adjustments for several months or limiting pensions by excluding them from normal indexing, taking advantage of a segment of society who did not have the organizational capacity to mount an effective protest.165 The importance of the economic model to the authoritarian regime’s legitimation strategy explains the obsession for demonstrating success and refusing to admit any weakness. The 1975 recession provided the Chicago Boys the pretext they needed to take over the operation of the economy. In the April 1974 cabinet shuffle, Sergio de Castro took over as minister of economy and Jorge Cauas as minister of finance. The gradual liberalization that followed the coup was promptly dropped in favor of drastic change.166 The economic reforms moved into new areas and increased when Sergio de Castro took over as minister of finance in late 1976, making him the economic strongman.167 These economic policies made it possible to overcome the crisis inherited from the Popular Unity government, although at enormous social cost. In 1975 the economy started to grow, despite inflation, which remained high. The opening of the economy and new capital inflows provided a bonanza that was exploited by many financial institutions, which provided credit to individuals and companies without major limitations. The country seemed to have begun a period of sustained growth, referred to as the “economic miracle” by the model’s proponents. Growth rates were high and unemployment was low. Inflation declined, boosting the income of formal sector employees, and capital inflows boomed, thus strengthening the balance of payments and helping the Central Bank to increase its reserves. Chileans enjoyed a moment of great economic well-being. Legitimation based on economic success peaked in 1980, when the new constitution was approved. Thus the intertwining of the strategies of legal legitimation and economic yields, introduced simultaneously by the Gremialistas and the Chicago Boys, was no coincidence, and helped to secure General Pinochet’s confirmation as constitutional president in that year’s plebiscite. In 1980 a new presidential period of eight years began, at the end of which the country would have a new plebiscite, understood as an election with no obstacles to the sole candidate’s victory. With this boom the government’s supporters were sure the majority of the country would opt for the regime to continue, that is, for economic development without poverty.168 The happiness produced by the regime’s victory in the 1980 plebiscite was fleeting. Economic difficulties, predicted by opposition experts for several years, started to appear when, on April 29, 1981, the Crav sugar company declared bankruptcy. Nonetheless, the economic team saw nothing more than an isolated problem, which it blamed on the firm’s owners. Problems, however, snowballed. In 1982 the deficit reached US$4.8 billion, with only onequarter due to external factors (the decline in the copper price), rising interest rates, and falling export prices.169 The situation became more delicate due to

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difficulties in obtaining foreign credit to pay off the enormous international loans assumed by companies and banks. The economic team did not acknowledge the model’s problems. Capital inflows and the fixed dollar led to the overvaluation of Chile’s currency. The conglomerates were over their heads in debt, especially in credit among their own related companies and each firm’s corresponding bank. The lack of regulation that had prevailed in official policy meant minimal supervision by the authorities; and to avoid the existing rules, companies had resorted to credit between real and paper companies.170 Businesspeople were convinced that the authorities would prevent a crisis, believing that “the State had implicitly insured them.”171 External borrowing came with a decline in investment and domestic saving. Consumption had risen, which favored imports, and did not stimulate domestic production. The rise in interest rates and the decline in the copper price happened in the midst of already serious economic problems, which explains their tremendous impact on Chile’s economy, a situation akin only to the 1929 crisis. In 1982, GDP plunged 14.4 percent, the result of the most severe negative growth rates ever experienced by manufacturing (–21.1 percent) and construction (–23.4 percent). In 1982, unemployment reached 19.6 percent, incredibly high given that community employment programs—the Minimum Employment Program (Programa de Empleo Mínimo [PEM]) and the Employment for Household Heads Program (Programa de Empleo para Jefes de Hogar [POJH])—accounted for 26.1 percent, and rose even further, to 26.4 percent (31.3 percent excluding PEM and POJH workers), in 1983.172 This created a delicate political situation that would soon become apparent. Sergio de Castro trusted that unemployment would be solved by the wage cut that he was able to impose. It was a serious political error, since the military rejected this option, foreseeing the enormous social and political costs it would entail.173 De Castro clung to the fixed exchange rate as the model’s great symbol on which the system’s credibility depended; however, he could not head off devaluation, which occurred on June 14, 1982, after he had been removed from the ministry.174 The economic system’s “profinancier bias,” in the words of an opposition economist, Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, gave way to grave financial crisis when, on January 13, 1983, the government took over five banks, ordering the sale of three and the direct supervision of the other two. These banks represented 45 percent of the financial system’s capital and reserves and 64 percent of the private banking system.175 The fall of the banks brought with it the bankruptcy of related firms owned by the same conglomerates. The Bank of Chile, a major symbol of the country’s commercial power, which the Allende government had proven unable to nationalize, came under direct governmental control, and with it, all its related firms. The state also took over the Bank of Santiago, which belonged to another powerful conglomerate, the Cruzat group, and with it, many companies. The Chicago Boys had turned history around, giving the government

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more control over the economy than it had experienced during the socialist administration of Popular Unity. The neoliberal scheme had shown its weaknesses, and prominent businessmen ended up in jail.176 *

*

*

This chapter has analyzed the new government’s strategy for legitimation, its efforts to create a long-term regime and perpetuate its hold on power, far beyond the moment when the military was to return to its barracks. A multiple legitimation strategy was adopted, which combined historical justifications, identifying the military regime with the Authoritarian Republic of the early nineteenth century; legal-rational justifications, through the use of states of exception and a new constitution; and the search for economic success, with legitimacy arising from material success. We turn next to the organization of political power under the new regime.

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Notes

1. Referencing the concept of legitimacy according to the definition by Lipset (1960). 2. I draw from Beetham (1991), pp. 25ff. 3. Weber (1968). Beetham expresses a position that is critical of Weber’s; Beetham (1991). 4. Linz (1978, 1988). 5. Charismatic legitimation was not present, since Pinochet lacked the rare qualities that define it. However, the regime did have a strong component of personalization of power when it emphasized his qualities as a statesman. Much has been written on the concept of “charisma” according to Weber (1942): for example, Roth (1979, 1987), pp. 119–143. 6. The claim that the collapsed institutional order and democratic rule would be restored “did not last very long. Maybe a couple of weeks, two months, at the most”; Arriagada (1998), p. 31. 7. The text is presented in Ordenamiento constitucional (1980), pp. 137–139; quote from p. 139. 8. Decree Law no. 1 reads: “On this date the Junta is established and assumes the supreme command of the nation with the patriotic promise to restore the true Chilean spirit (chilenidad), justice and weakened institutional order.” The text is printed in Ordenamiento constitucional (1980), pp. 140–142; quote from p. 141. 9. General Sergio Arellano’s son recalls that in the days following the coup, military officers and civilians commented among themselves that the military would relinquish power in 1976, when the constitutional mandate of the ousted president would have expired; Arellano Iturriaga (1985), p. 15. 10. He envisioned the comeback of former president Eduardo Frei Montalva, Senate president at the time of the coup and the country’s top political figure. 11. “Memorandum. From: Creative Committee. To: Honorable Governing Junta,” c/129, FJGE, emphasis in original. In this important document, Guzmán makes various suggestions on the junta, emphasizing “the image that the Junta must project” to become the main authority in the new political regime and to “provide the Junta with majesty and a certain mystery”: it was to project an image of “stability,” unchallenged by other authorities, preventing ministerial statements setting a deadline for the end of

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its exercise of power. In this document, Guzmán warns of a problem that would soon become apparent: the need for executive authority to be exercised by one individual, suggesting that the issues raised by “the extension of the joint Executive over a period of several years” should be examined. He establishes criteria for political legitimacy and points out the wisdom of “associating the Armed Forces with our history and with the notion of victory.” 12. From then on, this became the scene of the new regime’s main political rallies. 13. This phrase, which would become recurrent under the Pinochet regime, was also present in the discourse of General Juan Carlos Onganía: “This revolution has no specific deadline, but rather goals to be achieved over time”; Mensaje del Presidente de la Nación Teniente General Juan Carlos Onganía al Pueblo Argentino, 30 de diciembre de 1966 (1967), p. 17, quoted in Potash (1994), p. 36, n. 47. 14. The text of Pinochet’s speech was published in El Mercurio, October 12, 1973. 15. El Mercurio, October 12, 1973, emphasis added. 16. Ibid., March 12, 1974. 17. Declaración de Principios de la Junta de Gobierno. 18. Ibid. 19. di Palma (1980), pp. 162–189. 20. The justification for this was the existence of the so-called Plan Z, described in Libro blanco (1973), which was planned by civilians after the coup (see Chapter 2). 21. Using the concept of semi-opposition as defined by Linz (1973). 22. Using the concept of “authoritarian enclaves” by Garretón (1982). 23. There is a well-documented analysis by Cristi and Ruiz (1992) on how the nationalist ideas of a historian, Jaime Eyzaguirre, and a priest, Osvaldo Lira, influenced both Estanquero’s and Portada’s political views. 24. A summary of this approach appears in an editorial signed by Jorge Prat: Estanquero, December 18, 1948, p. 14. 25. “Our ineffective and artificial liberal democracy must be transformed, giving way to a new, more complete, more technical and more just form of this regime: a functional democracy”; Estanquero, March 12, 1949, p. 14. 26. “To insist on the fact that Chile is going through a phase of political crisis, expressed by the disintegration of [political] parties, their incompetence to rule and the expiration of their doctrines and programs, means facing reality seriously and loyally, and laying the ground for the creation of broad new currents of opinion”; Estanquero, April 17, 1948, p. 15. 27. The views of Estanquero and its political influence would be well worth further research. Of particular interest: in 1966, Nationa Action, founded by Jorge Prat, joined the National Party, along with other politicians who worked with him, such as Sergio Onofre Jarpa. The magazine had extreme views on various issues, questioning the emigration of Jews to Chile after World War II, and including anti-Semitic concepts that were condemned at the time. See “Semana nacional,” Estanquero, January 17, 1948, pp. 5–8; “La inmigración judía,” Estanquero, January 24, 1948, p. 3 (pp. 6–9 include a list of the Jews arriving in the country, and the front page opposes this arrival); “Semana nacional,” El Estanquero, January 31, 1948, pp. 5–8; “Inmigración y política anti-comunista,” El Estanquero, February 7, 1948, pp. 3, 8–9. 28. The first issue came out in January 1969. It was founded by Guillermo Bruna Contreras, Ricardo Claro Valdés, Javier González Echeñique, Víctor Manuel Muñoz Risopatrón, Fernando Silva Vargas, Hugo Tagle Martínez, Gonzalo Vial Correa, Joaquín Villarino Goldsmith, and Cristián Zegers Ariztía. It stopped publishing a few months after the coup, reappeared with a few issues in 1975, and closed down again in 1976. Historian Jaime Eyzaguirre, who died prematurely in 1968, had great influence. Eyzaguirre had been closely involved with the Hispanic Cultural Institute (Instituto de

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Cultura Hispánica) since its creation in the 1940s, hence the influence of traditional Hispanic ideas and conservative Catholicism on his thought. There is a well-documented study by Aylwin (1977). 29. A summary of his thesis can be found in Vial (1984); it is further developed in his history of Chile; Vial (1981). See also Gazmuri (1985). 30. This was not original, as the intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s constantly trumpeted the country’s state of “crisis,” even if the emphasis was on the economic situation. Economist Jorge Ahumada, who had a strong influence on the agenda of the Frei administration, had raised the issue of the existence of an “integral crisis in Chile” in his book En vez de la miseria (1957), chap. 1. An essay in that text became the introduction to the government’s La crisis integral de Chile; Ahumada (1966). See also Pinto (1957). 31. Portada did not like the new orientations of the church, issued from the Second Vatican Council, and was tacitly critical of the social stance adopted by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Chile. I have analyzed this in another text: Huneeus (1988). 32. Criticism of the church became more noticeable after the cardinal and archbishop of Santiago, Raúl Silva Henríquez, supported reforms of Catholic University, during which its main premises were taken over by Catholic University’s student federation, which demanded that new university authorities be elected by faculty and not the church. 33. “Las lecciones del golpe,” Portada no. 8, 1969, pp. 4–5. The title of the article, using the word golpe (coup), should be noted. 34. Ibid. 35. “Desorden social y crisis política,” Portada no. 9, 1970, pp. 5–8; quote from p. 6. 36. Ibid. This criticism takes into account Jorge Prat’s approach, developed in his editorials and articles printed in Estanquero, such as the editorials “Desorientación política,” February 28, 1948; “Presencia del pueblo,” March 6, 1948; “Más sobre los partidos políticos,” April 17, 1948; “Congresos políticos,” June 5, 1948; “La administración pública, parcela política,” December 23, 1949; “Más allá de derechas e izquierdas,” December 23, 1949. 37. “Desorden social y crisis política,” p. 7. 38. Ibid. 39. “Crisis de autoridad,” Portada no. 5, 1969, p. 4. 40. “Nacionalismo y estatismo,” Portada no. 6, 1969, p. 6. 41. “Crisis de autoridad,” p. 3. This attitude represented support for the presidential candidacy of Jorge Alessandri, who had exactly the same view of the leadership of the state. 42. “Desorden social y crisis política,” p. 8. 43. In the late 1960s, under the Franco regime, Las Cortes was reformed to include lawyers elected by direct vote, representing not political currents but rather the family; Linz (1971). 44. “Nacionalismo y estatismo,” pp. 4–7; quote from p. 5. 45. On the Christian Democratic Party, see Grayson (1965), Hofmeister (1995). 46. “[For foreign investors] to invest, they must be respected, in their persons and in their property; abuse and propensity to monopoly must be prevented and the excessive growth of their economic power should be avoided as they might become a threat to the stability and sovereignty of the country”; “Nacionalismo y estatismo,” 1969, p. 6. 47. I draw from Lepsius (1971). 48. El Mercurio, October 12, 1973. 49. Text published in El Mercurio, September 12, 1977.

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50. Instituto Geográfico Militar (1979), p. 7. 51. Ibid., pp. 7–8. 52. Ibid., p. 9. 53. Ibid., p. 11. 54. Ibid., p. 12. 55. Ibid. This view of history has been extensively developed by Vial (1981, 1984). 56. Instituto Geográfico Militar (1979), p. 16. 57. Ibid., pp. 10–11. 58. An extensive collection of documents about political-judiciary tensions during the Allende government is included in a three-volume series published by the Instituto de Estudios Políticos (1974). 59. Rossiter (1963). 60. Ibid., p. 298. 61. The message from the Supreme Court, May 26, 1973, mentioned that nearly thirty companies were impacted by precautionary measures, among them Fensa, Cristalerías Chile, Soprole, Metalúrgica Cerrillos, and Cholguán. The text is printed in González Pino and Fontaine Talavera (1997). A very difficult case occurred with the newspaper La Mañana of Talca, which was taken over by its workers, then taken over by the government, and eventually restored to its owner by a court order. The opposition described the government’s action as a severe attack on freedom of speech. 62. “Oficio del presidente de la república al presidente de la Corte Suprema,” June 12, 1973, published in González Pino and Fontaine Talavera (1997), vol. 2, pp. 1235–1243; quote from p. 1236. 63. General Carlos Prats, interior minister from November 1972 to March 1973, gave an order, which the Supreme Court “heard of only indirectly” (as it informed Allende in a harshly worded message, June 22, 1973); according to González Pino and Fontaine Talavera (1997), vol. 2, p. 1246: “The Interior minister instructed the police force through a confidential memorandum, which the Supreme Court heard of only indirectly. Although these instructions are considered valid and necessary by the Interior minister and the Army commander-in-chief [General Prats] who issued them, this was done in secrecy.” 64. González Pino and Fontaine Talavera (1997), vol. 2, p. 1241. 65. Ibid., p. 1245. 66. The military’s previous involvement in politics occurred in 1924–1925, when the 1925 constitution was passed, ending what is known as the parliamentary regime. 67. Silva Bascuñán (1997). 68. Interest in producing a new charter was apparent in the junta’s first session: “Preparation of a new Constitution is being considered, under the direction of university professor Jaime Guzmán”; AHJG, sess. 1, September 13, 1973. 69. He had been elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1972 and elected senator in March 1973, and had taught at Catholic University. 70. The junta approved commission appointees on September 21, 1973; AHJG, sess. 7, no. 7. 71. It became known as the Ortúzar Commission, because Ortúzar had produced a draft for constitutional reform based on Alessandri’s proposals to correct what he considered “the defects” of politics in Chile, which was made public in July 1964. See endnote 100. 72. Evans had occupied the post of deputy minister of justice in Eduardo Frei Montalva’s government; Silva Bascuñán was a founder of the Falange in 1938, which later gave birth to the Christian Democratic Party. 73. This happened on October 9, 1973. Lorca was a professor of constitutional law at the Catholic University of Valparaiso.

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74. She was appointed through the General Secretariat Ministry, through Colonel Pedro Ewing, on December 21, 1973, and not by the minister of justice, as were the other commission members. 75. Supreme Decree no. 1064 of 1973. 76. There were subcommissions on property rights, the judiciary, the electoral system, political parties, domestic administration, administrative decentralization, the media, and administrative disputes. The decision to create certain subcommissions and appoint their members is presented in the Minutes of the Constituent Commission (Actas Oficiales de la Comisión Constituyente), especially sessions 5, 9, 12, 50, 53. 77. It concluded with a document—“Metas u objetivos fundamentales en que deberá inspirarse la nueva constitución política del estado”—which contained very general suggestions for the new institutional order, and was approved by the military junta in late 1973. 78. He visited Chile in September 1975. Pinochet recalls that he “started a sincere friendship with him that has lasted through the years”; Pinochet (1990), vol. 2, p. 101. Later, when Bordaberry was ousted, Pinochet did not keep in touch with him. He was invited to a seminar organized by the “hard-liners” in late 1979, where he presented some of his political ideas, justifying the participation of the military in politics and putting the crisis of democracy down to the crisis of the political parties; Bordaberry (1980), esp. pp. 22–26. 79. Its structure and roles are analyzed in the next chapter. 80. Decree Law no. 1551, September 13, 1976. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. The text is published in Ordenamiento constitucional (1980), pp. 95–107. 83. Justice minister Mónica Madariaga said in an interview with El Mercurio on May 20, 1977, that the reason was that he had lost Pinochet’s trust, clarifying that the members of the Ortúzar Commission “are essentially people who have the exclusive confidence of the head of state, a circumstance that has allowed the president of the Republic full and absolute freedom to decide to appoint or remove them.” Pinochet had taken a strong dislike to Ovalle, because he was an adviser to General Leigh. 84. Verdugo et al. (1994), vol. 1, p. 77. 85. This is a recurrent problem under authoritarianism, which has not been able to solve it satisfactorily; Linz (1973a). 86. Organized by the National Unity Youth Front, part of the Gremialista movement (see Chapter 7). 87. El Mercurio, July 10, 1977. The speech was written by Jaime Guzmán. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. Jaime Guzmán defended this approach in an interview with Qué Pasa, March 31, 1977, pp. 10–11. 91. The message is dated November 10, 1977, and was written by the minister of justice, Mónica Madariaga, and Jaime Guzmán; see Arancibia, Góngora, and Vial (1996), p. 330. The text is printed in Revista Chilena de Derecho 8, nos. 1–6, January–December 1981, pp. 137–143. 92. Revista Chilena de Derecho, p. 138. This was included in one of the definitions in the junta’s 1974 Declaration of Principles, which outlined the military’s supervisory role. 93. Revista Chilena de Derecho, p. 139. 94. Ibid., p. 139. 95. Schmitt (1931). 96. Revista Chilena de Derecho, p. 140. 97. Ibid., p. 140.

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98. These thoughts are in line with those of Fernández de la Mora (1976b). Another of his short works, El crepúsculo de las ideologías, was published by Zig-Zag in 1968. His ideas are taken up by historian Bravo Lira (1986), who offers a critical analysis of political parties’ performance in Chile. 99. Revista Chilena de Derecho, p. 140. 100. The Alessandri-Ortúzar constitutional reform draft of the 1960s established the following appointed senators: two former presidents of the Senate and two from the Chamber of Deputies, elected by their respective bodies; two former presidents of the Supreme Court, appointed by the court; a former comptroller-general, appointed by the president; two former presidents of the University of Chile or others recognized by the state, appointed by the university system’s Council of Presidents; four representatives of the private business sector, appointed by the Senate, plus two representatives of the employee sector (white-collar workers) and two of the worker sector (manual workers). The text of Alessandri’s speech and the articles of the draft are in La Nación, July 3, 1964. 101. The commission held 417 sessions, some of which were secret, although every session documented itself in minutes. They did not write the articles of the new constitution, but produced a narrative report that seemed more an academic essay on constitutional law and political theory, in the opinion of Jorge Alessandri, president of the Council of State. He demanded a new version, drafted in articles, for the body’s review. The Ortúzar Commission needed only two months to carry out this task; Arancibia, Góngora, and Vial (1996), pp. 330–331. 102. Alessandri accepted the position on two conditions: the report on the constitutional draft to be produced by the Council of State was to be published in the press in its entirety, so that the country would know his position; and he was to be allowed to personally defend it before the junta if it decided to make any changes in its text; Boetsch (1998), p. 165. 103. In his speech when the body was established, he stated that the causes for the democratic breakdown lay in political factors of which he had warned a long time ago: “Before becoming President, and later while in office, on many occasions I publicly warned of the fatal and imminent collapse of our constitutional life, should the country continue on the path it had been following”; quoted in Boetsch (1998), p. 163 (the entire text of the speech is reproduced in this source). 104. Minutes of the Council of State (Actas del Consejo de Estado [ACE]), sess. 67a, March 27, 1979, p. 435. 105. Ibid., p. 436. 106. The text of Pedro Ibáñez’s document was attached to the minutes of a decision made in the subsequent session, on April 10, 1979. 107. ACE, sess. 61, March 27, 1979, p. 440. 108. Cáceres believed that a political regime based on “principles issuing from natural law, and therefore, not subjected to citizens’ will,” should be established; ACE, sess. 67, March 27, 1979, p. 441. 109. Julio Philippi refuted Ibáñez’s approach, seconded by Carmona and Figueroa; ACE, sess. 67, March 27, 1979, pp. 439–440. 110. Alessandri maintained that “if it depended on him, he would eliminate universal suffrage, [as he was] convinced that very few people were qualified to intervene in governmental affairs”; ACE, sess. 66, March 21, 1979, p. 426. 111. ACE, sess. 67, March 27, 1979, p. 444. González Videla opposed appointed senators, when the issue was discussed; ACE, sess. 71, April 24, 1979, p. 482. 112. They joined through Jaime Guzmán, as shown by a careful analysis of the minutes of the commission; Godoy (1996). 113. Generals Izurieta and Huerta (Carabineros), Admiral Barros, and council members Philippi, Urrutia, and Figueroa made lengthy statements opposing the fact

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that no one could remove the military commanders in chief; ACE, sess. 70, April 17, 1979. 114. ACE, sess. 70, April 17, 1979. 115. ACE, sess. 66, March 21, 1979, p. 427. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., p. 429. 118. Ibid., p. 429. 119. He added that a period in which it would be “indispensable to continue with the task of uniting the people of Chile as much as possible and seek to disarm spirits” was necessary; ACE, sess. 66, March 21, 1979, p. 427. 120. The text is presented in Instituto de Estudios Generales (1980); quote from p. 139. 121. Years later, speaking at a national business meeting on November 9, 1983, Alessandri regretted that his proposal was not accepted, as “we would be living in full constitutional normalcy today”; quoted in Zaldívar (1995), p. 196. 122. The interview that Alessandri had requested with the junta did not take place; instead, General Pinochet met him, surrounded by reporters, implying that the senior politician had come to personally deliver the report from the body he presided over. Alessandri took part in the ceremony and “came out deeply discouraged and weary”; Boetsch (1998), p. 173. Arancibia, Góngora, and Vial (1996), p. 334, indicate that he was “deeply hurt.” 123. He ended up being used by Pinochet, just as he had been warned by his brother Fernando. His resignation was formalized in a very special way. He sent a letter to the Council of State’s secretary, enclosing the resignation letter, to be delivered to Pinochet on September 12, 1980, if the plebiscite was won. If not, the secretary was to return the letter to him and await further instructions; Arancibia, Góngora, and Vial (1996), p. 335. 124. Alessandri’s stance did not surprise the government, since his friend Eduardo Boetsch had informed finance minister Sergio de Castro of his opinions months earlier, requesting a meeting to present his views, which did not take place. Boetsch (1998), pp. 179ff. Alessandri’s criticism was the ultimate reason behind the powerful finance minister’s fall. 125. He removed a former foreign affairs minister, a former ambassador, and a former president of the Chamber of Deputies. 126. Fernández (1994), p. 162, n. 8; he termed them “major discrepancies.” 127. See Valenzuela (1998), esp. p. 158. 128. The text submitted to plebiscite was produced by an Interior Ministry task force that included Mónica Madariaga, justice minister; Sergio Fernández, interior minister; the head of the Presidential General Staff (a ministerial position), General Santiago Sinclair; four military auditors, who were legal advisers to the junta members Fernando Lyon (army), Aldo Montagna (navy), Enrique Montero (air force), and Harry Gruenewald (Carabineros); and the junta’s legislative secretary, Captain Mario Duvauchelle. Some ministers, such as Miguel Kast, José Piñera, and Pablo Baraona, worked on specific issues. The list is presented in Zaldívar (1995), p. 192. A different view, looking more closely at the roles of Pablo Rodríguez and Hugo Rosende, is provided in Valenzuela (1998), n. 9. There are no minutes to determine who the true authors of these changes were. 129. Barros (1996), p. 128. 130. Ibid., p. 178. 131. The interior minister in office at the time of the 1980 and 1988 plebiscites defended it; Fernández (1994), chap. 3. The opposition’s version was provided by the Christian Democratic Party’s president in 1980; Zaldívar (1995), chap. 4.

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132. Jaime Guzmán considered universal suffrage as the lesser evil in his document “El camino político,” Realidad 1, no. 7, December 1979, pp. 13–23. He had developed these ideas further in June 1979 in an extensive document, “El sufragio universal y la nueva institucionalidad,” which can be found at the foundation that bears his name. 133. Article 45 of the constitution. 134. Transitory Article 27. In the event that it was not approved, the president’s and junta’s terms would be extended for a year, and simultaneous presidential and congressional elections would be called within ninety days of the expiration of such extensions, according to Transitory Article 29. The former interior minister considered himself the real author of the transition phase, pointing out that “the transitory articles were my main contribution to this task”; Fernández (1994), p. 146. 135. She recalled it this way: “A personal gesture by Enrique Ortúzar persuaded the Junta—and primarily the president—that a single sixteen-year presidential period wouldn’t work, so it was best to divide it in two, through a plebiscite with a single candidate. This historical aspect is the key to several presidential speeches that only few have been able to understand”; Marras (1988), p. 82. The interior minister at the time, Sergio Fernández, refutes this interpretation, pointing out that “the President was realistic and knew that citizens would not approve of a formula that allowed him to rule for a total of 23 years”; Fernández (1994), p. 146. 136. Fernández (1994), pp. 146–147. 137. This term could be extended up to fifteen days “if there were terrorist attacks of serious consequences.” 138. Such decisions were signed by the interior minister “by order of the President of the Republic” and could not be restricted by the courts, since no appeals could be lodged; Transitory Article 24. 139. Sartori (1987). 140. Angell (1984). 141. For a description of these conditions, see Meller (1996), chap. 2. 142. For an account of this situation, see Nohlen (1973). 143. The economic team’s role is analyzed in Chapter 8. Among the works broaching this subject are Fontaine Aldunate (1988), Silva (1992), pp. 385–410, Valdés (1989). 144. One author emphasizes external influences, saying that “the apparent rationality of the Military Junta’s [economic] model did not emerge spontaneously and was not born in Chile. It originated abroad. Milton Friedman’s school of thought fundamentally influenced the ideas of a small group of Chilean economists [known as the Chicago Boys], who held the main positions in the economic structure”; Bitar (1980), p. 29. 145. Friedman visited Chile for a few days in March 1975, on invitation from businessman Javier Vial to give conferences. He held meetings with the economic team and with Pinochet, to whom he later wrote a memorandum suggesting how to deal with the serious external crisis caused by the oil crisis and falling copper prices. However, Friedman’s Nobel Prize for economics as an influence on the military regime’s economic policies, for which Friedman was later blamed, should not be exaggerated. As we will see (Chapter 8), the economic proposals were defined before the coup and were very much determined by political conflict. Friedman describes his visit to Chile and its consequences for his international image, especially when he was awarded the Nobel Prize, in his memoirs, where he reproduces the memorandum to Pinochet and his response, together with other documents written during his controversial trip; Friedman and Friedman (1998), chap. 24 and app. A. 146. Interview by Pilar Vergara, El Mercurio, August 27, 1978.

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147. Much has been written on economic policy under the military regime. See the book by its finance minister in the 1980s: Büchi (1993); see also Castañeda (1992). Critical visions are offered by Meller (1996), Foxley (1982), Ffrench-Davis (1999). 148. Ffrench-Davis (1999), p. 30. The nominal exchange rate was “frozen” at 39 pesos per US dollar. 149. I take the concept of the dual state from Fraenkel (1984). 150. Privatizations are analyzed from a political perspective in Chapter 9. Much has been written on the economic perspective: Hachette and Lüders (1992), Marcel (1989), Sáez (1993), Larroulet (1994a, 1996). 151. “[They have] a small surplus, which would have been much higher if not for the losses of Ferrocarriles del Estado, Soquimich, Enacar and LanChile,” Exposición sobre el estado de la Hacienda Pública, presented by Sergio de Castro, January 1978, p. 8. 152. “In its entrepreneurial role, the State should protect the institutional frameworks that ensure the operation of its companies, corporations and banks, so that they perform at levels of efficiency in line with a competitive economy. This will guarantee the legal consolidation of the administrative management of these institutions during the years in power, which has resulted in a clearly positive balance”; Exposición, January 1978, p. 17. 153. Three hundred twenty-five of these were industrial firms, and eighteen were financial institutions. They were taken over by the Popular Unity government through Decree Law no. 520, enacted during the 1932 Socialist Republic. 154. They represented 100 percent of public utility companies, more than financial services and mining firms, with 85 percent; Hachette and Lüders (1992), p. 18. 155. For more on conglomerates, see Dahse (1979). 156. The enormous problems faced by a successful businessman during the Popular Unity government and the early days of the military regime have been described well by Platovsky (1997), chap. 12. 157. Hachette and Lüders (1992), p. 19. 158. These conditions were not monitored later, resulting in a major subsidy, which was justified as compensation for the damages suffered due to administrative decisions by the Popular Unity government; Hachette and Lüders (1992), p. 19. 159. To the point that “just five [groups] control 36 percent of the 250 largest companies and 53 percent of their net worth. Since 1974, there has been an enormous concentration of the ownership of productive capital and moreover, these groups recovered economically long before it is officially acknowledged, since the net worth of the corporations they controlled virtually doubled between 1969 and 1978”; Dahse (1979), p. 199 (this book lists each group’s main companies). 160. Extensive information is available in Fontaine Aldunate (1988). We will return to this important document in Chapter 8. 161. For an analysis of the reasons behind the slow recovery from this economic crisis, see Ffrench-Davis (1999), chap. 2. 162. Ffrench-Davis (1999), p. 29. 163. Ibid., p. 30. 164. Ibid. 165. Recovery of the 10.8 percent adjustment taken from pensioners by finance minister Hernán Büchi in 1986 was a major issue adopted by the opposition in the 1989 presidential campaign. 166. The major decisions on economic change were made during the regime’s first few months, starting with the liberalization of prices and exchange rates. 167. Another prominent Chicago Boy, Pablo Baraona, was sworn in as minister of economy.

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168. The Gremialista movement launched the idea that there would be no more poverty by the end of the 1980s through Miguel Kast; Las Últimas Noticias, November 4, 1980. 169. Arellano and Cortázar (1982), p. 48. 170. Faced with high interest rates, banks gave debtors new credits so they could pay their interest, causing deposits to grow by a real 38 percent per year from 1976 to 1981; Ffrench-Davis (1999), p. 187. 171. Arellano (1983), p. 31. 172. Unemployment reached 35 percent in the construction sector in March 1982 and leaped to an incredible 62.2 percent in the winter-quarter survey, a level unheard of since Chile began keeping employment statistics; Meller (1996), p. 198. 173. To tackle unemployment, de Castro proposed eliminating the minimum wage, an idea criticized by the Presidential Secretariat’s minister, General Santiago Sinclair, and by mining minister José Piñera, who said it would not solve unemployment and warned of political problems; Fontaine Aldunate (1988), pp. 153–154. Piñera had been waiting to block de Castro’s way for some time, since de Castro opposed his appointment as minister of economy in 1978 (see Chapter 8). 174. “A pillar of De Castro’s policy was falling apart and, with it, part of the government’s credibility”; Fernández (1994), p. 187. 175. Excluding the state-owned bank, Banco del Estado; Arellano (1983), p. 48. 176. General Pinochet lost patience with the conglomerates, and the government took harsh measures against those responsible for the banks’ insolvency, including charging some of the main executive officers. Javier Vial and one of his main advisers, Rolf Lüders, a former minister of finance and economy, were arrested, among others.

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6 The Organization of Political Power

At the time of the coup, the Chilean military had a relatively well-defined program to deal with the grave economic crisis, and professionals trained to take charge of the ministries, but they lacked a political platform to guide the building of the institutional order. Nor did they share the ideas dominant among the right wing at the time, ideas that were influenced by Spanish corporativism.1 There was consensus about a number of issues, such as the rejection of parties and the decision that the government would be “no mere parenthesis,” but there was no clarity about how to organize political power, how to incorporate civilians into the government, and how the future institutional order should look. The military found itself facing a challenge recurrent in authoritarian situations: the need to institutionalize, that is, to establish a political order on which their rule would depend in the long term. As Juan Linz argued,2 choices in terms of political institutionalization in the 1960s and 1970s were not broad, and the known types of institutionalization were not easy to implement. The military could opt for a path of charismatic legitimation, but it frowned on this as being incompatible with its excessive personalization of power in one individual and its highly professional status. It could opt for some corporativist formula, such as “organic democracy,” where no lone accepted party would be built; multiple parties would spring up. Another alternative was to invent a formula with a single party, or a party system with a single hegemonic party and minor parties marginally integrated into the opposition, which wasn’t very feasible given the poor image that these political groupings had among members of the military. None of these solutions was viable in the short term. Not even Brazil was able to satisfactorily resolve this challenge, finding itself forced to set up an “authoritarian situation”3 that drove the military to introduce a gradual return to democratic rule early on, through a process of opening (apertura).4 The lack of a definition for the political order led Chile’s new rulers to opt for a traditional military regime, with a governing junta as its top authority, but 179

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with an important degree of power concentrated in General Pinochet, who simultaneously functioned as president of the republic, president of the junta until 1980, and army commander in chief. There were efforts to build a “new institutional foundation” and go on to construct an “authoritarian situation,” as Linz would say. For example, the 1977 Chacarillas Plan, although it did not establish public institutions, did open the way to civilian participation in the government. These efforts were hampered by Pinochet’s aspirations to become the regime’s strongman, which led to abandonment of the idea of organizing a political system with a distribution of power among different bodies. As a result, the political order never became very institutionalized, and power remained highly personalized in General Pinochet, the undisputed leader starting in December 1974, when he was appointed president of the republic (see Chapter 3). This chapter analyzes the establishment of the Chilean political regime, as well as the establishment of others that share similar characteristics, but that differ in key ways as well.

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The Problem of Military Institutionalization in Argentina and Uruguay

The military in Argentina, under “El Processo” (The Process) (1976–1983), and the military in Uruguay (1973–1985) established regimes that avoided the personalization of power, because they thought that doing so would prevent their country’s future and military organization from becoming identified with the person in charge of the executive branch. Political power in Argentina hinged on the armed forces and remained rooted in the military junta, formed by the commanders in chief of the three branches of the armed forces, with this junta, in its role as “supreme body of the state,” appointing the president of the republic and reserving for itself the right of “revoking” his mandate “when, for reasons of state they considered it appropriate, appointing his replacement.”5 Executive power thus lay with “a senior officer of the armed forces, appointed by the military Junta.”6 The authoritarian order did not change the length of senior officers’ postings, which rotated regularly every three years once active service ended, according to seniority. The first president under El Proceso, army lieutenant-general Jorge Rafael Videla, remained in this post until 1981, and was succeeded by General Roberto Viola.7 The legislative advisory commission, responsible for writing bills, comprised three officers, one from each of the military branches, and its presidency, which lasted just one year, rotated.8 The army held no dominant political position, but rather remained at the same level as the other branches. Thus, for example, the secretary of the military junta was head of the joint General Staff and not an army officer, as was the case in Chile.9 In the case of Uruguay’s authoritarian experience, no officer in active service took charge of the executive branch, because after the June 1973 coup, the man who had been elected president in 1971, Juan María Bordaberry, con-

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tinued in this position. In 1976, following an attempt at suppressing parties, which was opposed by the military, Bordaberry was replaced by civilian Alberto Demichelli, president of the Council of State. When he refused to sign a decree banning political leaders, he was promptly replaced by another civilian, Aparicio Méndez. After the defeat in the 1980 plebiscite, in September 1981 the military appointed retired general Gregorio Álvarez to lead the return to democratic rule.10 Nor were there personalization and centralization of authority within the Uruguayan army. Major government decisions were made primarily in the Council of Generals by ballot, according to majority rule, without the commander in chief having a preferential vote. The same procedure for joint resolutions was followed in the other two branches of the armed forces, which meant that the authority structure of the army, and of the armed forces in general in Uruguay, was collegial, a characteristic peculiar to the country’s political system during the 1960s.11

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Traditional Military Regimes and the Influence of Franquist Corporatism

In Chile, institutional definition was postponed because there was no clarity about its character, beyond the initial consensus among the new authorities on anticommunism, which served to justify the persecution of opposition parties. The governing junta’s 1974 Declaration of Principles expressed this in grandiloquent terms, stating that “our fatherland has decided to enter into frontal combat against international communism and the Marxist ideology that sustains it, dealing it its worst defeat in the past 30 years.” Because of this, it concluded by stressing that “Chile is not neutral on Marxism [and] the current Government is not afraid . . . nor does it hesitate to declare itself anti-Marxist.”12 In the Declaration of Principles, the regime stated its intent to establish a “new and modern institutional order,” influenced by the corporativist ideas of Francisco Franco’s Spain, which were promoted in the late 1960s by academics and intellectuals in the magazine Portada (see Chapter 5).13 In this important document, the junta proposed a quest for the decentralization of power to permit the development of a “social power,” understood as “the ability of the mid-level bodies within society to develop with legitimate autonomy in order to obtain specific ends, becoming a vehicle for limiting and at the same time enriching the application of political power.” This social power was conceived of as “the most important organic channel of citizens’ expression,” and its implementation required “ensuring the independence and de-politicization of all intermediary entities between man and State,” to prevent parties from influencing interest groups and “open the way to a new meaning of association,” an element that would become very important in the government. Following the corporativist concepts of a former minister of Franco’s regime, Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora,14 who was admired by the Chilean

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regime’s advisers and whose book, La Partitocracia (The Partyarchy). was published by a state-owned press in 1976,15 the Declaration of Principles underlined the fact that problems were increasingly “of a more technical and less ideological nature,” concluding that Chile should build “a technified [in the sense of economically and administratively, not of technology] society, in which the word of those who know prevails over slogans,” and “a society of true participation,” in which political parties had no role. In short, our democracy must therefore be “organic, social and involve participation.” The authors of the Declaration of Principles rejected the personalization of power, since that would inevitably lead to caudillismo (leadership by a strong personality). The document proposed an “authoritarian, impersonal and fair government that will de-personalize power, avoiding all caudillismo foreign to our ways.” Power would be exercised using force and without permitting any political activity from those who did not support the regime, reaffirming the coercive style employed since the coup: “The principle of authority will be exercised forcefully, with any appearance of indiscipline or anarchy drastically sanctioned.” The military did not put into practice the corporativist concepts contained in its Declaration of Principles. Putting them into practice would have meant making room for civilian participation, which at that time was not wanted by the military, who felt they were the only ones capable of governing. Instead, they preferred to establish a traditional military regime in which political power was sustained by their participation in institutions. For this purpose, they concentrated authority in the junta, which assumed legislative and constituent powers. Civilians represented a rather secondary source of support.16

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The Junta and the Organization of Legislative Power

The junta comprised the commander in chief of each branch of the armed forces—General Augusto Pinochet, for the army; Admiral José Toribio Merino, for the navy; General Gustavo Leigh, for the air force—and General César Mendoza, director of the Carabineros.17 Immediately after the coup, the army commander in chief, Pinochet, was appointed president of the junta, but as first among equals in relation to the other members, without the full authority of the president of the republic as laid out in the 1925 constitution. Pinochet joined the conspiracy late, creating mistrust among the other heads of the armed forces regarding his real intentions (see Chapter 3).18 This situation gave General Leigh plenty of room to indulge his hopes of becoming the new regime’s strongman. At first, the junta members functioned as equals and made their decisions unanimously, reflecting the unity of the armed forces. In practice this meant that each had the right to veto decisions. Initially, the idea implicit in this decisionmaking structure was to have a collegial leadership to avoid generating an overly strong presidential power. The junta planned to become the new regime’s power

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center, but this proved impossible, because the navy and the air force did not have enough personnel to assume all the necessary functions, and because General Pinochet was determined to impose his authority and power quickly, which were strengthened by the army’s larger size.19 In the early years, the junta acted as if it was the executive, assigning jurisdictions—governmental domains— according to a proportional distribution of power, in order to control conflict between branches.20 The navy took charge of the economy, which reflected its participation in the development of the economic program prior to the coup.21 It also took charge of education, given its obvious interest in the educational reform program known as Unified National School during the Salvador Allende government. When the navy lost control of the Ministry of Finance in 1974, it took charge of Foreign Affairs.22 The air force took charge of the social arena, including the Ministries of Labor and Health, and the army reserved Defense and the General Secretariat (which became a ministry in 1976) for itself. The only ministries headed by civilians were Justice and Economy.23 The army participated mainly at the executive level through General Pinochet, who, as president of the junta, steadily acquired more weight in its decisions. The presidential prerogative to direct international relations allowed the army to intervene in the operation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The army’s involvement was further favored by the danger of war with Peru in the early months after the coup and by tensions with the Argentine military regime due to a border conflict being arbitrated by the United Kingdom. For these reasons, the army took charge of the second-in-command position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, giving its representative the rank of deputy minister and the powers necessary to participate in cabinet meetings, as well as a direct relationship with Pinochet. This led to conflicts, given the duplication of functions between the minister and deputy minister, each of whom often had different information about the main issues, especially when the minister was a civilian.24 Each junta member organized his own legal-political advisory team, using lawyers from his respective judicial service. Only General Leigh had civilian advisers.25 In October 1973 the junta started to receive support from officers of the three branches of the armed forces, following their invitation from General Pinochet, as president of the body, to work as advisers in this new area of responsibility. This advisory group, COAJ, was headed by an army officer.26 COAJ brought together military officers working in the government, distancing them from their institutional responsibilities, a very important move, since it helped to prevent the politicization of the armed forces. The first members of COAJ were officers of the high command, some of whom had degrees in economics27 and political science.28 Several officers would go on to different governmental functions, some as ministers. Only in 1976 did the junta organize a broad advisory group on legislative matters, with participation from civilians and military officers, and with support from personnel who had worked in Congress. “Legislative commissions” were set up, each headed by a junta member and composed of military and

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Carabineros officers, lawyers from each branch’s justice service, and some civilians. Of the three, only the legislative commission chaired by General Leigh29 had members with any previous political experience. The purpose of this initiative was to reinforce the junta’s authority and reduce the influence of COAJ, which also supported General Pinochet. Draft legislation was prepared by ministries and then sent to COAJ, which forwarded it to the respective commission for study. Each commission carried out a detailed study of the drafts, because each junta member took his legislative role very seriously. Once the commission had examined the draft and differences had been resolved, it was sent to the junta for final approval. With the approval of the 1980 constitution, the junta acquired more decisionmaking independence, as General Pinochet ceased to be a member once he became head of state. Admiral José Toribio Merino became the junta’s president. The army maintained its representation, through the deputy commander in chief, who headed the new legislative commission, the fourth,30 created precisely to allow this branch of the armed forces to participate. In 1981 the commissions began to deal with the issues and domains assigned after the coup. The first commission was assigned to the navy and was in charge of constitutional issues, economy, development and reconstruction, finance, and mining; the second commission was overseen by the air force and focused on education, justice, health, and labor and social welfare; the third commission was entrusted to the Carabineros and was in charge of bills involving the Ministries of Agriculture, Public Works, National Properties, and Housing and Urban Development; the fourth commission was entrusted to the army, and was responsible for studying the bills from Interior, Foreign Affairs, National Defense, and Transportation and Telecommunications. The members of the legislative commissions were military officers and civilians from the justice service of each branch. A few lawyers from the branches were members as well. From March 1981 to August 1986, civilians held the majority of posts in the commissions, fifty-nine, compared to fiftyone officers. The officers remained in charge for two to three years, depending on the length of their institutional posting.31

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Gustavo Leigh’s Leadership Aspirations

The military regime’s early years were marked by a power struggle between General Gustavo Leigh and General Pinochet. With political ambitions and a strong character, Leigh initially wanted to become the regime’s main figure, underestimating the army’s power and the abilities of General Pinochet, whom he disliked. He considered himself the initiator of the coup, saying that he had to pressure General Pinochet to join in.32 His impulsive style and his marked anticommunism led him to make statements that gave the impression he was the “hard-liner” during the early weeks of the new regime.33 A reading of the junta’s minutes backs up this impression. Leigh’s great flaw was his lack of po-

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litical sensitivity when it came to putting forth his point of view, a fault that hurt his relations with the other commanders in chief, because he often resorted to personal attacks unfitting of his high position,34 exacerbating the problems. His hard-line image was soon forgotten in light of his differences with the Chicago Boys on social issues, and in light of his power struggles with General Pinochet.35 Two actions that contributed to radicalizing the use of violence in the seizure of power and influenced the new regime’s character involved General Leigh: the bombing of La Moneda (the presidential palace and seat of government), and his declaration about “excising the Marxist cancer.” Although it’s true that he made the decision to bomb the palace before the coup, along with General Pinochet and the head of the General Staff of National Defense, ViceAdmiral Patricio Carvajal,36 Leigh rushed the bombing to highlight the air force’s leadership and to send a signal that it was the most important institution in the overthrow of the Allende government. The bombing of the presidential palace, the result of rockets skillfully fired by two Hawker Hunter aircraft that flew over the center of Santiago on the morning of September 11, 1973, demonstrated that the military would make full use of all its resources to take control, and would not balk at the human and material costs involved. The second initiative also had an important symbolic importance, given the open announcement that the ideological struggle against dissidents would be violent. Chileans heard neither prudence nor moderation when they listened to General Leigh on television that day, in contrast to the cautious tone used by General Pinochet and Admiral Merino (see Chapter 2). The styles used in the early moments of a new regime mark its character, because it is the moment when the broadest choice of decisions is still available and the population is tuned in to events. The declaration of war against Marxism, which dominated politics in the years to come, had a very strong birth. Leigh did not stop at words when he announced the war against Marxism. The air force took charge of the war tribunals in Santiago, showing more arbitrariness and severity than did the other two branches of the armed forces.37 Military justice did not respect the basic rules in Chilean legislation, not even the regulations in the military justice code covering trials in time of war. The air force prosecutor acted with full powers, arresting many without informing the Interior Ministry, thus contributing to the prevailing climate of insecurity and arbitrariness. Interior minister General Óscar Bonilla complained to the junta, calling attention to the unlimited power being exercised by intelligence services.38 General Leigh participated in the war against Marxism and approved the creation of the DINA, which was to be the internal intelligence body of the three branches of the armed forces in support of the junta. He provided air force personnel as requested by then-colonel Manuel Contreras, DINA’s organizer, but when he noticed that DINA was supporting General Pinochet, Leigh distanced himself, creating a “joint command” as the air force’s own intelligence

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body. It was a secret organization, and Leigh did not report its creation or its legal rules for functioning to his colleagues in the junta. This body carried out intense repression against the Communist Party and the Left Revolutionary Movement, which led to conflicts with the DINA, considered the only entity with the power to wage war against Marxist organizations.39 Contreras’s organization won this conflict due to three key elements: more institutional, legal, and economic resources; Pinochet’s support; and DINA’s complete freedom to achieve its goals with tolerance from the judiciary.40 Leigh’s obsession with Marxism was apparent in his insistence on bringing Allende’s ministers, arrested on Dawson Island, to trial. He was convinced that they had committed serious irregularities that could be proven using the documentation supposedly kept in each ministry, and that they would be convicted by the regular justice system.41 On many occasions he complained to his junta colleagues of the slowness of finding this proof, criticizing the work on this matter by the public defense council (Consejo de Defensa Fiscal). At a junta session on April 11, 1974, he put forward a detailed plan to speed up the trials of prisoners and left-wing organizations, distributing tasks among the three branches of the armed forces and the Carabineros, with the air force playing the lead role. In fact, the air force was responsible for gathering information on organizations with “violent ends,” such as the MIR; the Ramona Parra Brigade (of the Communist Party); President Allende’s security team, known as the Group of Personal Friends (Grupo de Amigos Personales [GAP]); and the Elmo Catalán Brigade, a Socialist Party shock group. The air force was also responsible for collecting information about Plan Z (the left wing’s plan to violently seize power) and irregularities in the Civil Registrar and Identification Service (Registro Civil y Servicio de Identificación), where the electoral fraud that was supposed to have affected the 1973 parliamentary elections was alleged to have taken place. The army was to investigate the illegal manufacture of weapons in state-run industries, activities contrary to national security, and the delivery of industrial secrets to foreign companies. The navy, meanwhile, was to head the investigation of foreigners entering and remaining illegally in the country, illegal arms smuggling, and illegal activities regarding Soviet fishing boats.42 Leigh was also obsessed with the opposition. Concerned about obtaining information about the activities carried out by foreign embassies in Santiago, he proposed measures to prevent the embassies from continuing to receive people seeking asylum.43 He was insistent in his campaign against the Christian Democratic Party. He thought that since President Frei’s government, the Christian Democrats had been the main group responsible for the political crisis that led to the collapse of democracy. He was constantly kept abreast of the actions of the PDC’s political figures in the country and abroad, where he thought the party was cooperating with the Marxists to defeat the government. Some months before the DINA attack on former national vice president Bernardo Leighton, a major PDC leader,44 Leigh used harsh language to excoriate him before the junta, reading a

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speech Leighton had given during a political event in Italy, in which Leighton used moderate words in referring to former president Allende. As part of his presentation, Leigh read a Communist Youth document and the words of a major Communist Party leader, former senator Volodia Teitelboim, that had been broadcast over Radio Moscow.45 The conclusion, according to Leigh, was obvious: Leighton was working with the communists against the government. Leigh made an effort to have a particular governmental area of his own, choosing social affairs for this purpose46 and maintaining a relationship with union leaders, whose support he sought in order to implement what he considered his main contribution to economic change, the Social Statute of the Industry (Estatuto Social de la Empresa), passed early in 1975 to promote worker participation in their firms. However, his ideas were not implemented, since the regime had decided on the neoliberal economic approach, and Leigh’s proposals were ignored by the economic team. Sergio de Castro and the rest of the Chicago Boys considered Leigh a populist.47 Conflicts with Pinochet grew worse during the general’s January 4, 1978, consulta (referendum), whose purpose was to strengthen Pinochet’s authority and power, a goal that Leigh opposed. Seeing that Pinochet’s power was being significantly reinforced, the air force chief, on March 21 in an air force anniversary speech given at the Aviation School, publicly emphasized the need to advance toward meeting the military’s initial promise on “reestablishing the set of broken institutions.” 48 Pinochet waited a few months before deciding to follow through with a drastic decision he had been planning for some time: to expel Leigh from the junta. As an excuse, Pinochet used an interview Leigh had given to an Italian newspaper in which he had expressed his support for a return to democracy. In the interim, Leigh had talked about the need to return to a democratic system, talk that may have reflected his failure to prevent Pinochet from becoming the government’s strongman more than anything else.49 Judging from his performance on the political stage, it is hard to imagine that a dictatorship headed by Leigh would have been any less repressive than Pinochet’s.

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Presidential Personalization of Power and Institutional Resources

With a weak presidency and General Pinochet as a first among equals, the junta’s goal of becoming the new regime’s main decisionmaking body was impossible to maintain, because it required collegiality, which was not viable given the problems the junta experienced and the personal differences and power struggle between Pinochet and Leigh. Political and economic conditions suggested the necessity of creating a unipersonal executive power that would reduce the junta’s authority. This, moreover, was General Pinochet’s goal, a goal that appeared reachable due to two central elements: the army and time. Initially, Leigh and Merino were reluctant to appoint a junta president who had strong authority, because this would mean giving leadership of the

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political process to a person who would have all the powers of a president of the republic, in line with Chile’s constitutional tradition, among them the power to appoint hundreds of senior public servants, from ministers and undersecretaries down to regional administrators and provincial governors, including the mayors of Chile’s largest cities, Santiago, Valparaiso, and Viña del Mar. Moreover, with agreement from the Senate, the president could appoint ambassadors, generals and admirals in the armed forces, among other officials. The 1970 constitutional reform put the president in charge of public spending, taking responsibility for the country’s economic management away from Congress.50 The presidency was also tremendously prestigious in the eyes of citizens, a fact that presidents took into consideration as enhancing the almost imperial image associated with the institution.51 Early on, the process of defining the political regime began to intertwine with the consolidation of General Pinochet’s power, facilitated by the junta’s inability to effectively perform its legislative and executive functions. Decree Law no. 527, of June 17, 1974, established that the junta would exercise constituent, legislative, and executive powers. However, army officers in COAJ began to persuade the navy and air force of the need to establish a unipersonal executive power, an idea that was also reflected in this law in a statute that introduced a new interpretation of the junta’s role in running the government as being mere collaboration with the president.52 Pinochet immediately took advantage of the new assignment of powers once the law was approved, carrying out a major cabinet shuffle in order to appoint ministers that he trusted.53 Interior minister General Óscar Bonilla, who had criticized the DINA, was moved to the inconsequential post of defense minister,54 and was replaced by General César Raúl Benavides, an officer with little personality and less seniority than Bonilla. Pinochet also removed the minister of justice, Gonzalo Prieto Gándara, who had expressed concern about human rights violations, appointing in his place a former justice minister from Jorge Alessandri’s government, a criminal law professor, Miguel Schweitzer Speisky. The navy lost the Ministry of Finance, with a Chicago Boy, engineer Jorge Cauas, taking over, who until then had been president of the Central Bank.55 Engineer Raúl Sáez was appointed minister without portfolio, heading up “economic coordination.” This first cabinet shuffle was the first step on the road to strengthening Pinochet’s power and the Chicago Boys’ move into economic leadership, two situations that reinforced each other. The junta’s establishing statute did not give Pinochet all the power he had hoped for, since it did not allow him to exercise the presidency independently from the junta. However, on December 17, 1974, he received the title of president of the republic and “supreme chief of the nation,” just as Article 71 of the 1925 constitution had provided for.56 This decree was signed by Merino and Mendoza, but Leigh resisted, since this involved sanctioning Pinochet’s higher political power. At a meeting that Leigh described as “dramatic and harsh,” Pinochet was waiting for him with the two other junta members who

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had already signed the decree. Pinochet urged Leigh to sign, showing enough determination to intimidate the irascible air force chief, who did not dare to use his veto against such a decided army chief.57 The small number of ministries controlled by the army was enough for Pinochet to take control of the new regime’s political direction. Along with establishing an organization to advise him in his role as junta president, he strengthened the General Secretariat, placing it in charge of political functions that involved controlling the media, through the national communications office, DINACOS. Relations with interest groups and the public were given to the Civilian Organizations Directorate. To make it function more effectively, Pinochet raised to ministerial rank the General Secretariat, a decision that Leigh and Merino resisted for some time, only approving the change in 1976.58 Pinochet needed this body to have enough managerial independence to be able to fulfill its functions.59 Thus the draft decree law stated that the people appointed to positions in the General Secretariat Ministry would be “freely appointed and freely removed,”60 which was necessary given the enormous political sensitivity of the new functions that this ministry assumed.

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The Council of State

To strengthen the image of presidential authority and moderate the character of the military regime by integrating civilians into decisionmaking, Pinochet created an advisory body, the Council of State, announced on September 11, 1975. His idea was for this body to be the start of a “new institutional order.” It was to include former presidents of the republic, which was directly related to historical legitimation, and two former presidents, Gabriel González Videla (1946–1952)61 and Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964).62 This was supposed to force a decision from former president Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970), and a conflict was expected between the regime and the PDC if he refused, thus justifying possible new measures against the Christian Democrats.63 Originally, the Council of State was conceived as a body that would advise the junta and the president. It would be of a “consultative nature, to provide the government with highly qualified opinions on matters of utmost importance to national life, and in which the Honorable Junta or the President of the Republic, depending on the case, considered it opportune to request their point of view.”64 However, the final text, as passed by the junta, established that the Council of State would advise only the president.65 Former president Eduardo Frei refused to join. In a public statement, he rejected the initiative and called the council merely a cosmetic entity that would only be useful “if it formed part of an institutional system that clearly and completely defined the attributes of each body involved in expressing the life of the nation.”66 He considered it a body of little consequence, with few powers and entirely subject to the will of the head of state.67 He rejected General Pinochet’s announcement that he would create a new institutional order, arguing that this

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could only come from a constitution prepared by and approved in a plebiscite of the people, “the only sovereign body for sanctioning a constitution.” Frei considered this initiative another step toward consolidating authoritarianism, saying that “it will be impossible to suppress the existence of parliament and democratic political currents. This order will be unable to sustain itself on forms of corporativism or associativism (Gremialismo), because the roles of each of those are different.”68 Frei’s refusal gave the government the excuse it needed to appoint as his replacement a former defense minister and PDC senator, Juan de Dios Carmona, who resigned from the party.69 With this appointment, the regime sought to trigger the resignation of other PDC figures in favor of the military regime. However, this did not occur. Only William Thayer, who had been labor minister and justice minister in the Frei government, resigned.70 The composition of the Council of State followed some corporativist concepts, since it included military officers and civilians representing various economic activities, the public and private sectors of the economy, and some former Congress members.71 The presidency went to Jorge Alessandri. The Council of State was conceived as an advisory body, with no determination on when it would be obligatory to request its opinion. The president could call a meeting whenever he wished. The decree mentioned several subjects that could be sent to the council, such as draft constitutional reforms, proposed economic, social, financial, administrative, and tax reforms, along with international treaties and agreements and other matters of importance to the nation. However, Pinochet did not request the council’s opinion on any of the economic reforms, which may be explained by the fact that the economic team knew that Alessandri supported a mixed economy and had no sympathy for the neoliberal plan. The council’s main activity in the 1970s was to examine the draft constitution prepared by the Ortúzar Commission. Alessandri had no special interest in activating the Council of State. He did not trust the military, because they had exiled his father, former president Arturo Alessandri, half a century earlier.72 Alessandri limited himself to complaining in some sessions of the lack of importance Pinochet assigned to the council.73 Overall, the council fulfilled certain political functions by including some right-wing figures representing a broad range of positions and interests, thus providing an avenue for people with different views on some policies, as occurred during the discussion of the draft constitution. This allowed the Council of State to become an institutional arena for semi-opposition.74

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Weakening of the Military and Demands for a New Institutional Order

Along with criticisms from civilians concerning their lack of participation in the government, the international climate had shifted to reveal the limitations of the military regime and the urgency of profound changes in both structures

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and policies. Chile was paying an increasingly high price and was isolated internationally, as countries denounced its terrible human rights record. Its foreign policy, characterized by obsessively anticommunist rhetoric, did not reflect new international conditions, marked by the policy of “détente” between the United States and the Soviet Union. US foreign policy had shifted, reflecting the new Democratic administration, headed by Jimmy Carter, which gave priority to the defense of human rights.75 With regard to Chile, the United States was reacting strongly to FBI proof that the DINA had been behind the September 1976 bomb blast that killed Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington, D.C. The US demand for concrete changes forced the regime to dismantle the DINA in 1977, which it replaced with a somewhat milder version of its secret police, the CNI. Isolation was having very serious consequences for national security, because relations with Peru and Argentina had become very sensitive. The situation with Peru became extremely tense in 1973–1974, with real danger of war. A border conflict with Argentina had been brewing since the late 1960s, and its solution, through arbitration by the Queen of England, looked like it could be beneficial to Chile, thus provoking an adverse reaction from the Argentine military, which had seized power in March 1976.76 The failure of Franco’s efforts to control his own succession and Spain’s return to democratic rule were also taken as a warning by some of Pinochet’s advisers, particularly Jaime Guzmán. Franco’s death, on November 20, 1975, revealed the extreme fragility of his regime and highlighted Pinochet’s isolation: he was the only head of state to attend the funeral.77 Guzmán, who followed Spanish politics closely because he had great admiration for Franco and identified with his regime (see Chapter 7), saw the need for Chile to gain control of the issue of succession to ensure policy continuity in the event of Pinochet’s absence. The case of Spain was illuminating, since Franco had been concerned with establishing very precise institutional rules to ensure continuity after his death, summarized in his affirmation “everything’s wrapped up and well wrapped up.” The rapid dismantling of the Franco regime’s institutions, begun in August 1976 by the government of Adolfo Suárez, who had won the first general elections, on June 15, 1977, was carried out with the support of King Juan Carlos, which was bad news for the Chilean regime, since it demonstrated the viability of moving peacefully from dictatorship to democracy. That made Spain an object of interest for Chile’s democratic opposition, which was very weak at the time.78 In terms of coercion, Chile developed in a fashion similar to that of the Brazilian military regime, which was characterized by lack of control over security bodies.79 The DINA developed into a body with unlimited powers, allowing itself to spy not only on the opposition and the Catholic Church, but also on ministers and the regime’s main civilian advisers. In the winter of 1976 (June–August), Jaime Guzmán discovered a DINA document that harshly criticized his movement, gremialismo,80 and become convinced of the need to rein

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in Contreras, since he was dysfunctional to the regime’s consolidation, generating unforeseeable external and internal political costs. Finally, economic liberalization led to more extensive economic relationships, placing economic authorities in contact with businesspeople and politicians from advanced democracies, who constantly expressed their concern about the violations of human rights. It was necessary to open up the political system to more participation from civilians, a change that would be important to developing the economy.

■

The Role of Dissidence: Qué Pasa

The demand for a new institutional order, expressed in the creation of the Council of State, was heard among the civilians who supported the regime, concerned that it continue to be a “military dictatorship” instead of advancing toward being a “military regime.” The semantic difference was far from irrelevant, since what these civilians wanted was a distribution of power among different bodies and more participation in the government. They expressed their irritation discreetly through the weekly magazine Qué Pasa, which was founded by the same people, associated with Jaime Guzmán, who had created the magazine Portada. Qué Pasa became the voice of the soft-liners. Three situations served as the basis for this criticism of the development of authoritarianism: the behavior of the DINA; international isolation, attributed to a poor performance by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and civilians’ lack of political participation. Since mid-1975, Qué Pasa had expressed its concern over abuse committed by the security services, considering their style inimical to consolidating the political order. Qué Pasa argued that these excesses were inevitable, but attributed them to action by “extremist groups.”81 The breaking point in its attitude toward the DINA was reached in July 1975, due to information on 119 people who had disappeared in Argentina, to which they were supposed to have traveled voluntarily. The names were those of people who had disappeared after detainment, so the DINA’s involvement was clear. Qué Pasa took a critical position, demanding that the government investigate and punish those who were responsible.82 This didn’t mean that Qué Pasa was proposing a change in human rights policy in favor of liberalization, since the magazine’s criticism only dealt with this dramatic event. At the same time, Qué Pasa was attacking the work done by the Pro-Peace Committee, created after the coup by the Catholic and Lutheran Churches, calling it a politicized body that was encouraging “direct collaboration with Marxist-Leninist violence and its antiChilean propaganda machine abroad.”83 In other editorials, Qué Pasa called for a more moderate human rights policy. In the case of the Letelier killing, the magazine covered the progress of the US investigation in depth, reporting on the actions carried out by the justice system in the United States.84

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Besides human lives, the main cost of the repression was international isolation, which had to be taken into consideration by those in power to avoid excesses. Behind its anticommunist language, Qué Pasa was proposing a change in repressive policies: It seems clear that Soviet communism continues full speed ahead in its “Operation Chile,” an attempt to isolate us internationally as a step toward recovering the power it lost here on September 11, 1973. And the battlefield of “Operation Chile” remains the human rights issue. This forces us, on one hand, to adjust our foreign policy to this reality, seeking the most suitable strategy and means to thwart “Operation Chile” and, on the other, to be especially careful in solving the human rights problems that go on in the country, which—magnified and distorted—are the “leitmotiv” of this campaign. Any detention that’s unjustified or unknown to the relatives of the person detained, any disappearance, any undue physical or psychological pressure are not only despicable legally and morally, but are weapons placed in the hands of Chile’s enemy.85

However, this moderate criticism involved no concessions regarding the rest of the political system. Some time after criticizing the DINA’s actions, Qué Pasa supported the government’s pressure on the Pro-Peace Committee, which was dissolved in late 1975. Later it rejected a public letter prepared by a group of very distinguished human rights lawyers for the June 1976 assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS), held in Santiago; the letter was signed by lawyers Jaime Castillo Velasco and Eugenio Velasco Letelier, among others.86 Qué Pasa condemned the letter for its “lack of patriotism,” because “it did not seek correction but rather condemnation; the letter does no service to human rights, nor the eventual victims. It only serves our untiring and powerful adversaries.”87 Qué Pasa accused the signatories of turning their human rights demands into “unfortunate political flags,” a stance that revealed the magazine’s accommodating view of the issue, since it argued that these rights had to adjust to the requirements of national security.88 As a result of this letter, the lawyers who signed were suddenly expelled from the country, without being able to take even their personal effects. Qué Pasa defended this action in an editorial, sharing the government’s rationale that the letter constituted a threat to national security.89 Qué Pasa’s main criticism was the government’s weak ability in taking political initiative, which led to “immobility,” a direct criticism of the performance of interior minister General César Raúl Benavides. The regime had to get out of this dangerous “immobility”; getting out required clearly defining the principles behind the new institutional order, to avoid turning the Chilean regime into “the typical South American dictatorship that is nothing more than an antechamber to ‘democratic’ corruption, or rather, the recess or break between two acts of the political farce, which is exactly what our armed forces do not want to be.”90 The content of this institutional order was not clarified in the junta’s Declaration of Principles, which led Qué Pasa to editorialize that a corporative parliament

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could be possible. The defining of this institutional order reflected the political formula of Spanish corporativism, particularly as conceived of by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, whose ideas were useful to Chile in those years.91 The central point was that Chile needed to remain a “military regime and not a military dictatorship.”92 The regime ran the risk of missing the opportunity to undertake a different type of authoritarianism within Latin America and becoming just another military government like the rest.93 According to Qué Pasa, if the government were to take the initiative and establish a clear institutional order, “our enemies’ clumsy imputations of totalitarianism and being a police state would vanish forever.”94 This new institutional order did not mean ending the political recess and the states of exception, however, since the idea of making room for parties to reemerge was rejected. Qué Pasa’s editorialists emphasized the need to obtain the maximum number of supporters for the regime, questioning the PDC for not respecting the political recess, which implied that the party should remain paralyzed, stopping any work it was doing clandestinely.95 The political order that Qué Pasa was proposing contained earlier ideas from the magazine Portada, particularly proposals by former president Jorge Alessandri: a powerful presidential system, with an “effective, agile and authoritarian government, invested with supreme powers, placed above classes and groups, an impartial arbiter of the common good.”96 Only a political order established in this way could correct the minimal participation of civilians, which had been “scarce, occasional or limited to very specific sectors.”97

■

The Chacarillas Political Shift

Qué Pasa’s demands for a new institutional order expressed the position of relevant groups within the regime, especially the Gremialistas and Alessandri’s supporters. Jaime Guzmán insisted on the new institutional order, and his proposals were directed to Pinochet through the head of the Presidential General Staff, General Sergio Covarrubias, who shared his arguments. After a lengthy analysis, Pinochet announced his decision to advance toward establishing the new institutional order in a speech read in Chacarillas on July 9, 1977, whose text was analyzed in the previous chapter. This event was organized by the National Unity Youth Front (see Chapter 7), a body created by the Gremialistas. Thus it was no coincidence that this was the moment Pinochet chose for his most important political announcement to date, since a group of civilians working for the regime’s consolidation was present and supported a strengthening of his leadership. The Chacarillas speech essentially elaborated on the ideas included in the Declaration of Principles, since in it Pinochet spoke of establishing an institutional order that would represent a definitive break with the country’s democratic development to date. Before the speech, political conditions had hardened; in March the parties had been ordered to dissolve, a measure directed mainly at the

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PDC. This measure had been discussed in the junta for some time, since its members were irritated by growing opposition from that party’s leaders, including former president Eduardo Frei’s activities in Chile and abroad. In October 1976 the junta debated the political recess, and General Leigh and Mónica Madariaga, General Pinochet’s legal adviser, who would become justice minister eighteen months later, spoke strongly in favor of dissolving all political parties. Madariaga’s words revealed the aggressive atmosphere against the PDC among the regime’s civilian collaborators: Always when a recess is spoken of the whole range of prohibitions must be mentioned, because the more the living dead man remains in good health and has to be fed, the more one has to take care that the dead man does not walk, leap or jump. This is why it is preferable to kill the dead man once and for all and my opinion, Mr. President, as your personal legal advisor, is that this whole discussion means that legally I am proposing to you that the only logical way out of this is the dissolution of political parties. That will put an end to these problems. A law is dictated and directs that their property should be dealt with as laid out in their statutes or will be covered by the rules in Art. 561 of the Civil Code and that’s that. But to the degree that this goes on (there a dead man in every live one) a live one will have to control every move that he makes.98

The Chacarillas Plan was not immediately put into practice.99 The junta was opposed to seeing its powers reduced in favor of an appointed congress; General Pinochet sensed that his power needed special ratification, different from the institutionalization approach mentioned in the speech, so some months later he resorted to a somewhat more daring initiative, the consulta (referendum) of January 4, 1978. The transition was longer, eight years rather than five, the path outlined in the constitutional acts was abandoned, and the constitution would also serve to confirm Pinochet’s authority and power. Despite all this, the importance of the Chacarillas Plan cannot be ignored, since it marked the start of a political strategy that put an end to the traditional military regime and opened the way to a new form of government, with an emphasis on institutionalization. Its implementation fell to the cabinet, headed by the new interior minister, Sergio Fernández, who took over on April 14, 1978, becoming the first civilian to hold this position since the coup.

■

Implementation of the Chacarillas Plan

Implementation of the Chacarillas Plan was possible mainly thanks to the efforts of three people: Jaime Guzmán, who had developed the ideas and written the speech; General Sergio Covarrubias, who as head of the Presidential General Staff convinced Pinochet to accept the political plan that Guzmán had prepared; and Sergio Fernández, who had developed a close friendship with Guzmán and played an important role in the referendum,100 having been appointed minister to carry out the institutionalization process.

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Fernández’s background was very different from that of the Gremialistas, who were young, upper-class professionals from Santiago who had studied at Catholic schools and at Catholic University. He was the son of an exile from the Spanish civil war who settled in Punta Arenas, where Fernández was educated. He later obtained a law degree at the University of Chile, where he became a professor of civil law. He was one of many professionals who entered the government through Miguel Kast, who consulted Fernández regularly on legal aspects concerning with pension reforms.101 Fernández entered the Interior Ministry with help from the Gremialistas; Jaime Guzmán was behind the appointment. Fernández had little political visibility, and it seemed necessary to Guzmán to make him known to the public. To do so, Fernández, who at the time was comptroller-general of the republic, was invited to deliver a class on April 5, 1978, at the launch of Catholic University’s academic year, amid great publicity. It was unusual for the comptroller, an apolitical official, to choose as his subject the country’s political development.102 The speech, penned by Guzmán, was the first time that a civilian developed the proposals outlined by General Pinochet in Chacarillas. The title of his talk was “Elements to Protect the New Institutional Order.”103 Some days later, Pinochet offered him the post of interior minister, granting him broad powers to start building the new institutional order.104 Fernández was presented by the official press as the “head of cabinet,”105 as if this were a civilian minister in a democratic government who could choose his cohorts.106 With the appointment of the cabinet headed by Fernández, a second phase of the authoritarian regime began, political institutionalization, which encompassed two major tasks: preparing and ratifying the constitution, and making the coercive apparatus more flexible, a task made easier by the DINA’s dissolution in 1977 and its replacement by the CNI, and by General Manuel Contreras’s elimination as head of the former.

■

The Fernández Cabinet: The Gremialista–Chicago Boy Coalition

Sergio Fernández’s appointment as interior minister became a major landmark in the Pinochet regime, as it marked the military’s abandoning of this portfolio, a significant political change in the sense that security services would come under the control of a civilian authority, since the CNI was attached to the government through this ministry, and therefore was supposed to refrain from the abuses of previous years. To symbolize this new start, the Fernández cabinet passed an amnesty law covering crimes committed after the coup up to the moment the new law was passed, amid enormous publicity. This new tone was encouraged by the Letelier-Moffit case, since the announcement that put an end to the DINA and created the CNI came on August 13, 1977, during a visit from Terence Todman, US assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, who

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had traveled to Chile to express the US government’s support for the solving of the bomb attack that had targeted and killed Letelier and Moffit in Washington, D.C., one year earlier. The cabinet shuffle was in fact triggered by the Letelier-Moffit case. On March 1, 1978, Chilean newspapers published the photographs and names of two of the suspects involved in the murder of the former foreign affairs minister; a few days later, the Mercurio announced their real identities. One was a Chilean army officer.107 This was extremely serious, because it confirmed the DINA’s participation in the attack and revealed that the US government had enough evidence to prove this. This severely strained relations between the two countries. Without the pressure from the Letelier-Moffit case, the Chacarillas Plan would not have gone ahead, and Fernández would never have become interior minister.108 The importance of the Letelier-Moffit case also explains why Fernández included Hernán Cubillos in the cabinet as foreign affairs minister.109 Cubillos, a businessman with good contacts in the United States, was associated with the Chilean navy110 and was president of Qué Pasa’s board, which had conflicts with the DINA. His was a new face to show the world. Cubillos tried to change foreign policy, setting aside the militaristic discourse on national security that had prevailed until then. The army, however, limited his maneuvering room, holding on to the position of deputy minister, filled by army general Enrique Valdés. This allowed dual information to reach Pinochet, damaging his efficacy and generating a series of problems, the worst of which was Pinochet’s failed trip to the Philippines in March 1980. Fernández was able to add more civilians to the cabinet some months later, among them lawyer Gonzalo Vial Correa, a former Portada and Qué Pasa editor who took over the education portfolio, and economist José Piñera Echeñique, an adviser to the Cruzat group and a columnist with the weekly magazine Ercilla, who was appointed minister of labor.111 Vial had been one of the authors of the Libro Blanco (White Book), and was critical of the DINA’s excesses. His appointment did not please General Pinochet, who appointed a deputy minister that he trusted, Alfredo Prieto Bafalluy, with whom he resolved the issues surrounding this portfolio. Piñera had been a PDC sympathizer during his college days,112 a piece of information that positioned him well in the eyes of union leaders. The threat of US unions calling a work stoppage in ports facilitated his entry into the cabinet. He was an intelligent economist, with enough personality to find a solution to this serious problem and a voice of his own, even when facing the powerful finance minister, Sergio de Castro. Unlike the other members of the economic team, Piñera had political sense.113 He was associated with Guzmán, from whom he borrowed the political language he used to support his bills. He constantly defended them through the media, explaining more clearly than Miguel Kast the importance of economic development to consolidating the political order, predicting that Chile would become a developed country.114

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Piñera was able to resolve the conflict with the US labor unions rather effectively, thanks to approval of a labor plan that seemed to make some important concessions to unions, but that actually undercut their capacities and functions. The plan created a much more flexible labor market, and also drastically weakened unions by sanctioning the principle of voluntary affiliation and permitting the presence of more than one union in a company.115 This was an economic reform with strong political content. He also introduced privatization of the pension system, an initiative that ODEPLAN had been proposing to the regime since it began, but that no minister had been able to pull off, for lack of support from the junta because General Leigh opposed it. It became one of the military regime’s most important privatizations, since it stripped the state of one of its main functions, handling pensions, and handed them over to the private sector. Thus, pension fund administrators (administradoras de fondos de pensiones [AFPs]) were born. These played a key role in privatizing publicly owned firms from 1985 onward (see Chapter 9). As a result, this reform had considerable political impact. Thus the cabinet, headed by Sergio Fernández, involved joint activity of the Chicago Boys and the Gremialistas. Moreover, it enjoyed significant support from General Sergio Covarrubias, who was the head of the Presidential General Staff until early 1979, and his successor, General René Escauriaza, who was also a Guzmán sympathizer. Fernández had some room to maneuver, because General Pinochet had to focus on the 1978 crisis with Argentina, which took the country to the brink of war in December of that year. The head of cabinet did not receive full powers from Pinochet, since the two ministers who symbolized this new epoch were removed from their posts through a presidential decision. Hernán Cubillos was fired in March 1980 after Pinochet was forced to return from a presidential trip to the Philippines in midflight, because dictator Ferdinand Marcos suddenly canceled his invitation.116 Cubillos was not responsible for this fiasco; in fact he had previously expressed his view that the tour was not a good idea, given the ambiguous nature of the invitation from the Philippine government. Pinochet, however, decided to travel on the advice of his deputy minister, General Enrique Valdés, who assured him that they had the information necessary to confirm the invitation’s validity. Moreover, Pinochet needed to leave the country to demonstrate that the country’s international isolation wasn’t total.117 The second minister to lose his post was Gonzalo Vial, in late 1979. This was a long time coming, since Pinochet hadn’t trusted him from the start, and preferred to deal with his deputy minister, Alfredo Prieto Bafalluy, who was eventually appointed as Vial’s successor. Fernández’s main achievement was the approval of the constitution and Pinochet’s election in the September 11, 1980, plebiscite, an event that had a double impact, since it established the institutional order as “a protected and authoritarian democracy,” which meant progress toward political institutionalization, and also served as a noncompetitive election, which strengthened

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Pinochet’s personal power. This contradiction would become a source of tension and conflict within the governing coalition (see Chapter 10).

■

The Seven “Governments” of the Military Regime

Advances toward institutionalization were affected by General Pinochet’s style of government, which was characterized by frequent cabinet shuffles, although these did not affect the continuity of public policies. If one counts the number of cabinets by requests for ministers to resign and the ceremonies to swear in new ones, there were a total of forty-nine changes.118 By a wide margin, Pinochet kept most of his ministers. In terms of policies and the composition of the governing elite, seven “governments” can be identified during the regime’s seventeen years (see Table 6.1). This is a large number, especially if we consider the fact that the government was without internal conflicts and without political or economic crises, except for the 1975 and 1982 recessions and the 1983 opposition protests. By way of comparison, General Franco’s authoritarian regime had just nine “governments” during its almost forty years, despite having dealt with conflicts in the governing coalition, such as the one involving the technocrats versus the Falangists in the 1960s, and despite having faced a more difficult international environment than did Pinochet.119 The first government was set up after the coup, and so could be considered an emergency government. The ministers, excepting those from Justice and Economy, were all military officers,120 appointed from among the three branches of the armed forces and the Carabineros using proportional distribution,121 with more weight given to the navy to reflect its leadership in planning the coup (see Table 6.2). Military officers were appointed as ambassadors to many countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. The management of that first government was clouded by the harshness of the seizure of power and by the repression. Human rights violations make it difficult to see the important role that the government played in terms of launching the economic transformation, decreeing freedom in pricing, letting the dollar float free, starting the economic restructuring, opening the economy, eliminating quotas and prior official approvals for imports, and making some important long-term decisions to promote competition, such as the creation of the national economic supervisory body and the antimonopoly commission. The second government was formed on July 11, 1974, when General Pinochet was appointed president of the junta, and lasted until April 1978. It was a traditional military government, since it depended primarily on officers: twenty-four of the thirty-eight ministers up to 1978 were military officers. It did include some civilians in the economic sector. Pinochet completely remodeled his ministries, with twelve ministers leaving the cabinet or changing portfolio, although the proportionality was maintained in these appointments: the navy

1973–1974

Coup d’état

Main Goal

Appointment of Pinochet as president Letelier case

IV Crisis government

1983–1985

Economic crisis

Overcome crisis and start liberalization

V “Transition” government

1985–1987

End of liberalization

Recapture political control

VI Campaign government

1987–1988

Plebiscite campaign

Win the plebiscite

VII Retreating government

1988–1990

Defeat in the plebiscite

“Tie up” the institutional order

Main Minister on the Economic Team

Efficacy

The military

General Óscar Bonilla

Fernando Léniz

High

The military

General Sergio Covarrubias

J. Cauas and S. de Castro

Medium

Members of the Gremialista movement and the Chicago Boys Developmentoriented former members of the National Party Members of the Gremialista movement and the Chicago Boys Members of the Gremialista movement and the Chicago Boys All the elites

Sergio Fernández

Sergio de Castro

High

Sergio O. Jarpa

L. Escobar Cerda

Low

F. J. Cuadra

Hernán Büchi

Medium

Sergio Fernández

Hernán Büchi

Medium

Carlos Cáceres

General Enrique Seguel

High

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II Traditional 1974–1978 military government III Gremialista– 1978–1983 Chicago Boy government

Main Political Minister

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Control public order and normalize the economy Consolidate the military government Institutionalization and economic reform (“seven modernizations”)

Main Supporting Elite

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I Emergency government

Period

Triggering Event

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Table 6.1

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Composition of the Pinochet Regime’s Seven “Governments” III

IV

V

VI

VII

Total

Percentage

3 5 3 3 — 1 1

9 6 5 4 2 5 2

17 6 4 3 9 9 3

2 1 1 1 4 3 7

4 1 1 1 3 2 4

3 1 1 1 4 2 2

8 2 — — 4 9 1

46 22 15 13 26 31 20

22.0 10.5 7.0 6.0 12.5 17.0 9.0

— — — 16

1 2 2 38

3 2 4 60

2 1 2 24

3 — 3 22

2 — 2 18

6 — — 30

17 5 13 208

8.0 2.0 6.0 100.0

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Army Navy Air Force Carabineros Gremialistas Chicago Boys Former Alessandri supporters Independents Pinochet supporters Associations (gremios) Total

I

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Table 6.2

Sources: El Mercurio, Diario Oficial, Qué Pasa, Hoy.

201

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received four important ministries,122 a similar number as the army, which received five ministries;123 the air force held three ministries,124 as did the Carabineros.125 Among the ministerial changes, the main one was General Óscar Bonilla, who was moved from Interior to Defense and replaced by General César Raúl Benavides. The minister of justice, Gonzalo Prieto Gándara, was replaced by a Carabinero, General Hugo Munsante, an unusual decision in dictatorships, which normally resort to lawyers. Foreign Affairs also changed, with Rear Admiral Ismael Huerta leaving to become ambassador to the United Nations and being replaced by Rear Admiral Patricio Carvajal, who played an active role in the coup as the head of the General Staff of National Defense. Civilians were reduced to the economic sector, specifically the Ministries of Finance and Economy, held respectively by a Chicago Boy, Jorge Cauas, and a businessman, Fernando Léniz.126 During this stage of government, Pinochet was involved in a power struggle with General Gustavo Leigh that weakened the air force’s participation in the cabinet. In April 1975, this branch lost Public Works, which went to an engineer associated with the national builders’ association (Cámara Chilena de la Construcción), Hugo León Puelma. The next year, it had to hand over the Ministries of Labor and Social Security to Sergio Fernández. To compensate for this important loss, the air force received the Ministry of Transportation and Telecommunications, held for some months by air force brigadier-general Raúl Vargas, who was replaced by a Chicago Boy, José Luis Federici.127 The man responsible for the political guidelines of the government was General Sergio Covarrubias, head of the Presidential General Staff, and to a lesser degree the Interior Ministry. To offset the impact of limited civilian participation in the cabinet, formal and informal opportunities for their participation were created: the Council of State, in the first case, and the political advisory commission (Asesoría Política [ASEP]), in the latter, which were brought together by the interior minister and comprised National Party politicians and Gremialistas.128 This second government was responsible for extending the economic restructuring in a new international context marked by the 1974 oil crisis and the decline in the copper price. Cutbacks led to many layoffs from the public service and universities, which were used to rid the regime of its opponents.129 In April 1975, when Sergio de Castro replaced Fernando Léniz as minister of economy, the Chicago Boys took over the main responsibility for economic policy, a situation further bolstered when de Castro took over finance as well.130 Another Chicago Boy, Pablo Baraona, also became minister of economy. De Castro emphasized macroeconomic measures, promoting tariff cuts, which included radical measures such as withdrawing from the Andean Pact. The third government, of a civilian-military nature, was set up on April 14, 1978, in light of the Letelier-Moffit case and the resulting pressure brought to bear on Chile by the United States. In this new government, civilians held the majority of posts, particularly the Chicago Boys and the Gremialistas. Of

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the thirty civilian ministers serving until this cabinet ended in August 1983, nine were Chicago Boys and nine were Gremialistas; just three were independents, four represented business associations, and three had held posts prior to 1973 under Alessandri. The Gremialistas’ influence was at its peak, but would decline thereafter. This cabinet’s priority was to institutionalize the regime in line with the concept of a “protected and authoritarian democracy,” which culminated in the approval of the constitution in the 1980 plebiscite. Moreover, General Pinochet’s leadership was also consolidated, as he was elected president during this same event. The economic reforms were extended by the new minister of labor, José Piñera, with the approval of the Labor Plan (Plan Laboral) and the privatization of the pension system. This was the most successful of Pinochet’s governments. The fourth was also a civilian-military government. Set up on August 12, 1983, to deal with the economic and political crisis, it was headed by former National Party president Sergio Onofre Jarpa, as interior minister, along with figures from governments prior to 1970, including Modesto Collados in Housing131 and Hugo Gálvez in Labor.132 Jarpa imposed a new style, known as the apertura (“opening”; that is, the gradual relaxation of repressive rule), allowing the press more room to maneuver, authorizing the return of many exiles, and providing parties with more freedom.133 Jarpa, however, had limited powers, since he could not even appoint a finance minister who agreed with him on dealing with the economic crisis.134 He faced internal opposition from a former Conservative Party deputy as well, Hugo Rosende, who took over as justice minister in December 1983, and from General Secretariat minister Francisco Javier Cuadra, who was appointed one year later. Both questioned Jarpa’s politics of apertura (see Chapter 10). The fifth government was set up in February 1985 and involved institutional reorganization, the return of the Chicago Boys, and a partial rebound of the Gremialistas’ influence, expressed in Miguel Angel Poduje’s appointment to the Housing Ministry. Poduje had been a Gremialista from the start, at Catholic University’s law school.135 With great determination he began to “eradicate” the campamentos (shantytowns) in Santiago, through a massive plan for building low-income housing, developed in close cooperation with the municipal governments, and with participation from their political advisers.136 This allowed the Gremialistas to win important support in the poblaciones (poor and working-class communities), which formed part of the long-term strategy of building a major right-wing party. The interior minister was another lawyer, Ricardo García Rodríguez, who shared political leadership with Cuadra of the General Secretariat Ministry. Cuadra had plenty of room to determine the government’s direction, and was particularly confrontational in his attitude to the opposition. Moreover, Cuadra made an effort to move the Gremialistas out of his ministry, especially the Youth Secretariat, which generated conflicts in the governing coalition. The economic team was successfully led by Hernán Büchi, who extended economic

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reforms, particularly the privatization of public firms, to dismantle the entrepreneurial state (see Chapter 9). The sixth government focused on the electoral campaign, with Sergio Fernández back as the interior minister in July 1987, which in turn brought the Gremialistas back to the government (see Chapter 11). The seventh government directed the withdrawal from power beginning after the 1988 plebiscite, and was headed by former finance minister Carlos Cáceres, now in the Interior Ministry. Its objectives included not only organizing presidential and congressional elections, and by doing so permitting change in the political regime, but also ensuring the continuity of the main institutions forming its “protected and authoritarian democracy.” It was also responsible for providing the military’s institutions with greater autonomy, based on the fear that a democratically elected government might take measures against them. The junta passed several laws that had been in the pipeline, such as those guaranteeing the autonomy of the Central Bank and a statute giving the armed forces more autonomy in the months before power was transferred. These became institutional knots tightly binding the new elected government, preventing it from dismantling the constitution. This last government negotiated a major constitutional reform with the opposition, which eliminated some components of its democracy (see Chapter 12).

■

The Cabinet: Proportional Distribution of Posts and Ministerial Instability

The limited pluralism that characterizes an authoritarian regime, according to Juan Linz’s definition,137 is primarily expressed in its governing elite.138 This was evidenced in Chile through participation in government by the three branches of the armed forces, by the Carabineros, and by civilian groups, from the Chicago Boys through National Party politicians, Alessandri supporters, Gremialistas, and independent groups. The heterogeneous nature of the governing coalition was reflected in the cabinet, which became an important decisionmaking center. For the heterogeneousness of the governing coalition to find political expression, a strategy of proportional control of political conflict had to be used,139 in which each group would be given positions in the government. The number of positions given to each group would depend on the group’s power and influence. Comparatively speaking, this meant that General Pinochet also had to resort to political quotas to form his governments, a style he had questioned when applied by the Popular Unity government. The hard-liners were excluded from the cabinet, because they held positions considered extreme by the rest of the governing coalition. Pinochet kept up informal ties with hard-liners, listening to their opinions and allowing them to exercise some “semi-opposition” through the media.140 The hard-line group included a lawyer, Pablo Rodríguez, who had founded the Fatherland and Freedom movement during the Allende government, and who supported forming a corpo-

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rativist-style government.141 Some retired generals were also hard-liners, among them Manuel Contreras, who, after retiring in 1978, tried to induce failure of the CNI and harassed the Gremialistas. Some of Pinochet’s family, such as his daughter Lucía, were also among this group. The exclusion of the hard-liners from positions of authority also reflects the fact they did not have among them many well-known figures to be appointed to the cabinet; nor could they count on support from other power groups, especially the Gremialistas. To neutralize them, Jaime Guzmán used a relatively radicalized rhetoric when it came to issues of public order, to thus shut down the proposals of the most extreme. During the debate about the institutional order in 1980, Guzmán emphasized his conflict with “the fascists” to prevent them from gaining more influence with General Pinochet. While the hard-liners were not actually in the cabinet, some ministers nonetheless pursued, in their actions, policies supported by them.142 Ministerial appointments took the form of orders from Pinochet, who nonetheless paid attention to the internal resistance these could provoke among his civilian collaborators. José Piñera was almost appointed minister of economy in 1978, but was then denied the post because of opposition from the Chicago Boys and the Gremialistas.143 To give expression to these different power groups, two mechanisms were used to increase the number of ministers. Ministerial rank was assigned to the directors of important public entities, such as CORFO, ODEPLAN, and the Presidential General Staff (which later became Presidential Secretariat), the latter of which comprised high-ranking military officers. Similarly, a decree law approved by the junta created new ministries, among them Transportation and Telecommunications, which in 1974 had been separated from Public Works, and the General Secretariat officially became a ministry in 1976. Each branch of the armed forces assumed certain portfolios. In the 1970s the army took charge of the General Secretariat Ministry and the Ministry of Defense; the navy, Foreign Affairs and Education; the air force, Labor and Social Security; and the Carabineros, National Properties. The navy concentrated its participation in the junta in the person of Admiral Merino. This branch did not feel it was part of the government, but rather part of the regime, and it focused particularly on introducing economic reforms. Merino considered himself the regime’s number-two man. Pinochet understood this and took great pains in his relations with the admiral, developing a great friendship with him. Starting in March 1981, when Pinochet became president of Chile, Merino became president of the junta, which underlined his public image as the regime’s number-two man. Later, in 1981, the navy held just two ministries, with Rear Admiral Hernán Rivera as minister of health from early 1981 to August 1983, and Rear Admiral Patricio Carvajal as minister of defense from early 1983 until the regime ended. The Carabineros always held one ministry, National Properties, which was not very important. Limited pluralism reflected not only different political and military interests, but also different interest groups, such as business organizations. Limited

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pluralism primarily favored three associations. The first was the national builders’ association,144 a body with enormous influence. The chamber had experienced pragmatic relationships with Chile’s various governments over the years, due to its participation in public works and housing projects initiated by Chile’s rulers since the 1940s to create jobs and stimulate the economy. The second favored body was the National Agricultural Society, because its former presidents were ministers of agriculture.145 The government’s interest in appointing an association representative lay in the fact that further opening the country to trade had seriously hurt the agriculture sector, causing conflicts within the economic team, which considered people in agriculture incapable of economic modernization. The tension between landowners’ organizations and the Chicago Boys peaked during the 1982–1983 economic crisis, when the landowners openly rebelled, holding a strike.146 The third favored body was the National Chamber of Commerce, whose representative was appointed minister of economy.147 The Pinochet government, which was very unstable at the ministerial level, went through a large number of ministers, 133 in total, of which 66 were civilians and 67, military officers. Of the latter, 37 were army, 11 were navy, 11 were air force, and 8 were Carabineros. The average time in office was ten months.148 By comparison, the regime of the Generalísimo de los Ejércitos y Caudillo de España (Supreme General of the Armies and Maximum Leader of Spain), which lasted forty years to Pinochet’s seventeen, had 102 ministers between 1938 and 1971.149 This underscores the large number of ministers in the Pinochet regime, especially considering that Spain had three portfolios for defense (each branch of the armed forces had its own minister), while Chile had only one.150 In quantitative terms, the Chilean army had the greatest participation in cabinet, in CORFO’s companies, and in regional government. The navy participated less, focusing on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs until 1978 and the Ministry of Defense from 1983 to the regime’s end, both headed by retired rear admiral Patricio Carvajal. The air force held on to the Ministry of Labor until July 1976, when Fernández took over, but was then rewarded with Transportation and Telecommunications. The air force held on to the Ministry of Health until the end of 1979, when an army general took over in 1980, followed by a naval rear admiral until late 1983, then a Carabineros doctor, Winston Chinchón, until mid-1986, after which the position went to another physician with no links to the armed forces, Juan Giaconi, a move to increase ties with the national physicians’ association (Colegio Médico). Getting the right representation of political and economic interests in the cabinet made the process of appointing ministers complex. Lists were prepared by the Presidential General Staff and later by the Presidential Secretariat. The military officers who worked on list preparation monitored the performance of senior public officials and received recommendations from professionals. Some undersecretaries were promoted to ministerial rank, thanks to their dis-

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tinguished work151 or their efficient performance in the government’s lower echelons, such as Francisco Javier Cuadra, who worked in the Office of Church Relations (Oficina de las Relaciones con la Iglesia), run by Sergio Rillón, a direct adviser to Pinochet. Another case was that of Sergio Fernández, who had worked with Miguel Kast, then–deputy director of ODEPLAN, on legal advisement concerning the reform of the pension system being prepared by that body. Pinochet was also open to appointing professionals who had distinguished themselves in business, such as Rolf Lüders. The Gremialistas and the Chicago Boys were the only groups determined to place their supporters in top government posts. They were promoted very efficiently by Kast (the “great recruiter”), who had files on hundreds of professionals and could propose many names for the various positions. Jaime Guzmán was also interested in placing his own people in top posts, especially while General Sergio Covarrubias was head of the Presidential General Staff. Many professionals from Catholic University became Gremialista ministers, among them Jaime del Valle (foreign affairs), Juan Antonio Guzmán (education), Guillermo Arthur (labor), and Miguel Ángel Poduje (housing). In sum, the Gremialistas participated heavily in each of seven governments of the military regime, except the first (which was all-military), with their presence peaking in the third government, when Gremialistas headed nine ministries. In the fourth government their participation dropped sharply, but it stood out in the sixth, when Fernández became interior minister, and in the seventh, when Miguel Ángel Poduje was housing minister. Housing was a very important portfolio for the Gremialistas’ organizing efforts in the poblaciones, given the minister’s enormous capacity for clientelism through its “housing solution” programs. The Gremialistas held a total of twenty-six ministries. They were surpassed by the Chicago Boys, who held thirty-one, and the army, who held forty-six.152 Pinochet used this style of ministerial appointment for his own political needs, to recruit a wide number of individuals who would support him in his long-term political goals. Ministerial instability offered many people opportunities to enter the cabinet. There was no other formal opportunity for political participation, unlike in Spain, which had a parliament (Las Cortes) and a movement organization (movimiento-organización). In Chile, the low level of institutionalization limited political participation by civilian groups as well as by independents, encouraging them to seek entry into the cabinet or the removal of their competitors during conflicts of interest or power.153

■

The Regime’s Ministers

General Pinochet was very consistent when he stated that his “government” would break with the past, because he did not resort to working with right-wing politicians. He made a few exceptions with some figures who had distinguished themselves during democracy, but he mostly appointed them ambassadors to

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keep them out of the country.154 He made an exception due to the 1982–1983 economic crisis, when Sergio Onofre Jarpa, former president of the National Party and a former senator, was appointed interior minister. The delicate situation forced Pinochet to resort to assistance from a very experienced politician who helped to neutralize the opposition, which had acquired considerable strength.155 Pinochet showed no special deference to politicians associated with the former president, Jorge Alessandri. He appointed just three of Alessandri’s former ministers, but none of them remained long enough to leave a mark.156 The typical Pinochet minister was a distinguished professional with no party membership prior to the coup, who had risen to importance due to disinterested cooperation with the government. This was the case with Sergio Fernández (see Table 3.4), who started out as an external adviser to ODEPLAN, then joined the Labor Ministry in 1976, then rose to become comptroller-general of the republic, to make the referendum possible. In April 1978 he became interior minister (see Chapter 5). Another example was Francisco Javier Cuadra, who became head of the General Secretariat Ministry (1984–1987). He was a young lawyer at Catholic University, a member of the National Party until 1973, and worked several years with Sergio Rillón as an adviser to Pinochet on legal affairs and relations with the Catholic Church. Cuadra’s personality interested Pinochet: intelligent and cold, he strongly supported Pinochet’s leadership and he offered a young face different from that of Jaime Guzmán, who had been pushed out of the main circle of Pinochet’s advisers for giving more priority to the interests of the Gremialistas than those of the regime. Cuadra worked alone and had no interest in organizing a political movement. The trust that Pinochet extended to Cuadra allowed him to become the main political minister, displacing the interior minister, Ricardo García. Hugo Rosende, an important minister of the 1980s, also proved to be of special talent, since he combined his expertise in legal matters with lengthy political experience and an enormous ability to adapt to Pinochet’s aspirations. He had been a well-known politician in the Conservative Party, a representative for Santiago for four terms (1949–1965), and adviser to President Alessandri for a few years. He was also a civil law professor at the University of Chile and was appointed dean of that university’s law school during the military regime. He became minister of justice in late 1983 after a long assignment as legal adviser to the Interior Ministry, where his duties included defending the government in cases of expulsion of opponents.157 Seeing Rosende as a hard-line politician, Pinochet brought him into the cabinet to control Jarpa’s policies. Rosende confirmed his hard-line approach when he announced his opposition to the policy of apertura. He also carried out a second very important task for Pinochet: appointing Supreme Court judges who identified with the military regime, to prevent possible trials of officers for violations of human rights once the military returned to their barracks (see Chapter 12).

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Table 6.3

Ministerial Instability Under the Military Regime, 1973–1990

July 7, 1987 Oct. 21, 1988 Apr. 5, 1989

15 5 12

Interior, General C. Raúl Benavides Economy, Jorge Cauas Finance, Sergio de Castro Interior, Sergio Fernández Interior/Finance, Sergio de la Cuadra Interior/Finance, Rolf Lüders Finance, Carlos Cáceres Interior, Sergio O. Jarpa Finance, Luis Escobar Interior/Finance, Ricardo García, Hernán Büchi Interior, Sergio Fernández Interior, Carlos Cáceres Finance, General Enrique Seguel

Ministers Who Remained in Office

Pinochet takes up the presidency Chicago Boys enter the government Strengthening of the Chicago Boys Beginning of institutionalization Economic crisis Economic crisis Economic crisis Economic crisis Economic crisis Economic crisis

12 4 1 3 8 7 7 8 4 3

6 14 17 15 10 11 11 10 14 15

Preparation for plebiscite campaign Defeat in the plebiscite Preparation for the presidential campaign

7 9 10

11 9 8

Cause of Change

Page 209

9 20 15 48 4 5 6 8 10 29

New Ministers

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July 11, 1974 Apr. 14, 1975 Dec. 31, 1976 Apr. 14, 1978 Apr. 22, 1982 Aug. 31, 1982 Feb. 14, 1983 Aug. 10, 1983 Apr. 2, 1984 Feb. 12, 1985

Main Ministerial Post and Minister Affected

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Months in Cabinet

Sources: Estimates based on information in Valencia Avaria (1986), pp. 702–728; and El Mercurio, October 23, 1988. Notes: Cabinet changes caused by political differences without policy changes, such as the removal of the foreign affairs minister after Pinochet’s failed visit to the Philippines in March 1980, have been excluded. Average cabinet period, 14 months. Average period for new ministers, 6 months.

209

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Table 6.4 Ministers of the Pinochet Regime, 1973–1989 Table 6.4 Ministers of the Pinochet Regime (1973-1990) 1973

Interior Foreign Affairs Defense

Economy

army general Rolando González

Finance

navy rear admiral Lorenzo Gotuzzo

Education

José Navarro

Justice

Public Works

1974

1975

1976

Fernando Léniz

Gonzalo Prieto

Carabineros general H. Mussiante

Labor and Social Security

Carabineros general Mario Mackay

air force brigadier-general Nicanor Díaz Estrada

Health

air force general Alberto Spoerer

air force brigadier-general Francisco Herrera

Mining

Carabineros general Arturo Yovane

Transportation and Telecommunications

Created in 1974

army colonel Pedro Ewing

army general Rolando Ramos

Gonzalo Vial

R. Damilano

Hugo León Puelma

Carabineros general Mario Mackay

army general Arturo Vivero

José Luis Federici

navy rear admiral Luis Nieman

Miguel Schweitzer Speisky

air force brigadier-general Sergio Gutiérrez

Housing and Urban Planning

Pablo Baraona

navy rear admiral Arturo Troncoso

navy rear admiral Hugo Castro J.

National Properties

Presidential Secretariat

1980

Sergio de Castro

Carabineros general Diego Barba

National Planning Office

1979

Jorge Cauas

Carabineros general Tucapel Vallejos

General Secretariat

1978

Sergio de Castro

air force general (retired) Sergio Crespo

Agriculture

1977

Sept Sept Oct July Oct Dec Mar Apr Apr May Mar July Dec Dec Dec Mar Apr Nov Jan Apr July Dec Dec Jan Apr Oct Dec Mar Dec Dec 12 26 11 11 25 10 7 14 30 16 8 12 3 27 31 11 20 15 1 14 27 2 26 27 1 16 11 20 14 24 army general army general César Raúl Benavides Sergio Fernández Óscar Bonilla navy rear admiral navy rear admiral Patricio Carvajal Hernán Cubillos S. Ismael Huerta navy rear admiral army general army general Hernán Brady army general César Raúl Benavides Patricio Carvajal Óscar Bonilla

army general Agustin Toro Davila navy general Arturo Troncoso

army general Patricio Torres

Carabineros general Mario Mackay

Alfonso Márquez de la Plata

Carabineros general Lautaro Recabarren

Sergio Fernández

Vasco Costa

air force brigadier-general Fernando Matthei

air force brigadier-general Mario Jiménez

Enrique Valenzuela

Carlos Granifo

army general Enrique Garín

Edmundo Ruiz

air force brigadier-general Jaime Estrada

José Luis Federici

army general Hernán Bejares

army general René Vidal

army general Sergio Covarrubias

army general Alejandro Medina Lois

Captain Carlos Quiñones

air force brigadier-general (retired) Vargas

Roberto Kelly

José Piñera

army general Julio Fernández

army general Sergio Badiola

Miguel Kast

army general René Escauriaza

Pinochet preferred the technocrats of his economic team, the Chicago Boys, whose main figures were Sergio de Castro, minister of finance (1976– 1982); Hernán Büchi, who also handled this portfolio (1985–1988); and Miguel Kast, minister of ODEPLAN (1978–1980) and labor (1980–1982). De Castro was the undisputed leader among the economists at Catholic University, where he had taught many generations of students.158 He had a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and became an academic, rising to the position of dean of Catholic University’s economics school. He did not participate politically until the coup, although he worked actively on the eco-

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80

1981

ec Dec 4 24

Dec

1982 Apr 22

4

1983

Aug 31

Feb 14

Aug 10

1984 Oct 18

Dec 19

air force brigadier-general E. Montero René Rojas Galdames army general Carlos Forestier

1985

Apr May Nov 2 18 6

Feb 12

Feb 28

Sergio O. Jarpa

Rolf Lüders

S. de la Cuadra

Rolf Lüders

Mónica Madariaga

M. Marín

Andrés Passicot

Carlos Cáceres

Modesto Collados

Estrada

Jaime del Valle

Patricio Mardones

René Salamé Martín

Jaime de la Sotta

Hugo Gálvez

Alfonso Márquez de la Plata

Winston Chinchón

H. F. Errázuriz

army general Gastón Frez

Ramón Suárez

army general S. Pérez

army general Santiago Sinclair

Modesto Collados

Pablo Baraona

Francisco Javier Cuadra

L. S. Figueroa

María Teresa Infante

Juan Giaconi

air force brigadier-general Enrique Escobar

Hernán Büchi

Armando Álvarez

Miguel Ángel Poduje

Alfonso Márquez de la Plata

army brigadiergeneral Hernán Abad Cid Juan Ignacio Domínguez

Guillermo Arthur

Samuel Lira O.

army general Julio Bravo

Martín Costobal

Juan Antonio Guzmán

Carabineros general J. Veloso

H. Felipe Errázuriz

army general Roberto Guillard M.

navy rear admiral Pedro Larrondo Jara

Hugo Rosende S.

navy rear admiral Hernán Rivera Calderón

A. army general Donoso Luis Danús

Pablo Baraona brigadiergeneral Enrique Seguel

Jorge Prado A.

air force brigadier-general Caupolicán Boisset

army general Sergio Badiola

Carlos Cáceres

army brigadier-general Bruno Siebert

Max Silva

Aug

Hernán F. Errázuriz

army general Manuel Concha

Sergio Gaete

Carabineros general René Peri

José Piñera

Apr 6

Hernán Büchi B.

Horacio Aránguiz D.

José Luis Toro

Miguel Kast

1989

Oct 21

Sergio Fernández Ricardo García

J. C. Délano

Luis Escobar

army general Patricio Torres

eneral o Medina is

1988

July

navy vice admiral Patricio Carvajal

navy rear admiral Álvaro Rigoberto Arriagada Cruz

Alfredo Prieto

1987 Apr 24

Jaime del Valle

army general Washington Carrasco

army general Rolando Ramos

Aug

Ricardo García

Miguel Schweitzer

army general Luis Danús

1986

July Nov 29 28

211

army general army general Sergio Francisco Ramírez Valenzuela M. Ramírez

Jorge López

Gustavo Montero air force brigadiergeneral J. Mesa Orlando Poblete

Carlos Silva

Miguel Ángel Poduje

Sergio Melnick

army general Sergio Valenzuela

army brigadiergeneral Óscar Vargas

army colonel Cristián Labbé

Luis Larraín army brigadier-general Jorge Ballerino

nomic program known as “The Brick” (El Ladrillo). He became adviser to the minister of economy, Fernando Léniz, rose to deputy minister, and then took over the portfolio in April 1975. His professional and political profile fit the characteristics sought by the military: he was right-wing, did not belong to a political party, and had a strong personality. Hernán Büchi was a mining engineer from the University of Chile who participated in an ultra-left-wing movement while in college.159 He did not belong to the group of technocrats who worked on The Brick. Büchi joined the government in 1975 and held several posts before being appointed minister of

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finance in 1985, a position he maintained until the 1988 plebiscite. His first job was as an adviser to the Economy Ministry, where he participated in the modernization of public firms. He then became head of several public companies.160 He became deputy economy minister in late 1979, then deputy minister of health in January 1981, taking an active role in privatizing the healthcare system.161 In August 1983 he became minister of ODEPLAN, and in May 1984 he became superintendent of banks. Büchi was a pragmatic man, with no major political convictions or religious beliefs, unlike the Gremialistas, and his personal style was unconventional, winning Pinochet’s admiration. Miguel Kast was younger than Sergio de Castro, and was the most outstanding figure among the second generation of Chicago Boys.162 Unlike de Castro, Kast was very active in the student movement, showing special dedication in developing the Gremialista movement.163 He joined ODEPLAN as a deputy minister in late 1973 upon completing his master’s degree at the University of Chicago, then became minister-director in 1978. Born in Germany, he had moved to Chile when he was a child, where he became convinced of the political relevance of a market-based economy, based on his knowledge of the political and economic development of Germany after World War II. His political ideas were characterized by strong religious convictions and by ideological views of the economy, which he considered to be a powerful predictor of human behavior, almost like the natural sciences. Kast was very critical of Chilean Christian Democracy, and was strongly committed to helping Jaime Guzmán during the military regime.164 Pinochet generally did not appoint ministers based on family relationships or friendships. The sole exceptions had clear professional justifications. His niece and legal adviser, Mónica Madariaga, who became justice minister and later took charge of education, had been a career employee of the comptrollergeneral’s office and a law school professor at the University of Chile. His friend Manuel Martín, a businessman, was minister of economy for several months in 1983, in which position his role was to placate business associations. The regime’s main figures were not all ministers. Some very influential figures held no cabinet post, among them Jaime Guzmán, who preferred to work through the ministers he trusted and had no interest in being a minister himself, because he desired independence from Pinochet to pursue his own political goals, which were incompatible with Pinochet’s interests: building a movement that would later become a hegemonic force, once the military had returned to its barracks (see Chapter 7). In order to do so, Guzmán had to direct the activities of many Gremialista activists who held different posts in the government, which required that he maintain his independence. *

*

*

This chapter has provided an analysis of the organization of the political regime and its difficulties in defining an institutional structure, since the military had no political plan at the time of the coup. Initially, officers organized a

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traditional military regime, but then, in light of internal and external factors, among them the Letelier-Moffit case, they moved toward a different kind of military regime, with some degree of institutionalization and participation from civilians. The regime defined itself in Chacarillas in July 1977 as the overseer of a “protected and authoritarian democracy,” and went on to complete the drafting of the 1980 constitution, essentially sharing its power with the government, with some degree of proportional civilian representation. However, Pinochet’s leadership style involved considerable ministerial instability, weakening the authority of the cabinet and the ministers while strengthening his own, but provoking insecurity among power groups and independent figures who joined the government. To better understand the functioning of the authoritarian regime, it is essential to examine its main elites, the Gremialistas and the Chicago Boys.

■

Notes

1. These were Jaime Guzmán’s ideas, as some of his friends have recognized. See Finis Terrae University (1994). 2. Linz (1973b). 3. Ibid., p. 247. 4. Stepan (1989, 1987). 5. Article 2 of “Estatuto para el proceso de reorganización nacional,” March 24, 1976, printed in Clarín, March 25, 1976. For further documentation, see Troncoso (1984), López Saavedra (1984). The statute’s text can also be found in Blaustein and Zubieta (1998). 6. Article 2.1 of “Estatuto para el proceso de reorganización nacional.” 7. See García-Delgado and Stiletano (1988). 8. Article 3.4.1 of “Estatuto para el proceso de reorganización nacional.” 9. Articles 1, 3–4 of “Reglamento para el funcionamiento de la junta militar, poder ejecutivo nacional y comisión de asesoramiento legislativo,” March 24, 1976. 10. The best study on the transition to democracy in Uruguay is—in my opinion— Gillespie (1990). For a political history, see Rocha Imaz, Varesi, and Pizziruso (1985). 11. González (1988), Gillespie (1987). 12. “Declaración de Principios de la Junta de Gobierno,” March 11, 1974, printed in El Mercurio, March 12, 1974. 13. The main author of the Declaration of Principles was Jaime Guzmán, who was very close to Portada and also participated on Qué Pasa’s editorial committee (see Chapter 7). 14. Fernández de la Mora (1968, 1976b, 1985). He wrote numerous works to support his “organic democracy” thesis. 15. Fernández de la Mora (1976b). 16. Decree Law no. 128, of November 16, 1973, stated that the junta had legislative, constituent, and executive powers. Its text is presented in Ordenamiento constitucional (1980), pp. 143–144. 17. The latter was a novelty in military regimes, which did not normally include the head of the police. The Carabineros corps was created under Ibáñez’s dictatorship (1927–1931) and had a large staff throughout the country. It had received institutional and material resources, especially during the Eduardo Frei Montalva administration, to control public order. The Carabineros director had little influence in the junta.

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18. This has been meticulously documented by González (2000). 19. A different interpretation highlights the authority of the junta, downplaying Pinochet’s power: “the members of the Junta early on came to recognize the need for procedural rules to regulate their mutual relations and to prevent any single member from achieving absolute dominance—as well as to rule effectively. This regulation involved a self-conscious introduction of a separation of executive and legislative functions to prevent their fusion in Pinochet. In instituting procedural rules the Junta put in place safeguards against the absolute dictatorship of any one member”; Barros (1996), p. 227. 20. I am using the concept as defined by Lehmbruch (1967). 21. Vice Admiral Lorenzo Gotuzzo was the first minister of finance. The text of the program is published in Center for Public Studies (1992), with a preface by Sergio de Castro. 22. Rear Admiral Ismael Huerta, who had acted as minister of public works for a few weeks in early 1973 during the Allende government, was appointed. 23. They were held by lawyer Gonzalo Prieto Gándara and by engineer and businessman Fernando Léniz, who took up the post in early October 1973. The first minister of education, José Navarro, a professor at the Military School, remained in the post for only a month. 24. They had different views of the aborted visit to the Philippines in March 1980. It had been proposed by the deputy foreign minister, General Enrique Valdés, and advised against by the foreign minister, Hernán Cubillos (1978–1980). For a good analysis of the army’s participation in the Foreign Affairs Ministry, see Muñoz (1986), chap. 3; the conflict between Valdés and Cubillos and the Philippines incident are examined on pp. 44–54. 25. He called lawyer Julio Tapia Falk, who would later become president of the University of Chile, and Jorge Ovalle, professor of constitutional law and member of the constituent commission, among others. In the early days, Jaime Guzmán was one of them, but he soon withdrew to become Pinochet’s adviser. 26. For more on the emergence of the advisory committee to the junta, COAJ, see Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989). See also Chapter 3 in this volume. 27. Colonels Gastón Frez and Luis Danús, at the University of Chile. 28. Colonel Horacio Toro, at Catholic University. 29. Decree Law no. 991, of 1976. The legislative commission was formed by former deputies Gustavo Alessandri Valdés and Fernando Maturana; Ernesto Pinto Lagarrigue, former minister under Jorge Alessandri’s administration; and William Thayer, former minister under Eduardo Frei’s government. A constitutional law professor, Jorge Ovalle, was also involved. See Valencia Avaria (1986), p. 669. 30. Generals César Raúl Benavides (1981–1985), Julio Canessa (1985–1986), Humberto Gordon (1987–1988), and Santiago Sinclair (1988–1990). 31. Naval officers Aldo Montagna and Mario Duvauchelle were exceptions, as they had worked in legislative functions since the coup and remained in the legislative commissions until the end of the military regime. There were a few politicians among the civilian members. 32. This is the version he gave to journalist Varas (1979a). 33. Former president Aylwin recalls that Leigh was the toughest of the junta members during the meeting with the leadership of the Christian Democratic Party in December 1973: “As soon as I finished, General Leigh took the floor and literally tore our arguments to shreds. Speaking in harsh tones, he presented the reasons why he believed that we, since President Frei’s administration—on whom he seemed to place most of the blame—were just as responsible for what had happened as the communists and socialists. He told us bluntly that we needed to understand that the armed forces would rule without politics, which were forbidden in Chile. We left the interview very dis-

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couraged and under the impression that the most sociable and rational of the four Junta members was Pinochet. I remember Eduardo Frei saying that Cardinal Silva thought the same”; Aylwin (1998), p. 53. 34. In late 1977, he attacked an Internal Revenue Service employee, accusing her of being a leftist and sabotaging the government’s work, which was refuted by the director of the service, who defended the employee’s professionalism: “There is a cunning little man at the internal revenue service who heads a department—I believe it is tax investigations—who has specialized in investigating Popular Unity opponents and is still doing it today. I have names, cases, and examples”; AHJG, sess. 323A, October 19, 1977. 35. On the differences of General Leigh with the Chicago Boys and the power struggle with Pinochet, see Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate (2003). 36. The option of bombing the presidential palace was considered only in the event that President Allende “resisted”; Whelan (1993), p. 439. 37. The war tribunals outside Santiago were relatively benevolent, triggering General Pinochet’s ire. In early October 1973, he ordered General Arellano to rush them along and toughen the sentences, an order that gave rise to the “caravan of death” (see Chapter 2). 38. Annoyed, Bonilla said: “I, as Interior minister, don’t know who is imprisoned in Chile. Every service, every institution, takes things into their own hands without letting me know.” He cited as example a Swiss journalist who had turned out to be under arrest on an order from the air force’s prosecution office. See AHJG, sess. 111, April 11, 1974. 39. There is a well-documented book on the joint command: González and Contreras (1991). 40. The joint command, in the context of the institutionalization of terror, turned out to be “moderate” in its treatment of prisoners; while detention by the DINA meant almost certain death, detention by the air force joint command meant some chance of survival. Clashes between the DINA and the joint command are described in Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), chap. 14, esp. pp. 141–142. 41. Admiral Merino shared this aim, while Pinochet remained silent. In late January 1974, the admiral stated: “As chief of the cabinet, it is the Interior minister’s duty to let the ministers know in a very drastic way that we need information on the deeds of the previous regime’s officials. The most serious crime, involving the largest number of people, is the misappropriation of public property, and there is not a single ministry that doesn’t have someone who has committed that crime”; AHJG, sess. 76, January 21, 1974. The status of investigations into alleged corruption among high-ranking officials in the Allende government was addressed again in the junta’s ninety-first session, on February 12, 1974, with a report from the public defense council (Consejo de Defensa Fiscal, currently the Council for Defense of the State [Consejo de Defensa del Estado]). On that occasion, it was agreed that the military’s intelligence services should cooperate with the council to accelerate the process. In the end, these investigations produced no evidence of any kind. 42. The Carabineros were supposed to investigate the forming of guerrilla groups, among others things, and the public defense council would focus on administrative irregularities. Leigh proposed that each national defense branch and the council should appoint prosecutors, who could deliver results on “the charges they have found” in a brief period of thirty to forty-five days; AHJG, sess. 111, April 11, 1974. 43. On September 21, 1973, “a list of all the political refugees inside the Argentine Embassy, obtained by General Leigh, [was] delivered to the Minister of Defense.” In addition, “we know from very reliable sources that some Argentine Embassy employees are carrying out activities that displease the current Chilean government.” See AHJG, sess. 7, September 21, 1973, nos. 4–5.

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44. He had left the country voluntarily in early 1974, establishing himself in Italy. The junta later prohibited his return to Chile. See Boye (1999), chap. 17. 45. Leigh quoted a speech delivered by Leighton in Módena, pointing out that “these are the words of this man who wants to return to Chile”; AHJG, sess. 139A, July 24, 1974. 46. Leigh’s concern for social issues can be followed in the press. There is a lengthy letter he wrote to the weekly magazine Qué Pasa, May 10, 1974, p. 11. See as well the Qué Pasa editorials “Desarrollo social y libertad económica,” April 26, 1974; “Desarrollo social,” September 6, 1974; “Una política coherente y estable,” October 31, 1974; “Año del desarrollo social,” January 23, 1975; “El costo social,” May 29, 1975. See also “75, año social,” January 30, 1975, pp. 32–34. 47. Sergio de Castro’s views on this issue are in Finis Terrae University (1994), transcript of video no. 20, pp. 51–53. 48. Reproduced in Varas (1979a), pp. 159–165. A few weeks later, Leigh wrote a memorandum to Pinochet, developing these ideas further; ibid., pp. 153–157. 49. Some interviews given by General Leigh shed light on his political views: Hugo Mery, “General Leigh: la imagen nacionalista,” Ercilla, April 17–23, 1974, pp. 21–25; “Habla el general Leigh: en un año, otro país,” Qué Pasa, September 17, 1974, pp. 32–35; “El general Leigh recuerda y opina,” Qué Pasa, August 18–24, 1977, pp. 6–9. See also “El pensamiento de Leigh,” Qué Pasa, March 30–April 5, 1978, pp. 6–7. 50. Lagos (1970). 51. On the presidency, see Silva Bascuñán (1997). On the weakening of the Congress, see Valenzuela and Wilde (1984). 52. As stipulated in Article 8, the junta’s participation in the government’s administration was expressed in the appointment of diplomatic personnel and in the fact that ministers reported to their respective military branch commander, and not to Pinochet. 53. The decree displeased the Council of Admirals, called by Merino to report on its text, as well as the air force’s Council of Generals; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 31. 54. The ministerial post was limited to administrative functions and had limited influence and power, since the command of each military branch was in charge of its respective commander in chief, who in turn was a member of the junta. 55. His successor in the post was Pablo Baraona, an economist from the team that put together “The Brick” (El Ladrillo). 56. Pinochet appealed to historical legitimacy to justify this far-reaching political change when he stipulated, in the third item of the decree, that “it is necessary to maintain the national historical tradition with respect to the appointment of the person who exercises Executive Power, within the framework of organic action set by the Constitution and the statutes of the Junta, especially due to the fact that the title ‘President of the Republic’ appears in numerous pre-existing laws and regulations.” 57. He had summoned the authorities to a formal ceremony in the Diego Portales building to take over the presidency. Leigh’s version can be found in Varas (1979a), pp. 59–60. 58. AHJG, sess. 262, March 19, 1976. Until then, it was supposed to have functioned administratively through the Interior Ministry, which proved cumbersome. 59. This was put forward by the promoters of the initiative during the debate in the junta: “Individuals must meet requirements of absolute reliability, and it is necessary to separate them immediately in case of the slightest suspicion of unreliability or questionable behavior. . . . These positions require the President’s exclusive confidence, a rule that allows us enormous freedom to fire employees from their posts”; AHJG, sess. 262, March 16, 1976.

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60. Clarification by Mónica Madariaga, to which the Carabineros’ legal adviser replied that this was a repetition of Decree Law no. 502; AHJG, sess. 262, March 16, 1976. 61. He had been a member of the Radical Party, an important fact since that party adopted an anticommunist policy in 1948 by promoting the law to defend democracy, which outlawed the Communist Party and persecuted its leaders. 62. During the “prayer for peace” at the Church of National Gratitude (Templo de Gratitud Nacional) on September 18, 1973, Alessandri and former president Gabriel González Videla approached the junta members to greet them, while former president Eduardo Frei Montalva did not, irritating them. Frei had initially refused to attend, thinking that his presence would be perceived as a show of support for the junta, but he finally agreed at the request of Cardinal Silva Henríquez, who wanted him to accompany him; Silva Henríquez (1994), vol. 2, p. 290. 63. Former president Frei broke his political silence in April 1975, publishing a harsh criticism of the regime and its economic policy in a short work titled El mandato de la historia y las exigencias del porvenir (The Mandate of History and the Demands of the Future). The military regime authorized its publication, fearing that rejection would cause more public impact, particularly abroad. 64. The text of the speech is presented in El Mercurio, September 12, 1975; quote from p. 28. 65. Decree Law no. 1319, January 9, 1976, printed in Ordenamiento constitucional (1980), pp. 65–69. 66. There is a copy of the letter (hereafter “Frei’s letter”) in the archives of the Frei Foundation. It was published in El Mercurio, January 3, 1976. There is a brief summary of the letter in Ercilla, January 7, 1976, p. 10. The government ignored his refusal. 67. “Moreover, this Council has no charge to promote debate; it is merely consultative, there is no obligation to hear it, and except for former Presidents, its members are appointed and can be removed by the head of state at will”; Frei’s letter. 68. Frei’s letter. 69. See the extensive interview in La Tercera de la Hora, June 3, 1976, pp. 6–7, where he explains his acceptance and his withdrawal from the Christian Democratic Party. Pinochet’s appointment of Christian Democrats in the Council of State could be interpreted as retaliation against Frei. 70. He was a distinguished labor lawyer, professor of labor law, and president of Austral University of Valdivia at the time of the coup. The other important member of the Christian Democratic Party working in the government at that time was Jorge Cauas, who had not progressed as far in the party as had Carmona and Thayer. He had been vice president of the Central Bank in the Frei administration. Undurraga Vergara (1995) has written an interesting study. 71. Its members were former presidents Jorge Alessandri and Gabriel González Videla; former comptroller-general Héctor Humeres; former president of the Supreme Court Enrique Urrutia Manzano; the former commanders in chief of the army, Óscar Izurieta M., the navy, Ramón Barros G., and the air force, Renato García; former director of the Carabineros Vicente Huerta C.; Juan de Dios Carmona; former ambassador Hernán Figueroa Anguita; former president of the University of Chile Juvenal Hernández; former University of Chile law professor Enrique Ortúzar; former University of Chile economics professor Carlos Cáceres; Julio Philippi I. (representing professional guilds, he had been a minister under the Alessandri administration); Pedro Ibáñez (representing the business sector, he had been a Liberal Party senator); union leader Guillermo Medina (representing labor); Mercedes Ezquerra B. (representing

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women); and Gremialista Juan Antonio Coloma (representing youth). William Thayer replaced Juvenal Hernández after his death. 72. His mother, to whom he was very much attached, had been strongly affected by exile; Arancibia, Góngora, and Vial (1996), pp. 109–113. 73. Alessandri had regrets, stating that “his legal opinions have ended up in other commissions, or have simply been filed” and that “his efforts have been useless.” “This body’s influence on the course of events is insignificant or nil. For example, just look at what happened with the reports on labor legislation, which were not taken into account at all”; ACE, sess. 73, May 15, 1979. 74. I use the concept of semi-opposition as defined by Linz (1973). 75. For more on the foreign policy of the new US administration, see Schoultz (1981). 76. The arbitration decision was delivered in May 1977, and was favorable to Chile, recognizing its sovereignty over the three islands in the Beagle Channel. It was immediately embraced by the Chilean government, but the Argentine administration remained silent until formally announcing its rejection on January 25, 1978. For an informative account of this incident with respect to the Argentine military, see Passarelli (1998). 77. Pinochet directly suffered the effects of the regime’s international isolation, since he could not attend the coronation of King Juan Carlos of Spain. Several European heads of state threatened to boycott if Pinochet stayed in the country. This bitter experience was reflected in his criticism of King Juan Carlos in his memoirs: “I have a painful memory of the ceremony at the Palacio de las Cortes, because when he spoke, H.R.H. King Juan Carlos I did not have a single phrase of recognition to offer for Generalísimo Franco or his family. It was an ungrateful attitude, out of keeping with Spanish nobility”; Pinochet (1990), vol. 2, p. 104. 78. I have analyzed the Spanish transition in Huneeus (1985b). See also Carr and Fusi (1979), Linz (1981b), López Pintor (1981), Maravall (1982). 79. Lamounier (1988). In Brazil, this was key in precipitating an end to the military regime and initiating a gradual and controlled return to democracy, a process known as abertura. 80. The DINA responded to a request from the Presidential General Staff about evaluating a document on youth prepared by CISEC in the Jesuits’ Bellarmino Center; Rojas Sánchez (1998), p. 230. 81. “Opinión: solución chilena para una experiencia chilena,” Qué Pasa, November 6, 1975. 82. “Opinión: ¿faltan 119 chilenos?” Qué Pasa, August 14, 1975, p. 9. 83. “Religious communities have behaved pitifully in the case of their human rights defense body, the pro-peace committee [Comité Pro Paz], allowing it to become politicized, influenced at the top by people from the former Popular Unity and eventually, by letting its initially commendable work be spoiled in decisive aspects, including direct cooperation with Marxist-Leninist agitation and its anti Chilean propaganda abroad”; “Opinión: una política de derechos humanos,” Qué Pasa, December 9, 1975, p. 5. This referred to an incident in which some priests gave asylum to MIR members who had been attacked by DINA agents in November 1975. 84. This caused DINA agents to kidnap the magazine’s editor, Jaime Martínez Williams, on July 2, 1977. 85. “Editorial votación en la NU,” Qué Pasa, November 20, 1975, p. 5. See also the editorial “Los derechos humanos: ataque y defensa,” Qué Pasa, November 6, 1975, p. 8, which refers to a preliminary report by the United Nations criticizing the state of human rights in Chile, and the editorial “Derechos humanos, una vez más,” Qué Pasa, November 18, 1976, which argues that the public should have been informed of what was happening in the country and that the courts should have decided on the loss of lib-

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erty. The latter editorial was published when the UN’s “Allana Report” on the state of human rights in Chile was being discussed. 86. Jaime Castillo Velasco was a prominent Christian Democratic Party leader and a minister under Eduardo Frei’s administration. He had been defending prisoners since the beginning of the military regime. Eugenio Velasco Letelier was a member of the Radical Party and former dean of law at the University of Chile. 87. “Opinión: por qué una carta perjudica a Chile,” Qué Pasa, June 17, 1976, p. 5. 88. “[The letter] does not make any suggestions on concrete measures or on making national security needs more compatible with human rights demands”; ibid. 89. As expressed in the reply to the bishops’ statement, criticizing the expulsion: “Los obispos y el amparo,” Qué Pasa, August 28, 1976. 90. Ibid. 91. “The first thing that should be clarified in a society, said José Antonio Primo de Rivera, is who commands and who obeys. Fortunately, that is very clear in Chile”; “Opinión: lo que por callado se olvida,” Qué Pasa, June 3, 1976, p. 5. For more on Spanish fascism and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, see the outstanding book by Payne (1999). 92. “El once y la evolución política,” Qué Pasa, September 9, 1976. 93. “Opinión: trabas al retorno a la normalidad,” Qué Pasa, June 23, 1977, p. 5. 94. Opinión: el once y la evolución política,” Qué Pasa, September 9, 1976, p. 4. 95. Denouncing the Christian Democratic Party’s “persistent rejection of the political recess” and recognizing that same party as an “inescapable social reality”; “Opinión: la activa DC,” Qué Pasa, November 17–23, 1977, p. 5. 96. “Opinión: el poder presidencial,” Qué Pasa, September 23, 1976, p. 5. 97. “El gobierno y el régimen,” Qué Pasa, January 6, 1978, pp. 16–19; quote from p. 19. See also “Opinión: el Presidente abrió el camino,” Qué Pasa, August 28, 1976, p. 5. 98. AHJG, sess. 284, October 6, 1976, p. 22. 99. This new political course was, in a way, a response to Jimmy Carter’s administration, and helped to prevent “surprise attacks by the American administration—in Carter’s hands since last January,” said comptroller and later interior minister; Fernández (1994), p. 15. 100. Sergio Fernández had been the minister of labor since 1976. He played a major political role when he was appointed comptroller in late 1977, as he ratified Pinochet’s decision to call the referendum, something his predecessor, Héctor Humeres, had refused to do. The decree that called the referendum needed the comptroller’s approval for legal validity. Mónica Madariaga, then minister of justice, sped Humeres’s departure, handling his pension in record time; Fernández was appointed his successor and dealt with the presidential decree at once. 101. Fernández was a lawyer for the bank employees’ pension fund (Caja Bancaria de Pensiones), whose legal department head was Ernesto Silva Bafalluy, father of one of Kast’s closest friends and colleagues. 102. The newly arrived papal ambassador, Angelo Sodano, pointed it out, remarking that “the speech sounds more like that of an Interior minister than a comptroller”; Fernández (1994), p. 22. 103. The text is presented in El Mercurio, April 6, 1978. 104. “Ministro Fernández propone gabinete al Presidente Pinochet: S.E. precisó que la consecución de la nueva institucionalidad estará en manos de una sola persona: el ministro del interior,” El Mercurio, April 14, 1978, p. 1. Pinochet reinforced the point: “Just as I placed responsibility for implementing our economic plans under a single minister, likewise the new institutional order should come under a single head, who works toward that end.”

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105. “Sergio Fernández nuevo ministro del interior,” La Tercera, April 13, 1978, p. 11. General Pinochet said: “I have decided to appoint Sergio Fernández Interior minister to bring more civilians into the government. At the same time, entrusting him, as head of cabinet, with compliance and the application of all measures advancing the new institutional order.” He added that “the new Interior Minister also has 48 hours to propose the composition of a new cabinet, which he will head.” See also La Tercera, April 14, 1978, p. 2; “‘Superministro Fernández’ elogió equipo para nueva etapa,” La Tercera, April 15, 1978, p. 1; “Sergio Fernández: ‘El Premier’ Chileno,” Qué Pasa, April 20–26, 1978, p. 5. 106. Fernández pointed out that he asked Pinochet for “freedom to appoint some team members, to which he immediately agreed”; Fernández (1994), p. 28. 107. El Mercurio’s information showed that the originally published names were false, and that the real names were Michael Townley, a US citizen, and army captain Armando Fernández Larios. 108. For more on the Letelier-Moffit case, see the book by the US prosecution: Propper and Branche (1984). 109. The rest of the ministers remained in their posts. The outgoing interior minister, General César Raúl Benavides, was transferred to the defense portfolio, replacing General Herman Brady. 110. He had reached the rank of naval lieutenant; his father was a rear admiral who had been ambassador to Brazil in the early years of the military regime, when relations with that country were very important for the Chilean government. 111. The minister of economy, Pablo Baraona, was also dismissed, and replaced by Roberto Kelly, minister of ODEPLAN, who in turn was succeeded by Miguel Kast. 112. He ran for president of Catholic University’s student federation, as part of the PDC list for a few days in 1968, but withdrew in favor of another candidate (for the “11 August” movement). 113. “Cauas is not a politician. Sergio de Castro is a technician with a great personality and rigorous ideas, but lacks the flexibility of a politician. The real politician in the economic sector is José Piñera. Brave, tough-skinned, armed for times of crisis, he is the imaginative and restless image of a politician”; Fontaine Aldunate (1988), p. 184. 114. At a rally attended by 3,000 union leaders during the plebiscite campaign, Piñera stated that “Chile will be a developed country in 1990”; El Mercurio, August 28, 1980, quoted in Fontaine Aldunate (1988), p. 140. Smarter than Kast, Piñera used an intelligent demagogy, somewhat hidden behind economic analysis. Piñera ran as an independent candidate in the 1993 presidential elections, obtaining 6.18 percent of the vote and benefiting from the fact that the UDI and National Renewal presented a weak candidate, Senator Arturo Alessandri, to face a strong candidate of the Concertación, Senator Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle. 115. Campero and Valenzuela (1984b). 116. Several ministers, including those of interior and finance, had tried to persuade Pinochet to keep Hernán Cubillos in the post; the director of the CNI, Odlanier Mena, also pleaded for his retention unsuccessfully; Fernández (1994), p. 133. 117. Pinochet profited from the incident, because a massive reception was organized upon his return, which gave his advisers grounds to call a plebiscite on the constitution, fully confident they would win: “For me and many others, the sight on that afternoon confirmed that the government had unbeatable support. The plebiscite was possible and winnable. I would have the occasion to use this argument later on; to that extent, the Philippines incident [filipinazo] helped institutionalization”; Fernández (1994), p. 130. 118. Toward the end of 1986, there were thirty-six cabinet changes; “36 cambios ha tenido el gabinete en 11 años,” El Mercurio, November 6, 1986.

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119. I have taken the composition of Franco’s cabinet from Beyme (1971b), pp. 128–129. An analysis of the ministers’ political inclinations can be found in de Miguel (1975). 120. Fernando Léniz was appointed minister of economy in early October 1973 and lawyer Gonzalo Prieto Gándara was appointed to the justice portfolio. 121. As defined by Lehmbruch (1967). 122. Patricio Carvajal, Foreign Affairs; Rear Admiral Hugo Castro continued in Education; Rear Admiral Arturo Troncoso, in Housing and Urban Development; and Captain Roberto Kelly in ODEPLAN. 123. Interior, Defense, Mining, Transportation and Telecommunications, and General Secretariat. I include the latter even though it did not legally have ministerial status until 1976. 124. General Francisco Herrera, Health; General Nicanor Díaz Estrada, Labor and Social Security; General Sergio Gutierrez, Public Works; the latter stayed on from the first cabinet, as deputy chief of the General Staff of National Defense. 125. Justice, National Properties, and Agriculture. 126. The navy did not lose its influence in the economic sector, because Roberto Kelly stayed on in ODEPLAN. 127. The Carabineros had previously lost the Ministry of Justice in April 1975, when it came under criminal law professor Miguel Schweitzer Speisky, who had held the same ministerial post under Jorge Alessandri’s administration. 128. For more on ASEP, see Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), chap. 11. 129. This was the case at Catholic University, from which numerous leftist and Christian Democratic professors were expelled (see Chapter 2). 130. He was appointed ambassador to the United States, not knowing that he would have to deal with the assassination of Letelier by DINA agents. 131. He was minister of public works, and later housing, under the Eduardo Frei Montalva administration. 132. He held this ministerial post during Jorge Alessandri’s administration. 133. I have analyzed this in Huneeus (1985a). 134. A Chicago Boy, Carlos Cáceres, remained. 135. He was previously undersecretary of housing and legal adviser to the Presidential Secretariat. 136. One was Pablo Longueira, president of the Independent Democratic Union in the capital, Santiago. 137. Linz (1964). 138. This is Beyme’s criticism (1971b), p. 29. 139. Lehmbruch (1967). 140. They acted through the newspaper La Tercera de la Hora. 141. On this organization, see the account by a former leader: Fuentes (1999). 142. For instance, opposition to the apertura was led by Hugo Rosende, minister of justice, and Francisco Javier Cuadra, minister of the General Secretariat. 143. Finis Terrae University (1994), p. 53. 144. For example, former president Hugo León Puelma was minister of public works (1975 and 1979). 145. The former presidents of the SNA, Alfonso Márquez de la Plata and Jorge Prado Aránguiz, who were ministers of agriculture in 1977–1980 and 1982–1987, respectively. 146. The most radical was Carlos Podlech, president of the National Association of Wheat Producers (Asociación Nacional de Productores de Trigo), who was expelled from the country. For more on businessmen in the 1982–1983 crises, see Campero (1991).

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147. Its former president, Juan Carlos Délano, was minister of economy (1985 and 1987) and ambassador to the United Kingdom (1987–1990). 148. The full list of ministers, with brief biographic information on each, is presented in the booklet Las ideas, los hombres, las obras, 1973–1980 (1990). For the period up to the 1988 plebiscite, the table “Los ministros y la evolución del régimen,” El Mercurio, October 23, 1988, p. D2, which details the ministers and the regime’s development, is very useful. I have not included in my estimate the vice presidents of the government development corporation, CORFO, or the secretary of energy, who had ministerial rank, which would have increased the number of military ministers. 149. Beyme (1971b), pp. 128–129. 150. This explains why the Franco regime had twenty-one military ministers: nine in the Ministry of the Army and six each in the Ministry of the Navy and Ministry of the Air Force. Ibid. 151. Sergio de Castro entered as undersecretary of economy under Fernando Léniz in March 1975, starting out as his adviser at the beginning of the regime; Hernán Büchi was undersecretary twice—thirteen months in the economy portfolio before the crisis, and two years in the health portfolio, 1981–1983; Miguel Angel Poduje was undersecretary of housing for less than a year, 1983–1984, before taking over the ministerial post. 152. I have included the ministerial posts and not the names of those filling them because some individuals held more than one position under the same “government,” or under different “governments.” 153. General Pinochet was sensitive to pressure from power groups. The Qué Pasa group promoted the removal of military officers from their ministerial posts in the Ministries of Interior and Foreign Affairs during Pinochet’s second “government”; the hard-liners forced the withdrawal of minister Hernán Cubillos from Foreign Affairs, and of minister Gonzalo Vial from Education, in 1979–1980. 154. Former National Party senators Sergio Diez, Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes, and Sergio Onofre Jarpa were appointed ambassadors to the United Nations, Peru, and Colombia, respectively. A former Christian Democratic Party senator, Juan de Dios Carmona, was appointed to the Council of State, an agency that was of no consequence; he was later appointed ambassador to Spain. Another former Christian Democrat, William Thayer, was also appointed to the Council of State and later took the post of ambassador to UNESCO. 155. Jarpa promoted the apertura, which is analyzed in Chapter 10. 156. Miguel Schweitzer Speisky, in Justice (1975–1977); Hugo Gálvez, in Labor, 1983–1984; Luis Escobar Cerda, in Finance, 1984–1985. Other Alessandri administration officials became ministers, such as Carlos Granifo, who was the director of the government housing corporation (Corporación de la Vivienda); Jaime del Valle, undersecretary of justice in 1962; and Samuel Lira Ovalle, undersecretary of mining in 1962. 157. The most outstanding was the defense of Jaime Castillo Velasco and Eugenio Velasco Letelier when they were expelled in 1976. 158. See the biography provided in Osorio and Cabezas (1995), chap. 1. 159. In the movement Conscience, Compromise, and Revolution (Conciencia, Compromiso y Revolución), in the physical sciences and mathematics department. He went on to graduate studies in economy at Columbia University in the United States. 160. He was a board member of the national sugar plant, Iansa; the Telephone Company of Chile; the national energy distribution utility, Endesa; and the Pacific Steel Company, according to María Olivia Monckeberg, “Los hilos que mueve Büchi,” La Época, Crónica dominical, March 13, 1988, pp. 8–9. He used his experience in stateowned companies to become the most determined promoter of their privatization.

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161. He sat on the boards of the Pacific Steel Company and Endesa while he was undersecretary, and was appointed chairman of the Endesa board in 1981; Endesa (1982), p. 10. 162. Sergio de Castro was born in 1930 and Miguel Kast in 1948. 163. He was president of the student association in the school of economics, and later general secretary of Catholic University’s student federation (1970–1971), as analyzed in the next chapter. 164. There is an interesting book on Kast’s political career: Lavín (1986).

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7 Jaime Guzmán and the Gremialista Movement

Unlike other military regimes in Latin America, the Pinochet regime did not organize a political party as a base of support. In 1967, Brazil’s military created a government party, the National Renewal Alliance (Aliança Renovadora Nacional [ARENA]), allowed an opposition party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro [MDB]), to exist, and held elections at the local, state, and federal congressional levels.1 The sultanistic dictatorships2 of Central America also had political parties—for example, Nicaragua under Anastasio Somoza,3 and Paraguay under General Alfredo Stroessner.4 Authoritarian regimes are often identified with a single-party system, since the single party plays several roles, among them recruiting the leading elite, mobilizing support, articulating political interests, and distributing propaganda. Members and leaders are active, especially in organizing mass events and noncompetitive or semicompetitive elections, called to confirm the dictator’s power.5 In long-term authoritarian regimes, such as Francisco Franco’s in Spain (1939–1975), the party’s importance fades as time passes, while the institutional bureaucracy becomes increasingly influential.6 While it is true that in Chile the military did not organize a party, during the early years this possibility was not ruled out. The junta’s 1974 Declaration of Principles put forward the need to create a “civilian-military movement” to consolidate the population’s support for the new regime: “[The armed forces and police] consider it a part of their mission to inspire a large, new civilianmilitary movement, since this is already appearing in reality and will project the work of the current government into the future, in a fruitful and lasting manner.”7 Pinochet later considered creating such a movement, but decided not to when he discovered other political and institutional resources useful to his consolidation of power.8 Several factors explain why the military in Chile did not resort to a single party. One was that the conditions leading up to the crisis in democracy left a 225

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negative image of parties in the public mind. Many Chileans blamed parties for the collapse of the pluralistic order. Right-wing groups, which were the ones most actively collaborating with the new government, also strongly rejected parties and had openly questioned their performance since the 1960s (see Chapter 5).9 The military’s institutional participation in power also made it difficult to create a party that would attract civilians, since such a party might consider itself the decisive voice on subjects considered to fall solely within the domain of the governing junta and the head of state. The Pinochet regime did the work that a party would do in its own way, by setting up structures to recruit political personnel, mobilize support, organize propaganda, and run political campaigns. These included the Civilian Organizations Directorate, under the General Secretariat Ministry, in which the Youth Secretariat played a leading role. There was no official party, but there was a functional equivalent, the Gremialistas, organized by Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz and established as a political party in 1983: the Independent Democratic Union. Guzmán had proposed forming a single right-wing party that would be capable of winning a major victory in the first congressional elections following the military’s departure from power. Guzmán’s movement fulfilled some of the functions of a single party, especially when it came to recruiting the elite and mobilizing the population in noncompetitive elections. This chapter analyzes the conditions in which this movement arose, under Guzmán’s leadership, and its political role within the military regime. It will focus on the Youth Secretariat, the movement’s main power base.10

■

The Gremialista Movement: A Power Group

The Gremialistas were the main civilian power group supporting the Pinochet regime. They collaborated actively in the establishment and consolidation of the regime, taking advantage of authoritarian conditions to work toward their, and especially Jamie Guzmán’s, political objective: the building of a powerful right-wing movement. This movement included many activists who played diverse roles within the political system and acted with great unity based on their double loyalty. On the one hand, they were loyal to the military regime, especially to General Pinochet, which led them to justify every one of his actions, including the human rights violations. On the other hand, they were loyal to the principles of their own movement, always giving priority to their members and supporters of Guzmán’s leadership. Jaime Guzmán was a politician of note. He was greatly intelligent, had an enormous capacity for recruiting young people and exercising influence in the authoritarian regime, and had a powerful imagination, which helped him to orient his political activity toward long-term goals and to pragmatically bend his convictions to the opportunities that arose at any given moment. He was the regime’s main civilian adviser, a position he earned through effective work in various institutional areas, such as the General Secretariat Ministry, which

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he advised on propaganda and the dissemination of information. He also worked with the junta, especially General Pinochet, for whom he wrote major speeches, and participated heavily in the commission that was drafting the new constitution. Through these multiple arenas he was able to influence the content of authoritarianism’s political discourse and define the institutional architecture of its envisioned “protected and authoritarian democracy.” The Gremialista movement was most closely involved on three fronts. First was the General Secretariat, which the regime turned into an important ministry, expanding its domain and its human resources, to the point of giving it control over the media and mobilization of citizen support. To expand its influence among professionals working for the government in private firms and universities, Guzmán introduced a specifically Gremialista initiative, the National Unity Youth Front, which gained considerable influence thanks to political and economic support from the Youth Secretariat. Second, Gremialista economists and engineers, led by Miguel Kast, joined ODEPLAN and worked with the Chicago Boys to design economic reforms, to evaluate ministry management, and, through regional coordination secretariats, to support the political and administrative management of regional governments, all headed by military officers. Third, the movement also focused on local governments, with its members being appointed mayors in several important cities, including Santiago, Valparaiso, Viña del Mar, and Concepción. Previously the Gremialistas had worked at the local level, which gave them some legitimacy. The Gremialista movement had many professionals and activists recruited from Catholic University, where they enjoyed support from retired rear admiral Jorge Swett, the university’s appointed president. Swett posted Gremialistas to various management positions, allowing them to extend their influence to professors and students at the most important schools of the university, particularly law, economics, agriculture, and engineering. The Gremialistas did not have this influence at other universities.11 Another major area of influence arose from the fact that Jaime Guzmán, as a member of the commission that was working toward the new constitution, influenced the design of the institutional architecture necessary for the “protected and authoritarian democracy,” supposed to be set up by the constitution, which would place special emphasis on military power, limited pluralism, and the role of parties.12 The Gremialistas also participated in other bodies, such as the Council of State, in which the youth representative was a leader from Catholic University’s student federation (Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad Católica [FEUC]).13 Toward 1979, the Gremialista movement had so many sympathizers among senior government officials, the private sector, and the media that it created its own political journal, Realidad, which appeared regularly for four and a half years, from June 1979 to December 1983, with fifty-five issues published.14 Through Realidad, the Gremialistas communicated their

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views, emphasizing the need to advance in “the transition to democracy”—this at a time when their relations with General Pinochet had grown weaker and they had lost much of their influence. The Gremialista movement’s work at various levels of government, combined with Guzmán’s skills, gave it enormous influence over General Pinochet. In this the movement was aided by General Sergio Covarrubias, head of the Presidential General Staff (1974–1979), later the ministry-level Presidential Secretariat, who cultivated a close friendship with Guzmán. The Gremialistas’ influence peaked when Sergio Fernández was interior minister (1978–1982). Despite the fact that relations with Pinochet later cooled and that in 1983–1984 there was an effort to distance Guzmán from the government, the Gremialistas remained the main civilian power group, with Pinochet turning to them again in 1988 to help him win the plebiscite. The Gremialistas’ enormous influence in the government irritated other civilian groups that supported the military, who criticized the movement for its sectarianism. This encouraged the appearance of a new right-wing party in 1983, the National Union, which saw itself as an alternative.

■

Jaime Guzmán and the Influence of Franco’s Spain

Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz was born in 1946 into an upper-class, although not wealthy, family.15 He received a fervent religious education at home, guided particularly by the priest Osvaldo Lira, a teacher at his school who had lived in Spain during the 1940s and was an enthusiastic supporter of Franco’s corporativist ideas.16 He studied at Santiago’s Sacred Hearts School, graduating in 1962 and going straight into law school at Catholic University. Guzmán’s political views were influenced by Franco’s Spain as it existed in the 1960s, when corporativist ideas were still influential. From adolescence onward, he followed political developments in Spain with great interest, reading documents and speeches by its major figures, from José Antonio Primo de Rivera and Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora to General Franco himself. His trip to Europe in early 1962 included Spain, and was key to reinforcing his admiration for Franco’s regime. Spain at that time was performing well economically. Guzmán felt more comfortable in Spain than in the Latin American countries he had visited earlier. In a letter to his mother, written upon arriving in Barcelona, he wrote: “You can’t imagine the indescribable excitement with which I write you . . . excitement at setting foot on European soil, of being in the homeland of Velázquez, Calderón, Cervantes, Tirso, Franco and so many others.” He added: “I felt less of a foreigner than in Argentina or Brazil and feel [the Spanish] to be more my compatriots than Chileans themselves.” Writing his mother toward the end of his trip, he added: “I’ll tell you something about Europe that you probably noticed: Spain is by far the country I liked the

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most; after that, by a long shot, Italy.”17 He became more familiar with the details of historical events, especially the Spanish civil war.18 Guzmán was very precocious in defining his political ideas.19 A talk he gave at the Sacred Hearts School’s literary academy, and published in the academy’s journal upon his return from Spain, clarifies some features of his political thinking, revealing the influence of Franco’s regime and his admiration for “El Caudillo” (the Maximum Leader).20 At the time, Guzmán was already concerned with the importance of legitimacy, something he referred to in many texts during the Pinochet regime: “Francisco Franco cannot be labeled a dictator, except by a mental retard, since his entry into power is more than legitimized by a country that rose up in arms ‘for God, for Spain and for Franco.’”21 Because of his view of the extreme personalization of power in General Franco, Guzmán saw Spanish history in terms of Franco’s decisions, considering him an exceptional figure who had consolidated a new state that would be capable of surviving after his death: In 1936 his [Franco’s] mission was to save Spain from communism. . . . In 1942 his mission was to create a legislative body that would faithfully represent the people. . . . In 1949 his mission was to accelerate foreign policy, and Franco won the recognition of all western countries. . . . Today, the Caudillo’s mission is to complete material development to rise to the level of the great European powers. . . . And afterward, his final mission will be to consolidate the corporative State to guarantee that upon his death everything will continue to flow along normal channels. And if he has accomplished all his previous missions, why not this one? The Spanish anthem is not wrong when it says: “Volverá a reír la primavera, que por cielo, mar y tierra se espera. ¡Arriba escuadras a vencer! que en España empieza el amanecer. ¡Y en España ha empezado a amanecer! ¡Viva Franco! ¡¡Arriba España!!” (The spring will laugh again as expected, in sky, sea and on earth. Rise squadrons to vanquish! Dawn has come in Spain. And the dawn has come in Spain! Long live Franco! Up with Spain!)22

The Spain that Guzmán so admired shared another point in common with his political outlook: traditional Catholicism.23 The Spanish Catholic Church maintained its anticommunist stance, which had led it to support the “crusade” during the civil war and to support Franco’s regime toward the end of the 1960s. This meant that the idea of a church such as Chile’s, which remained critical of social injustice, defended human rights, and distanced itself from the military regime from the start, was outside Guzmán’s conceptualization. He did not like the reforms of the Second Vatican Council or the positions of the Catholic Church in Latin America, expressed in documents issued by the Latin American bishops’ conference. This religious orientation led Guzmán to become involved in an extremely right-wing Catholic movement, Fiducia,24 during his early college

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years. The movement was highly critical of the Second Vatican Council25 and the Chilean church.26 He wrote several articles about various political and religious topics that would later reappear in his political discourse, such as communism and socialism,27 and his rejection of the Christian Democratic Party for its efforts to become an alternative to capitalism and socialism.28 In a calculated political move, Guzmán distanced himself from Fiducia in 1965 when he created his Gremialista movement, which presented a candidate list in the elections for Catholic University’s law student association.29 Guzmán’s views about Spain were further reinforced during his law studies, thanks to the influence of certain professors, especially historian Jaime Eyzaguirre, who was also a practicing Catholic and an admirer of General Franco. In this context it becomes clear why Guzmán had no love for democracy. At least until the end of the 1970s, his admiration for Franco-style corporativism was well-known.30 From 1970 to 1972, Guzmán belonged to the “political council” of the extreme right-wing organization Fatherland and Freedom.31 He remained critical of democracy, openly questioning the principle of representation and universal suffrage. Only when Spain returned to democratic rule, after Franco’s death on November 20, 1975, which triggered the dismantling of Franco-style institutions, did Guzmán understand the extreme vulnerability of authoritarian rule and the need to carefully regulate its succession to ensure the continuity of its institutions after the return of the military to their barracks. From then on, he started to develop a more favorable view of democracy, not democracy in the normal sense understood throughout the Western world, but rather in the context of what the military regime called a “protected and authoritarian democracy.”32 In his major political article, “El Camino Político” (The Political Road, 1979), Guzmán expressed support for democracy for the first time, but from a minimalist or negative stance, using Winston Churchill’s well-known statement that it was the worst of the known forms of government.33 Guzmán’s dislike of democracy can be explained not only by his admiration for Franco’s Spain, but also by the influence of right-wing intellectuals and politicians, especially the editorialists of the magazine Portada (Chapter 5) and a former president of Chile, Jorge Alessandri, who had a negative opinion of the role of parties and Congress, considering the former responsible for the country’s problems. Much about Guzmán’s thinking is revealed in his many articles about the former president.34 Guzmán did not identify with traditional right-wing parties. He thought they had become infected by the same defects that had infected all parties, and that they were not strong enough to defend their principles against the PDC and the left. He was convinced of the need to build an alternative, with new political figures and renewed ideas, and he felt compelled to take up this task, which led him to found the Independent Democratic Union in 1983.35 Although Guzmán became a professor of constitutional law at Catholic University, he was no intellectual,36 but rather a politician. Teaching played a

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role in his political activity, since he used it to spread his ideas among young people and recruit supporters to his movement. He published no academic work indicative of his vocation, but rather proffered his views in many speeches and essays on a variety of constitutional and related political issues.37 His work was generally well structured and based on certain basic ideas that stood out in their simplicity and clarity, suggesting they were intended to encourage political action. Guzmán had a noticeable ability to synthesize the ideas of others, including political ideas from Spanish corporativist thinkers and Chilean politicians and intellectuals, such as priest Osvaldo Lira, of Portada, and Alessandri.38 Guzmán used the media heavily, because he knew it was necessary to strengthen his influence on wider sectors of society. He published the regime’s ideas in newspapers and weeklies, and defended them from the opposition.39 He paid special attention to television, enjoying easy access to Catholic University’s Channel 13 and appearing regularly on Chile’s national television channel, commenting on issues of interest or making political statements. He did not hesitate to enter into arguments with the Catholic Church, even criticizing cardinal and archbishop of Santiago Raúl Silva Henríquez. In the 1970s Guzmán was the most articulate civilian defending authoritarian rule.

■

Building the Gremialista Movement

The Gremialistas offer a fine example of the student movement’s importance in the emergence of new political parties. Traditionally, university politics have always been very important in Chile. Student federation elections have always been followed by the press, and student leaders’ positions on national issues are taken into consideration by the media and are influential in parties.40 Many well-known politicians’ careers began in the student movement.41 Guzmán started to organize the Gremialista movement at Catholic University’s law school in 1965. Political conditions were favorable. The collapse of the old Liberal and Conservative Parties in the 1964 presidential and 1965 congressional elections created a vacuum on the right, so it was a promising time to call upon their sympathizers to rally around new principles based on their vision for the university.42 President Frei’s government had introduced a reform program rejected by the right, especially the agrarian reform, so the right was looking for strong leadership to confront the governing party. The PDC youth had shifted to the left, which created plenty of space in the center to be taken by the right-wing movement. In 1965 the Gremialista movement won the elections of Catholic University’s law student association, in which it had played a leading political role for some time, with a candidate list led by Manuel Bezanilla, who was elected president. Guzmán was the second president, elected in 1966. From there, the Gremialista movement’s influence began to spread to other departments at the university, particularly during the 1967 campaign, when Guzmán was the

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Gremialista candidate in the FEUC elections. The Gremialistas became better known among university students during this campaign, in which their proposals were well publicized. Gremialista candidates did very well, winning 38 percent of the vote at a time when the right was on the defensive nationally and had no organized presence in any Chilean university. The second important center of the Gremialista movement was Catholic University’s economics school, where the movement took control of the school’s student association in 1967, with Ernesto Illanes as first president, and they kept the control of the assocation until the coup. This association was very politically active within the university, as was the law student association, and in the coming years became the central organizer of the Gremialista movement.43 From 1968 onward, the Gremialistas’ most distinguished supporter in economics was Miguel Kast, who introduced an intense style of political proselytizing among new students, demonstrating enormous persuasive ability, which he would later put to good use in ODEPLAN. At a time when the university was intensely politicized by its reform process, the economics school played an important role in the political struggle, which led to joint professorstudent campaigning in elections.44 The Chicago Boys demonstrated their strong interest in politics and their support for the Gremialista movement through Kast’s efforts and those of other professors, among them Sergio de Castro. The Gremialistas’ overwhelming presence among economics students gave them enormous influence once they graduated and went on to become part of the country’s business elite. Internal conflicts in the PDC helped the Gremialista movement in the FEUC elections in 1968,45 which were won by Ernesto Illanes, a student leader from the economics school, with 46 percent of the vote (see Table 7.1). He defeated the “11 August” movement, a coalition of well-known, left-leaning PDC youth,46 which had opted for a maximalist discourse foreign to the students’ low level of politicization, pushing some PDC voters (6.6 percent) to spoil their ballots, thus ensuring the Gremialistas’ victory. Thereafter, the Gremialista movement triumphed in every FEUC election until the coup, helped by the divisions in the PDC.47 In 1969, a law student, Hernán Larraín, won the presidency, accompanied by Kast as general secretary. In 1970, a civil engineering student, Tomás Irarrázabal, won the presidency. In 1971, the winning team was headed by Atilio Caorsi for president, Felipe Lamarca for vice president, and Javier Leturia for general secretary,48 and the movement swept the various student association elections, including law, engineering,49 education,50 and economics.51 In 1972, Leturia was elected president. The Gremialistas became the main right-wing youth movement opposing the Popular Unity government, and spread to Catholic University’s Valparaiso branch52 and the University of Concepción.53 Their growth was helped by Jaime Guzmán, who became a major presence in national politics, especially given his participation as a regular panelist on a political debate program, A

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Table 7.1

Electoral Results of Catholic University’s Student Federation, Executive Committee, 1967–1972 1969

1970

1971

1972

Votes

%

Votes

%

Votes

%

Votes

%

Votes

%

Votes

%

2,923

56.9

2,197

43.5

731

12.9

1,308

23.3

1,411

24.0

1,712

26.6

1,970 0 60 180 5,133

38.4 0 1.2 3.5 100.0

2,311 0 331 206 5,045

45.8 0 6.6 4.1 100.0

2,499 2,446 0 0 5,676

44.0 43.1 0 0 100.0

2,546 1,757 0 0 5,611

45.4 31.3 0 0 100.0

2,729 1,711 33 17 5,901

46.2 29.0 0.5 0.3 100.0

3,081 1,648 0 0 6,441

47.8 25.6 0 0 100.0

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1967

Sources: El Mercurio and La Nación.

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Moment for Improvisation (A Esta Hora se Improvisa), broadcast by Catholic University’s Channel 13, which had a large audience. This experience served Guzmán’s political career well, since it taught him television’s importance in forming public opinion. The opposition to the Popular Unity government supported the growth of the Gremialista movement. Guzmán worked closely with businesspeople, who borrowed his ideas on the role of associations, ideas that were very useful because they provided a good argument for uniting different interests in the fight against Allende, including the powerful landowners of the National Agricultural Society, the large manufacturers and their national association (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril), the small retailers and their national association (Confederación del Comercio Detallista), and the truck drivers and their national association (Confederación de Dueños de Camiones). A pro-Gremialista position was assumed by the leaders of the business organizations that led the October 1972 strike, which was supported by the FEUC and became the basis for the strikers’ manifesto, called the “Petition of Chile” (Pliego de Chile).54 The FEUC actively participated in national politics, supporting a major strike by the miners at El Teniente, a nationalized copper mine.55 After the coup, Catholic University’s military-appointed president allowed the FEUC and the student associations, most of which were controlled by Gremialistas, to continue with their activities. The countrywide “political recess” imposed by the new government did not cover the Gremialistas at the university, because the movement had the organizational capacity to control the students, and it needed to continue recruiting activists. The leaders of these student organizations were chosen by the Gremialista movement through the office of the university president, and many went on to hold senior administrative posts within the university or as advisers to the university president, which allowed them to expand their recruitment of well-known activists and supporters, and consolidate their growth in the university’s main departments. The Gremialistas’ substantial influence on university management led movement members to put forward not only political but also economic proposals to benefit some of their supporters, such as a savings and credit union (Cooperativa de Ahorro and Crédito “La Familia”), created by senior staff at the university. The credit union, however, went bankrupt in early 1977, amid questions about illegal acts allegedly committed by its directors and accusations of corruption.56 Important Gremialista figures who took part in the military regime had been FEUC leaders (see Table 7.2).57 Javier Leturia, the last president elected prior to the coup, became director of the National Youth Secretariat and the first secretary of the National Unity Youth Front.58 Three former FEUC presidents worked in the front during the military regime and were later elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the Independent Democratic Union: Juan Antonio Coloma (1976–1977), Andrés Chadwick (1977–1978), and Jaime Orpis (1981–1982).59

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Table 7.2

Gremialista Presidents of Catholic University’s Student Federation: Political Careers, 1968–1989 Term

School

Hernán Larraín Tomás Irarrázabal

1969–1970 1970–1971

Law Structural engineering

Atilio Caorsi Javier Leturia

1971–1972 1972–1973

Engineering Law

Arturo Fontaine Talavera 1973–1974

Law

Cristián Larroulet

1974–1975

Economics

Miguel Allamand

1975–1976

Agricultural engineering

—

President of UDI’s Supreme Tribunal Vice president of Catholic University UDI senator (2002–2010) Chief of staff for Labor Minister UDI city councilor in Lo Sergio Fernández Barnechea Member of UDI’s Political Committee President of UDI’s Professional Department — — National youth director, national UDI candidate for deputy coordinator, National Unity Youth (1989, 1997) Front Member of the Council of State Director, Center for Public Studies (CEP) Planning director, ODEPLAN Director, Institute for Freedom Member of the fourth legislative and Development committee Chief of staff for the finance minister — UDI city councilor in Santiago

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Democracy

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continues 235

Continued Term

School

Military Regime Director, National Unity Youth Front Member of the Council of State Director, National Unity Youth Front Prosecutor, ODEPLAN

Andrés Chadwick

1977–1978

Law

José M. Olivares

1978–1979

Law

—

Domingo Arteaga

1979–1980

Civil engineering

—

Mikel Urquiza Jaime Orpis

1980–1981 1981–1982

Law Law

— Mayor of San Joaquín

Juan Jaime Díaz

1982–1983

Civil engineering

—

Alfredo Burgos José A. Silva

1983–1984 1988–1989

Architecture Law

— —

UDI deputy since 1989 (District 31) UDI senator (2002–2010) UDI deputy (1990–1998) (District 33) UDI senator (1998–2006, 2006–2014) Member of UDI’s Political Committee Member of UDI’s Political Committee UDI candidate for deputy, 1993 (District 22) — UDI deputy (1990–2002) (District 25) UDI senator (2002–2010) Editor, El Mercurio, “Business and Economy” section — —

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Law

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1976–1977

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Juan A. Coloma

Democracy

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Table 7.2

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The first FEUC president appointed after the 1973 coup, Arturo Fontaine Talavera, was the first youth representative on the Council of State.60 Cristián Larroulet, another FEUC president (1974–1975), obtained a master’s in economics at the University of Chicago and then became a leader of the National Unity Youth Front, an adviser to the Ministry of Economy, director of planning at ODEPLAN, a member of the Fourth Legislative Commission (army), and chief of staff for Hernán Büchi, minister of finance (1985–1989).61 Felipe Lamarca, an FEUC vice president (1971–1972), became chief of staff for Sergio de Castro, minister of economy, and went on to direct internal revenue.62 Hernán Larraín, who had been president of Catholic University’s law student association and later FEUC vice president (1968–1969) and president (1969–1970), worked at the university during the military regime, holding various positions, which he used to help expand the Gremialistas’ influence in the university’s senior administration.63

■

The Four Faces of the Gremialistas: From Adaptation to Innovation

The Gremialistas’ influence on the military regime was not constant in content or reach. Guzmán was a pragmatic politician who knew to change positions when necessary, although he avoided explicit opportunism. Four stages can be identified in Guzmán’s political positions. The first lasted until 1977, and was characterized by his rejection of democracy, without hiding the influence of Franco’s corporativism. This type of political regime was at its peak in Latin America, where dictatorships had prevailed, and in Spain, Franco’s structures were still in place. The second stage lasted from 1977 until the 1980 plebiscite, when Guzmán changed the movement’s political positions in light of new national and international developments. Transitions to democracy in Latin America ended the golden era of dictatorships, and Franco’s Spain went through a democratization process that dismantled authoritarian institutions. Aware of the importance of carefully controlling the succession to ensure the political order’s continuity, Guzmán began to emphasize the need for a “new institutional order,” both to ensure the stability of Pinochet’s military regime64 and in the future, to ensure a solid political architecture once Pinochet voluntarily left power. Guzmán understood this institutionalization to be intimately linked to the personalization of power in General Pinochet, but he was also looking out for the interests of the Gremialista movement itself. This involved limiting Pinochet’s power by establishing an institutional order as well as an endpoint for his tenure, to be renewed through a noncompetitive election.65 Guzmán hid these intentions behind energetic attacks on the opposition and on regime supporters who opposed institutionalization, known as the “hard-liners.”66 The third stage of the Gremialista movement began after the 1980 plebiscite and lasted until the opposition parties and the National Union signed

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a national accord on the transition to full democracy, in August 1985. The archbishop of Santiago, Juan Francisco Fresno, had invited politicians from all sides to be involved in this important initiative. This was the time when the Gremialistas exercised the least influence. General Pinochet thought he had a solid base of authority to act more independently of the power groups, so he moved away from Guzmán when he noticed Guzmán’s instrumental approach to the constitution and Guzmán’s interest in using it to limit his powers. Nonetheless, Pinochet never broke completely with Guzmán, and appointed him a member of the commission that was studying the political laws and charged with drafting legislation that would govern implementation of the new constitution. In these years, Pinochet paid considerable attention to the Gremialistas’ most determined adversaries, the hard-liners. In light of this new scenario, Guzmán focused on defending “the transition” for fear of an even greater personalization of power in Pinochet, writing many articles and editorials in Realidad.67 Moreover, he worked hard to develop his movement and in September 1983 founded the Independent Democratic Union, which was also an initiative to show independence from Pinochet. He managed to expand the Gremialistas’ appeal when he enlisted Sergio Fernández, former interior minister (1978–1982), to join the early leadership of the UDI. While Sergio Onofre Jarpa (1983–1985) was interior minister, and later because of the actions of Francisco Javier Cuadra, minister of the General Secretariat, the Gremialistas’ influence plunged, as many of its supporters were fired from their posts, especially in ODEPLAN and the Youth Secretariat. The UDI was instrumental in maintaining the movement’s influence within the regime and in preparing for the future succession scenario. The fourth stage in the Gremialista movement began in 1985, in reaction to the national transition accord. Guzmán rejected this document, first because it called for constitutional reforms and thus questioned the established institutional order, and second because its authors criticized General Pinochet’s intentions of candidacy in the plebiscite and proposed open elections for the presidency of Chile. Guzmán feared that the UDI would end up excluded from the process, which could lead to the election of another head of state, so he reaffirmed his support for General Pinochet. The Gremialistas recovered their influence and played an important role in the 1988 plebiscite. In the 1989 congressional elections, held along with those for president, Guzmán was elected senator for Santiago, defeating a National Renewal candidate, Miguel Otero, and demonstrating significant electoral support for the UDI.68

■

Guzmán and the Question of Human Rights Violations

Guzmán held no post of authority within the government, because he preferred to remain free to develop the Gremialista movement. He exercised his influence as an adviser, starting in the junta and then concentrating on General

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Pinochet, with assistance from General Sergio Covarrubias, head of the Presidential General Staff (1974–1979).69 He became Pinochet’s main speechwriter,70 which allowed him to help shape the regime’s political thinking and assimilate the military’s ideas, especially the doctrine of national security. His extensive work as an adviser is clear in minutes and memoranda that express his political recommendations and ideological proposals. He enjoyed regular contact with the military, especially through the constitutional law course that he was giving at the National Academy for Political and Strategic Studies, ANEPE. However, he was careful not to openly flaunt his relations with officers, since he expected military rule to be temporary and was working hard to build the Gremialistas into a powerful movement that would be capable of taking over once Pinochet’s “protected and authoritarian democracy” was in place and the country was ready for civilian rule. One of the most controversial aspects of Guzmán’s participation in the military regime was his attitude toward human rights violations. As a practicing Catholic, he might have been expected to reject the use of coercion. However, he was a pragmatic politician who understood that cooperating with the military came with costs, among them having to justify states of exception and restrictions on human rights. He defended the regime on the grounds that the country was in a state of war, which would necessarily lead to excesses. While it is true that he did not raise his voice against abuse, neither did other rightwing supporters of the regime. His anticommunist stance led him to justify coercion as a valid method for fighting Marxists. The influence of Franco’s Spain was clear: there, thousands were killed in a civil war; by comparison, in Chile the costs, to Guzmán’s way of thinking, were very low. He played a major role in writing the junta’s Declaration of Principles, a document that established the impossibility of being both a Marxist and a democrat and the impossibility of the state remaining neutral when faced with Marxism, and supported the “war” against it, which left many victims. In late 1974, Guzmán repeatedly supported a policy of protecting a democracy that was “militantly” anti-Marxist and anticommunist, although he tried to distance himself from McCarthyism, which he considered impractical: “The belief that democracy must accept co-existence between Marxist-Leninists and democrats is a serious mistake, because democracy must protect itself. Without falling into McCarthyist fanaticism, I think that free states must be militantly anti-Marxist and anti-communist.”71 For Guzmán, coercive measures weren’t enough to defeat communism, “but they would help.”72 The military regime had the legitimacy to act, so, according to Guzmán, it could not be doubted for its involvement in human rights violations.73 Despite recognizing the primacy of the individual over the state, Guzmán thought that in “emergency or exceptional” situations, the suspension of civil rights was justified. Human rights were not absolute or unlimited, but rather subordinate to interests imposed by social and political conditions.74 The authorities could restrict human rights under exceptional circumstances “when

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societies are going through convulsions or major challenges that demand this,” which required the declaration of “some state of emergency or exception.”75 Under these circumstances, the government could “authorize restrictions on certain rights to a degree higher than normal or ordinary, which is proper to them. These exceptional or extraordinary situations can even go so far as to temporarily suspend certain rights.”76 The authorities determine when these circumstances exist. However, Guzmán never asked himself who would control the authorities to prevent abuses, or when these temporary measures could become permanent. Guzmán based this relativistic view of human rights on perceived political realities, stating that this was the situation prevailing in Latin America and there was no reason for Chile to be any different. The context of the Colombian experience served as an illustration of this argument: “Colombia has lived in a state of siege for more than thirty of the past thirty-five years, without the international community refusing to recognize the democratic nature of the governments that have ruled in that case.”77 The suspension of individual rights assumes that the authorities have a decisionmaking power that cannot be limited by any other power of the state, particularly the judiciary, so Guzmán argued that there was no need to defend those detained in the courts. Only the political authorities could suitably weigh conditions to justify the suspension of these rights, and he argued that they enjoyed a “broad and discretional enough range to apply this sort of restriction, that is [the states of] exception.”78 Thus the courts could not intervene, because that would involve their interfering in the executive branch’s powers, against the nature of these states of exception. If the judiciary were to qualify the political circumstances and judge whether or not a measure decreed by the executive were appropriate, it would be stepping outside its own domain, since this “would mean bringing into the judiciary arena an exclusionary and eminently political appreciation, entirely outside its jurisdiction.”79 This interpretation left the persecuted completely defenseless, since writs of protection (recursos de amparo) were no longer valid, thus allowing agents of the state to act with impunity. This explains the vehemence with which Guzmán criticized the work of the Pro-Peace Committee and the Vicariate of Solidarity, since they demanded that the courts rein in the arbitrary actions of security agents.80

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Guzmán’s Relations with the DINA and the Roman Catholic Church

Guzmán did not support the DINA’s arbitrary behavior or sympathize with General Manuel Contreras. On the contrary, he came to consider their actions politically counterproductive. He was no defender of human rights, as his supporters tried to argue after he was killed in 1991. He did not condemn Contreras’s methods, because he knew that Pinochet supported them and that such condemnation would place their relationship at risk. He began to criticize Con-

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treras after the DINA carried out its main operations against the opposition abroad, and when it spied on his own movement, the Gremialistas. Only after the 1988 plebiscite, during which he was a candidate for a Senate seat that was looking like it would be hard to win, did Guzmán speak openly against General Contreras.81 It was a convenient political ploy to announce, with enormous fanfare, his break with Contreras, but it occurred more than a decade after Contreras had been removed from the DINA. Contreras had no sympathy for the Gremialistas, which he considered a closed, sectarian group. The DINA followed their moves, as it did the moves of government officials, which irritated Guzmán, who learned of this in the winter (June–August) of 1976, immediately before the attack on Orlando Letelier, when the DINA, in an official reply to a request from the head of the Presidential General Staff, harshly referenced the Gremialistas. In that document, Contreras accused Guzmán of having been “incapable of capturing young people to indoctrinate them in favor of the government and so form a support group; in contrast, he provides a clearly patriotic ideology to its leaders and supporters, who form closed groups to which only some people have access.”82 When the Rettig Commission’s report on human rights violations during the military regime was published in 1991, Guzmán tried to justify the excesses, using the military’s thesis that Chile had been in a state of “civil war.”83 This had been his position earlier, in a meeting with Chile’s youth, when he said that the responsibility for the dead and the tortured lay with the Popular Unity government: The current regime reached power through a civil war, objectively speaking, which the country had been dragged into by the previous government. [There are no] objective situations of civil war where painful and serious acts of violence, death, and human rights violations do not occur. The first problem, therefore, is to clarify how much and how seriously the Popular Unity government was responsible for the acts that its own leaders must have suffered from as a result of the situation of civil war that they provoked.84

After his assassination by a terrorist group in 1991, the Gremialistas attempted to present Guzmán as a defender of human rights, an attitude he was supposed to have shown through many efforts to help the persecuted. Some of his friends in the opposition said that he had made several gestures, but reproached him for the fact that he never recognized the existence of systematic human rights violations.85 These gestures on some prisoners’ behalf cannot be confirmed. If indeed Guzmán did make them, he did so very discreetly to avoid damaging his relationship with Pinochet. A review of the correspondence housed at the Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz Foundation reveals nothing to support this claim. A single letter, thanking Guzmán for intervening in favor of an authorization for an exile to attend his mother’s funeral, could be found.86 His position on human rights led Guzmán into conflict with the Catholic Church.87 He could not understand how bishops could defend Marxists and

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how the Pro-Peace Committee could work with non-Catholics.88 Guzmán was involved in the most delicate conflict between the government and the Catholic hierarchy, brought on by the fact that some priests were protecting injured members of the MIR who were fleeing from a confrontation with the DINA in Malloco, west of Santiago.89 Two Jesuit priests, Patricio Cariola and Fernando Salas, later cooperated to ensure that two MIR fugitives found asylum in the Vatican’s Santiago embassy and another, a major MIR figure, Andrés Pascal, in a Latin American embassy.90 The situation was clear from the religious point of view, since the priests were acting under the Bible’s mandate to defend life, knowing full well that if they did not offer the fugitives protection, the DINA would have killed them; still, it was a politically delicate situation, since the fugitives had used violence. This protection was defended by the permanent committee of bishops, headed by cardinal and archbishop of Santiago Raúl Silva Henríquez.91 Guzmán harshly criticized the priests’ actions and questioned the position adopted by the hierarchy; moreover, he did so in the public spotlight, through a commentary read on the main news program of the state television channel.92 His arguments were consistent with his view of the authorities’ prerogative during the state of siege. He accused the priests of breaking the law, in that they had disobeyed a “correct and precise instruction,” issued in an announcement by the chief of Santiago’s emergency zone, that had established that “every individual who in any way helps fugitives was involved in serious criminal behavior covering up those brought to trial by the military courts.” Guzmán considered the juridical order superior to the mandate of the church, rejecting the argument of “mercy” that the Archbishopric of Santiago had used to justify the priests’ actions. Guzmán’s arguments were categorically rejected by the church, which considered them unacceptable because they questioned its basic principles with regard to the political authorities and attacked priests and bishops. In an unprecedented act, the Archbishopric of Santiago condemned Guzmán’s opinions through a public statement, making it known that Guzmán had broken the rules of canonic law and deserved punishment, which was interpreted as possible excommunication:93 “The Catholic Church will not accept that the authority of its pastors be usurped or hampered, or that the honor of the Catholic name be damaged, to the serious detriment of its unity and its mission of service to the people of Chile.”94 Guzmán’s declarations deeply angered the bishops. One, José Manuel Santos, bishop of Valdivia, who strongly supported human rights, sent Guzmán a letter in which he deemed Guzmán’s declaration a grave act of heresy, particularly given that he was well-known for his Catholicism: “There are two ways to place oneself outside the Church: one is the road of violence and the other that of strength without mercy. You do not lack intelligence or clarity. But be careful. All the heretics were intelligent and excessive intelligence was not the reason they left the Church.”95 Guzmán did not expect such a strong response from

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the church, and to avoid sanction had to retract his accusations. In a public statement, he repeated his obedience to the church, although he argued that as a Catholic he was still free to dissent: “[I repeat] my firm support for the Catholic Church, its unity and its ecclesiastic hierarchy in every field proper to its teachings, maintaining the right that the Church itself grants all Catholics to dissent, with respect and prudence, on those points not covered by its teachings.”96 The incident between the priests and the DINA caused the government to take a harder position toward the church. The military courts ordered the priests’ arrest.97 Pinochet demanded that Cardinal Silva Henríquez close down the ProPeace Committee, a body that had grown very weak due to the government’s steady campaign against it. Months earlier, the government had banned the return to Chile of the Lutheran bishop who belonged to this human rights body. He had been under the spotlight of Chile’s German community, which strongly supported the military regime. Cardinal Silva Henríquez had no choice but to agree to Pinochet’s request, but responded immediately by creating the Vicariate of Solidarity within the Archbishopric of Santiago.98 The vicariate became an important organization working in defense of victims of persecution, and was very active during the military regime. Its extensive documentation of the abuses committed by the regime in those years served as a basis for the work of the Rettig Commission, which was established by President Patricio Aylwin to determine the truth on the coercion that ended in death for some Chileans.

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Mobilizing Political Support: Civilian Organizations

The main institutional arena for the Gremialistas was the Youth Secretariat. To understand its importance, we must examine the functions it fulfilled within the regime’s broader strategy for mobilizing support. The Pinochet regime had the characteristics of exclusionary authoritarianism per Alfred Stepan’s typology.99 The regime attempted to neutralize union and political organizations, and its main support came from technocrats and right-wing groups. Its economic policy was conservative, with no concern for distributive measures, patently favoring large Chilean and foreign firms.100 However, Stepan’s analysis requires some fine-tuning in Chile’s case, given the needs imposed by legitimacy. Exclusionary authoritarian regimes also require legitimacy to stay in power and to introduce policies promoting economic transformation. It was not enough for the Chilean military to appeal to historical legitimacy, taking advantage of the country’s state of crisis at the time of the coup, nor was coercion enough to ensure that citizens respected its decisions; it also needed to rely on political resources to ensure the voluntary support of citizens. In light of this, one can identify two types of exclusionary authoritarianism: those that face the need for legitimation with little sophistication and in which coercion plays a major role, and those that develop a complex legitimation strategy that includes appealing to different sources to achieve voluntary

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support from the population.101 In the second case, the route that the Pinochet regime chose, the degree of exclusion is limited. This effort to win the population’s support was based on the broad backing for the coup due to the rejection of the Popular Unity government by many low- and middle-income sectors, a rejection the regime exploited through its long life. On the first anniversary of the coup, hundreds of thousands gathered along Santiago’s main road. Later, at key moments, the regime was able to mobilize an extensive number of citizens—for example, for the 1978 referendum, for a massive event in favor of Pinochet after his abortive trip to the Philippines in March 1980, or for the plebiscite the same year. Mobilization was not solely the result of media support; it was also possible because the regime had institutional resources, supporters, and the approval of many Chileans, including low-income sectors and wide sectors of the business community. The main organization dedicated to mobilizing political support was the General Secretariat Ministry. This body had new powers and enormous economic resources to reach its goals, which it never had under democratic rule. It became a ministry in early 1976 with ample administrative autonomy,102 which made it very effective. Its staff grew considerably in order to take on new tasks, with a large senior management staff (178 people), professional and technical personnel, and a large administrative staff (175 people). The ministry’s staff was actually considerably larger than this, because many people were hired under temporary contracts of which no record was kept.103 To mobilize political support, the ministry created the Civilian Organizations Directorate, which was set up in just a couple of weeks. After the coup, it was organized into four secretariats—for women, associations, youth, and culture—whose purpose was to win citizens’ support. The National Women’s Secretariat This body was concerned with promoting women’s social and economic interests, primarily to capture for the military the enormous mobilization of women that existed during the Popular Unity government, which formed an important part of the opposition’s effort. The purpose of the National Women’s Secretariat (Secretaría Nacional de la Mujer) was to “aid the Supreme government in its relationship with women’s organizations, to integrate women into the social, cultural and economic development of the country, through organized and volunteer labor.”104 To meet this objective, it was empowered to carry out a wide range of activities: training programs; education on family values and the importance of women; improvement of their roles as mothers, spouses, and housewives; incentives for women to participate in socially beneficial activities; cooperation with other women’s organizations; relations with embassies, international groups, and foreign women’s organizations; and appointment of their representatives to international women’s events, in conjunction with the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

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The Women’s Secretariat became a national organization, with branches in each of the thirteen regions, at the provincial level, and in most municipalities as well. Its work was carried out by carefully selected volunteers, who were trained in the military regime’s concepts. In 1976 the secretariat had about 7,700 people working as volunteers, a number that rose to 10,300 in 1979.105 At least once a year, it held a massive meeting between volunteers and General Pinochet, a well-publicized event whose purpose was to show the volunteers’ active participation and support for the government. The activities of the Women’s Secretariat were supported by Pinochet’s wife, Lucía Hiriart, who was very active in politics. With support from the wives of military officers, especially the army, Lucía Hiriart developed the network of mothers’ centers that had been created during the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva, successfully motivating many women to work with the government as volunteers.106 The secretariat’s activities were not political in nature, but rather aimed to improve women’s economic conditions and family life. “Civic orientation,” carried out in conjunction with the Diego Portales Institute, was considered important, and focused on upgrading the leadership skills of young women in gremios (associations) through cultural and training sessions. According to official figures, from 1973 to 1979 some 600,000 women participated in the secretariat’s workshops and courses, an inflated figure, of course, but suggestive of the effort to achieve a mass movement. This secretariat also provided assistance through social programs, such as provision of school meals, establishment of centers to feed the children of extremely poor families, assistance for rural schools, adult literacy through the Education Ministry, and multiple training on family, health, civic orientation, and nutrition. The secretariat claimed to have offered various courses in every region of the country from September 1975 to August 1976, with an attendance of almost a hundred thousand people.107 The Women’s Secretariat played a relevant role, although not a key one, since it lacked real leadership and a core of activists to spread its programs throughout the country, to allow them to survive over time. The National Associations Secretariat After the October 1972 strike, Chile saw a broad mobilization promoted by the so-called gremios, that is, unions, business organizations, and similar associational groups. The National Associations Secretariat (Secretaría Nacional de los Gremios) was created in April 1974 to ensure the continuity of the political action of these groups in support of the military regime. The military believed they could gather into a single entity people from both small and medium-sized businesses and unions, an idea borrowed from Spanish corporativism, which emphasized “national unity” and sought to join capital and labor through vertical unions.108

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It was the weakest of the secretariats. It had no support group able to implement it, but rather brought together some union leaders who were opposed to the Allende government, with very heterogeneous political ideas and little of the personal or political skill necessary to generate a significant movement. It was clear from the start that its main objective was to prevent the union movement from opposing the regime. In 1977 the National Associations Secretariat created the Union School of Chile (Escuela Sindical de Chile),109 whose results were modest, since just 5,223 workers participated in an indeterminate number of courses, seminars, and worker meetings.110 In the early years, the Associations Secretariat enjoyed the support of General Gustavo Leigh and the minister of labor, air force general Nicanor Díaz Estrada. Leigh was determined to strengthen the unions as a counterpart of the business community, to win their support for his strategy to gain power. The purpose of the 1975 industrial social statute, approved by the regime, was to promote the integration of companies and workers, which was also based on corporativist ideas present during the early phase of the regime. The Associations Secretariat worked closely with the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.111 Its main activity was an event presided over by General Pinochet to mark a “national labor festival,” which the authorities referred to as May Day. This took place every year, on May 1, in the plenary hall of the Diego Portales building, attended by some 3,000 people, many of them union leaders, and its purpose was to demonstrate the broad support the government enjoyed among workers. The 1978 presidential message stressed the intention of the Associations Secretariat to represent the interests of unions, business associations, and professional organizations. However, its activities remained limited to the first group, since business leaders related directly to the government through their own organizations, and because the professional associations were very weak. By 1979 the Associations Secretariat had grown, and now had four departments, overseeing action, publicity, research, and regional secretariats.112 Nonetheless, its results were limited compared to those of the Women’s Secretariat, because it could only show the participation of 6,000 workers in courses and seminars. At the time, the opposition had begun to achieve considerable mobilization against the Labor Plan, which made this secretariat’s work difficult. In 1979, government activities focused on publicizing the Labor Plan, an initiative supported by the minister of labor, José Piñera, who sought sympathy for the new law among workers.113 The Associations Secretariat did not receive much support in the union movement. Beginning in the late 1970s, the secretariat was left behind due to the opposition’s growing strength. With help from the National Intelligence Center, the secretariat tried to regain its initiative by taking action against opposition unionists. In early 1982 the secretariat worked with CNI agents to murder union leader Tucapel Jiménez, who at the time was achieving success in pulling together the main unions to create a single, unified body, which some government sectors viewed as a threat to political stability.

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The National Youth Secretariat The National Youth Secretariat (Secretaría Nacional de la Juventud) was the only division within the Civilian Organizations Directorate to achieve a high degree of organization, and had an effective presence in the target social group, with members throughout the country carrying out its tasks. The key to its success in playing an important political role was that, unlike the Women’s and Associations Secretariats, much of its staff came from the Gremialista movement and were united and shared a common spirit to work. The main leadership positions in the Youth Secretariat were held by former leaders of the FEUC. This secretariat became the natural gateway for youth to participate in the government after completing their university studies and before going on to hold other posts in ministries, regional governments, or cities. Dictatorships tend to focus on youth because they consider them more open to their schemes for building a better future, about which adults tend to be more skeptical.114 Because the military authorities planned to give up power eventually and hand it over to the new generation, Chile’s youth had to be saturated in the values of the authoritarian regime to give it continuity. Jaime Guzmán had encouraged a political discourse that emphasized the importance of mobilizing youth, and had proposed creating a body dedicated to this, which would become the Youth Secretariat. The efficacy of this secretariat was appreciated by General Pinochet, who supported it, seeing the importance of winning the support of youth and thus improving the regime’s image. Pinochet spent much time on the workings of the secretariat, which helped to strengthen ties with the Gremialistas. Gonzalo Rojas, who wrote a carefully documented book about the authoritarian regime, summarized the attention that Pinochet lavished on work with youth and the secretariat: Pinochet’s activities with young people are multiple; for example, he attends the closing ceremony of the youth camp, presides over the Luis Cruz Martínez awards and then has lunch with students, he visits the National Youth Secretariat’s headquarters in Valparaiso, he attends the Manuel Montt awards in the same secretariat, visits a youth camp in Panguipulli, rewards two young students who obtained the best average in secondary school and the best average on the university admission exams [Prueba de Aptitud Académica], he holds a meeting with 3,000 students, attended by ministers, has breakfast with regional youth leaders and another group of youth leaders to learn more about the proposals made at the working meeting the week before, he visits the summer camp of the Youth Front for National Unity, eats breakfast with young university students, attends the anniversary of the National Youth Secretariat, and hands out the Manuel Montt, Luis Cruz Martínez and President of the Republic scholarship awards.115

The Youth Secretariat was created according to the outline established by Guzmán in a lengthy memorandum prepared for this purpose in late 1973,116 when he invited the military to focus their efforts on transforming youth: “[We must offer] young people a great task: to make Chile a great nation. We will

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never win over young people with a mere administrative government, no matter how efficient it is. . . . This is why we must provide the government with content in terms of ideas that are increasingly complete and organic, from the nationalist, realistic and pragmatic perspective that characterizes the current regime.”117 The Youth Secretariat was to “[turn] youth’s support into an element that gives the regime intellectual vigor and accentuates the militant nature of the national reconstruction.” Guzmán was very conscious of the need to organize an institutional relationship with the youth, to ensure a change of mentality, for which it was necessary “to establish communication between the regime and youth, which would allow the armed forces and police to inspire a new generation of Chileans, endowed with a new mentality.”118 At the time, Guzmán shared the idea that the government should organize a grassroots support base through a civilian-military movement, which he considered necessary to stabilize popular support, without ruling out the organization of a single party: “The government could not successfully deal with organized groups at a civic level, only with the support of a silent, inorganic and disunited majority. In this sense, the idea of forming a new civilian-military movement that supports the Junta and can give a long and lasting elongation to its term becomes urgent.”119 In Guzmán’s opinion, the Youth Secretariat would fit with other youth organizations, such as student associations and sport clubs, which could benefit from its support, thus promoting the development of activities without giving them a political slant. The Youth Secretariat would have to work prudently to avoid showing an official bias, which would undermine its credibility and weaken its appeal. Guzmán also said that the secretariat should not try to lead the youth, but rather promote creative politics with support from youth organizations. But with the control that the Gremialista movement had over student associations and in the FEUC, he thought people from those groups should become the main leaders of this new body. Thus the Gremialistas’ work could grow through the Youth Secretariat: From what I have already written, it is clear that the National Youth Secretariat is not a body that should try to replace natural youth organizations, be these for students, neighbors, sports, culture or social activities, without establishing contact with them and coordinating with them, acting with respect for their own ways. . . . This way, it will be able to capture the feelings of youth and add them to the shaping of governmental policy on matters that concern them. It must avoid an excessively official image that could provoke rejection as propaganda. Similarly, and as mentioned, it should keep its functioning impersonal, without leaders who inappropriately attempt to represent youth.120

The decree that created the Youth Secretariat faithfully followed Guzmán’s ideas and established that the secretariat should “collaborate in the

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relationship of the Supreme government with youth organizations, to integrate young people into the country’s social, cultural and economic development through its organized and voluntary activity.”121 In his 1975 presidential message, Pinochet said the secretariat had developed very well, since it “had become the most important channel for young people’s participation,” with representation in 70 percent of the country’s municipal areas.122 Its activities aimed to “fill youth with a new spirit based on Christian values, love for the homeland, hard work and personal accomplishment.”123 The upper echelon of the Youth Secretariat comprised a national secretary, who was always a distinguished Gremialista leader from the FEUC; a national undersecretary; and six division heads: for youth organizations, communications, programs and activities, training, administration, and provincial coordination.124 The secretariat covered the whole country, having a branch in each province and most municipalities, where it worked with mayors and neighborhood associations. Its main tasks involved sports and recreation.125 However, it also looked after civic formation, offering courses on issues in current affairs, including civics, leadership, constitutional doctrine and the new institutional order, and labor rights. Training programs included courses on issues that would boost political action, such as the principles of the junta, the historical and economic fundamentals of the military regime, and the like.126 It sought to train young people on the regime’s fundamentals, paying special attention to analysis of the Gremialista movement, which was working to win activists and supporters for the government. The Youth Secretariat diversified its activities to expand its influence, offering everything from university preparatory courses to vocational talks and training seminars.127 One of its main activities was to offer summer “camps,” where Gremialistas brought together prominent leaders from all over the country to strengthen cohesion through social activities and give participants a discrete dose of political training.128 During these camps, personal exchanges between the youth and the officials of the secretariat helped to strengthen relations and commit the next generation to working toward the future.129 These camps became an important Gremialista initiative; General Pinochet attended their closing events, confirming his satisfaction with the secretariat’s efforts.130 The secretariat also developed activities for young people within their neighborhoods, through “congresses” held in certain municipalities, whose results were presented to Pinochet.131 The secretariat did not abstain from developing clientelist relationships, using its financial resources to develop youth employment services. It also provided financial aid to university students living at home, as well as scholarships for taking courses at business colleges.132 The Gremialistas also ensured that the work of the Youth Secretariat reached the military. The creation of the “civilian-military movement” was an effort to establish a link between these two elements in society. One of the

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campaigns along that line involved mimicking the symbols and styles of military bodies through awards and medals traditional in the armed forces. The Manuel Montt Award was created in 1975, to be given at the end of each year to the best high school students in each region.133 The same year, the Luis Cruz Martínez Award was created, in honor of a young soldier who died in the Battle of La Concepción in Peru in 1881, also to be given to the best students on Youth Day, July 10, in a ceremony with General Pinochet. The National Unity Youth Front The Youth Secretariat failed to generate an active mobilization of youth, because the political regime, based on exclusionary authoritarianism, did not encourage political participation. As it was an official body, it wasn’t very attractive to young people, who passively supported the regime. Young professionals who worked in other spheres of public service did not relate to a body included within the General Secretariat Ministry. Nor did it succeed in its efforts to draw professionals working in the private sector and at Catholic University, who wanted to maintain the independence that the Gremialistas presented as being the essence of student life. Guzmán saw that these weaknesses had to be overcome in order to achieve influence within the regime. To do so, he planned another initiative, which would not involve an institution and a political image, but rather would simply create an environment in which young people could meet. This was the purpose behind the creation of the National Unity Youth Front, a name borrowed from Francisco Franco’s Youth Front (Frente de Juventudes).134 This was a nongovernmental organization, designed to win the support of youth working in the private sector, in universities, and in the media, as well as the support of those who had distinguished themselves in sports. The front’s great advantage was that it was a Gremialista organization without being part of the government, although it was intimately linked to the government’s objectives and the person of General Pinochet,135 and although its work was made possible through human and financial resources from the National Youth Secretariat. Guzmán described the youth front as a support group for the government in its policy toward young people, serving as a “conduit for communication” between the two. It worked on a different level than did the National Youth Secretariat, because it was “independent of the government and of a civicpatriotic nature.”136 It was a national organization, with high school students in public and private schools participating.137 Membership in the front was carefully monitored by the Gremialistas in order to maintain their control, to prevent it from being infiltrated by the opposition or other right-wing groups. Access was restricted through a procedure that ensured the potential members’ commitment to the front’s principles. Procedures and controls reflected the criteria of a party of cadres, understandable given that Guzmán wanted to create a political party. In fact, the first step for joining the

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front was to become a “collaborator and sympathizer,” which gave an applicant the right to participate in its activities and attend seminars and courses. The second step was to become a “member,” which required a “recommendation from an active member.” After following these steps, the young person could join “a nucleus,” a core group, and then proceed to “sign the rolls.”138 The leadership of the front consisted of an eighteen-person national council, all well-known Gremialistas, including senior members of the government, especially the economic team, among them Miguel Kast, deputy director of ODEPLAN, and Juan Carlos Méndez, director of the National Budget Office, professionals working in the private sector, and senior staff from Catholic University, such as the vice president of finance, Alberto Hardenssen.139 This mix was very interesting because it united public and private sector Gremialistas, thus maintaining political interest among the business elite, who helped to finance the Gremialistas’ activities during the military regime so that the movement did not have to depend solely on the government. Most of the members of this council held some leadership position in the FEUC.140 The executive directorship was filled by former leaders of the FEUC. The first national coordinator was a former president, Javier Leturia, who had also served as national secretary of youth. He was followed by Juan Antonio Coloma and Andrés Chadwick, both lawyers and former presidents of the FEUC, and close to Jaime Guzmán. The national coordinator, who led many of the front’s activities, was very visible publicly. Guzmán spent much time building the front throughout the country. He attended many youth meetings in many cities to encourage recruitment of leaders, made suggestions for improving the efforts of the front and publicizing its ideas more widely, and emphasized the need to expand the front’s presence into high schools and universities. This political legwork provided him with a very detailed knowledge of the front’s progress in the major cities, and he took note of weaknesses in order to propose solutions.141 To a large degree, the National Unity Youth Front represented a push to create the “civilian-military movement” that Guzmán had proposed in his first memoranda and included in the junta’s Declaration of Principles. It was conceived as a movement that would combine the efforts of civilians and military officers to ensure the regime’s success. Since it was very difficult to organize this movement within the population as a whole, Guzmán focused on the country’s youth, because they had the human resources necessary to create an organization that he could control. The National Unity Youth Front was solemnly constituted in a mass event on July 9, 1975, at a site on San Cristóbal Hill known as Chacarillas. The front’s civilian-military profile was apparent in its official launch on July 9, a day of enormous symbolism for the army, as it commemorated the Battle of La Concepción in Peru, during the so-called War of the Pacific, which took place on July 9–10, 1881. Traditionally, this has been the day that the infantry held its allegiance ceremony for new recruits.142 Based on a proposal from the

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Photo courtesy of Centro de Documentación–La Tercera.

Gremialistas, the government decreed July 9 as “Youth Day,” enabling a joint celebration between the military and the civilian world. To make Youth Days more solemn, the Luis Cruz Martínez Award was created to recognize the best students each year.143 Each year, a rally was held, attended by delegations of cadets from the schools of the three military branches. Events were also held in the capitals of the main regions where the Gremialistas had a good organizational presence, such as Valparaiso and Concepción. It was a chance for the Gremialistas to show Pinochet their capacity for bringing together thousands of young people throughout the country. The activities of the 1975 launch were carefully prepared to have the greatest impact on public opinion and appreciation of the military. Guzmán’s corporativist ideas of the moment played a clear role in defining its nature, as was apparent in the use of a choreography typical of fascist regimes, involving torches and parades at night. The ceremony started on the night of July 8, when eight young people kept a torch lit in memory of the seventy-seven soldiers who died in the Battle of La Concepción.144 Under a heavy rain, several thousand youth marched from different parts of Santiago in columns, carrying torches and advancing toward the esplanade, where they met up with another seventy-seven youth, also carrying torches and symbolizing the soldiers who had fallen in the 1881 battle.145 The top figures of the Gremialista movement were among them, headed by Jaime Guzmán.146 Javier Leturia read the “Proclamation of Youth,” in which, along with repeating support for the regime, he defended the state of exception still in effect in Chile, harshly at-

July 10, 1975: Jaime Guzmán, Claudio Sánchez (journalist), and Jaime Fillol (tennis player) celebrating Youth Day, inaugurated by Augusto Pinochet.

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tacking the countries that criticized it and accusing them of being infiltrated by Marxism.147 Leturia also addressed the UN’s condemnation of Chile for human rights violations: “We particularly discredit the United Nations, symbol of a decadent world, and with it all its bodies and resolutions, which today bring shame to the honorable consciences of humanity.”148 The Gremialistas’ political rhetoric reaffirmed the thesis of “war with Soviet imperialism” and the dichotomy of “friend versus enemy” that the new government had imposed. Moreover, Leturia used the corporativist proposals from the regime’s early stage, emphasizing national unity and the nationalist significance that the Pinochet regime should have. Leturia clarified these ideas a few days later: “This is a movement that unites youth in every sense. It unites students, workers, professionals, all the sectors representing Chilean youth behind a great ideal, the Regime of National Unity, the nationalist regime.”149 Pinochet’s participation in the 1975 launch event was no coincidence: it was a manifestation of personal support for him as head of the new regime, and expressed loyalty to him. This became explicit on Youth Day in 1976, held in the small rural town of Molina, where Cruz Martínez was born, because it sought to turn him into a symbolic figure among young people. This time Leturia was very explicit in emphasizing General Pinochet’s leadership: Know, Mr. President of the Republic, Army General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, that young people are with you and support you with all our hearts, as a symbol of Chile and our September 11. You should feel, Very Excellent Sir, who once again has wanted to be here with us to encourage us, that the Front and Chilean youth as a whole are with you daily, although sometimes our voice is represented by a silent effort, [it is work] always carried out with our minds on Chile. Young people are present and on guard, because Chile is at war with Soviet imperialism.150

The importance of this annual rally and the shared interests between the Gremialistas and Pinochet explain his choice of Youth Day, in 1977, to announce his plan for the regime’s new institutional order (see Chapter 5).151 The fourth Youth Day took place as the antagonism between General Pinochet and air force commander in chief General Gustavo Leigh was reaching its peak, just days before Pinochet expelled Leigh from the junta. Pinochet had “won” the January 4, 1978, referendum, and Guzmán had maintained that this triumph meant Pinochet was “the symbol and leader of the regime.”152 The Gremialistas, aware of the monumental decision at hand, did not remain neutral in this power struggle and openly expressed their support for General Pinochet during Youth Day on July 10, 1978, in La Serena. In an unprecedented step, because it involved an enormous personalization of power, the Gremialistas declared themselves “Pinochetistas” (Pinochet supporters), and called for a movement to support him. Ignacio Astete, the youth front’s national coordinator, said in his speech: “Everything we have outlined relies on a non-negotiable foundation, his Excellency, President of the Republic, and

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given the evidence that he has become the main target of our adversaries, we declare ourselves today, publicly and explicitly, Pinochetists and we call on all Chileans to close ranks in a civic mobilization to turn Pinochetism into the overwhelming force that will consolidate our new democratic institutions.”153 This declaration surprised the regime’s supporters, since it highly personalized the regime, which went against the idea of impersonal government inspired by Diego Portales in the junta’s Declaration of Principles, and contradicted the effort to establish a new institutional order. Moreover the new public stance was considered a sectarian move, because support for General Pinochet was supposed to come from every sector behind the regime, not just one of them. It gave the impression that the Gremialista movement was trying to take advantage of Pinochet’s image for its own interests. Through DINACOS, the government rushed to control publication of the speech to avoid a polemic.154 Guzmán did not fall silent. Responding to criticism in one of his columns in the weekly magazine Ercilla, he clarified that the objective of the move was not to go against institutional principles, in which the maximum authority was the junta, and that the Gremialistas did not seek to promote a personalization of power. However, he argued that an institutional order based on the armed forces was compatible with General Pinochet’s leadership, because Pinochet’s purpose was to consolidate a new institutional order: To define oneself today as a Pinochetist means to support the leader of a government whose essential base is the armed forces and police, with the whole organic structure they involve, and which is expressed at the highest level in the governing Junta, of which General Pinochet is also its President. The fact that his position as head of state is the legal consequence of this last and arises from his position as Army commander-in-chief, excludes supposed “personalisms,” which are incompatible with the reality we have lived in since September 11, 1973. What is occurring is that Pinochetism is on the rise, as is the affection that the President of the Republic has won from the people to turn it into a force at the service of the consolidation of a new institutional order, that will have to continue to be impersonal.155

To further appease the critics and avoid criticism from the armed forces themselves, Guzmán emphasized that major institution building requires leadership, citing the examples of General Charles de Gaulle in France and Diego Portales in Chile: “Was it not the prestige of General De Gaulle that the French people supported, in De Gaullism, the Fifth Republic and the impersonal Constitution that today rules that country? . . . Do we not know the regime that created in Chile the concept of impersonal government by the name of the man who inspired it, as it is called the ‘Portalian regime’?”156 Guzmán did not want to give up on the defense of Pinochet’s leadership provided by the youth front, because he was convinced that without the front’s participation it would be impossible to get the constitution approved. He thought that Pinochet’s discre-

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tionary powers would be limited by the constitution. But time would reveal his error and his underestimation of Pinochet’s political ability. Later Youth Day events avoided the issue of the head of state’s leadership and focused on the regime’s achievements in its policies toward youth, highlighting young people who had stood out in public management and other spheres, such as sports, television, and the private sector. It was a way of making the Gremialistas’ figures better known, as they were the ones who received the awards, thus confirming the sectarianism of the youth front’s leaders. Thus, in 1979, General Pinochet awarded medals to seventy-seven young people, of which twenty-nine were for “public service,” recognizing Gremialista figures such as Juan Antonio Coloma, national coordinator of the youth front (i.e., the organizer of the event);157 Arsenio Molina, superintendent of limited companies;158 Álvaro Donoso, deputy director of ODEPLAN; and Andrés Chadwick, executive secretary of the youth front. Among those who received medals in the area of “public service” were cadets from the Military, Naval, and Aviation Schools, reflecting the civilian-military nature of the youth front.159 In the “student” area,160 the main Gremialista leaders of the student federations also received medals, among them José Miguel Olivares, FEUC president; Patricio Melero, vice president of the Federation of Student Associations of the University of Chile (Federación de Centros de Estudios de la Universidad de Chile [FECECH]), who in 1985 would become mayor of Pudahuel, and later a UDI deputy for that district; Domingo Arteaga, head of Catholic University’s Gremialista movement and later an FEUC president; and Gonzalo Steffani, student leader and later a UDI candidate for the Chamber of Deputies. In 1981, the awards were handed out in a ceremony held in the Diego Portales building, and again the program and the character of the event were very favorable to Gremialista politicians. Award winners included “university leader” Jaime Orpis, representative of the Gremialista movement at Catholic University, who would later become FEUC president, mayor of San Joaquín, UDI deputy for that district, and senator for a northern district (2002–2010). Distinguished for their efforts in the public sector were Cristián Larroulet, director of studies at ODEPLAN, who had been the appointed president of the FEUC, and would later become Hernán Büchi’s chief of staff,161 and Víctor Pérez, a former leader of the National Youth Secretariat, mayor of Los Ángeles, and later a UDI deputy for the same city and a senator (elected in 2005).162 The 1981 celebrations were the last organized by the National Unity Youth Front, as the cooling of relations between General Pinochet and Guzmán prevented the Gremialista movement from continuing with Youth Day events. Similarly, the political mobilization provoked by the economic crisis triggered enormous growth in the opposition’s presence in the student movement, with the Gremialistas losing their previous dominance. A right-wing youth organization also appeared, the National Union, which tried to stem the growth of the youth front. However, the front had served the development of the Gremialista movement for six years, making a decisive contribution to the organization of

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the Independent Democratic Union. The political careers of the UDI’s main leaders, therefore, are intimately linked to the National Unity Youth Front and the National Youth Secretariat. The Gremialista movement continued to work more discreetly in the Youth Secretariat, where it retained many leaders during the years in which the General Secretariat Ministry’s Francisco Javier Cuadra remained in power (1984–1987). Cuadra expelled them from the ministry, but could not do without all of the personnel from this power group, because he needed them to do the ministry’s work. However, the Youth Secretariat never achieved the influence it had in the 1970s under the leadership of the former Gremialista presidents of the FEUC.

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The Gremialistas in Municipal Government

The Gremialistas focused their efforts not only in the central government, especially in ODEPLAN, in the National Youth Secretariat, and as advisers to General Pinochet and the junta, but also at the level of local governments, taking part in their management, which was important for the movement’s development, given the valuable institutional and political resources available for consolidating the right-wing political movement that Guzmán sought. To analyze the importance of this participation, it is necessary to take a brief look at the municipal reform applied by the military regime, expressed in the 1976 municipal law (Ley Orgánica de Municipalidades).163 This was part of a policy to maintain control of the population and reflected the exclusionary nature of the political regime, which was attempting to develop organized support bases within the population to dilute the military component. This was one of the ends sought by the 1974 administrative reform, that is, to expand the influence of the central power over regions through the organization of regional governments. The municipal governments were headed by a mayor, appointed by the president, and advised by a municipal development council (Consejo de Desarrollo Comunal),164 consisting of representatives of neighborhood associations (juntas de vecinos), mothers’ centers, and economic interests. To build political support, a community development department (Departamento de Desarrollo Comunitario) was created to “promote and consolidate the organization and functioning of neighborhood associations, the municipal-level federation of neighborhood associations (Unión Comunal) and other community organizations.”165 This led to the creation of networks between the local authority and neighbors, which provided the mayor with a higher level of local political power. The municipal reform significantly broadened the skills and human and financial resources of local governments before the coup. To build a closer relationship with the community, new municipalities were created throughout the country, especially in Santiago.166 The appearance of new municipal governments created new needs in terms of administration and political leadership, which were exploited by the Gremialistas. The municipalities developed

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capabilities to participate in community employment programs, played an active role in programs to eliminate extreme poverty, and saw their powers expanded further when reforms to the healthcare system shifted responsibility for primary care to them. They also were given powers over education when the administration of public schools was handed over to them.167 These changes in local government, known as “municipalization,” produced a sharp rise in the number of personnel employed by local governments, and created a need for more financial resources to deal with new functions. During the 1980s, municipal revenues rose to the point that income and expenditures in Greater Santiago were three times higher than they had been at the end of the 1970s.168 The municipalities had to modernize their management, which required greater professionalization of their staff and contributed to improving the efficacy of policies. The new law substantially increased municipalities’ powers, allowing them to participate in the implementation of social policies, such as community employment, under close cooperation with the central government through their integration into the planning system as directed by ODEPLAN. This opened a direct channel of communication between the Gremialistas in local governments and in ODEPLAN. The law established that each municipal government would include a planning and coordination secretariat (secretaría de planificación y coordinación [SERPLAC]) as the main adviser to the mayor and the local council, directly linked to the respective SERPLAC and, through it, to ODEPLAN. The municipalities’ new functions required more flexible bureaucratic procedures and more autonomous management, allowing them to enter into contracts and make other legal commitments that required only the governor’s approval. The 1979 law governing municipal income (Ley de Rentas Municipales) boosted their income by giving them a portion of the property tax revenue (45 percent). The remaining 55 percent went to a “common municipal fund” to promote the transfer of resources from wealthy to poor municipal areas. Local governments were included in the implementation of antipoverty social programs. The military expanded the country’s long-standing assistance programs, which had been established to develop education and healthcare. It created subsidies to focus on specific areas and types of poverty, giving priority to support for women and children, and providing the municipalities with information about the magnitude of the poverty problem. The municipalities offered other subsidies,169 and provided poor people with access to daycare, school lunches and breakfasts, and so on. These “focused” political policies were designed in ODEPLAN under the leadership of Miguel Kast, and their purpose was not only to achieve better results, but also to develop a network of interpersonal and power relationships with the poorest sectors that would serve the Gremialistas’ political plans. In August 1974 the municipalities started to implement the special employment programs (the PEM) that the government had created to combat

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soaring unemployment, and welfare programs that had been created to help cushion the effects of economic adjustment policies. These programs were national, and in the 1970s represented about 5 percent of the labor force. Workers received wages below the legal minimum, but the programs were appreciated because of the lack of jobs.170 The Interior Ministry was in charge of these programs, which reveals their political nature, since, for example, resources rose or fell according to whether the workers employed through the programs participated in antigovernment demonstrations.171 This ambitious change in the municipalities explains the importance that the Gremialistas assigned to them. The local government became an important power center, with significant clientelist capacities for winning the support of the poorest sectors, one of the main target groups highlighted by Guzmán in his absorptive effort to build the right-wing movement. The municipalities offered job opportunities to the movement’s supporters, and made it possible to apply social programs to support the community and influence decisionmaking at the local and regional governmental levels. The Gremialistas’ presence in ODEPLAN and the National Youth Secretariat made it easier to penetrate the municipalities, since ODEPLAN influenced local governments through its planning system and social policies, while the Youth Secretariat was very active in political training tasks. The Gremialistas were was able to take over local governments in many cities, including the largest ones, among them Valparaiso and Concepción, from the low-income areas of Pudahuel, San Joaquín, and San Miguel to the municipal area of Santiago itself (a smaller territory consisting of the city center). The Gremialista movement’s political fortune was closely linked to the mayors. In fact, from 1989 to 2001, fourteen of the UDI’s twenty-nine Chamber of Deputies members were mayors (48 percent), which contrasts with National Renewal’s Chamber of Deputies members, of which 31 percent were mayors. Many leaders of the National Youth Secretariat went on to political careers as mayors, a position that in turn became an important stepping-stone to a congressional career. An analysis of the biographies of the main staff in the secretariat reveals this. Carlos Bombal was national director of youth from November 1976 to February 1978, mayor of Santiago from 1981 to 1987, Chamber of Deputies member for Santiago in 1990, and senator for Santiago in 1998 (see Table 7.3). Francisco Bartolucci, a former student leader of Catholic University at Valparaiso, was national secretary of youth (1974–1978), mayor of Valparaiso (1982–1987), and Chamber of Deputies member for Valparaiso (1990– 2002). Patricio Melero was national secretary of youth (1982–1985), mayor of Pudahuel (1985–1989), UDI deputy for Pudahuel (1990–2010), and general secretary of the UDI (2004–2006). Iván Moreira, who was not a major FEUC leader, was an active staff member of the National Youth Secretariat as section chief (1980–1981), mayor of La Cisterna (1989–1992), and UDI deputy for La Cisterna (1994–2010). There are a few exceptions in terms of Youth Secretariat staff who, instead of belonging to the UDI, belonged to National Renewal, in-

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Table 7.3

Leaders of the National Youth Secretariat: Political Careers Term in Office

Claudio Arteaga Francisco Bartolucci Carlos Bombal

Student coordinator National secretary National director

1974–1974 1974–1978 1976–1978

Concepción Valparaiso Santiago

1981–1988 1982–1987 1981–1987

Juan Carlos Bull Edmundo Crespo Cristián Leay Francisco Javier Leturia Patricio Melero

Provincial chief Provincial chief Section chief National director

1975–1976 1974–1976 1980–1986 1974–1977

San Miguel Viña del Mar — —

1981–1984 1980–1981 — —

National secretary

1982–1985

Pudahuel

1985–1989

Iván Moreira Víctor Pérez Varela

Section chief Provincial chief

1980–1981 1977–1978

La Cisterna Los Angeles

1989–1992 —

Pedro Sabat

Provincial chief

1978–1979

—

—

Raúl Urrutia Félix Viveros

Provincial chief National department chief

1974–1980 1975–1976

— —

— —

Career After 1990 — Deputy of Valparaiso (1990–2002) Deputy (1990–1998) Senator (1998–2006) — — UDI deputy (1990–2006) UDI candidate for deputy (1989, 1997)

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UDI deputy (1990–2010) UDI secretary-general (2004–2006) UDI deputy (1994–2010) UDI deputy (1990–2006) Senator (2006–2014) Mayor of Ñuñoa (National Renewal) (1996–2008) National Renewal deputy (1990–1998) National Renewal leader (1984–1996)

Source: General Secretariat Ministry, 1999.

259

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cluding Pedro Sabat (provincial head), Raúl Urrutia (provincial head), and Félix Viveros (national department chief).172 Jaime Guzmán did not completely succeed in meeting his goal of building a powerful political movement, because another right-wing party, National Renewal, appeared, but he did build a party, the Independent Democratic Union, which broke with the traditional party style, amassed powerful electoral support, and continued to increase its political influence later in the democracy, unaffected by Guzmán’s murder in 1991. It is impossible to understand the UDI without analyzing the important political role of the Gremialistas in the military regime. *

*

*

This chapter has analyzed the role of the Gremialistas, the regime’s main power group, and the conditions that led to its growing strength within Catholic University’s student movement in the 1960s under the leadership of Jaime Guzmán. We have also seen the Gremialistas’ influence in the management of Catholic University after the coup, as they held senior and advisory posts, providing the university with important institutional resources to recruit a large number of students and professors. The Gremialistas focused their political actions on the National Youth Secretariat, ODEPLAN, and local governments, placing dozens of their supporters in multiple positions.173 Guzmán was Pinochet’s main civilian adviser, playing a very important political role in consolidating the general’s power. He was able to organize a highly cohesive power group with a strong united spirit and sense of mission, whose influence peaked in 1980, although it remained very important afterward. With its important political functions, the Gremialista movement was the equivalent of the single-party structure common in authoritarian regimes. The Gremialistas worked closely with the economic team, the Chicago Boys, who were the other main power group of the authoritarian regime. The next chapter will analyze the role of the technocrats and the role of the Gremialistas in ODEPLAN, under the direction of economist Miguel Kast, the most distinguished of the second generation of Chicago Boys.

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Notes

1. Skidmore (1988), Moreira Alves (1984), Lamounier (1989), Lamounier and Cardozo (1978). For more on the opposition, see Kinzo (1988). 2. I am using the concept as defined by Chehabi and Linz (1998). 3. Walter (1993). 4. “Under Stroessner’s dictatorship, the Partido Colorado was the best organized in the country and was the base of a persistent and solid political support for the government”; Abente (1995), p. 307. 5. His role is so relevant that some authors call this political order a “single party”: Huntington and Moore (1970); more recently, Brooker (1995). 6. The Falange went from being a political party to a less ideological organization with a weaker structure, the “organization-movement”; Linz (1970).

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7. “Declaración de Principios de la Junta de Gobierno,” March 11, 1974, p. 25. 8. After the 1980 plebiscite, he called on his supporters to organize it through the municipalities, but the idea was rejected by his closest civilian team members at the time. 9. They were linked to Portada magazine (see Chapter 5). 10. We will return to the Gremialista movement in Chapter 8 to examine its ties to the Chicago Boys, together with Miguel Kast’s role in ODEPLAN. 11. The intervention at the University of Chile was moderate, because its first government-appointed president, air force General César Ruiz Danyau, accepted that academic management should remain in the dean’s hands, without the involvement of any right-wing advisers and allowing only moderate intervention of faculties and departments. The Gremialista movement achieved influence among the students, since it was the only group supporting the regime and had the backing of the National Youth Secretariat. This allowed the Gremialistas to control the FECECH, the central student association. However, the main influence on the right came from the National Party, which had opposed the appearance of the Gremialista movement at the University of Chile before the coup. During the apertura in the 1980s, these entities formed the National Union (see Chapter 11). 12. Guzmán’s role in enshrining the military’s role as guardians of the constitution is documented in a study of the constituent commission’s session minutes: Godoy (1996), pp. 269–307, esp. pp. 278–290. 13. Through a youth representative, initially Arturo Fontaine Talavera, and later Juan Antonio Coloma. 14. It ended amid economic hardship following Sergio Fernández’s withdrawal from the Interior Ministry and the apertura, which led to the appearance of new magazines. In 1983, its editorial board included architect Carlos Alberto Cruz, Sergio Gutierrez Yrarrabal, Hernán Larraín, Ernesto Illanes, Jaime Guzmán, publicist Manfredo Mayol, and Chicago Boy Juan Ignacio Varas. Pablo Longueira handled legal affairs. See Realidad no. 55, December 1983. 15. His mother had to work, and she did it at a travel agency, yet managed to obtain an education for her four children after her husband left her. She continued this work even as her son became very powerful in the regime and later in democracy, which shows that he did not enrich himself to the point that she could live without having to work. 16. This priest’s major influence on the Chilean right has not been studied. He has been forgotten by his followers of the 1960s and early 1970s; none of them worked on the tribute book for his ninetieth birthday, prepared by Adolfo Ibáñez University (1994). 17. Guzmán Errázuriz (1992), pp. 49–50, 85. 18. He gave one of his sisters a long and emotional account of the assault by the Republican government troops on the Alcazar de Toledo, held by the rebels “after the rise of Spain against the Republican-Communist Madrid government,” during the civil war, including the telephone conversation between General Moscardó and his son, which is one of the myths about the revolt held by Franco’s supporters; ibid., pp. 88–89. 19. Guzmán wrote intensely in his school magazine, Revista Escolar, during his last year of school. For example: “¡Viva Franco, arriba España!” Revista Escolar 54, no. 436, 1962, pp. 15–18; “GOA: un inicuo atentado a la Historia y al Derecho,” Revista Escolar 54, no. 437, 1962, pp. 13–14; “Don Pablo Correa da Brito: revolución y contrarrevolución, bolchevización de Brasil,” Revista Escolar 54, no. 437, 1962, pp. 7–8; “La tradición y su permanente valor,” Revista Escolar 54, no. 438, 1962, p. 86. Special thanks to Renato Cristi, Wilfred Laurier University, Canada, for providing this documentation.

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20. Guzmán, Revista Escolar 54, no. 436, 1962, pp. 15–18, quote from p. 16. 21. Ibid., p. 17. 22. Ibid., p. 18. Guzmán quotes the lyrics of the Falange’s anthem. 23. Known as “national Catholicism.” Payne (1984), chap. 7, provides a good summary. 24. Thanks to Cristián Gazmuri for pointing out Guzmán’s views on this, and to Renato Cristi for providing the articles. 25. Guzmán, “Socialización en ‘mater et magistra,’” Fiducia 2, no. 8, May 1964, p. 3; “El diálogo, la socialización y la paz utilizados como slogans de la Revolución,” Fiducia 3, no. 17, May–June 1965, pp. 10–11. 26. Guzmán maintained the religious fervor, adding religious classes to his political training of Gremialista movement supporters, apparently captivating them with his theological knowledge. 27. He criticized Frei’s government for establishing diplomatic relations with some socialist countries; Guzmán, “Comentando . . . relaciones diplomáticas con los países comunistas,” Fiducia 2, no. 13, November 1964, p. 9. 28. He argued that the Christian Democratic Party promoted the class struggle and rejected private property, and that it would end up shoulder to shoulder with socialism; Guzmán, “El capitalismo y los Católicos de tercera posición,” Fiducia 3, no. 20, 1965, pp. 4–5. 29. This change reflected Guzmán’s pragmatism, which brought results, because the Gremialista movement won the elections. 30. Guzmán’s precoup support for corporativism was well-known among his friends, as recognized by Juan Carlos Méndez in Finis Terrae University (1994), p. 52. 31. He resigned from the organization together with Eduardo Boetsch, because he disagreed with the paramilitary training that the group began giving its members; Fuentes (1999), p. 126. 32. The end of Franco’s regime was followed by that of some military dictatorships in Latin America, marking the end of authoritarianism’s golden era in the region and giving birth to democratizing processes known as the “third wave”; Huntington (1991). 33. Guzmán accepted the vote because the alternatives to universal suffrage were worse. This was the first time he explicitly rejected fascism and corporative political styles. 34. In Ercilla: “Don Jorge con la juventud,” February 1, 1984, p. 12; “Jorge Alessandri: su pensamiento político,” December 18, 1985, p. 12. In La Tercera de la Hora: “90 años de don Jorge,” May 18, 1986, p. 2; “Don Jorge: un espíritu superior,” September 7, 1986, p. 2; “Alessandri y una lección muy actual,” December 28, 1986, p. 2; “El consejo y la confianza de don Jorge,” January 18, 1987, p. 2. Also in his column in the evening paper La Segunda, for example: “Otra lección de don Jorge,” December 2, 1983; “En torno al mensaje de don Jorge,” January 27, 1984; “La principal obra de Don Jorge,” September 6, 1985. 35. Guzmán recognized the experience of young Catholics who broke off from the Conservative Party in the early 1930s and created the Falange, which would develop into the main political party in Chile, the Christian Democratic Party. In a way, he wanted to form an alternative to the PDC, which explains his constant attacks on that party during the military regime. He described the PDC as left-wing and allied to Marxism, encouraging the class struggle and spreading utopist promises that disrupted political development. 36. There is a detailed study on his political ideas: Cristi (2000). 37. There are two books that contain his main journalistic articles, which are useful for those who want to understand his political thinking: Guzmán Errázuriz (1992), Rojas Sánchez, Achurra, and Dussaillant (1995). His work is published in Estudios Públicos no. 42, Fall 1991, pp. 251–570.

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38. These elements of Guzmán’s thought were toned down by his readings of certain liberal thinkers admired by the Chicago Boys, such as Hayek, as he told Constable and Valenzuela (1991), p. 190, n. 62. Perhaps he read articles Hayek wrote, as books that Guzmán apparently owned and housed at the foundation that bears his name seemed, to my inspection, unread: they weren’t torn, which would have been necessary to read them. 39. Mainly in an evening paper that strongly identified with the military regime, La Segunda, and in a major national newspaper, La Tercera de la Hora. Also, he had a weekly column in Ercilla magazine for several years, after progovernment businessmen bought it in 1977. He was regularly interviewed by Qué Pasa. 40. I have examined this in Huneeus (1973b). 41. Bonilla and Glazer (1970). The Falange (later the PDC) was an initiative of young university students, as was the United People’s Action Movement in the late 1960s. MAPU had emerged from a split in the PDC. 42. They withdrew their support for the Radical Party’s Julio Durán, their joint candidate in the presidential elections, after their defeat in a by-election. They then gave their support to Eduardo Frei to prevent the victory of left-wing candidate Salvador Allende. In the 1965 legislative elections, the right-wing parties achieved just 12.5 percent of the vote, electing 13 deputies out of 120, and no senators. The following year they merged with Jorge Prat’s National Action movement to create the National Party. 43. This was because the Gremialista movement had to coexist with the youth section of the National Party at the law school; in comparison it was the only right-wing organization in the economics school. It was made up of extreme right-wing students, such as Alan Cooper, who belonged to the movement’s shock troops and participated in the kidnapping of army commander in chief General René Schneider in October 1970, which resulted in his death. See “Los autores del crimen político 30 años después,” La Tercera, Reportajes, October 15, 2000, pp. 10–12. 44. Before he went to Chicago in 1972, Kast partnered with Alberto Hardenssen, Ernesto Silva, and Carlos Alberto Délano in his political work; upon his return from Chicago, Joaquín Lavín worked closely with him. 45. The Christian Democratic Youth (Juventud Demócrata Cristiana [JDC]) had become more radical in their positions under the leadership of another young graduate from Catholic University, sociologist Rodrigo Ambrosio, who supported Marxism and sympathized with some of Lenin’s concepts on revolution, and strongly criticized the government for being “reformist.” Ambrosio reached the presidency of the JDC in 1967, accompanied by Enrique Correa, Juan Enrique Vega, and Jaime Gazmuri, who would later become presidents of the JDC until the split with the PDC and the creation of MAPU in 1969. They joined Popular Unity, took part in the Allende government, and later switched to the Socialist Party. They were all Catholic University alumnae. I have covered this in Huneeus (1973b). 46. The Christian Democratic Party’s branch at Catholic University (Democracia Cristiana Universitaria [DCU]) did not support the “11 August” movement, because it represented JDC “rebels” who were leaving the party to join the left. The former presented an electoral list in Catholic University’s student federation (FEUC) elections, headed by economics student José Piñera. The list was withdrawn a few days before the elections at the request of Bernardo Leighton, explaining why many Christian Democrats had blank or null votes. This political development confirmed the DCU’s fears, as six months after leaving the PDC the “rebels” created MAPU, presenting themselves as the “left” in the FEUC elections. 47. The PDC split in early May 1969, and MAPU emerged. This division caused a drastic weakening of the DCU, which obtained only 13 percent of the vote in the FEUC elections held a few months later, while MAPU obtained 44 percent and was

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narrowly defeated by the Gremialista movement. The DCU managed to recover in the following elections, obtaining 27 percent of the vote in 1972. 48. Marcos Zylberberg (economics), Arturo Fontaine (law), Cristóbal Philippi (engineering), and Rodrigo Mujica (agricultural sciences) were elected members of the FEUC executive; Debate Universitario, no. 21, November 1971, p. 17. 49. Debate Universitario, no. 30, November 23, 1971, p. 4. 50. Ibid., p. 2. 51. Debate Universitario, no. 32, December 7, 1971. Ignacio Guerrero, Cristián Larroulet, and Marcos Zylberberg, among others, were on the winning list, which obtained 56 percent of the vote, followed by the PDC with 27 percent, and a leftist list, with 14 percent. 52. In 1972 the Gremialistas won Valparaiso’s student federation elections with Juan Carlos Bull; Guzmán Errázuriz (1992), p. 44. 53. This expansion of the Gremialista movement was largely due to Guzmán’s leadership and to the weakness of the National Party’s youth section, which only had an organized presence in a few schools at the University of Chile. Nor did they have a figure of national status to compete with Guzmán. Senator Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes, a National Party member, invited young members of the Gremialista movement to accompany him in the senatorial elections in Concepción in 1969. Guzmán took an active part in his campaign, which was later helpful in creating a Gremialista movement in that city’s university. 54. The text and the names of the fifteen organizations that signed it, including the national manufacturers’ association (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril), the National Chamber of Commerce (Cámara Nacional de Comercio), and the national builders’ association (Cámara Chilena de la Construcción), together with small business associations such as taxi owners and farmers, is printed in El Mercurio, October 23, 1972, and in González Pino and Fontaine Talavera (1997), vol. 1, pp. 503–505. 55. This was a symbolic event in the history of the coup, because it was a workers’ protest against a left-wing government. The miners marched to Santiago in opposition to the government, and the FEUC gathered hundreds of demonstrators at the university, loudly announcing student leaders’ support for the union and the copper workers. See the account in an article in the FEUC magazine at the time, Presencia, reproduced in González Pino and Fontaine Talavera (1997), vol. 2, pp. 1255–1262. The strike movement was headed by union leader Guillermo Medina, who later became a member of the Council of State under the Pinochet regime. 56. The responsibility of Gremialista figures was widely touted by some media. The savings and credit union “was created and managed by famous leaders of the Gremialista movement and operated within the university itself: its offices were at eastern campus. Moreover it obtained funds from registration fees and other university income, providing credit with interest to students to pursue their studies. A group of members sued its management, due to its poor financial management. Alberto Hardenssen, vice president of economic and administrative affairs at the Catholic University, and Hernán Larraín, vice president of communications, belonged to the board of directors of ‘La Familia.’ Other partners were Javier Leturia, Tomas Irarrázabal, chief of staff to the Labor minister at the time, and Sergio Fernández. Hardenssen and Cristián López were arrested and prosecuted”; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 157. 57. The presidents of Catholic University’s student federation, FEUC, remained active in politics. Ernesto Illanes became an Independent Democratic Union leader, reaching a position in the UDI’s supreme tribunal. Tomas Irarrázabal (1970–1971) was a town councilor in Lo Barnechea. The exceptions were Atilio Caorsi (elected in 1971) and Miguel Allamand (1975–1976). 58. After the return to elected government, he ran for deputy twice (1989 and 1993); he was the only precoup Gremialista leader to be twice defeated in elections.

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59. Domingo Arteaga (1979–1980) unsuccessfully ran for deputy for the TwentySecond District in the 1993 elections. Coloma was also a member of the Council of State, representing youth, and was elected general secretary of the UDI in 1998, deputy in 1990, and later senator (2002–2010). Chadwick was an employee at ODEPLAN; he became a lawyer for ODEPLAN in 1987, and was elected senator in 1997, after two terms as a deputy; he was reelected senator in 2005. 60. He later distanced himself from the Gremialista movement. He has been the director of the influential Center for Public Studies (CEP), a right-wing think tank created in 1978. 61. He has been the executive director of the Institute for Freedom and Development (Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo), a right-wing think tank that serves mainly opposition parliamentarians since the return to democratic rule. 62. Leaders of the Gremialista student associations also played an active leading role during the military regime. Jovino Novoa, president of Catholic University’s law student association, was undersecretary-general of the government at the time of the 1980 plebiscite and later became president of the UDI; he was elected senator for Santiago in 1998; he was reelected senator in 2005. Carlos Bombal, head of the law student association, was chief of staff to the government-appointed president of Catholic University, regional director of the National Youth Secretariat, and mayor of Santiago; he was elected deputy for the city in 1989, and senator in 1997 for the period 1998–2006; he lost a reelection for senator in 2005, however, in another district. 63. He became the second in command at the university when he was appointed vice president of academic affairs; he was elected senator in 1993 for the period 1994–2006 and was reelected in 2005 for another eight-year period (2002–2010). In 1993 he became a member of the UDI executive, and in 2006 he was elected party president. 64. The Chilean military, through its Brazilian colleagues, was probably aware of the classic study on political institutionalization by a political scientist who influenced the Brazilian military: Huntington (1968). Much criticism has been leveled against this concept, because it fails to examine the negative aspects of institutionalization; see Kesselman (1970), pp. 21–44. 65. That is why Guzmán emphasized support for passing a constitution, because it limited General Pinochet’s authority, as he expressed in several Realidad editorials: “11 de marzo: ante nueva etapa jurídico-política,” no. 22, March 1981, p. 4; “El camino político en debate,” no. 10, March 1980, pp. 9–12; “Alcances de una declaración ministerial,” no. 12, May 1980, pp. 11–13; “Ante una decisión política transcendental,” no. 15, July 1980, pp. 3–5; “Transición: compromiso y desafío,” no. 23, April 1981, pp. 3–7. 66. The Realidad editorials insisted on putting opponents and “hard-liners” in the same camp. The most explicit example of this is presented in “Dos frentes antagónicos contra la Constitución,” Realidad, no. 24, May 1981, pp. 3–7. 67. He developed the most extensive version of his position on the transition in “El sentido de la transición,” Realidad, no. 38, July 1982, pp. 9–28. See also the editorial “Transición: importancia y exigencias,” Realidad, no. 41, October 1982, pp. 3–6. 68. The binomial electoral system made possible his election to the Senate with fewer votes, because under this system, for two candidates from the same list to win, they had to obtain approximately two-thirds of the vote. In this case, another Concertación candidate, Andrés Zaldívar (PDC), won the first majority, and his vote, combined with that of the other Concertación candidate, Ricardo Lagos (member of the Socialist Party and the Party for Democracy, PPD), did not meet the quorum for both to be elected, despite Lagos’s majority over his opponent in the right, Jaime Guzmán (UDI). 69. He joined the junta’s team as an adviser to General Gustavo Leigh, who was its most influential member during the first few weeks (see Chapter 6). He was part of

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what was known as ASEP, an informal political advisory body to the interior minister, César Raúl Benavides. ASEP would, “in time, become the government’s heart, brain and skin”; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 111. 70. Guzmán kept the manuscripts of the speeches he wrote, together with the final versions actually read by Pinochet, which were often the same. Some copies at the FJGE bear Guzmán’s name. 71. “Los ocho caracteres fundamentales del Estado nuevo,” Qué Pasa, January 2, 1975, pp. 42–43; quote from p. 43. The article’s title is reminiscent of an oft-used term, the “new state.” 72. Ibid., p. 43. 73. “The distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism is conceptually very relevant to me, because a totalitarian regime is always illegitimate, while an authoritarian one will be legitimate or not according to its [own] justification, its efficiency and the ethical course it adopts. . . . I think that Chile’s current government is authoritarian but legitimate”; “Discrepo de Alfredo Etcheberry,” La Segunda, May 29, 1981. 74. I have taken Guzmán’s position on human rights from Rojas Sánchez, Achurra, and Dussaillant (1996), chap. 5. 75. Ibid., p. 149. 76. Ibid., p. 150. 77. Ibid., p. 151. These texts are also in Guzmán Errázuriz (1992). 78. Ibid., p. 150. 79. Ibid. 80. For an interesting study on the Pro-Peace Committee and the Vicariate of Solidarity, see Lowden (1996). 81. It occurred on June 15, 1989, during a meeting with university students from the Cardinal Caro student residence; “Jaime Guzmán acusa a Manuel Contreras,” Análisis, June 26–July 2, 1989, pp. 26–27. See also Patricia Verdugo, “Jaime Guzmán, entre dos fuegos,” Apsi, April 6–21, 1991, pp. 22–23. 82. The document, dated July 26, 1976, was commissioned to evaluate a publication on youth by the Jesuits’ Centro Bellarmino; the quote is presented in Rojas Sánchez (1998), p. 229. 83. See the interview by journalist Blanca Arthur in El Mercurio, Cuerpo D, March 10, 1991. It was later reproduced in the FJGE newsletter, October 1998, pp. 1–6. 84. Estudios Públicos, no. 42, Fall 1991, p. 534. 85. In a long letter protesting an article that appeared in El Mercurio on November 29, 1974, Claudio Orrego Vicuña, a former Christian Democratic Party deputy, reproached him for his silence on human rights abuses: “Need we say anything on human rights? How long will you insist on denying them, when there is more and more evidence of the violations committed every day? You have personally interceded, generously, in several cases that I know of, with no results. How long will we continue trying to fool ourselves, since we cannot fool the world?” Thanks to Orrego’s widow, Valentina Larraín, for this document. 86. Letter from the president of the College of Architects, Pastor Correa Prats, November 15, 1979, on behalf of architect Miguel Lawner, at a time when the level of coercion was very low, and the CNI, which had replaced the DINA and was considerably less powerful. The letter is at the FJGE. 87. For more on the role of the Catholic Church under the Pinochet regime, see the excellent study by Smith (1982). 88. Guzmán criticized the secretary of the bishops’ conference, Carlos Camus, bishop of Linares. On September 30, 1975, at a private meeting between the bishop and foreign reporters, Guzmán recognized that a few left-wing individuals worked on the Pro-Peace Committee, and this was tape-recorded and leaked to the press to prove that

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the committee was controlled by Marxists. Camus was strongly attacked by Guzmán and the media, particularly Qué Pasa and La Segunda. 89. On November 2, 1975, a fugitive member of the Left Revolutionary Movement was discovered at the home of Congregation of the Holy Cross priest Gerardo Whelan, who was arrested; two other priests, Rafael Maroto and Fermín Donoso, were also taken into custody. DINA agents shot at the home of Columbano congregation priests, where other fugitives were hiding and had been treated by a British physician, Sheila Cassidy. An employee died and Cassidy was arrested and tortured, leading the British government to condemn these events and withdraw its ambassador; diplomatic relations were restored years later under Margaret Thatcher. See Muñoz (1986), p. 103. 90. On November 7, 1975, Father Cariola entered the Vatican’s Santiago embassy with fugitive MIR members and convinced the ambassador of Costa Rica to give refuge to MIR leader Andrés Pascal. 91. Cardinal Silva Henríquez defended the priests’ actions because “the Gospels’ mandate is unequivocal” on protecting life; Silva Henríquez (1994), vol. 3, p. 77. 92. Broadcast on November 7, its text is presented in “Los claros conceptos del abogado Jaime Guzmán,” La Segunda, November 11, 1975, p. 5. 93. Despite press censorship, press coverage did hint at the church’s strong position with some headlines: “Arzobispado advierte que Jaime Guzmán podría ser excomulgado,” La Tercera de la Hora, November 12, 1975, p. 10; “Amenaza el cardenal: ¡Excomunión!” Las Últimas Noticias, November 12, 1975, p. 7, which published the cardinal’s statement at length; “Amenaza con la excomunión,” La Segunda, November 11, 1975. The media’s bias against the priests was very evident in these papers, which called them “pro-Marxist”: “Jaime Guzmán y el problema de los curas promarxistas” and “Italia desea contacto con curas extremistas,” Las Últimas Noticias, November 12, 1975, p. 6. 94. An excerpt from text of the archbishopric’s statement, released by its public relations department, was published in Qué Pasa, November 13, 1975, p. 13. 95. The letter is at the FJGE. 96. Guzmán’s response appeared in “El marxismo es el enemigo común de Chile y de la Iglesia,” La Segunda, November 13, 1975, p. 6. 97. They appeared in court for questioning and were then arrested, as they did not provide the required information. 98. The emergency-zone chief’s prohibition of the traditional Virgin of Carmen annual December 8 pilgrimage was yet another act of aggression against the church. 99. Stepan (1978). 100. Ibid., chap. 3, esp. pp. 76–77. 101. The concept of legitimation and its sources are analyzed in Chapter 5. 102. Decree Law no. 1385, March 29, 1976. It was to include a minister, an undersecretary, and a division director, who would have the president’s exclusive confidence (Article 2). It had previously operated through the Interior Ministry. 103. Its staff was defined by Decree Law no. 502, of June 7, 1974. Decree Law no. 2826, of August 30, 1979, made no major changes, introducing only a few new categories of posts and reducing the administrative staff to sixteen positions to satisfy the Ministry of Finance’s requirements to curb public spending. 104. Article 10 of Supreme Decree no. 11, November 30, 1976. 105. Presidential address, September 11, 1979 (Mensaje presidencial del 11 de septiembre de 1979). 106. They were known as the “ladies in red,” due to the color of their uniforms. 107. Mensaje presidencial 1976, p. 100. 108. Payne (1994b). 109. Mensaje presidencial 1977, p. 133. 110. Mensaje presidencial 1978, p. 114, app. 1.

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111. Ibid., p. 110. 112. Mensaje presidencial 1979, pp. 135–136. 113. He printed and distributed thousands of booklets and posters on the Labor Plan and collective bargaining. Details are presented in Mensaje presidencial 1979, p. 138. 114. This is the subject of the classic study by Germani (1970). 115. Rojas Sánchez (1998), p. 267. 116. An untitled twenty-page copy is at the FJGE, and the final chapter refers to the National Youth Secretariat. 117. Ibid., p. 10. 118. Ibid., p. 1. 119. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 120. Ibid., p. 16. 121. Article 11 of Supreme Decree no. 11, November 30, 1973. 122. Mensaje presidencial 1975, p. 105. 123. Ibid., p. 105. 124. Mensaje presidencial 1976, p. 89. 125. Ibid., p. 104. 126. Ibid., p. 77. In 1979 the plan was to train 7,000 youth, which was quite a large number; Mensaje presidencial 1979, p. 131. 127. Mensaje presidencial 1980, p. 136. 128. In 1975, 3,500 youths took part in summer camps in different locations in northern, central, and southern Chile; Mensaje presidencial 1976, p. 108. 129. Vacation activities were supported through a program to build hostels in several locations throughout the country. In 1979 there were 32 youth hostels, which took in 8,700 young people; Mensaje presidencial 1979, p. 131. In 1980 the hostels welcomed 13,932 young people, and a special hostel was opened at the exclusive ski resort of Farellones in 1980, which lodged 250 young people that winter; Mensaje presidencial 1980, p. 137. 130. The welcoming speech was written by Jaime Guzmán. I have examined the manuscripts of the speeches delivered in the summer camps in 1978 and 1979, which can be found at the FJGE. 131. More than 8,000 youths participated in 1980; Mensaje presidencial 1980, p. 137. 132. Mensaje presidencial 1980, p. 136. 133. In 1974 it included only the best alumni of the military’s main schools. 134. See Sáez (1988). 135. Javier Leturia, “Un respaldo cívico al Gobierno,” Qué Pasa, September 9, 1976, p. 7. 136. “Jaime Guzmán habla del Frente Juvenil,” Qué Pasa, September 9, 1976, pp. 8–10; quote from p. 9. 137. See Qué Pasa, September 9, 1976, pp. 7–8. 138. See Patricia Verdugo’s interview with the front’s “coordinator,” Javier Leturia: “Trasluz: las ideas del joven Leturia,” Ercilla, September 1, 1976, pp. 21–25; quote from p. 22. 139. “Frente Juvenil: un respaldo cívico al Gobierno,” Qué Pasa, September 9, 1976, pp. 6–8. Publicist Manfredo Mayol, general manager of the state-owned national television station, was also there. 140. Cristián Larroulet, another president of Catholic University’s student federation, FEUC, actively participated, and was pointed out in the press as a “front leader”; see La Tercera de la Hora, July 7, 1977, p. 11. 141. The minutes of the regional meetings, which are at the FJGE, reveal his dedication. I examined several of Guzmán’s handwritten minutes of 1975–1976, which assess the front’s progress in different cities and make suggestions to correct disparities.

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142. The analogies were significant for the government: it was a battle in which a small contingent of Chilean soldiers preferred to die rather than to surrender to a much larger enemy force. This same significance was assigned to the “war on communism.” 143. It was named after the youngest soldier killed in the battle at La Concepción. 144. Unfortunately for its organizers, the preparation and staging of the event became gloomy because of bad weather, which forced the youth to seek refuge in the dressing rooms. Press reports include the list of participants; see “Hoy queda instituido el Día de la Juventud,” La Segunda, July 10, 1975. 145. Among them were television personalities, sportsmen, and celebrities, and a large number of Gremialista youth, such as Francisco Bartolucci, Juan Antonio Coloma, Fernando Barros, Joaquín Lavín, Luis Cordero, and Patricio Melero; the full list is presented in “Los 77 del recuerdo,” La Tercera de la Hora, July 10, 1977, p. 5. A massive event was organized in Valparaiso as well, attended by over 4,000 youth from the Fifth Region; “Impresionante fue el acto en Valparaíso,” La Tercera de la Hora, July 10, 1977, p. 4. 146. “La juventud, futuro de Chile, marchó a la cita con el recuerdo de los héroes.” La Tercera de la Hora, July 11, 1975, says that “the ceremony was brief and restrained, and the rain that poured during the entire function equally soaked the youngsters, the President and the ministers who accompanied him.” 147. Leturia condemned “the suicidal weakness of great contemporary democracies that by allowing the infiltration of the communist enemy move towards an abyss that has already closed the door to freedom in so many nations of the world.” The text is presented in “La juventud, futuro de Chile, marchó a la cita con el recuerdo de los héroes,” La Tercera de la Hora, July 11, 1975. 148. “La juventud, futuro de Chile, marchó a la cita con el recuerdo de los héroes,” La Tercera de la Hora, July 11, 1975. 149. Emilio Bakit, “El Frente Juvenil se extiende a provincias,” La Segunda, July 19, 1975, p. 7. 150. The text of the speech was published in La Tercera de la Hora, July 14, 1975, p. 13. Moreover, see “Emotivo homenaje a los héroes de La Concepción,” La Segunda, July 10, 1976; “Mañana se inician actos del ‘Día de la Bandera,’” La Segunda, July 8, 1976. 151. Under the slogan “United Youth, shine on the present and future of Chile.” This important speech has become known as the “Chacarillas speech” (see Chapter 5). 152. See Noelia Miranda, “Contrapunto: El apoyo al Presidente,” La Segunda, July 10, 1978, which included, in a new fashion, the opinion of the former president of the Christian Democratic Party, Patricio Aylwin. 153. El Mercurio, July 10, 1978, emphasis added. 154. Only one critical statement appeared, signed by three law students from the University of Chile, indicating that “selfish intentions are incompatible with the objectives of the honorable Junta headed by His Excellency the President of the Republic, and would go against our fatherland’s traditions”; see “Responden a Astete,” La Segunda, July 13, 1978. 155. Guzmán, “Significado y oportunidades del pinochetismo,” Ercilla, July 19, 1978, p. 10. 156. Ibid. 157. Coloma also took part in the Council of State, representing the youth sector. 158. He later worked in ODEPLAN and joined José Yuraszeck’s team, which privatized the national electric company (Chilectra), becoming one of the seven “key” executives of the Enersis group. See Chapter 9. 159. Those decorated were Ramón Suárez, labor director, who was minister of the General Secretariat in 1983; Francisco Bartolucci, mayor of Valparaíso; Aníbal Vial, youth leader and later professor at Catholic University; Julio Dittborn, head of ODEPLAN’s re-

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search department; Ignacio Astete, youth leader; Javier Leturia, former national coordinator of the Youth Front; and Juan Jorge Lazo, adviser to the labor minister. 160. The other three areas were “social-dissemination”; “sports,” for which Felipe Montero, deputy director of the government’s Department of Sports, and several soccer players received awards; and “artistic” endeavors, for which two television personalities were decorated; El Mercurio, July 9, 1979. 161. He has been the director of the Institute for Freedom and Development since its creation in 1990. 162. As on other occasions, cadets from the main military schools, union leaders, and sportsmen were decorated; El Mercurio, July 9, 1981. 163. Decree Law no. 1289, January 14, 1976. 164. In the 1980s, when the government had good control of it, the Communal Development Council (Consejo de Desarrollo Comunal [CODECO]) had a stronger influence on the appointment of the mayor. 165. Article 23 of Decree Law no. 1289, January 14, 1976. 166. In 1981, seventeen new municipalities were created, for a total of thirty-two in the Greater Santiago area. 167. Decree with Force of Law no. 1, June 13, 1980. In 1982, 83 percent of public education was managed by municipalities; Pozo (1987), p. 342. 168. Raczyinski and Cabezas (1988), p. 9. 169. There were subsidies to cover a range of needs, such as welfare and housing assistance for homeless people. 170. A new program, directed toward heads of households (the POJH), was created after the 1982 economic crisis (see Chapter 9). 171. Morales (1987), p. 378. 172. Information from the Presidential Secretariat, July 1998. Sabat has been a successful mayor of Ñuñoa, a district of Santiago, and Urrutia was deputy for Viña del Mar. 173. Chapter 8 analyzes the role of the Gremialista movement in ODEPLAN, an important government agency that advised Pinochet on economic issues.

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8 The Chicago Boys: Legitimation Through Economic Success

Economic success was a high priority for the military regime and an integral part of its multipronged legitimation strategy (the other aspects were historical legitimacy and legal-constitutional legitimacy).1 The economy was a political issue because the Popular Unity government’s poor performance had been one of the reasons for the crisis and collapse of democracy. That failure had been apparent not only in serious macroeconomic imbalances (hyperinflation,2 deficits in the balance of payments, and fiscal accounts), but also in shortages of basic goods that affected much of the population. For the public, the long queues of people waiting to buy basic goods, and the black market, were the most visible evidence of a serious crisis. Economic insecurity and discontent with Popular Unity among much of the public caused many to support the authoritarian regime, with the hope that it would bring back order and growth. Along with maintaining its anticommunist stance and its “war” on Marxism, the new regime was anxious to overcome the economic crisis and defeat poverty, promising tranquillity and a bright future. So the government not only stressed the totalitarian nature of the Popular Unity parties, but also kept alive the negative image of their economic management, particularly its effect on the working class and women. Its own economic management was never a politically neutral issue—it was part of the strategy of legitimizing the authoritarian order, which would be consolidated by economic success. The economy was an integral part of its political strategy. The Pinochet regime set out to transform the economy with far-reaching structural reforms.3 Its economic program was associated with a group of economists known as the Chicago Boys, who were led during the 1970s by Sergio de Castro, and from 1984 onward by Hernán Büchi.4 Its members had had similar backgrounds, having graduated from Catholic University, where they also taught, and having obtained postgraduate degrees from the University of Chicago. They imposed a neoliberal monetarist program that was reasoned and 271

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highly inflexible, and was implemented over the protests of large segments of the business community, who were accustomed to operating in an economy with heavy state intervention and protectionism. Examined over the long term, the results were modest in terms of growth, employment, and inflation compared with the achievements of democratic governments in the 1960s and the 1990s (see Table 8.1). The results were also uneven: neoliberal policies led Chile into its worst recession of the century, when in 1982 and 1983 the financial system collapsed and GDP dropped by 14.5 percent. Economic problems had hastened the political crisis of the Allende government and provoked massive protests in the streets of middle- and workingclass neighborhoods, but under Pinochet things were different, with the military harshly repressing any sign of public protest. In the 1970s, unemployment soared, and the regime created work-generation programs, run by the municipalities and known as the Minimum Employment Program (PEM) and the Employment for Household Heads Program (POJH). In 1975, unemployment reached 15.7 percent (17.6 percent of PEM workers are included), and fell slowly in the following years.5 In 1983, there were 740,000 unemployed, 19 percent of the work force, and another 500,000 in the PEM and POJH, representing 13 percent of the work force. The recovery was slow, and only in 1989 did the figure fall to a single digit (8 percent). Wages fell and stayed below 1970 levels until 1992 (see Table 8.2), as did nonwage income; in 1989, family allowances, for example, were 72 percent below their 1970 level. (Not by chance, wages and allowances rose before the 1988 referendum, and the economic recovery was used to boost Pinochet’s electoral campaign.) Social spending was also cut back, as a result of the strong antistate policy bias, affecting education and health in particular. The impact continued to be felt in many sectors after the return to democracy, such as healthcare, which suffered from worn hospital infrastructure. Any evaluation of the regime’s economic policy, however, must go further than macroeconomic indicators, for the regime’s reforms radically changed Chile’s production infrastructure and laid the foundation for subsequent growth. Other Latin American dictators failed to manage their economies successfully,6 but Pinochet set up conditions friendly to growth, and his main economic institutions continue to function in Chile today. Democratization brought deep changes in the political system that were visible to all. The economic system underwent significant institutional modifications as well, although these were less spectacular than the modifications in the political system, as Chile’s new rulers sought to reform parts of the economic model using neoliberalism as a basis.7 Whatever the case, the reforms were carried out in a dictatorship, not a democracy, and must be evaluated in that political context. The political system in which economic transformation takes place is relevant, because it sets the institutional scene for the actors and the institutions involved. Modernizations in democracies are carried out within the bounds of

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Table 8.1

Comparison of Key Macroeconomic Indicators, 1959–1998

3.7 6.2 26.6 5.2 62.2 20.7 –4.7

4.0 2.3 26.3 5.9 84.2 19.3 –2.5

Allende 1971–1973 1.2 –4.2 293.8 4.7 89.7 15.9 –11.5

Pinochet 1974–1989

Aylwin 1990–1993

2.9 10.6 79.9 18.1e 81.9 15.6 0.3

7.7 9.6 17.7 7.3 99.8 19.9 1.7

Frei Ruiz-Tagle 1994–1998 6.9 10.1 6.9 6.8 121.6 24.5 1.8

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Growth in GDPa (%) Growth in exportsb (%) Inflation ratec Unemployment rated Real wages (1970 = 100%) Gross fixed investment (% of GDP)f General government surplus (% of GDP)

Alessandri 1959–1964

Source: Ffrench-Davis (1999), p. 24. Notes: a. Accumulated. In 1977 pesos until 1985, in 1986 pesos for 1985–1998. b. Accumulated. Goods and service exports in 1977 pesos for 1959–1985, in 1986 pesos for 1986–1998. c. Annual average, December to December. d. Annual average. e. Including workers in community employment programs (PEM and POJH), without which the percentage is 13.3. f. In 1977 pesos for all years.

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Table 8.2

Salaries, Family Allowances, and Public Social Spending, 1970–1998 (percentages) Social Public Spending per Capita Wagesa

1970 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

100.0 89.0 96.8 83.2 84.6 84.3 89.8 91.6 93.3 97.8 102.2 105.9 110.7 118.3 123.2 126.1 129.5

Minimum Wageb 100.0 130.0 135.7 86.1 82.1 77.1 82.3 91.8 98.0 107.2 112.2 117.7 122.1 127.5 133.0 137.8 146.2

Family Allowancec Education 100.0 81.6 80.9 54.6 45.7 38.1 33.2 28.4 33.7 41.4 42.4 43.2 43.9 45.3 47.2 49.7 51.9

100.0 88.6 92.1 76.0 71.5 65.7 64.1 62.5 58.8 64.7 73.1 78.2 83.9 92.3 102.7 111.6 122.6

Health 100.0 82.3 74.7 64.0 62.5 61.5 70.4 69.6 65.3 75.7 87.0 95.9 104.0 106.7 114.3 119.4 127.5

Totald 100.0 90.1 97.5 90.5 86.9 84.7 86.0 83.7 81.6 87.8 95.4 102.9 107.4 113.9 123.2 128.1 135.7

Source: Ffrench-Davis (1999), p. 262. Notes: Real indices, 1970 = 100%. a. General wage index until April 1993, then hourly wage index. b. Net income. c. Social security family allowances in 1970, then onetime allowances, then allowances specific to lowest-income segment. d. Expenditures on education, health, housing, and social security. Annual averages.

law, with the participation of public institutions such as parliament, unions, and political parties, and with goals and decisions serving a plurality of interests, as happened in Britain, for example. The aim of the Pinochet regime was not simply to carry out reforms for the benefit of the big-business community, as is pointed out in dependency theory.8 Chile’s rulers also sought to win the support of the poorest sectors through clientelist policies, deliberately distributing economic resources, particularly through municipalities, so as to create and increase support for the military regime. The new rulers sought the backing of the poor through political means, for in economic policy they gave priority to business interests. It is easier to push through economic reforms in an authoritarian context. The media reported the government line exclusively, ignoring dissident voices, particularly those of opposition economists who criticized the neoliberal poli-

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cies and warned of mistakes and flaws. The official propaganda insisted that the Chicago Boys’ policies were the only way forward, and constantly compared their success in restoring normality with the shortages, hyperinflation, and production chaos under Popular Unity. The results always looked better set against this past. The team’s policies also served political ends: the 1979 labor reforms, for example, were an attempt to create conditions that would result in more jobs and make the economy more competitive, but at the same time were intended to neutralize the union movement. Chile’s experience fits the pattern of the authoritarian modernizations accomplished under what is known as the Prussian model, comparable to modernizations that took place in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century and in Francisco Franco’s Spain (see Chapter 1). In those cases, the concentration of authority and power in the head of state had a number of consequences. There was a fainter distinction between public and private interests, allowing initiatives that favored groups in power and those with privileged access, and there was ample room to distribute benefits to senior regime officials and supporters. The centralization of authority accounts for any distortions that may occur in the market in favor of the economic agents closest to the government team; favoritism is justified in terms of their collaboration and support for the regime.9 Authoritarian modernizations are partial. They do not affect the economy as a whole, or the social system, since they maintain the components that benefit the interests of the dominant players. The Chicago Boys’ modernizations were partial,10 with significant progress in some areas but traditional or semimodern complacence in others. This can be explained by the team’s ideological bias and by the authoritarian context. Sweeping modernization can only be achieved in a democratic setting in which different interest groups have equal opportunities to make their demands, and in which the economic system becomes institutionally complex. Labor policy, for example, was designed to favor the employers, curtailing worker rights and weakening the union movement. In the private sector, preference was given to larger companies at the expense of medium and small enterprises, and regulatory consumer protection institutions were reined in. There was a traditional view on the use of natural resources, with no interest in protecting the environment. Socially, the lower classes bore the brunt of the stabilization policies; their living standards fell alongside the cuts in public education, health, and housing. A major modernization, the pension system reform, was biased in favor of middle- and highincome workers.11 Traditional decisionmaking structures tolerated clientelism and patronage, most evident in the privatization process, because these personally benefited senior executives in the public companies as well as government advisers and collaborators (see Chapter 9). This partial modernization produced a radically skewed institutional development,12 with modern sectors alongside semimodern or traditional ones. There were serious distortions, which became evident with the return to democracy.

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Political Orientation of the Chicago Boys

In most studies, the emphasis on the Chicago Boys’ management has focused primarily on the technical aspects, which have become more obvious and better appreciated because economic performance in Chile was stronger than in other dictatorships. Among these aspects are economic equilibrium, including fiscal accounts, the fundamental importance of the market, and the exaltation of business dynamics. But a political analysis reveals the limits and weaknesses of the Chilean economic system as a result of its authoritarian context. Political analysis is essential, because the Chicago Boys’ work was part of the strategy to legitimize the military regime. The members of the team were not technocrats who made decisions based on academic criteria, nor were they servants to the interests of national and international capital who simply did capital’s bidding. They came from the right and shared the regime’s political objectives, they accepted the conditions created by the authoritarian order that made radical change possible, and they were guided by considerations of power. They were not politically neutral before they entered the military government. Many of them belonged to the Gremialista movement,13 and were held together by their common experience of fighting reform at Catholic University and against the Popular Unity government. The economic crisis put them in contact with several PDC economists,14 who met regularly to analyze the economic situation and formulate plans to confront it, which were later gathered by one of the participants into a policy and document that has come to be known as “The Brick” (El Ladrillo).15 The team was able to put its reforms into effect because it had the support, first, of the navy and, second, of General Pinochet, who fully accepted its policies, even at the most contentious moments. The largest and most influential group in the economic team comprised Catholic University economists who had done their postgraduate work at the University of Chicago, thanks to an agreement between the two institutions made in the 1950s.16 On their return to Chile, many of them took up full-time teaching posts at the university, and acquired a professional identity and a line of academic work that led them to see themselves as the vanguard of modern scientific economics, to the detriment of their relations with other members of Catholic University’s economics school.17 In 1965, tensions with their colleagues and the university authorities led them to take control of the economics school, forcing out its dean.18 He was replaced by Sergio de Castro, and Pablo Baraona took over as director.19 During the period of university reforms, begun in 1967 by the FEUC, Catholic University’s student federation, then controlled by the PDC, the Chicago Boys came out in opposition and joined the Gremialista electoral list in the vote for university administration positions. In the June 1973 elections, Gremialista leader Jaime Guzmán headed a list of thirty-seven faculty candidates, including leading Chicago Boys de Castro and Mario Corbo from eco-

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nomics, and Juan Ignacio Varas and Rodrigo Mujica from agronomy. Varas later joined the economics school, becoming director in 1975.20 But the conflicts involved in the university reform reinforced the Chicago Boys’ decision to stay out of national politics and dedicate themselves to academic pursuits, at least for a while. The Chicago Boys were largely outsiders in Chilean politics, without solid ties to politicians or the business community prior to the coup.21 They were very independent in pursuing their program, which met with opposition from much of the traditional business community. With the exception of Baraona, a member of the National Party, none of them took part in Jorge Alessandri’s presidential campaign in 1970.22 Their influence on the right came from the dissemination of their ideas, first in the economics section of El Mercurio, begun in 1967, and then, the following year, in a short-lived, restricted-circulation magazine of their own, Polémica Económico-Social.23 Others saw them as a closed group, but they were respected in right-wing intellectual circles surrounding the magazines Portada and Qué Pasa, and among some businessmen.24 The group was impacted by Allende’s victory in 1970. Ernesto Fontaine and Rolf Lüders left Chile to work in the United States. De Castro and Baraona stayed to fight Popular Unity. They increased the teaching staff at Catholic University’s economics school, bringing in economists of the “structuralist” school.25 De Castro’s influence grew as a result of his determined opposition to the government, opposition that was supported by the student union and its main leader, Gremialista Miguel Kast.26 The Gremialistas were strongest in the economics school, where they controlled the student association.27 Key members of the economic team had been student leaders (see Chapter 7). Kast was president of the student union in 1967–1970 and general secretary of the FEUC in 1970–1971. He went on to become deputy director and then director of ODEPLAN, the planning ministry, then minister of labor and president of the Central Bank. Felipe Lamarca, de Castro’s chief of staff, and later director of internal revenue (1980–1985), had been vice president of the FEUC in 1971–1972. Cristián Larroulet, a senior official in ODEPLAN and Büchi’s chief of staff, was president of the student union and then the FEUC (1975–1976). After the coup, the FEUC and student associations continued to function under the control of the Gremialistas, the only political group allowed by the university’s new authorities. Economics and law students were the most active. Not all the professionals on the economic team were economists from Catholic University and the University of Chicago. Álvaro Bardón, for example, came from the University of Chile. Nor did all the Chicago postgraduates receive support from Catholic University; some were supported by the Central Bank.28 Not all members of the team were former University of Chicago students, and not all former University of Chicago students joined the government.29

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Finance ministers Jorge Cauas (1975–1976)30 and Büchi (1985–1988) were both graduates of the University of Chile with postgraduate degrees from Columbia University. José Piñera was an economist from Catholic University with a doctorate from Harvard, and was close to the PDC during his student years.31 The economic reforms implied radical changes in legislation, so the economic team called in legal advisers, such as Hernán Felipe Errázuriz, another Catholic University graduate, who began working with the team when he was at the Central Bank, and who later became minister of mining.32

■

Economic Leadership: Sergio de Castro, Hernán Büchi, and Miguel Kast

The Chicago Boys’ economic model cannot be seen as monolithic, for over time there were many different perspectives and styles. For analytical purposes, we can define four phases. Initially there was a gradualist strategy led by the minister of economy, Fernando Léniz. He was a businessman, chairman of the board of El Mercurio during Popular Unity, and an engineering graduate of the University of Chile. His support in the government came from the minister of economic coordination, Raúl Saez, who had been minister for Eduardo Frei for a few months in 1967, and from the military in COAJ, the advisory committee to the junta. In the first two years, Léniz’s team carried out a stabilization program, with drastic measures to cut the deficit and bring order and efficiency into the management of public companies. They also began to liberalize trade and return to their owners most of the companies that had been taken over by the Popular Unity government. The gradualist approach was dropped in 1975 when the economy went into a recession, opening the door to the second phase: the more radical strategies proposed by de Castro and Cauas. The third phase was marked by the serious crisis of 1982–1983 and the policies applied to confront it, when some neoliberal measures were modified under minister of finance Luis Escobar Cerda, who was closer to the “structuralist” school. The fourth and final phase, which lasted until the end of the military regime, was led by Büchi, who showed more analytical flexibility and greater political pragmatism than had de Castro. The end of the gradualist phase was hastened by the political differences between General Pinochet and his ministers Léniz and Saez, who voiced their criticism of the government’s human rights abuses and its strident anticommunism. Léniz endorsed criticism coming from the US government and expressed it to the junta. He was also critical of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then run by the navy, the performance of its ambassador to the United Nations,33 a retired air force officer, and the performance of its functionaries in the New York offices of CORFO, the government development corporation. At one meeting with the junta, Léniz firmly rejected the explanation, often

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heard among Pinochet’s supporters, that the opposition of the US administration and the main European governments to the military regime was due to communist influence: “There is no question of the North Americans acting under communist influence. [The same is true] in some of the most important newspapers and in academic circles, where naturally there are segments that are influenced by communist thinking but there are others who are not. This is one of my conclusions.”34 Léniz told the junta that the difficulties in obtaining foreign loans were due to criticism from abroad of the human rights situation, and that measures to change this, such as releasing political prisoners, would help in obtaining the economic support the government needed. Léniz used political arguments that the junta members rejected, convinced as they were of the need to use violence: I attempted to investigate whether, once the human rights issues were resolved, there might be pressure for other reasons. But these other matters bore no comparison to the damage and the pressure we are suffering because of the human rights question. I believe we must understand the outside world’s opinions of our country, because we must form an absolutely objective opinion of the facts. There is the fact of a communist plot, undoubtedly. But let us make no mistake, not everything is part of a plot. There are clearly other factors.35

Some months later, minister of economic coordination Raúl Saez also expressed his concern about the negative impact of Chile’s image abroad: “Our country has still not yet fully grasped how seriously the outside world views what is happening in Chile. Events occur here that are not especially significant but that are blown out of proportion, and that hinders the tasks that we, Chileans’ representatives, are trying to perform at those precise moments.”36 These attempts by the economic team in 1973–1974 to moderate the regime were at odds with the fiercely anticommunist rhetoric of the junta’s right-wing political collaborators, who exaggerated the importance of the “communist threat” and were silent on the subject of human rights abuses. Sergio Diez, ambassador to the UN, in a report to the junta on April 23, 1975, painted a different picture than Léniz’s. The North American population, he claimed, was “10 to 15% Marxist, and the main newspapers there, as in Europe, are under Marxist influence because the journalists are [Marxists]. Most of the international press is influenced by Marxism, and in the world today the Soviet Union’s capacity to lie is more of a threat than the atom bomb.”37 When de Castro took over the Ministry of Economy and Jorge Cauas the Ministry of Finance in April 1975, there was a marked shift in relations with the junta, because the two new ministers did not express opinions on political issues. This was not simply because Pinochet would not accept such from his economic team; it was the team members themselves who accepted the consequences of an authoritarian scenario, which they saw as essential for pushing through radical changes in the economic system.

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Two figures stand out among the Chicago Boys who led the economic team: de Castro and Büchi. A third key figure was Miguel Kast, a remarkable political operator. José Piñera also played a significant role. De Castro’s background and character were major factors in the way the neoliberal model was implemented. He was an intelligent and determined man who stood out less for the originality of his ideas than for his sway over his colleagues, his former students at Catholic University. His strong character brought him into conflict with the authorities in the economics school when he returned from the United States, and with some businessmen and those close to Alessandri at the end of the 1960s.38 He acted with considerable independence, shrugging off pressure from the business community, which was struggling with the impact of the liberalization policies. He cultivated the image of a technocrat, but nonetheless resorted to using the regime’s political arguments to support the economic transformation. He thus admitted that the causes of the economic crisis stretched back several decades to well before the policies of the Popular Unity government: “The fundamental solution to our social problems [lies] in freeing Chile from being a breeding ground for totalitarian socializing ideologies, the product of the lack of expectations; [it lies] in overcoming poverty, and in guaranteeing individual freedom and economic well-being.”39 De Castro was the unquestioned leader of the Catholic University economists; several generations of students had taken his first-year introduction course.40 He was known as a good teacher who was committed to his students, and less interested in research.41 He wanted to make rapid and radical changes in the economic system, the only possible strategy, in his view, for modifying it structurally; and he refused to take a more flexible approach when problems emerged in implementing the program, as during the difficult situation of 1981 and 1982. De Castro’s rigidity became a serious flaw, preventing him from confronting problems; it paralyzed his decisionmaking, worsening the crisis and leading him to leave the government in April 1982. Büchi’s professional and political career was different. He was an outstanding student in mining engineering at the University of Chile, and went on to obtain a postgraduate degree in economics at Columbia University. He was not part of the group who produced “The Brick”; he entered the government thanks to Kast, in 1975, on his return from the United States, and went on to serve in a range of posts before becoming minister of finance on February 18, 1985. His intelligence and his ability to form and work in teams were his outstanding features. In December 1979 he was named deputy minister of economy, and in January 1981, deputy minister of health, in which position he played a leading role in the privatization of the health system, which led to the creation of the Health Pension Institutions (Instituciones de Salud Previsional [ISAPRES]), a group of private health insurance companies.42 In August 1983 he briefly headed ODEPLAN, the planning ministry, and in May 1984 was named superintendent of banks by the finance minister, Escobar. In this post he was highly effective in tightening and improving the regulatory mecha-

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nisms at a difficult moment. The new norms and regulations were key to creating the institutional conditions necessary to overcome the crisis in the financial system. Büchi was a close friend of Jaime Guzmán and was a Gremialista by the time he became a minister. Unlike de Castro, Büchi did not have a rigid character, so while he did not abandon the principles of the neoliberal model, he was flexible in implementing it. He raised tariffs and kept the surcharges imposed by his predecessor, Escobar, which would have been heresy for the monetarists of the 1970s. He resorted to drastic measures to balance the budget, such as freezing old-age pensions in 1985 and delaying wage increases by several months to postpone an outlay and improve the fiscal balance. These would later cost the regime dearly in political support. He was more clever politically than de Castro, grasping the need for military and civilian support to make his decisions more effective. He thus gave priority to the privatization of public companies, in order to achieve several political aims: the dismantling of the state, the securing of support from the business community, and the generation of more resources to pump into the social programs that were intended to benefit General Pinochet in the 1988 referendum. Büchi was also lucky: good copper prices helped to finance the housing and public works campaigns that formed the basis of the presidential campaign.43 He was able to consolidate the reforms that de Castro had begun, which helped maintain the latter’s image as the founding father of the new economic model. Those successes help explain why Büchi was the right’s candidate in the 1989 presidential elections. The third and very significant political figure was Miguel Kast.44 Considerably younger than de Castro, he was indisputably the leading figure of the second generation of Chicago Boys,45 and unlike de Castro, he was heavily involved in student politics and the active recruitment of new supporters for the Gremialistas. From his base in ODEPLAN, which he joined in 1973 when he returned from Chicago, he worked toward policies to combat poverty for political as much as for economic reasons, seeing these policies as the way to weaken the organizations of the left and the PDC. Political motives also lay behind his desire to change the labor laws, in order to strengthen the position of employers and weaken unions. He was the driving force behind the reform of the pension system, one of the regime’s most far-reaching economic and political reforms (see Chapter 9). Kast was particularly effective at recruiting professionals to work for the regime, a very important task. He helped the military to create government teams and aided the ministries in finding staff and advisers. He became known as the “great recruiter,”46 dedicating much of his time and energy to attracting economists, engineers, and lawyers to work in ODEPLAN and other state agencies. He brought in key figures such as Sergio Fernández and Büchi. In this work he had two objectives: helping the government and strengthening the

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Gremialista movement by advancing its members and sympathizers and displacing right-wingers who were not supporters.47 A fourth minister who was also important to reforms was José Piñera. He did not belong to the core group of the Chicago Boys, for during his time at Catholic University he had been a PDC sympathizer. This created tensions when he entered the government as minister of labor in 1978, in a cabinet headed by Fernández as interior minister.48 Piñera was one of the leading spokesmen for the “seven modernizations” thesis, which was launched that year. It was to be the main push in the regime’s strategy to establish a “new institutional order,” whose chief purpose was the approval of a new constitution49 (see Chapter 5). Piñera had the intelligence, the personality, and the political ambition to maintain a degree of autonomy for himself on de Castro’s team, and was the only member who would argue with him. As labor minister he was responsible for two substantial reforms: the Labor Plan and the privatization of the pension system.50 He then became minister of mining (1981–1983), in which role he pushed a new mining law and also was aware of the failure of private businessmen’s attempts at privatizing CODELCO, the state copper corporation. The private sector was clearly in favor of the privatization, but the military defended the presence of the state in the copper industry and defeated Piñera.

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Designing the Economic Program: “The Brick”

The policy and document known as “The Brick” was the result of work by economists in opposition to the Allende government from Catholic University and the University of Chile, individuals of different political stripes—from the National Party (Pablo Baraona), the Gremialistas (Sergio de Castro), independents (Sergio Undurraga, Manuel Cruzat, and Emilio Sanfuentes), and the Christian Democratic Party (Álvaro Bardón, Juan Villarzú, and Andrés Sanfuentes)—who met regularly to analyze the economic situation. The group was called together by Emilio Sanfuentes, who worked for the conservative newspaper El Mercurio. The parties became aware of these meetings. All the economists, except Undurraga, had done their postgraduate work at the University of Chicago.51 The magnitude of the economic crisis and the extent of political polarization brought together economists with very different visions on the economic system and on political development. The PDC favored a mixed economy with worker-owned companies and identified with the structuralist school of thought,52 rather than with the monetarism of the Catholic University group. Jaime Guzmán attended some of the meetings and realized the importance of the group, seeing them as a team that had the technical competence to take over economic affairs when the coup occurred.53 Orlando Saenz, president of the national manufacturers’ association (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril), suggested to the economists that they devise a program to address the economic crisis. With financing from that group, steady

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work was started, with Undurraga, an adviser to the manufacturers’ association at the time, coordinating the effort. The navy learned about the group through El Mercurio. Once the coup took place, Sanfuentes turned the work that they were producing over to the navy, without the knowledge of the group and without Saenz’s authorization. The diversity of the economic and political visions involved explains why “The Brick” was not a coherent program of monetarist reforms, but a collection of general and heterogeneous solutions. After the coup, the Chicago Boys gave it a monetarist character that did not reflect its true nature. A careful reading of the document shows that it did not propose a radical break with the prevailing economic system, but instead suggested gradual responses to the most controversial political issues, such as the question of social property (the companies taken over by the government).54 Some recommendations were a far cry from the monetarism of the Chicago Boys, for example the antimonopoly recommendations,55 which were critical of conglomerates, but which never actually became policies.56 One idea coming from this document that was later developed in ODEPLAN was the pension system reform, based on the creation of private pension funds. The original idea was to help normalize the area of social property, and the reform was justified on political grounds because “it would lead to a socialization of wealth while avoiding the formulas of state socialism.”57 The pension funds could acquire the public companies, providing “a useful mechanism for transferring the wealth now in the hands of the State to the workers.”58 It would not only help solve the social security problem, but also bring substantial political benefits, as it would reduce the sources of conflict between the business community and workers.59 After the coup, when the navy took responsibility for economic management, it called in the economists of “The Brick” as advisers. A month later the Chicago Boys entered the Ministry of Economy, when Léniz hired de Castro as one of his close collaborators.

■

Neutralization of Academic Centers

The Chicago Boys turned themselves into the only group capable of managing the economy, not only because of their shared professional, political, and human values, but also because they were prepared to make full use of the political resources afforded by the authoritarian regime. They had the backing of the media, which systematically spotlighted the progress of the economy and covered up their weaknesses and mistakes. When opposition economists voiced criticisms, the team dismissed them out of hand, and reinforced the synchronization of the think tanks and research centers where they themselves worked.60 The PDC economists at Catholic University and the University of Chile very quickly became critical of the Chicago Boys’ stabilization program. The

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PDC magazine Política y Espíritu published a document, “The Economic Report” (1975), which angered the economic team. The report questioned the regime’s self-proclaimed achievements, warning that “the main cause of the failure is the application of an economic model that is not rooted in the national situation, and has been imposed dogmatically.”61 The authors suggested a “pragmatic approach” that would take into account the particularities of the Chilean economy, notably its instability. They proposed to confront a fall in inflationary expectations “by regulating not only the exchange rate but also interest rates and key prices in the economy.”62 They offered a series of technical measures to correct the errors in economic management. It was clear the report was read by the military in COAJ, who at that moment was on bad terms with the neoliberal team. The report’s authors came from two academic centers: Catholic University’s planning studies center (Centro de Estudios de Planificación [CEPLAN]) and the University of Chile’s economics school.63 The Chicago Boys saw them as opponents determined to hinder their work who had to be neutralized. The team also wanted to prevent the military in the COAJ from forming or strengthening views critical of neoliberalism and of the business community. The Gremialistas took charge of the campaign against CEPLAN, whose economists were recognized opponents of the neoliberal policies and were well-known and well regarded internationally. The Gremialistas were now the most powerful group in the management of Catholic University, helped by the departure in November 1974 of Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, who resigned as the university’s chancellor in protest of the activities of the military’s appointed university president, retired admiral Jorge Swett.64 Backing the campaign from within the government was Kast, deputy director of ODEPLAN. The first attack on CEPLAN came a few weeks later, as the 1975 budget was being prepared. The university’s vice president of finance and administration had drawn up an institutional budget with a far more pessimistic estimate than the figures from the Ministry of Finance, and he had ordered drastic staff cuts to be made.65 Responsibility for deciding which staff to dismiss would be passed to the university’s schools. The main targets were the social sciences and humanities schools, where the Gremialistas had few members. The order to cut staff was questioned in some academic units. At a meeting with the president and the vice president of finance and administration, CEPLAN’s director, Alejandro Foxley, demonstrated that the vice president’s figures substantially underestimated the real size of the fiscal contribution, and that such major staff cuts were not necessary.66 The heads of several schools asked for the staff cuts to be suspended.67 But the order was upheld, and on January 16, 1975, the military’s appointed university president advised the deans and academic heads that “there was no mistake” in the figures, that the Ministry of Finance “was offering no credit,” and that he required an immediate list of the names of the professors to be dismissed. He rejected Foxley’s arguments as a political maneuver and, to silence any further questioning, en-

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listed Admiral Merino to confirm that there would be no additional funding for the university. As a result, 152 professors were dismissed, and another 163 had their hours and pay cut back drastically and were eventually forced out by economic need. CEPLAN’s staff was thus reduced.68 The second offensive came a year later, once again through the budget. This time the Chicago Boys themselves launched the attack. In the 1976 budget the director of the economics school, Juan Ignacio Varas, canceled the contracts of two young CEPLAN research assistants, René Cortazar and José Pablo Arellano. CEPLAN’s leading researchers, who also taught in the economics school, saw this as a move by the government to eliminate dissident views at the university,69 and they rushed along plans, in preparation since the first days of the military regime, to leave the university and set up an independent research center.70 At the beginning of June 1976, all of CEPLAN’s researchers and administrative staff resigned to establish a private body, the Corporation for Latin American Studies (Corporación de Estudios para Latinoamérica [CIEPLAN]). Its first director was Foxley, the former head of CEPLAN.71 The new research center became the most important in Chile; it was well regarded internationally and a leading player in the opposition to the military regime.72 The process of neutralizing the University of Chile’s economics school came somewhat later, at the end of the 1970s. Although some of its academic staff had opposed Popular Unity and had taken part in preparing “The Brick,” the Chicago Boys had no liking for the school.73 In the 1950s and 1960s it had been influenced by “structuralist” thinking, and had supplied the main members of President Eduardo Frei Montalva’s economic team.74 It was well thought of nationally and internationally, and the armed forces sent officers to postgraduate courses in its Escolatina school.75 The University of Chile’s economics school had been the first choice of a University of Chicago commission that had visited Chile in the 1950s to sign an agreement on modernizing economics studies, but the economics school already had an arrangement with the University of California. Nevertheless, the school had good relations with the University of Chicago, and several graduates pursued doctoral studies there.76 The University of Chile’s economics school kept a degree of pluralism in its teaching staff throughout the 1970s. Its director was a PDC party member, Andrés Sanfuentes, who had collaborated on “The Brick” and worked in the budget office after the coup, but then became an opponent of the regime.77 Unlike their counterparts at Catholic University, the military presidents at the University of Chile, who were officers in active service in the air force and the army,78 did not carry out mass purges of the teaching staff for ideological reasons, nor did they surround themselves with Gremialista advisers. The University of Chile’s economics school was an important academic center for teaching and research, but its work was ignored by the economic team, which backed the economics school at Catholic University. The University of Chile’s team was excluded from research projects commissioned by the

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government through ODEPLAN or the Ministry of Finance. The only exception was employment surveys, which had been undertaken by the University of Chile since the 1950s and were financed through the Central Bank. This work was long headed by José Luis Federici, a Chicago Boy who supported the regime and went on to become president of the University of Chile and minister of economy. In 1979 the Chicago Boys took control of the University of Chile’s economics school under the new appointed president, army general Alejandro Medina Lois. Less tolerant than his predecessors, he brought in several Chicago Boys as his main collaborators, most notably Álvaro Saieh, who was named vice president. Sanfuentes left after a disagreement with the economic team over the results of a survey on income distribution. He was replaced by Andrés Passicot, who dismissed two leading professors, both opponents of the regime,79 followed some months later by another six, also from the opposition.80 Medina named Jorge Selume as director of the economics school; Selume later headed the government budget office. A number of leading professors resigned in protest, and the University of Chile’s economics school lost the reputation it had acquired during those difficult years.81 The Chicago Boys thus silenced the voices of dissent in the academic world, which strengthened their power in the political system. This was not enough, however; they also neutralized the dissidents within the military government.

■

Neutralization of Military Officers in COAJ and CORFO

The third initiative that allowed the Chicago Boys to become the only option in the economic sector of the government was the neutralization of the military officers who worked in CORFO and COAJ as advisers to Pinochet and the junta on economic affairs.82 The military had taken over management of CORFO, the state development corporation, which gave them control of the companies it ran (see Table 8.3).83 The economic team had no respect for the CORFO-COAJ group, who not only lacked their formal academic qualifications but also held typical military views on the importance of the state in the economy.84 The team made little of the work CORFO was undertaking to scrutinize and explain the management decisions of public companies, despite scant human and economic resources. The military economists were in favor of a change of economic system, but they did not share the ideological bias and the inflexibility of the Chicago Boys. Nor did they feel the same suspicion of the public sector, to which they themselves belonged; they were convinced that with good management the public companies could become efficient. CORFO had enormous responsibilities in national development. It was in charge of the main companies set up by the state from the 1940s onward in the

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Composition of Boards of Directors of CORFO-Controlled Companies, June 1986 Vice Presidency

Directors

General Managers

Total

%

Total

%

13 2 — — 3 18

7 2 1 2 5 17

15 4 2 2 66 89

4 — — — 15 19

39 8 3 4 — —

27.3 5.6 2.1 2.8 — —

54

37.8

89 143

62.2 100.0

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Army Navy Air force Carabineros Civilians Total

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Table 8.3

Source: Huneeus and Olave (1987), tab. 8.

287

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energy, communications, and petrochemicals sectors,85 and also operated more than 400 companies taken over under Popular Unity, which had to be returned to the former owners or reprivatized.86 The Chicago Boys fought their military rivals through ODEPLAN, which had considerable influence; it enjoyed support from the navy and acted as an advisory body to the president. It had won the approval of the junta for its work, particularly its reports on public policies and on the social impact of investment projects. This work provided wide-ranging information on the state of the economy and the way the ministries were working, which was very useful to the economic team in evaluating public service management. ODEPLAN’s predominance over CORFO as an economic adviser was recognized by the junta at the end of 1974, when ODEPLAN presented its agenda and a solid account of the economic situation and the projects it was carrying out. Among the main features was work by its research department, which was responsible for preparing economic policy proposals on topics such as new alternatives for capital markets and pension fund and tax reforms.87 News of its work had even created interest in Brazil, whose government sent a group of civil servants to study it.88 ODEPLAN also centralized information on government investment projects, including CORFO’s, and drew up criteria for evaluating their social impact. ODEPLAN’s relationship with other ministries engaged in substantial investments, such as Education, Health, and Public Works, meant it could sort and evaluate the relevant information for General Pinochet, particularly in areas where he lacked advisers. ODEPLAN also achieved greater political weight than did CORFO, because the latter was unlucky in its choice of executive vice presidents, particularly in 1975, with its first civilian, Francisco Soza Cousiño, who pushed through a policy of returning companies to their former owners and of privatizations that were undertaken with little attention to detail or transparency and that opened the way for corruption and conflicts to reach the junta. The most controversial case was the auction of Panal, a textile company previously owned by the Hirmas family that had been nationalized during Popular Unity. The bidding was private and the property was awarded to a businessman who outbid the family, but who was not obliged to put up a guarantee; nor did the auction recognize a government credit in the Hirmas family’s favor, a serious irregularity. The junta was advised of the proceedings by the minister of economic coordination, Raúl Saez; there was a debate, which was reported at length in the minutes of its meetings, and some weeks later Soza was dismissed.89 It was the work of Kast and his Gremialista collaborators in ODEPLAN that finally reduced the influence of the military in CORFO over the economic reforms and secured the monopoly of neoliberal thinking. The Chicago Boys were not politically neutral; they had clear ideas about power, and their work in government was oriented toward political objectives. Their specific contribution was their attention to the political issues of economic management, expressed particularly in the way they placed their mem-

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bers in various areas of government. They acted with notable team spirit under Kast’s leadership and identified strongly with their institution, ODEPLAN, which had a major effect on their political careers. I thus name these young technocrats the “ODEPLAN Boys.”90

■

The ODEPLAN Boys: The Gremialista Movement and Economic Management

ODEPLAN’s political importance was determined immediately after the coup, because of decisions by the navy. Admiral Merino, who took responsibility for coordinating the “economic front,” believed his service should play an active role in economic management, and so required a director of ODEPLAN whom he could trust.91 The subject was discussed in the junta’s second meeting, where it was agreed that the nomination “should be made with extreme care.”92 The man chosen was a retired navy officer, Roberto Kelly,93 who delegated much of the work to Kast. Kast had joined ODEPLAN at the end of 1973, when there were already several Gremialista economists there, hired by Ernesto Silva, who had joined ODEPLAN after the coup. ODEPLAN, the national planning office, was created in 1967 by Frei Montalva’s government to advise the president “on all matters related to the process of economic and social planning.”94 It was a national organization, with regional offices throughout Chile, which was something new, for political-administration organization was normally undertaken by provinces.95 Its tasks were to coordinate the research needed to produce the national development plan, establish criteria for economic and social evaluation for statefinanced investment projects, and promote and organize training courses for civil servants in planning techniques.96 Although it was not a ministry, ODEPLAN reported directly to the president. It was headed by a director, and included a national deputy director and a regional planning deputy director.97 It had a large staff, of some 200 people, mostly university graduates,98 and also retained contract employees, such that in 1979 ODEPLAN had 262 officials.99 In the Frei government, ODEPLAN organized itself quickly and performed its varied functions efficiently, attracting top professionals.100 President Frei took into account its reports and recommendations, and it played an important part in decisionmaking.101 After the coup it grew substantially, assuming a clear institutional identity. It fulfilled three main functions in the first decade of the regime.102 First, it carried out the preparatory research for fundamental economic reforms like the pension system,103 and it designed long-term measures when the government lacked another agency to do this work. For this purpose, Kast developed close working links with Catholic University, providing it with substantial economic resources at a moment when the universities had serious budgetary problems as a result of the economic adjustment policies. Second, it played an

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executive role in implementing the social policies of the neoliberal model, including the focusing of social spending and the evaluation of investment projects.104 Third, ODEPLAN acted as a recruitment agency for the government. Over the long term, it worked to form a civil service elite through “president of the republic” scholarships. The Gremialistas controlled ODEPLAN until the end of 1984, when Jarpa was interior minister and Luis Simón Figueroa was named ODEPLAN director. Figueroa dismissed some of the Gremialistas as part of a broader initiative by Jarpa against their group.105 At this moment, the Gremialistas’ relationship with Pinochet was on ice. But in 1987, when Fernández returned to the Interior Ministry, the Gremialistas once again took over ODEPLAN; by the 1988 referendum, figures like Andrés Chadwick and Luis Larraín held senior posts, as ODEPLAN’s lawyer and deputy director respectively. Larraín became ODEPLAN director in the last military cabinet. Attracting Gremialista Staff to ODEPLAN The Gremialistas took control of ODEPLAN from the beginning of the military regime, with the support of its director, Roberto Kelly, who named Miguel Kast as deputy director in 1973. Kast took over as director in late 1978, when Kelly moved to the Ministry of Economy. Kast worked to bring hundreds of young graduates into ODEPLAN and other government agencies. It was no easy task to hire qualified professionals, especially to work in the regional offices, especially given competition with the attractions of the private sector. Entering government service required enthusiasm and a political commitment. Kast chose his people personally, and worked persistently to convince them to serve in the SERPLACs, regional coordination secretariats, in the most remote regions.106 He was systematic, holding regular meetings with dozens of young people and offering strong political arguments and material incentives.107 He spoke of the need for a principled commitment to the military regime, he stressed the ideas of gremialismo, and he spoke of public service as a crusade, which justified his sectarianism in naming officials and marginalizing or removing those who disagreed or dissented from his positions or from neoliberalism. He had the ability to inspire colleagues and followers with team spirit, forming a group with strong human, professional, and political loyalties. The ODEPLAN Boys were more strongly socialized and politicized than the Chicago Boys.108 The composition of the senior staff at ODEPLAN illustrates the control the Gremialista movement exercised there. In 1979, when Kast was director, his deputy, Álvaro Donoso, and the head of the planning department, Julio Dittborn,109 were both members. ODEPLAN was strong in the regional offices; José Yuraszeck, for example, headed a SERPLAC in the Eleventh Region. The following year, the Gremialistas’ presence had grown: Donoso was moved to the Ministry of Health as deputy minister,110 and Dittborn replaced him as national deputy director, while Yuraszeck became head of ODEPLAN’s research depart-

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ment.111 When Donoso returned to become director, in December 1980,112 he kept Dittborn as his deputy national director. Yuraszeck became deputy regional director; Cristián Larroulet, from the National Unity Youth Front, became head of the planning department; and Cristobal Phillippi moved from the SERPLAC in the Twelfth Region to head ODEPLAN’s technical cooperation department, which was responsible for awarding postgraduate scholarships. When the military took over the directorship between late 1981 and early 1983, they retained the Gremialistas in the senior posts, and the latter retook full control in August 1983 with Büchi’s appointment. Table 8.4 shows the composition of ODEPLAN’s executive staff from 1981 to 1985. Many were engineers and economists. In 1983, four of the nine senior managers were engineers and four were economists (excluding two additional staff, an administrator and an accountant).113 This professional profile was maintained in following years,114 except in 1985, when the post of regional deputy director was taken by an air force officer. Most of the senior staff were graduates of Catholic University and members of the Gremialista movement: of the twenty-eight management personnel from 1981 to 1985, excluding the directors, sixteen had studied at Catholic University; only seven came from the University of Chile, three from the University of Concepción, one from Santa María Technical University, and one from Adolfo Ibáñez University’s business school.115 Good professional qualifications were also important at senior management level in the SERPLACs, which played an important role in supporting the regional administrators.116 In 1983, for example, the thirteen regional directors were all university graduates: one a lawyer, one an accountant,117 and all the rest economists or engineers.118 The same profile was maintained in the successive years. Cooperation Between Catholic University and ODEPLAN Kast’s second task in ODEPLAN was to carry out preparatory studies for the economic reforms, for which he used his own staff and assistance from Catholic University. He resolutely refused to work with the University of Chile’s economics school, however, preferring Catholic University’s, into which he poured resources that allowed the latter to fund considerable expansion. Between 1974 and 1987, ODEPLAN and Catholic University signed fourteen contracts for a total US$12.7 million (see Table 8.5)119 in state funds, and they signed many more in the ensuing years. In the same period, not a single contract was signed with the University of Chile’s economics school, home to various leading opposition economists. The service contracts with Catholic University began very early, the first on February 28, 1974, for 298,500 escudos. It was for a one-month study of “national industrial concentration” to provide “an adequate quantification of said concentration in the manufacturing sector.”120 Some months later another contract was signed for four months, for 4,400,000 escudos, “to quantify the

ODEPLAN Executive Staff, 1981–1985 1981

1985 Luis S. Figueroa D.

Gen. Luis Danús C. Gen. Gastón Frez A. Gen. Sergio Pérez H. Arturo Alessandri C. Arturo Alessandri C. Julio Dittborn C. Julio Dittborn C.

Gen. Sergio Pérez H. Hernán Büchi B.

Hernán Büchi B. Luis S. Figueroa D.

Arturo Alessandri C. José Yuraszeck T.

Ximena Ramírez Ch. Ximena Ramírez Ch.

Mario Manríquez K.

Juan Valenzuela V. Jorge Valenzuela C. Rodolfo Schmidt G. Mario Manríquez K.

Aníbal Vial E.

Aníbal Vial E.

Aníbal Vial E.

Cristián Larroulet V.

Cristián Larroulet V. Gerardo Jofré M.

Gerardo Jofré M.

M. Luisa Dueer R.

M. Luisa Dueer R.

M. Luisa Dueer R.

Francisco Labbé O. Sergio Melnick I. José Yuraszeck T.

Francisco Labbé O. Francisco León D. F. Covarrubias F.

Francisco León D. Ricardo Zavala H. F. Covarrubias F.

Ricardo Silva M. Alfredo Bowen B. Gerardo Jofré M. Rodrigo Donoso S. Daniel Hernández C. M. Luisa Dueer R.

Ricardo Zavala H. Hernán Álvarez C. F. Covarruvias F. Sergio Lizasoaín M.

Gen. Sergio Valenzuela Juan Valenzuela V. Rodolfo Schmidt Luis Larraín A. Mario Manríquez K. Alejandro Rojas P. Alfredo Bowen B. Carlos Castillo E. Daniel Hernández Jorge González A. M. Luisa Dueer R.

Hernán Álvarez C. Eliana Gómez D. Sergio Lizasoaín Rodrigo Moncada continues

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Head of Social Accounting Department Head of Investment Department Regional deputy director

1984

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General counsel National deputy director Deputy director of administration Head of Research Department Head of Planning Department

Álvaro Donoso B. Gen. Luis Danús C.

1983

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Minister-director

1982

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Table 8.4

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Table 8.4

Continued 1983

1984

1985

F. Covarrubias F. J. Enrique Castro C.

J. Enrique Castro F. Pablo Ihnen D.

Pablo Ihnen D. Víctor Hassi S.

Víctor Hassi S. A. María Vivero L. Jorge Holmberg L.

Cristóbal Phillippi I. Patricio Yunis J.

Cristóbal Philippi I. Raúl Carrasco B.

Raúl Carrasco B.

Raúl Carrasco B. Jorge González A.

Raúl Carrasco B. Jorge González A.

Sara Donoso R.

Sara Donoso R.

Sara Donoso R.

Sara Donoso R.

Sara Donoso R.

Fresia Farías G.

Fresia Farías G.

Fresia Farías G.

Fresia Farías G.

Fresia Farías G.

Marcelo Astoreca

Marcelo Astoreca

Marcelo Astoreca

Marcelo Astoreca

Jaime Barros V.

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F. Covarrubias F.

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1982

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Head of Regional Support and Cooperation Department Head of International Cooperation Department Head of Personnel Department Head of Budget and Finance Department SERPLAC (Metropolitan Region/Santiago)

1981

293

Joint Academic Projects of ODEPLAN and Catholic University’s Economics Institute, 1974–1987 Amount (in Dec. 1997 pesos)

No. 14, Feb. 28, 1974 No. 25, Apr. 18, 1974 No. 37, July 12, 1974 No. 42, July 12, 1974 No. 101, Oct. 7, 1974 No. 137, June 8, 1976 No. 4, Jan. 3, 1977

1 7 6 4 No date 9 4?

761,831 15,585,938 2,702,700 5,945,940 730,213 14,298,572 —

No. 145, May 26, 1977 Decision no. 176, July 17, 1978

No date 38

3,753,366 1,208,122,507

Decree no. 500, Mar. 9, 1979 Decree no. 180, Feb. 8, 1980

4 12

3,328,132 154,742,980

Decision no. 15, Jan. 15, 1981

73

3,045,970,249

3

3,493,709

60

1,173,590,149

No. 011, Jan. 2, 1986 Decision no. 31, Dec. 28, 1987

5,633,026,286

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Source: ODEPLAN documents.

Duration (in months)

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National industrial concentration Groups in extreme poverty Capital markets Quantification of changes in social costs Groups in extreme poverty (national extension) Housing, education, health Application of fees to national irrigation (Department of Agricultural Economics) Markets for agricultural products Preparation and socioeconomic evaluation of projects (training and postgraduate program) Economic implications of antipollution measures Professional development for public sector employees (scholarships) Preparation and socioeconomic evaluation of projects (extension) General coordination of the second extreme poverty map Preparation and socioeconomic evaluation of projects (extension) Total

Number and Date of Decision

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Study Topic

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Table 8.5

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range of variation in the social cost of factors (labor, capital and dividends).”121 On May 27, 1976, a contract was signed between the substitute deputy director, Ernesto Silva, and the president of Catholic University for research on various subjects over a nine-month period.122 A year later, ODEPLAN commissioned a new study from the economics school on “futures markets for farm products,” to be undertaken by two teachers from the economics school and “a highly qualified expert in futures markets”123 from ODEPLAN. One of the most important contracts was for a study on extreme poverty, to measure its extent and scope. ODEPLAN commissioned the work a few weeks after the coup, and in the economics school the project was coordinated by Sergio Molina, a professor, a former finance minister under President Eduardo Frei Montalva, and a PDC sympathizer.124 CEPLAN was also involved.125 The aim was to produce a map of poverty, broken down on a territorial basis using data from the 1970 census, and to conclude with proposals for overcoming it.126 Originally the project was to be finished by September 1974, but it was extended by an agreement on October 1, 1974, to include data from the municipal level.127 A large number of researchers from both Catholic University’s economics school and CEPLAN worked on the study.128 It was the only university economics project that employed non-neoliberal economists. This was during the first year of the military regime, when it still tolerated them. Later, ODEPLAN developed this line of work significantly with the Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional (CASEN, Survey on National Socioeconomic Characteristics) designed to monitor the results of social policies. It worked closely with the municipalities, where the Gremialistas became influential. The main ODEPLAN contract with Catholic University’s economics school was a social evaluation of projects, with the aim of training civil servants. Although the Chicago Boys were ideologically hostile to the state, they recognized its importance in an authoritarian context, particularly in social policies and infrastructure. Though Kast did not share the vision of Spain’s technocrats on the importance of the public administration in the transformation of the economy, he did push through initiatives that would improve the efficacy of state action, particularly by training staff to manage project evaluations. He backed two major programs in public administration that sought to expand the influence of neoliberalism in the national and international academic worlds: a training program in project evaluation, and a program for graduate studies abroad, known as the “president of the republic” scholarship fund.129 The first of these programs was sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank, and was carried out by Catholic University’s economics school. It was under the management of a founding member of the Chicago Boys, Ernesto Fontaine, one of the first to obtain his doctorate at the University of Chicago and a specialist in project evaluation.130 The program’s aim was to train civil servants in project evaluation, including use of human resources and detailed monitoring of public spending and its outcomes. In this way the economic team could supervise the work of sector ministries. The project was state financed.

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The thirty-eight-month project evaluation contract was signed in 1978, and consisted of two parts. The first part involved training in preparing and evaluating projects, offering a full-time course of three classes of 45 students each, maximum, of whom up to 15 could be foreign students under scholarship.131 There would also be regional seminars, a total of twelve intensive courses over three years, with 225 students per four-week course, and a total of 300 civil servants in the regional administration. The program was nationwide. The second part was a postgraduate program in training and evaluation of socioeconomic matters, which had a Latin American component. It consisted of a sixteen-month course divided into three semesters, for a maximum of 30 full-time students a year, with a core curriculum. Over the three years of the contract, the program would train two classes of students. Applicants were required to show “adequate knowledge of economics,” and those who could not had to complete a preparatory course of seven to nine months, which gave the economics school the opportunity to indoctrinate the candidates in its prevalent monetarist thinking. The school thus expanded its role in the project and its influence in the region, training Latin American economists who would work in government or the universities, giving itself broad academic and political influence. The project evaluation contract was renewed twice during the military regime, and brought Catholic University’s economics school substantial resources: a total of US$1.5 million in the first phase.132 It was renewed for 73 months in 1981,133 with a contribution from ODEPLAN of US$2.5 million, and again in 1987 for 60 months,134 for a further US$2.9 million. Over the program’s 14-year duration, the economics school received US$6.7 million. This was an enormously important contract for Catholic University’s economics school, giving it the resources to develop an intensive program of academic work and to exercise extensive influence in the national public administration, as well as allowing it to extend its regional network at a moment when neoliberal policies were discredited by their association with military regimes. The program’s excellent performance explains why the contract has also been twice renewed since the return to democracy.135 Training the Civil Service Elite: “President of the Republic” Scholarships Kast’s third concern was to recruit and train a large number of graduates to work in the numerous advisory and executive posts in the government, to provide coherent public management and also to broaden the power base of the Gremialistas. A major initiative was the creation of the “president of the republic” scholarships for postgraduate study in European and US universities for young graduates from the public sector, the universities, and the private sector.136 Begun in 1981, the program was an important tool for the Gremialistas, serving as a means of influencing young people by helping them in their careers. Also, the Gremialistas hoped to increase their influence in universities,

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and the program allowed them to do so at other schools, particularly at the University of Chile, where their presence was small.137 The program was also important to the regime because the continuity of the economic reforms required a highly qualified professional elite in the government, the universities, and the private sector.138 Hence it was launched when the new constitution came into effect, marking the beginning of the regime’s institutionalization.139 It was timed to allow the government to have at its disposal professional and political staff trained in the best foreign universities, to extend and deepen the impact of the economic reforms, and to create a readymade and regime-friendly elite for the new political scenario following the planned public ratification in the 1988 plebiscite. The scholarship program was thus far more than a technocratic initiative; it had a strong political character. The applicants were selected with great care, with priority given to government personnel and sympathizers. Graduates with good academic backgrounds but a record of political opposition were not admitted.140 The scholarships were awarded for postgraduate studies (a master’s or a doctoral degree) for a maximum of three years,141 and the number of beneficiaries during the military regime was considerable. From 1981 to 1990 there were 479 awards, the bulk of them in the first three years (166 scholarships, 35 percent of the total) and in the final years.142 During the economic crisis, funding was scarcer; there were fewer awards in 1984 and 1985, but the figures rose again in 1986 (45 scholarships), 1987 (57), 1988 (56), and 1989 (78), with the latter year seeing the second highest number of annual awards after 1982 (87). Electoral defeat in 1988 and the certainty of regime change to a democratic government of the opposition practically paralyzed the program (there were only 20 awards in 1990), which confirmed its eminently political nature. By contrast, the first part of the project evaluation contract was renewed in 1987, with a longer-term view than just considering the results of the 1988 referendum. The scholarship recipients came from the public sector (35 percent), the universities (57 percent), and the private sector (8 percent).143 Priority was given to those in programs that would help consolidate the economic reforms, especially economics (32 percent of awards) and engineering (15 percent). Generally speaking, social sciences had low priority (16 percent): they were suspect in the regime for ideological reasons.144 There was also a strong preference in terms of destination countries, three of which received 86 percent of scholarship students: the United States (54 percent), Spain (18 percent), and the United Kingdom (14 percent). The low preference of other European countries—Germany (4 percent) and France (3 percent)—was at least partly due to their political opposition to the Chilean regime and their large exile communities. State and private agencies in several European countries gave scholarships to Chilean graduates who opposed the military regime.145

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The sponsoring university that sent the most students was the University of Chile, with 33 percent, followed by Catholic University, with 28 percent. A smaller number came from the University of Concepción and Catholic University at Valparaiso. The scholarship program allowed the government to ensure that its outgoing graduates would be well prepared to undertake the economic and political development tasks needed under General Pinochet’s leadership. Through its scholarship program, together with its research and training programs for civil servants, ODEPLAN fulfilled a crucial political function and contributed to the joint work of the Chicago Boys and the Gremialistas. In this respect, Kast’s leadership was highly effective. *

*

*

This chapter has analyzed the regime’s economic team, its academic and professional background, and its political links. The team fulfilled not simply a technical but also a political role under its leading figures, de Castro, Büchi, and Kast. The Chicago Boys’ cohesion as a team explains their dominance in the military regime. They had a well-defined program for achieving influence in various areas of government, and they successfully neutralized the academic centers that could have offered the military other options and weakened their own power. ODEPLAN played a significant political role, through the recruitment of young professionals to work in government positions, most of whom joined the Gremialistas. The ODEPLAN Boys functioned as a bridge between the economic team and Jaime Guzmán, who worked to institutionalize the regime. The next chapter will analyze a key policy of the economic team in which ODEPLAN played an active role: the privatization program.

■

Notes

1. I use the concept of legitimacy as defined by Linz (1978, 1988). 2. The annual inflation rate in 1973 was 600 percent; it had gone up to 700 percent during the last four months of the Popular Unity government; Ffrench-Davis (1999), p. 27. 3. I use the concept of economic transformation as defined by Kloten (1991). 4. An interesting story is told by Fontaine Aldunate (1988). On the military regime’s economic policy, see Büchi (1993), Castañeda (1992). Critical views are offered by Meller (1996), Foxley (1982), Ffrench-Davis (1999). 5. Drawn from Ffrench-Davis (1999), p. 264. 6. As correctly highlighted by Angell (1984). It has also been shown by Remmer (1989a). 7. I have analyzed this duality in Huneeus (1998b). For an interpretation that underestimates the political changes that occurred during the transition from dictatorship to democracy, see Moulián (1997). 8. For example, Silva (1996). 9. The centralization of authority explains why there is—strictly speaking—no corruption under authoritarian regimes, due to a weakening of the barriers between public and private interests; Lamo de Espinosa (1996).

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10. Using the concept developed by Rüschemeyer (1969). This interpretation is further developed in Chapter 1. 11. A reference to research by Arenas (1997a, 1999) and by Arenas and Bertranou (1997). 12. The concept of institutionalization in the classic sense defined by Huntington (1968) is used here. 13. My interpretation differs from Patricio Silva’s (1992) to some extent on the notion that the Gremialistas and the Chicago Boys were part of “completely different intellectual traditions.” On the contrary, I believe that they were linked by their personal experiences and common political interests. 14. These were Juan Villarzú, Andrés Sanfuentes, and Álvaro Bardón. The first was budget director until late 1974, when he resigned for political reasons, reacting to the measures taken by authorities against PDC leaders. In early October of that year, Bernardo Leighton was banned from returning to the country, and in late November the former president of the PDC, Renán Fuentealba, was expelled from the country. After working at the budget office for a few months, Sanfuentes headed the University of Chile’s school of economics. Bardón occupied several positions in the economy sector under the military regime, and withdrew from the PDC after the coup. 15. The text is printed in Centro de Estudios Públicos (1992). 16. It was funded by the US Agency for International Development and its objective was to improve research programs and enlarge the faculty at the economics school, thus supporting economic modernization and the country’s development. It has been studied in detail in Valdés (1989). Quite informative, including interviews with main figures and explaining the conflicts between Chicago Boys, university authorities, and Alessandri supporters, is Vial (1999). 17. They were the monetarist alternative to the “structuralist” approach that had dominated the study of the Chilean economy since the great 1929 crisis; its main elements have been described in Grundwald (1961). Also see Montecinos (1998). The classic study of the Chilean economy from a “structuralist” perspective is Pinto (1957). 18. Julio Chaná, a minister under Jorge Alessandri’s government, who had signed an agreement with the University of Chicago. 19. Vial (1999), pp. 180–181. The problems had started in August 1962, when Chaná censored an article criticizing Alessandri’s economic policy published in the weekly Ercilla, August 15, 1962; Vial (1999), p. 177. 20. The Gremialista movement presented fifty-nine student candidates. Among them were some leaders who would become active political figures under the military regime, such as Carlos Bombal (law), who was a high-ranking leader of the National Youth Secretariat in the 1970s and then mayor of Santiago from 1983 to 1987, and Cristián Larroulet (economics), who was an ODEPLAN Boy and later chief of staff for finance minister Hernán Büchi. The list of professors and student candidates is included in the Gremialista document “Listo de candidatos Gremialistas.” 21. “The university reform process and the aggressive presence of the left spreading throughout the country forced Catholic University economists to first ‘encapsulate,’ and then project themselves with equal energy when conditions were favorable”; Fontaine Aldunate (1988), pp. 30–31. 22. De Castro was invited to work on Alessandri’s economic program, but did not share the leadership’s views and went on to become distanced from Alessandri supporters, believing that they still followed traditional economic thinking. Jorge Alessandri did not like de Castro and those working with him, whom he criticized for their ideological rigidity and their rejection of the state’s role. For more on these differences, see the chapter “Alessandri and De Castro” in Boetsch (1998), pp. 179–190; Boetsch was a loyal Alessandri supporter.

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23. Cristi and Ruiz (1992), p. 106. Soto (2003) is an interesting study on the Chicago Boys’ cooperation with El Mercurio. 24. They met while teaching introductory courses in the late 1960s at the national manufacturers’ association (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril). Related by Fernando Léniz in Finis Terrae University (1990). 25. Former finance minister Sergio Molina, Eduardo García, and Osvaldo Súnkel, among others. 26. They did not have enough votes to get Sergio de Castro elected as director, and fearing that structuralist economist Eduardo García might take the position, Kast persuaded Jorge Cauas to be the candidate, and he thus became director until 1972, according to Vial (1999), pp. 219–220. 27. It was no coincidence that the first Gremialista to become president of Catholic University’s student federation, FEUC, was economics student Ernesto Illanes (1968–1969), who had earlier been president of the economics student association. 28. The Central Bank had sent young economists who worked in that institution to pursue studies, on the initiative of research department director Ricardo FfrenchDavis, who had a doctorate from the University of Chicago. 29. For example, Dominique Hachette, who was the director of Catholic University’s school of economics at the time of the coup. 30. He stayed on until December 1976, when he was appointed ambassador to the United States. Undurraga Vergara (1995) is an interesting study. 31. His biography is provided by journalists Osorio and Cabezas (1995), chap. 2. His father was José Piñera, a distinguished member of the Christian Democratic Party who worked closely with Eduardo Frei Montalva as his administration’s ambassador to the United Nations and Belgium. 32. He had previously been minister of the General Secretariat; toward the end of the regime, he was ambassador to the United States; and later he became foreign affairs minister, in Pinochet’s last cabinet. 33. “Speaking of my section, the manager of the government development corporation [CORFO] in New York does not in any way fit the type of person we should have in that post. . . . In Washington we should have a group of people who are capable of handling the labor, financial, academic, journalistic and political fronts, in addition to the State department, which is the traditional diplomatic front, with very good, friendly, and personally respectful insight”; AHJG, sess. 177A, December 11, 1974. 34. AHJG, sess. 177A, December 11, 1974. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., sess. 187A, April 4, 1975. 37. Ibid., sess. 193A, April 23, 1975. 38. The finance minister’s character is clearly portrayed by a sympathetic author: “[De Castro] works alone or with a small group; by nature, he does not listen to opinions that do not interest him, and decides for himself according to his own judgment of the situation. He is loyal and considerate with his subordinate staff and shows leadership in his group”; Fontaine Aldunate (1988), p. 118. Osorio and Cabezas (1995), chap. 1, provide a description from a different perspective. 39. Exposición sobre el estado de la Hacienda Pública, presented by Sergio de Castro, January 1978, p. 6. 40. See biographic data supplied by Osorio and Cabezas (1995), chap. 1. 41. He belatedly finished his doctoral thesis during the Popular Unity government. 42. He kept his position on the boards of the Pacific Steel Company and Endesa while he was undersecretary, and was appointed president of the board of Endesa in 1981; Endesa (1982), p. 10. 43. These variables in public finances—income from privatizations and high copper prices—can help to clarify why Büchi’s management was not as successful as the

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right’s official propaganda paints it. In fact, the structural balance shows a 1 percent deficit in 1988, accounting for the impact of election campaign expenditures, and was somewhat lower than in 1989, when the government supported his candidacy for president. See Aspectos macroeconómicos (2000), tab. 1. 44. There is an informative book on his political career: Lavín (1986). 45. Sergio de Castro was born in 1930 and Miguel Kast in 1948. 46. Lavín (1986), p. 65. 47. A clear example of Kast’s sectarianism was his neutralization of the two academic centers that did not follow neoliberal thinking. This is recalled by Vial (1999), p. 250. 48. Sergio de Castro recalls the uproar associated with Piñera’s appointment: “Piñera was going to be appointed to the Economics ministry, which caused a grassroots rebellion against him, since he was a Christian Democrat. De Castro spoke to Sergio Fernández, then to Pinochet, and that is how he got appointed to the Labor ministry”; Finis Terrae University (1994), p. 53. 49. See the interview by M. Angelica Bulnes: “José Piñera: dar un golpe de timón, crear esquemas nuevos,” Qué Pasa, December 27, 1979, pp. 6–11. 50. Piñera joined the Independent Democratic Union after Guzmán’s murder in 1991, and was elected municipal councilor in Conchalí (Santiago) in the 1992 elections, but withdrew from the party after a few months. He ran as an independent candidate in the 1993 presidential election, drawing 6.2 percent of the vote. 51. Also attending the meetings was Juan Braun, who would later become one of the top executives of the Cruzat group, and Christian Democrat José Luis Zabala, vice president of research at the Central Bank. Cruzat is the owner of the conglomerate that bears his name; Álvaro Bardón was director of the economics department at the University of Chile’s western campus, and would become president of the Central Bank and later of the state-owned Banco del Estado. See Fontaine Aldunate (1988), p. 19. Undurraga was later manager of the CORFO office in New York. The most senior of them was Sergio de Castro. Only a few of the economists who had worked on “The Brick” were aware of this tie to the navy. Another version, from Fontaine Aldunate (1988), former editor of the newspaper El Mercurio, places more emphasis on the role played by the navy. 52. Using the concepts as defined in the 1960s and early 1970s on the two economic approaches; Grundwald (1961). 53. It is so stated by Juan Carlos Méndez, a Gremialista economist who would later become budget director; Finis Terrae University (1994), p. 6. 54. Centro de Estudios Públicos (1992), chap. K, pp. 160ff. 55. In Centro de Estudios Públicos (1992), chap. C, “Price Policy,” pp. 89–90, the suggestion is to “accelerate the anti-monopoly law, so that any possible understanding among producers to decrease competition is drastically punished.” This suggestion translated into the enactment of a decree law on free competition in October 1973, before the Chicago Boys took over the management of the economy. 56. “The anti-trust policy should initially include drastic measures in some cases of existing monopolies that do not have an economic justification, taking actions leading to the breaking up of a company into several competitive units. . . . [I]n the case of glass, mills and noodles, steps should also be taken to separate the shares that are in the hands of a single group, which allows for the creation of trusts”; Centro de Estudios Públicos (1992), p. 90. 57. Centro de Estudios Públicos (1992), p. 134. 58. Ibid. 59. “A mechanism for workers to accumulate wealth will be created. They will become, in time, one of the main sources of savings to finance investments, attaining a major role as capital owners; if this possibility materializes, tensions between labor and

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capital could disappear or decrease, since workers would also own important capital resources”; ibid., p. 134. 60. The concept of synchronization is analyzed in Chapter 1. 61. Política y Espíritu no. 357, 1975, p. 11. The report was finalized in June 1975. 62. Política y Espíritu no. 357, 1975, p. 20. 63. CEPLAN was founded in 1971 by university president Fernando Castillo Velasco in the context of the university reform process, and its first director was Alejandro Foxley, a chemical engineer from the Catholic University of Valparaiso with a doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin. He had headed the global planning division of the government development corporation, CORFO, from 1967 to 1970, and was a member of the Christian Democratic Party. See Krebs, Muñoz, and Valdivieso (1988). 64. The cardinal’s decision was triggered by the dismissal of the vice president for economic and administrative affairs, Jorge Awad, and the director-general of the same unit, Reinaldo Sapag, both Christian Democrats who had refused to appoint Gremialista representatives, in October 1974, by order of the military-appointed president (see Chapter 2). 65. Memorandum, December 30, 1974, to the heads of academic units, signed by Jorge Claro, acting vice president for economic and administrative affairs, and Fernando Martínez, academic vice president. 66. Undated memorandum. Alejandro Foxley estimated it had been underbudgeted by 5.9 million escudos (1975 currency) (US$1.64 million), while a senior staff member in the university’s administration estimated a slightly lower figure, of 4.48 million escudos (US$1.33 million). 67. Message dated January 14, 1975, to the academic vice president, signed by the directors of the art, social work, sociology, education, theology, and political science schools and CEPLAN; and another message signed on the same day by the directors of the psychology, philosophy, journalism, and engineering departments. 68. Data taken from a memorandum written by one of the faculty members who attended a meeting of the board, “Reunión del Consejo Consultivo efectuada el día miércoles 22 de enero de 1975.” 69. The expulsion was proposed by Miguel Kast, deputy director of ODEPLAN, as pointed out by Vial (1999), p. 250. 70. They were funded by European governmental development aid agencies and by the Ford Foundation. 71. In addition, Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, Óscar Muñoz, Nicolas Flaño, José Pablo Arellano, René Cortazár, Pablo Piñera, and other economists took part. 72. CIEPLAN members took over management of the economy under the first postregime democratic government, led by finance minister Foxley, budget director Arellano, and labor minister Cortázar, all of whom were CIEPLAN Boys. CIEPLAN is covered in depth in Chapter 13. See also Silva (1992). 73. Álvaro Bardón, director of the western-campus school of economics at the time of the military coup, and Andrés Sanfuentes stood out. 74. Finance minister Sergio Molina was dean of economic sciences; Edgardo Boeninger was budget director and succeeded Molina at the head of this body and in economic sciences. They had both worked at the budget office under the Alessandri administration, as director and deputy director, respectively. Carlos Massad, president of the Central Bank, and Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, director of research at the Central Bank under the Frei administration, were also professors. 75. Generals Gastón Frez and Luis Danús were students at the economics school before the coup; they were later joined by various officers who were part of the economic team, such as Brigadier Manuel Concha, who became minister of finance.

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76. Roberto Zahler, Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, Carlos Massad, and Dominique Hachette, among others. 77. The faculty included Andrés Passicot, minister of economy for a few months in 1982–1983; Álvaro Bardón, who would later become head of the Central Bank; as well as Roberto Zahler, Vitorio Corbo, Carlos Massad, Cristián Eyzaguirre, Mario Zañartu, and other prominent professionals. 78. Attorney Julio Tapia Falk, adviser to General Gustavo Leigh, who had a brief and troubled time as president and was forced to resign due to irregular procedures in student admissions, was the exception. 79. Attorney José Florencio Guzmán and economist Mario Zañartu. 80. Hugo Lavados, Jorge Rodríguez, and four young members of the academy. The former two had master’s degrees from North American universities other than the University of Chicago. Rodríguez led a major international project on income distribution supported by the Inter-American Development Bank. 81. Vitorio Corbo went to Catholic University, while Roberto Zahler and Carlos Massad would later leave the economics school. 82. Colonels Gastón Frez and Luis Danús, who had been economics students at the University of Chile, stood out. 83. In June 1986, thirteen of eighteen company presidents were army officers, two were navy, and only three were civilians; of seventeen vice presidents, seven were army, two were navy, one was air force, two were Carabineros, and five were civilians; of eighty-nine board members, fifteen were army, four were navy, two were air force, two were Carabineros, and sixty-six were civilians. 84. See the interview with Sergio de Castro in Finis Terrae University (1994), transcript of video no. 20. 85. An institutional history was commissioned by CORFO: Ortega Martínez (1989). 86. The list can be found in Hachette and Lüders (1992). 87. ODEPLAN’s extensive and detailed presentation was made by economist Tomas Lackington, who pointed out to Pinochet that it would be included in CORFO’s project registry. The account of his presentation and the debate that followed are in AHJG, sess. 176, December 3, 1974. 88. In the early years, there was close cooperation with the Brazilian military regime, including advice to the DINA; Whelan (1993), p. 622. 89. Pinochet criticized him harshly but did not reverse the decision; AHJG, sess. 200A, June 6, 1975; sess. 201A, June 6, 1975. Soza was removed from the post a few weeks later under accusations of betraying trust, such as buying Banco de Chile shares, a bank that had been reprivatized through CORFO. 90. I have examined this in Huneeus (2000b), pp. 461–501. 91. AHJG, sess. 3, September 16, 1973. 92. AHJG, sess. 1, September 13, 1973. Apart from appointments in the Foreign Affairs Ministry processed by the junta in the first few months, the only other analyzed case was ODEPLAN, which shows how important the national planning office was to the junta. 93. He was on very good terms with finance minister Admiral Gotuzzo, who had been his classmate at the Naval School, a circumstance that facilitated close cooperation between the two public agencies. Biographic data provided in Fontaine Aldunate (1988). Kelly explained his role in ODEPLAN, including his relationships with Miguel Kast and other Gremialistas, in the interviews with Patria Arancibia Clavel (2005). 94. Article 1, clause 1, of Law no. 16635, July 14, 1967. 95. Article 2 of Law no. 16635. 96. Article 3 of Law no. 16635.

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97. The latter carried out the important function of heading the regional planning offices (oficinas regionales de planificación [ORPLACs]), which would later be renamed regional planning secretariats (secretarías regionales de planificación [SERPLACs]) under the military regime. The law established four ORPLACs, calling for a director position for each; the 1974 administrative reform increased the number of directors to thirteen by the creation of the thirteen regions. 98. The staff comprised 150 people at the executive, professional, and technical levels, with only 15 in the latter category; 46 were administrative staff. 99. According to the information provided in the article “ODEPLAN: Radiografía de un Centro de Estudios,” El Mercurio, January 21, 1979, pp. C8–C9. 100. Since its creation, ODEPLAN had worked closely with CORFO, an agency that was in charge of executing the entrepreneurial state’s large projects. For example, Eduardo García was deputy director, Alejandro Foxley was division head from 1967 to 1970, engineer Fernán Ibáñez took charge of the ORPLAC in the city of Arica, and attorney Florencio Ceballos took charge of the ORPLAC in Antofagasta. 101. ODEPLAN’s influence was interrupted during the Popular Unity government, not just because the political strand of the economic leadership was different, but also because direction of this area was concentrated in a single ministry, Economy. It recovered its influence under the military regime and Roberto Kelly’s management. 102. His death in 1984 promoted a nonpolitical image of Kast, disseminated by the Gremialista movement. His religiousness and his supposed desire to become a “saint” have been emphasized; Lavín (1986), p. 101. 103. There is general information on this in “ODEPLAN: Radiografía de un Centro de Estudios,” El Mercurio, January 21, 1979, pp. C8–C9. It was no coincidence that it was termed an “academic center,” because it did in fact carry out work on various public policy issues, directly or by commissioning it to Catholic University professors. 104. This function was established by economy minister Fernando Léniz. 105. Gremialista members complained of being virtually “persecuted”; see “Las realizaciones de ODEPLAN cuando era ‘el cerebro’ de las políticas Gobierno,’” La Segunda, May 24, 1984, p. 2. Jarpa had a strong influence on ODEPLAN because it functioned administratively through the Interior Ministry and the minister had to sign its decrees, since it did not legally have ministerial status. 106. There are plenty of examples: José Yuraszeck went to work in Coyhaique, Pablo Ihnen in Coquimbo, and Cristóbal Philippi in Punta Arenas, according to Lavín (1986), p. 56. 107. Ibid., pp. 53–58. 108. I call them “ODEPLAN Boys” due to their common loyalties and political sense. I have analyzed them in detail in Huneeus (2000b). 109. He would later become president of the Independent Democratic Union and a congressional deputy. 110. Interior Ministry Decree no. 1422, December 19, 1979. Dittborn had joined ODEPLAN in 1975. He was appointed head of sector coordination three years later; Interior Ministry Decree no. 842, September 28, 1978. 111. Only chief legal counsel Arturo Alessandri Cohn, a University of Chile lawyer who was a nephew of former president Jorge Alessandri, was not a member of the Gremialista movement. 112. He remained there until late 1981. 113. The head of personnel and the head of budget and finance. 114. The following were engineers: the national deputy director, José Yuraszeck; the administrative deputy director, Mario Manríque; the head of the investments department, Francisco León Délano; and the head of the support department, Juan Enrique Castro. The following were economists: the regional deputy director, Francisco Covarrubias; the head of the planning department, Gerardo Jofré; the head of the re-

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search department, Ricardo Silva Mena; and the head of the international technical cooperation department, Raúl Carrasco. 115. Biographical data from ODEPLAN. 116. Each SERPLAC had a staff of eighteen to twenty-three people. Their function was to coordinate the regional ministerial services; see the interview with Roberto Kelly in “El Rol de ODEPLAN en el desarrollo,” El Mercurio, May 8, 1977. 117. For the First Region (Tarapacá) and the Ninth Region (Araucanía). 118. There were agricultural engineers in regions where agriculture was an important activity. 119. December 1997 value, with the exchange rate at 445 pesos per US dollar. 120. Agreement signed by Captain Roberto Kelly, director of ODEPLAN, and Dominique Hachette, director of the University of Chile’s economics school. The agreement was approved by Resolution no. 14, February 28, 1974. 121. ODEPLAN, Control de convenios suscritos por ODEPLAN. 122. Ibid., July 13, 1976. 123. Agreement between ODEPLAN and Catholic University, clause 3. The letter from the economics school, signed by its director, Juan Ignacio Varas, is addressed to national deputy director Miguel Kast, and has the handwritten note “Kast’s OK urgent,” proving that Varas kept a “direct line” to Kast. Resolution no. 145, May 26, 1977, approved the payment. 124. Molina was hired by the economics school during the Allende government as a gesture from the Chicago Boys toward the structuralist economists at the University of Chile, where he was dean of the economics faculty. During the apertura, Jorge Cauas and Osvaldo Súnkel were hired, among others. 125. Krebs, Muñoz, and Valdivieso (1988), pp. 1145–1146. 126. “Bases para el convenio sobre Proyecto de Pobreza entre ODEPLAN Instituto de Economía,” mimeo, n.d. 127. Control de convenios suscritos por ODEPLAN, November 21, 1974. 128. The former contributed three professors with half-time dedication to the project; three assistants with exclusive dedication, all of them for seven-month periods; and two economics professors. Ernesto Silva and Sergio de Castro were hired for four months, from October 1973 to January 1974. CEPLAN would assign a researcher, assistants, a full-time graduate, and a part-time assistant; “Bases del convenio.” 129. These programs have continued even since the return to democracy. 130. Fontaine had worked at the Organization of American States, in the field of social program evaluation, in the early 1970s, when he left Chile after Allende’s victory. 131. Decree no. 176, July 17, 1978. 132. Resolution no. 176, July 17, 1978. 133. ODEPLAN Resolution no. 15, January 15, 1981. 134. ODEPLAN Resolution no. 31, January 28, 1987. 135. It is included in the official history produced for Catholic University’s centennial celebration, which shows how important the program was; Krebs, Muñoz, and Valdivieso (1988). 136. Decree with Force of Law no. 22, 1981. In 1997 an evaluation of the “President of the Republic” scholarship program was carried out by the International Cooperation Agency (Agencia de Cooperación Internacional [AGCI]) and Fundación Chile: Análisis y propuestas programa de becas DFL 22 de 1981 MIDEPLAN y AGCI: programa de perfeccionamiento en el extranjero, AGCI–Fundación Chile, n.d. A list of students whose files were kept at the AGCI is included. I have examined the files kept at the Ministry of Planning and Cooperation (Ministerio de Planificación y Cooperación [MIDEPLAN], which succeeded ODEPLAN), and their number is considerably smaller than the total number of scholarship recipients, because the files of those receiving

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scholarships are missing, clearly for political reasons. The files cover scholarships awarded up to 1996, and the source is a survey of professionals who have returned to the country. I have not analyzed this report due to the small number of cases, and because it does not specify who received scholarships under the authoritarian regime. 137. The program was initially conceived of by Kast in collaboration with Catholic University’s school of economics, and an agreement was signed in 1980 to fund training for the school’s participants. The political objective of the agreement is revealed in the pompous title it received: “Program to Perfect Professionals Working in the Public Sector (Scholarships),” Decree no. 180, February 8, 1980. Funding was set at US$250,000, of which US$21,000 was marked for training in Chile, that is, at the economics school. ODEPLAN files. 138. The scholarship recipient had to commit to return to the country once his studies were completed, to work either in the government or at the university for a term twice as long as his stay abroad. This ensured that the recipient would have a job, and gave him a chance to be promoted within public administration. 139. Since its creation, ODEPLAN had been an intermediary, through its international aid department, for scholarships awarded by foreign governments and international institutions, and thus had some historical legitimacy to promote this program. 140. Political control was smart, since this was an authoritarian regime, not a totalitarian one. That is why scholarships were also awarded to a few opponents, in the hopes that they could evolve in their political positions and become regime supporters once they returned to the country. 141. Of scholarship recipients, 43 percent pursued master’s degrees, 41 percent pursued doctoral degrees, and 16 percent pursued specialized courses. 142. ODEPLAN (1990). 143. The public agencies that sent the most scholarship recipients abroad were ODEPLAN (23 percent), the Health Ministry (18 percent), the Education and Defense Ministries (14 percent each), the Interior Ministry (10 percent), and the Finance and Economy Ministries (7 percent and 6 percent, respectively). The government awarded a total of 167 scholarships from 1981 to 1990. 144. There were very few scholarships for basic sciences (6 percent) or natural sciences (9 percent), unlike health, which accounted for 16 percent of the graduatelevel scholarships, a figure that makes sense considering the interest in reforming the health system through the establishment of ISAPRES. 145. West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation awarded five scholarships to Chilean professionals every two years, which were given to young Christian Democrat professionals.

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9 Privatization: The Economic Policy of the Authoritarian Regime

The Pinochet regime introduced an ambitious program of economic reforms inspired by neoliberal ideas. Analyses to date have focused on the technical aspects of these ideas, ignoring their enormous importance in terms of power and influence, which became apparent in the regime’s political development and after the military returned to their barracks.1 Earlier chapters have explored structures and elites in the political realm (the Gremialistas) and the economic realm (the Chicago Boys and the ODEPLAN Boys). This chapter provides an analysis of the economic reforms themselves, focusing on the privatizations. Examining the privatizations is very important, because they became fundamental components of the regime’s economic plans, whose purpose was to redefine the relationship between the state and society, altering the foundations of the economy. The objective was to ensure that the state no longer participated in production-related activities, which would generate conditions favorable to the appearance of a powerful business class, which in turn would form the basis of a well-functioning private sector. The political component was very visible in the lack of transparency that accompanied these changes, making it possible for senior executives of the main public companies to personally benefit from them, becoming controlling partners when the companies were taken over by the private sector. Those aspects have meant that the privatizations that occurred during the authoritarian regime represent a stain on the neoliberal economic reforms introduced by the Chicago Boys. The economy’s robustness in the late 1980s and 1990s has hidden this weakness, granting the privatization process a certain ex post facto legitimation. This chapter highlights two privatizations. The first is of the pension system and the role of the private pension fund administrators—the AFPs, “the three letters that revolutionized America,” as the pompous title of a book prepared by the funds’ executors proclaimed.2 The second is of the electric power system, a strategic one within the economy, which gave rise to private companies that 307

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have grown enormous in Chile and abroad, particularly the powerful Enersis group, an active economic and political leader in the 1990s.3 The two privatizations were closely linked. The end of the traditional distributive pension system, which was based on intergenerational solidarity and state support, significantly weakened the welfare state that existed at that time in Chile. While in the past, social functions were assumed by the state to ensure the integration of middle- and lowincome sectors into the political system, the Chicago Boys inverted this relationship: individuals had to directly assume responsibility through pension payments to build enough capital to have the resources necessary for their future pensions. This change shattered one of the pillars of Chile’s political development, the institutionalization of social citizenship, which was ahead of its time4 and ahead of political citizenship, and which was enshrined considerably later, in the 1950s and 1960s.5 Those who advocated privatization of the pension system sought to produce major and long-term political consequences. Creation of the private pension fund administrators also came with a short-term objective: to help privatize public firms, since these funds served to purchase their shares, which turned the AFPs into influential players in the privatization process and made them the largest owners of the newly privatized companies. One of the most documented studies of the privatizations concluded that the AFPs purchased 25 percent of the equity of privatized public companies, making this “the main way of financing the privatizations carried out in Chile after 1985.”6 A third aspect that is essential to analyze regarding the AFPs has been neglected to date: the fact that the AFPs’ new owners gained significant political and economic clout, as they decided who held the controlling interest in the companies whose shares they purchased. This political effect was aided by CORFO’s decision that no single investor could own more than 25 percent of a privatized firm. The AFPs worked together on the strategy of minority shareholders winning the majority on boards, thus taking control of them. According to political scientists Harvey Feigenbaum and Jeffrey Henig, privatizations may involve systemic political objectives—that is, they may represent attempts to secure favorable results for the government in the long or short run, as when they tilt public opinion in a given direction during congressional elections.7 This concept serves to clarify the nature of Chile’s 1980s privatizations, which had obvious political objectives. The first was shortterm: to regain the political initiative and unite businesspeople behind the government during the grave economic crisis of 1982–1983 and to win their trust, given insecurity about the continuity of the economic system in the midst of political instability.8 General Pinochet needed support from business to face the 1988 plebiscite. The new owners actively campaigned for the “yes” vote and have supported right-wing parties in each election since 1989.9 Privatizations also had a medium- and long-term objective: dismantling the entrepreneurial state to reduce the government’s influence on the economy,

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turning private companies into the main players in the economy and giving them much more control. This objective grew more important in light of the possibility that an elected government would follow Pinochet should he lose the 1988 plebiscite.10 The sale of firms was not interrupted by the 1988 electoral campaign or afterward, but rather accelerated, so that privatization would be completed before the military returned to their barracks and could not be reversed by an elected government. Another major justification for the privatizations was the conviction of right-wing segments that private property constituted the fundamental principle on which the economy, the state, and freedom were all based. This view of the role of private property arose in reaction to the traumatic effects of the agrarian reform of the Eduardo Frei Montalva government (1964–1970) and the Salvador Allende government’s policy of interventions and requisitions; as authorities pursued that policy, businesses fell under state control. The opposition to both governments to a large degree was based on this defense of private property. After the 1980s, other economic justifications appeared to support privatization, among them the argument that privately owned firms were more efficient than public ones. The regime’s economists had an idealized view of the market and the role of business, thinking that selling off public companies would serve as a powerful stimulation to both. However, this argument was not central to the decision to sell. The priorities were political.

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The Three Stages of Privatization Policy

After the coup, the new rulers wanted to return the more than 300 companies taken over by the Popular Unity government to their former owners.11 As not all the former owners could resume the management of their companies, many had to be reprivatized. This process was carried out by CORFO, the state development corporation, during the 1970s, and is usually referred to as the “first round” of privatization.12 There was a second phase of reprivatization in the 1980s, when the state put the companies that it controlled or had taken over during the 1982–1983 financial crisis (belonging to conglomerates headed by Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat) up for sale. Another stage of privatization also began in the 1980s, with the sale of public companies created by the state through CORFO in strategic economic sectors: telecommunications (Entel), electricity (Endesa), steel (Pacific Steel Company, Compañía de Acero del Pacífico [CAP]), petrochemicals (Soquimich), and others. This initiative made way for creation of the entrepreneurial state.13 Of the main CORFO companies, only the National Petroleum Industry (Empresa Nacional del Petróleo (Enap) was not privatized, reflecting opposition from the navy. A third stage involved the incorporation of the private sector into social welfare programs, giving rise to private, profit-seeking pension fund adminis-

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trators,14 and, in the healthcare sector, private health insurance providers (under the group ISAPRES) that coexisted with the public healthcare system, which also underwent reforms.15 The purpose of these policies was to eliminate the welfare state, which was based on laws dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century. So far, the military regime’s privatizations have been studied from the economic perspective,16 with emphasis on how firms were sold, the price paid by purchasers, and company efficiency compared to performance under the previous system of ownership. While this is an essential perspective, it is not enough to explain the complex nature of this major institutional change. Profound political aspects, such as objectives, how sales were resolved, the procedures used, and the influence of the decisionmaking system imposed in the authoritarian context, especially the lack of transparency, also need to be analyzed. The conditions in which privatizations take place depend to a large degree on the kind of regime, and they occur differently depending on whether the country is under authoritarian or democratic rule. In democracy, the decisionmaking system is complex, with participation from multiple actors and with extensive input from various sources, which underscores the importance of transparency and provides for a distinction between public and private interests, especially if the process is done correctly, without abuse. Employees of publicly owned companies are often encouraged to buy shares, and they usually buy a small percentage, to prevent senior executives from assuming controlling interest.17 In Chile’s case, the authoritarian context eliminated the barriers between state and private individuals’ interests, giving priority to the sale of companies without the measures necessary to avoid abuse. The conditions for sale were decided by the same people behind the privatizations themselves, and these same people were able to purchase large packages of shares at very advantageous prices. The neoliberal ideology of the Chicago Boys was also influential, in that they had a very idealistic view of the market and businesspeople and neglected to create safeguards that would prevent private interests from unduly taking advantage of the privatizations. Some businesspeople worked as advisers to the economic regulators or had personal relationships with them, which gave them access to inside information from within the government,18 or allowed them to buy companies cheaply, under conditions unfavorable to their legitimate owners, as occurred with the Panal textile company.19 The authoritarian context cleared the way for cooperation between economic-team personnel, company executives, other businesspeople, and investors, and the privatizations were undertaken without consideration for transparency. Important figures within the military regime later became prosperous company owners or senior executives in firms privatized by the government, or both. A revolving-door relationship developed between public and private sectors that gave rise to patronage and exploitation by unethical individuals.20 Senior executives in public firms promptly became controlling part-

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ners when they were privatized. This procedure, questioned at the time by the opposition, reduced the legitimacy of the privatizations. An analysis of the biographies of certain executives illustrates this situation. Julio Ponce Lerou,21 one of the main controllers of the petrochemical company Soquimich, was a forestry engineer who started out working in the Agriculture Ministry after the coup, first as the government’s representative in the Agricultural and Ranching Service (Servicio Agrícolay Ganadero [SAG]), then later as executive director of the National Forestry Corporation (Corporación Nacional Forestal [CONAF]) and director of the Forestry Institute (Instituto Forestal). He then became business manager for CORFO, a key post in the privatizations, and went on to join the management of Soquimich as its sale was launched. At Soquimich, he directed the privatization of this important company using the mechanisms of “popular capitalism,” and eventually ended up president. He also served on the boards of directors of other public firms, among them Enami, Iansa, and Endesa.22 Another major case was that of an engineer, José Yuraszeck, who moved from director of municipal planning in the regional coordination secretariat (SERPLAC) for the Eleventh Region to ODEPLAN, which in 1983 took him into the general manager’s office of Chilectra, the main electric power distribution company. He headed Chilectra’s modernization, then privatized the company, becoming the main beneficiary of this process. Other privatizations strongly affected public opinion. Among them was the steel company CAP, where top executives under the leadership of Roberto de Andraca had modernized the firm in line with the principles of market economics adopted by the new rulers after September 11, 1973. While the company was still state-owned, executives had access to extensive insider information, which made clear the advantage of buying stock when shares became available. The shares at that time were of little value, allowing the executives to become controlling partners, along with foreign investors who were invited to participate in the privatization. Since the return to democracy, CAP has continued under Andraca and is developing well.23 This element of enormous personalization and patronage typical of privatizations did not infect the military. Army officers in the government’s economic sector and CORFO did not reap benefits from their positions, as they did not participate in the sale of stock or become members of the boards of privatized companies.24 Neither the state nor consumers received due consideration, because the change in company ownership did not involve the creation of solid regulatory statutes or institutional conditions to promote competition and protect consumers’ rights.25 The main weakness of these privatizations was the lack of transparency, which has been recognized by analysts.26 Privatization was based on general decisions made by a small number of CORFO staff, who could act with enormous autonomy and personal discretion, without even writing down the reasons

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behind their decisions. Dominique Hachette and Rolf Lüders found no CORFO documents to reconstruct the criteria used to determine the sale of companies, and had to rely on verbal information provided by a senior manager,27 according to whom the minister of finance, Hernán Büchi, who had assumed this post in February 1985, introduced the privatization program, creating a “committee for the sale of shares” three months later, which consisted of the deputy director of ODEPLAN,28 his chief of staff,29 and the staff of the minister of economy, along with senior CORFO executives.30 This tiny team received support from a “normalization office” that CORFO had set up in the 1970s. This office, consisting of four professionals, three secretaries, and an administrative assistant, and headed by a military officer in active service with an economics degree from the University of Chile,31 was hired to carry out the ambitious and complex “second round” of the privatization process. This very small group of people issued general guidelines for the privatizations, delegating their actual implementation to senior executives in each company32 without monitoring their management, so in practice the abuses were tolerated. This tolerance generated considerable personal benefits.

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The Political Objectives Behind Privatization

An examination of privatizations in Chile during the 1980s reveals that they did not reflect strictly economic considerations. The privatization process began while the effects of the serious 1982–1983 crisis were still being felt. The country lacked the economic resources to buy shares, and had to invent mechanisms to finance the full cost of purchasing a property. The economic crisis triggered a political one, involving intense social conflict, which created a climate of insecurity that discouraged foreign investors. The opposition criticized the privatizations for their lack of transparency, warning they would be reviewed when the country returned to democratic rule, and denounced the fact that the resources so generated were being used to finance populist political campaigns to strengthen Pinochet’s candidacy in the upcoming plebiscite on the succession. These adverse economic and political conditions influenced the low sales prices of companies, with the state receiving less than the real value of telecommunications, electric, steel, and petrochemical companies.33 This is particularly clear if the privatizations from this period are compared with those of the 1990s, when the economy was booming and the participation of foreign companies was sought, in a climate of more transparency and without senior executives being involved in purchases. While the privatizations of the 1980s contributed US$1.146 billion to state coffers, those of the Concertación government (1990–1999) contributed more than double this amount, US$2.519 billion, even in a context where there were fewer state companies and public works concessions on offer.34

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Nor were there solid economic justifications for privatization when the efficiency achieved by public companies prior to privatization is considered. They were modernized according to the new economic program, acting as private firms and being required to finance themselves.35 The companies’ efficiency has been scrutinized in several studies. Chilean engineers Tomislav Mandakovic and Marcos Lima concluded that the privatized companies did not perform better than they had after modernization while still owned by CORFO, in the mid-1970s.36 Hachette and Lüders reached a similar conclusion, indicating that although it was true that “private sector firms are in some ways more profitable than state companies, the differences, while statistically significant, are small.”37 This was because the companies were operating in an institutional framework “almost identical to that of private companies.”38 As a result, the fundamental factor influencing efficiency is not ownership, but rather the institutional parameters in which the company must operate.39 The government didn’t have a clearly articulated privatization program, probably because its real objectives could not be explicitly stated due to the rejection they would have provoked among military and opposition alike. On the contrary, there were scattered initiatives, according to the priorities of the executives in each firm. CORFO’s board also passed some rather erratic resolutions, changing the conditions of sales that were already under way to sell some companies at any price, despite the knowledge that this would lead to low prices. An analysis of CORFO board decisions illustrates the lack of a consistent privatization policy and, as a result, the tendency to improvise as the process advanced. For example, on July 2, 1986,40 the CORFO board authorized the sale of 49 percent of the Chilectra holding company (which included Chilectra Metropolitana, Quinta Región, and Generación) and of Entel and Soquimich; weeks later, it changed the criteria, increasing the authorization to 65 percent of Chilectra Metropolitana and Quinta Región;41 that same day,42 it authorized the direct sale of shares to these two companies’ employees, along with those of CAP, thus eliminating the public sale. Months later, in mid-1987, it decided that Chilectra Metropolitana employees could purchase up to 3 percent of shares;43 however, this percentage was promptly raised to 10 percent, during a time frame of June 22 to August 5;44 a week later, the deadline was extended to August 13.45 These changes, especially in the case of Chilectra, reflect executives’ interest in taking more time to gain control of the firm. In many cases, shares were sold at an artificially low price, as occurred with CAP, for which 61 percent of shares were sold at a “preferential” price that was lower than the price of shares trading on the exchange. This percentage was acquired by company management and workers, who paid just US$72 million for shares that fifteen months later were worth US$217 million.46 Companies’ debts were paid to make their sale easier and to improve efficiency, as is clear from an analysis of the Endesa privatization (see below).

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The Political Argument Behind Privatization: “Popular Capitalism”

The main argument behind these privatizations was of a political nature, and had a strong ideological component: the thesis of “popular capitalism.” The term “privatization” was often euphemized to limit its effect on public opinion and the military, who feared it would end up benefiting conglomerates, as happened in the 1970s. In fact, the chapter on privatizations in each of finance minister Hernán Büchi’s reports on the state of public finance had the title “The Diffusion of Property.”47 Popular capitalism sought the “diffusion of property” to make Chile “a country of owners.”48 This thesis was put forward by the minister of economy, Modesto Collados (1984–1985), who borrowed it from the government of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, who had coined it to justify a vast privatization program.49 Officials used this argument for several reasons. One was to break workers’ resistance to privatization, resistance born out of fear of layoffs, wage cuts, and reduced union rights associated with a transfer to the private sector.50 Workers, too, could become involved in privatization, by buying shares more cheaply, which served to stir hopes of significant gains.51 Another factor was that, for unexplained reasons, company executives could also purchase shares in their position as “employees.” This strategy was another attempt to reinforce the legitimacy of the economic system, since thousands of small shareholders would appear who would feel they owned companies and would defend them from any attempt by a new government to reverse the privatization process. The popular capitalism thesis was based on the conviction that private property was a basic principle of modern societies, and its objectives were achieved with the massive integration of shareholders into companies: “Private property is one of the pillars of a free society and one of the keys to success of advanced Western societies. For the right to property to really be effective, it must come with extensive, massive and indiscriminate access to property.”52 Based on the neoliberal premise that the economy influenced society as a whole, Collados argued that access to property was a new dimension, since individuals should simultaneously be owners, workers, and consumers.53 Popular capitalism had to open itself to citizens in general and to small investors, especially in regions outside the capital.54 This would encourage enormous political integration, which in turn would legitimize the economic system. Individuals would feel themselves to be company owners and would feel encouraged to work harder, which would therefore boost productivity. To make popular capitalism work during a time of economic crisis, various models were designed to attract the public, including excellent tax benefits in favor of purchasers. Moreover, CORFO offered incredibly favorable credit to finance share purchases. The most common credit was used to sell the

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banks taken over by the government during the 1982–1983 economic crisis, especially the Vial group’s Bank of Chile and the Cruzat group’s Bank of Santiago. In practice, anyone who purchased shares did not end up paying for them, making them almost a gift.55 One Chilean who benefited from this system, an economist, described it as follows: In December 1986, two executives responsible for selling Bank of Santiago shares appeared in my office. They showed me the results of my personal gains and demonstrated that if, in the coming years, I were to earn the same in the next three years, these shares, bought with a credit from CORFO, would automatically pay for themselves, even if the Bank of Santiago made no profit, because the purchaser had the legal right to deduct 20 percent of their value annually from his tax return. In practice, I have never paid anything. Every year I receive cash dividends after paying the fee; every year I’ve been able to deduct these payments from my tax return; every year I’ve been able to increase my ownership of the shares [as he paid the bank off].56

The government designed several financing formulas under which workers and the general public could purchase shares.57 The first authorized workers to buy shares using resources that had formed part of the pension plan, in what was called “labor capitalism.” Second, those who could not use those resources, or who wanted to buy more shares, had access to very general credits from CORFO. Third, the company or the state assumed the investment risk by reimbursing workers for the current value of the initial purchase, provided they remained in the company until retirement. Fourth, some public company executives invited their employees to form investment firms, contributing shares acquired by one of the above methods as the guarantee for bank credits to purchase more shares in the market. These firms were headed by company executives themselves, who thus increased their management power (see Table 9.1).58 To further boost the number of “popular capitalists,” the government extended the benefits to the AFPs. To do so, it had to modify Decree Law no. 3500, which had created the private pension system, since it prohibited participation in the stock market. It was argued that the workers belonging to AFPs would indirectly own the privatized companies,59 a position pushed by ODEPLAN economists who designed the pension reform.60 The achievements of popular capitalism were unimpressive in terms of the number of share purchases. Most popular capitalists focused on the banks taken over by the authorities in 1982–1983. Buying shares of those banks was encouraged through tax benefits, and thousands did buy. The government provided no figures on the number of popular capitalists, because they weren’t high enough to demonstrate the announced “massification” of company ownership. An ODEPLAN publication produced for the 1998 plebiscite campaign stated that about 56,000 people, mostly employees of large public firms that were privatized, had become part of this labor capitalism.61 Many workers and

Who Bought Public Companies, 1985–1988 (percentages of sales price)

Iron and steel Power distribution Power generation Power distribution Power distribution Power distribution Power distribution Power generation and distribution Power generation Power generation Computer technology Coal Explosives Telecommunications Telephones Telex Sugar refinery Pharmaceuticals Nitrates

Stock Exchange

Employees

Public Auction

— 24.0 14.0 17.0 — — — 36.4 — — — 13.2 — 29.0 9.6 — — 13.9 23.0 17.6

58.5 45.0 80.0 74.0 — — — 44.6 — — — 68.1 — 48.2 19.5 — 51.2 61.0 59.0 49.7

41.5 31.0 6.0 9.0 — 100.0 — 10.7 — — 100.0 7.2 — 20.2 8.3 — 29.4 25.1 18.0 20.4

— — — — 100.0 — 100.0 — 100.0 100.0 — — 100.0 — 62.6 100.0 — — — 9.0

Othera — — — — — — — 8.4 — — — 11.6 2.6 — — 19.4 — — 3.3

Source: Marcel (1989), tabs. 1, 5. Notes: Percentages reflect purchase of initial public offering of shares and not any subsequent transactions affecting company ownership. a. Includes sales to former creditors of the agrarian reform corporation (CORA) and sales of shares of the state-owned sugar plant (Iansa) to agricultural landowners.

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CAP Chilmetro Chilgener Chilquinta Emec Emelsa Emelat Endesa Pilmaiquen Pullinque Ecom Schwager Enaex Entel CTC Telex-Chile Iansa Laboratorío Chile Soquimich Total

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Table 9.1

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private individuals bought shares with a short-term view, selling them as soon as their value rose, as the economy recovered.62 As a result, popular capitalism produced no upsurge in “owners” or a new economic mentality, as its supporters had predicted.63 However, it greatly benefited the top executives of the public firms that were privatized.

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Privatization of the Pension System

Privatization of the pension system was a fresh idea that was touted by its supporters as a solution to be applied in both developing and developed countries.64 Chile was the first country to completely replace its former distributive pension system with an individual capitalization scheme managed by the private sector, known as “pay as you go.” The experiment drew the world’s attention.65 The new system performed well in terms of the number of people involved, almost 4 million in 2005. In terms of resources it was even more impressive, with almost US$74 billion, 59.4 percent of Chile’s GDP in 2005 (see Table 9.2). This made the system enormous, although its actual capacity will only be put to the test when it starts paying pensions to those who have contributed throughout their entire working lives. The new system has institutional weaknesses, already mentioned by opposition experts at the beginning of the reform, that will be discussed later in this chapter. President Michelle Bachelet made reform of the pension system one of the main priorities of her administration, appointing Mario Marcel, budget director of President Lagos, as chairman of an expert commission. The commission’s final report, which made several proposals for improving the system, was presented to President Bachelet on July 6, 2006. One of the major changes is the introduction of a “solidarity pillar” (pilar solidario) to provide pensions for low-earning workers who are not able to attain the minimum amount of individual capitalization to have a pension. This pillar is to be funded by the state, which neoliberal economists maintain is a severe weakness of the new system. The new system is based on individual capitalization; that is, each worker, through his or her employer, makes the corresponding payments, depositing the pension contribution in a personal account, which is managed by private, profit-oriented pension fund administrators. The AFPs are responsible for investing the funds to increase them. Upon retiring, employees receive a pension whose amount is determined by the size of contributions through their working lives and the earnings on the investments made by their respective AFPs. Workers tend to change their AFPs relatively often, switching to the one offering the most advantages. The creators of the system expected it to be very efficient; with competition they expected that many AFPs would appear. Other assumptions of the creators were wrong—for example, the belief that affiliates have had permanent jobs for the entire period of individual capitalization. This was a great mistake, which is understandable given that, among the Chicago Boys, there was not a single specialist in labor economics,

n/a 73.6 75.9 70.8 68.2 68.5 70.0 68.1 65.3 61.2 60.5 60.8 59.3 57.4 55.7 56.0 57.0 52.8 53.4 50.9 53.7 51.1 51.9 50.4 51.2

n/a 36.0 38.2 41.6 44.1 45.5 50.5 50.8 51.3 51.3 54.8 56.4 56.0 57.7 58.9 58.9 61.9 57.9 60.4 54.5 58.0 57.2 59.1 56.2 59.6

273.37 867.87 1,571.00 2,077.96 2,861.74 3,742.86 4,586.44 5,614.47 6,922.93 9,169.05 12,967.77 14,449.46 18,571.43 22,412.78 23,824.91 25,246.37 27,595.34 28,620.02 34,769.60 39,551.06 43,463.89 46,461.22 53,144.77 59,592.37 74,756.44

Sources: Bulletins from the Superintendent of AFPs and the Budget Directorate (Dirección de Presupuesto). Notes: n/a = data not available. a. In January 2000 US dollars. b. Average return = 10.26%.

Pension Fund as Percentage of GDP

Percentage Returnb

0.8 3.3 5.9 7.7 10.3 12.7 14.2 14.9 17.7 24.2 31.4 31.0 37.0 41.0 38.8 39.5 43.0 44.0 53.3 50.7 53.3 55.1 58.2 59.1 59.4

12.6 26.5 22.7 2.9 13.4 12.0 6.4 4.8 6.7 17.7 28.6 4.0 16.7 17.8 –2.5 3.3 4.8 –1.6 16.6 16.3 4.4 6.7 3.0 10.6 4.6

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n/a 1,060,000 1,229,877 1,360,000 1,558,194 1,774,057 2,023,739 2,167,568 2,267,622 2,289,254 2,486,813 2,695,580 2,792,118 2,879,637 2,961,928 3,121,139 3,296,361 3,149,755 3,262,269 3,196,991 3,450,080 3,431,277 3,618,995 3,571,864 3,784,141

Pension Fund (US$ millions)a

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1,400,000 1,440,000 1,620,000 1,930,353 2,283,830 2,591,484 2,890,680 3,183,002 3,470,845 3,739,542 4,190,184 4,434,795 4,708,840 5,014,444 5,320,913 5,571,482 5,780,400 5,966,143 6,105,731 6,280,191 6,427,656 6,708,491 6,979,351 7,080,646 7,394,506

Paid-Up Members as Percentage of Employed Labor Force

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Members

Paid-Up Members

Paid-Up Members as Percentage of Total Members

318

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

Changes in the New Pension Fund System, 1981–2005

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and this is why there was no understanding of the labor market in Chile regarding long-term development due to the impact of technology and globalization. Since the early 1990s, employees and workers have tended to change jobs frequently, and a significant proportion of businessmen have been hiring workers on temporary contracts, which has weakened individual capital resources. This privatization was systemic in the sense used by Feigenbaum and Henig,66 because not only did it remove a function from the state and give it to the private sector, but it also sought to change the attitudes and values of formal sector employees. Until 1980, Chile had a “distributive” pension system in which workers deposited their contributions into a common fund administered by the state, which was used to finance pensions based on the principle of intergenerational solidarity: those who worked helped those who had retired by financing the latter’s pensions. These resources were managed by institutions called “pension entities” (cajas de previsión), the first of which, the Caja de Seguro Obrero, was created in 1924. Other similar bodies were created, which numbered thirty-two in 1979. They were the result of initiatives of interest groups, who thereby succeeded in having their own systems for improving pensions implemented.67 Many associations, from the military and banks through parliament, used such systems, each with its own pension rules, thus generating a wide variety of systems, which in turn gave rise to serious inequalities.68 Much of the pension system became concentrated in just three funds: the Servicio de Seguro Social, which handled social security for blue-collar workers; the Caja de Empleados Particulares, which served private sector employees; and the Caja de Empleados Públicos, which served public service employees. Altogether, these three covered 94 percent of pension system members69 and 60–79 percent of the labor force.70 Pensions were low and the funds experienced significant shortfalls in meeting their obligations. Their investments weren’t very profitable, requiring constant increases in deductions and state contributions. Several governments tried to correct these weaknesses and provide better pensions, but none of these efforts flourished.71 The Pension Reform While selling off public firms was not an original idea, since it had already been tried by the conservative governments in the United Kingdom in the 1950s and later by Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990), Chile’s pension system privatization was unique, as economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago points out, since it was imposed during an authoritarian regime, which was able to make complex discussions with no public debate and without weighing the consequences.72 To apply it, the welfare state that had existed until that time was rejected out of hand, based on a highly ideological perspective that held that the welfare state yielded to pressure from interest groups and caused inequalities among employees.73

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The Chicago Boys’ rejection of the welfare state was not supported by empirical research,74 but rather by ideological arguments based on a radical critique of Chilean policy prior to the coup. They turned to ideas of the rightwing politicians and intellectuals of the 1940s, as represented in the magazines Estanquero and Portada (see Chapter 5). This contempt for the welfare state focused on criticizing the pension system’s redistribution and intergenerational solidarity concepts.75 The claims regarding the system’s inequalities were based on impressionistic examples or anecdotes, such as those that former minister José Piñera used when speaking about the advantages to racetrack workers.76 A prelude to the pension reform is found in the document “El Ladrillo” (The Brick), which implicitly introduces the idea of individual capitalization.77 The original objective was to achieve a mixed system, composed of two subsystems: one “run by the state, financed through taxes, and the other based on individual savings, deposited monthly in a specialized institution called a pension fund [fondo de pensión], which would work similarly to the savings and loan system.”78 The main arguments used in The Brick were not economic but political. Pension funds would be authorized to buy companies nationalized by the Allende government, potentially becoming “a useful mechanism for transferring wealth, currently in the hands of the state, to workers.”79 This would solve the political and economic problem of the powerful and heterogeneous “social property area,” consisting of the many companies taken over by the socialist government, without having to return them to previous owners or privatize them. Proponents of this idea sought a political objective, arguing that in the long term “this would lead to a socialization of wealth, without [the country] falling into statist socialist formulae.”80 At the same time, and even more importantly, the system’s supporters thought that by transferring ownership to workers, workers would become capitalist partners, thus overcoming the antagonism between capital and labor and preventing labor conflict: “[We] will create a mechanism for accumulating wealth in the hands of workers. In time they should become a major source of savings to finance investment, achieving a leadership role as holders of capital. If this possibility materializes, the tension between capital and labor could fade or disappear altogether, since the latter would become owner of significant capital resources.”81 After the coup, these ideas were developed by a team of ODEPLAN economists coordinated by Miguel Kast, who saw the strategic importance of this reform to transforming Chile’s economy, since it would place enormous resources—and power—in private hands.82 Kast explained that the new pension system had to be based on individual savings and that therefore pension savings associations (asociaciones de ahorro previsional) would have to exist. Workers would deposit their contributions into individual accounts, and the funds would be insured by a central association to protect them from the risks of bad management.83 This reform would positively impact both savings and

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investment, added its supporters, and would help to develop the country.84 This was about creating a “simple, accessible system easily understood by business people and workers.”85 The pension reform was not immediately implemented due to opposition from the air force.86 The minister of labor and social security, General Nicanor Díaz, did not support the reform ideas, because he did not agree with the economic and political principles being applied at the time by the economic team, and was trying to convince the junta to approve a “social statute of the company.” This was a legal initiative based on concepts opposed to monetarist ideas. However, the air force’s opposition was not enough to block the proposal, which was included in a new social security law announced by General Díaz in November 1975. The concept of individual capitalization for the pension system did appear in that effort, but did so within the general framework of an ambitious reform to social security that included healthcare and subsidies to the poor. Thus two contrasting initiatives were merged, the ODEPLAN Boys’ pension formula and the air force initiative regarding the healthcare system. The draft text was careful in presenting its arguments and avoided the contentious references to the old pension system that would later become associated with the neoliberal plan.87 The distributive system was maintained, but within a “mixed system, that is, involving individual capitalization and distribution.”88 Through individual capitalization, pensions and retirement bonuses would be financed,89 while distributive mechanisms would finance health pensions and family allowances. The system was to be administered by nonprofit “social security corporations” (unlike the funds today, run by profitseeking firms), which would have to compete against each other to maximize their efficacy.90 These corporations would be “managed by their own members” (Article 70), an innovative proposal completely absent from ODEPLAN’s thinking, since this would give workers the power of self-management, removing control from businesspeople and corporations, which was the essence of the Kast initiative. General Díaz’s proposal was incomplete, since it did not fully define these envisioned corporations.91 The text indicated that workers would be free to join the corporation of their choice and would have the right to “switch to the one offering the best service.” The initiative did not go further because of lack of support from the Chicago Boys, a factor that became important later, in light of the Finance Ministry’s important role in starting up the new system.92 The pension reform couldn’t be reactivated until a few years later, after General Leigh had been expelled from the junta in July 1978, a change that made it possible to approve several legal initiatives that paved the way for the privatization of the pension system.93 The young, dynamic minister of labor, José Piñera,94 reignited the initiative. He was able to obtain General Pinochet’s backing,95 earning his support immediately after the 1980 plebiscite, when Pinochet was open to ambitious proposals that would strengthen his image as a statesman. Piñera remembers it like this:

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The day after winning the plebiscite, when the congratulations and hugs were still going on, I went at it again and requested a meeting with General Pinochet. I congratulated him for the victory and before his smile disappeared I told him that the regime was enjoying one of those moments that Stefan Zweig called decisive. One of those moments when individuals or nations have the potential to move beyond anything they’ve ever been before. This was the moment to act and approve the pension reform. Persistence worked. The President agreed to reactivate the project and the Joint Legislative Commission, in almost ongoing sessions, completed the job, sending the draft to the Junta, with several options open. The Commission had not reached unanimous agreement and all the background was attached so the Junta could make the final decision.96

Piñera handled the draft carefully, so that it was only discussed by the junta and did not proceed for analysis to other governmental bodies, such as the Council of State. Economists were the main participants in the debate, with pension specialists, who were mistrustful of the reform, abstaining, since they understood its enormous complexities and costs.97 The minister of labor avoided public debate, since he was aware of the criticism within the regime and the opposition. Political Arguments Behind the Pension Reform Mainly political arguments were used to obtain the junta’s approval of the pension reform, which avoided having to sell the junta on more complex and harder-to-prove economic aspects.98 Piñera borrowed critical ideas from gremialismo about the development of democracy in Chile, ruling out the distributive system for its inefficiency, low pensions, and regressive nature and for having been used by political parties to provide their “electoral clients” with “favors.” Piñera described it this way: The pay-as-you-go system opens the door to a great amount of politicization and demagoguery. Why? Because [workers] pay into an enormous fund that belongs to no one. The laws make it possible to obtain them, but as a service there is nothing. It is therefore obvious that political pressure groups will politicize social life, unions, pension institutions to try to get political power, so that these will benefit them over anyone else. Secondly, this system leads inevitably to demagoguery and injustice, because it is clear that when it comes to pensions it’s easy to promise rights [to payments] that will be paid out later.99

The old system was based on a “collectivist concept” and a “false view of man and society,” which ended up hurting those it promised to defend: the poor. The system was managed by “politicized union leaderships,” who, with the reform, would lose their “demagogic banner.”100 This criticism was also directed at the unions, which were presented as bodies motivated by the petty interests of their leaders, who treated pensions as clientelist achievements.

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Thus Piñera linked pension reform with the Labor Plan, approved in 1979, which had structurally weakened unions. Piñera argued that the pension reform would eliminate these flaws. The minister of labor also employed the arguments of “popular capitalism” to justify the reform, since popular capitalism was to produce a change in workers’ values and attitudes. Under the new system, workers would have a stake in the economic order, ensuring its efficacy: “By having an individual account and seeing how his savings rise, which depends on how the economy is doing, the worker will necessarily be interested in efficient, responsible Finance ministers and Congress members who are not so politically manipulative [politiqueros], so that violent revolutions are avoided, because he has become an owner associated with the general progress of the nation. Thus, strikes will decline.”101 Piñera emphasized the many safeguards that would govern the pension funds, since the military was concerned that conglomerates could use the AFPs’ resources to their benefit. He said there would be a separation between resource management, under the AFPs, and the funds themselves, which would be subject to two types of controls to prevent abuses. First, the AFPs would invest in fixed-yield securities, especially state instruments with minimum risk that would guarantee investment security, without being able to trade shares on the stock market, given its instability and speculative risk. Second, the Central Bank, not the AFPs, would hold the securities. The new system’s security would be backed by an overseer with broad powers to monitor the AFPs and ensure that they fulfilled their functions. To break the unions’ opposition, Piñera argued that workers should also be able to create one or more AFPs. He cited copper workers, who enjoyed good wages, belonged to the national copper workers’ association (Confederacion de Trabajadores del Cobre), a major union body, and worked for a state company, CODELCO, which was headed by a military officer.102 However, in practice only a privileged group of high-income professionals—supervisors— created an AFP: Cuprum. The supervisors’ control was short-lived. In 1989, Chile’s Penta group bought them out, expanded the AFP, and then sold it to Canadian investors in the 1990s. A second group of workers, through the national teachers’ association (Colegio de Profesores), created another: Magister. This was a relatively well-organized segment over whom the government exercised great influence through the Ministry of Education and the municipalities, which ensured that their organization was controlled by proregime leaders. This AFP could not consolidate either. In 1998 the teachers’ association owned 50 percent, with the rest belonging to foreign investors, who took over its administration. The teachers sold their share off completely in August 2000 to the US investment firm Inverlink.103 The official proposal suffered from significant flaws and depended considerably on state support, a situation that diluted the revolutionary character that Piñera tried to give it. First, it ignored self-employed workers, who remained

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outside the system and who were less able to enter the new system, which was based only on contributions from workers, with no contribution from companies. In practice, this important sector was excluded from the new system because of the high costs involved. Second, the state committed to guaranteeing the payment of minimum pensions to those who did not save enough to receive a pension at the end of their working lives. Piñera knew that the system was designed for those in the formal sector who were earning medium to high incomes, and that it would be difficult to apply to low-income earners. This created a significant burden on the state, because the system, whose funding was not mentioned in the discussion, required major resources. The reform did not establish a purely private system, but rather a mixed one, because the state continued to pay minimum pensions. As the pension reform created substantial costs for the state that were not explicitly mentioned in the discussion with the junta, favorable conditions were created to ensure that these would be covered by the sale of public firms, as an opposition economist noted at the time.104 It would be an error of hindsight to argue that the creation of the AFPs represented a simultaneous effort to see public firms privatized, but it would be naive to think that this relationship was not apparent to its promoters. Privatization of the pension system was a systemic change, not only because it put an end to the functions of the welfare state, but also because it opened the way to privatizing public firms. The latter was not articulated as a problem (the economic cost to the state of the new pension system), but rather as a benefit in the sense that it would require finding new opportunities to invest the enormous resources accumulating in the pension funds. And that’s where the sale of public sector firms, modernized by CORFO and with efficient economic performance, came into the picture, since they offered the AFPs attractive investment opportunities. Indeed, they did provide high yields for AFPs, as they were well-managed firms sold off at low prices. The economy started to recover from recession, causing share values to soar. Military Mistrust of the Pension Reform The military officers in the regime were reluctant to accept the pension reform. Piñera remembers this in detail: “The final holdouts against the [pension] reform wore uniforms and spoke sharply. The President’s advisory committee, in fact, was made up of a group of generals very loyal to their convictions but with a clearly pro-state mentality. They stubbornly resisted the market-based social economic model and had harsh opinions of the liberalizing efforts of Minister of Finance Sergio de Castro.”105 The military authorities raised three objections, based on the nature of their own institutions and their mistrust of conglomerates.106 First, they could see that individual capitalization, which assumed that there would be an accumulation of resources during the working life of the contributor, would not fit

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well with the military career, which had no fixed duration and was highly uncertain because promotions and retirements were based on institutional needs. There was a risk that those in the military would retire without having contributed enough years to receive an adequate pension.107 Second, they could see that the AFPs and military institutions were incompatible, since the former would have confidential information on military personnel, which could constitute a risk to national security.108 Third, the military foresaw a conflict of interest, since the private system would create enormous economic leverage, which would end up being used by financial interests to their own benefit. This fear was based on the first round of privatizations, in which groups made the most of their institutional advantages.109 In the debate with the junta, General Pinochet put forward his fears about the conglomerates, especially the major conglomerates Grupo Vial and Grupo Cruzat, whose heads, Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat, were preparing to become leaders within the new system:110 I have said that I do not agree with the problem of [the responsibility for administering] payrolls going to private parties, in reality I don’t disagree with this, but rather I’m shocked when I consider that these businessmen are not yet skilled enough to manage 97 million dollars a month. That is what concerns me, because day by day I see different things happen, and it can’t be that all of a sudden someone heads abroad with 97 million. That’s what concerns me. Who will handle the money? I’m allergic to that, because I also know that there are several gentlemen who have been making millions in this country who have sent people to study the system because they want to operate well.111

Admiral José Toribio Merino supported the initiative from the start, because the navy supported the economic reforms. Unlike his predecessor, air force commander in chief Leigh, General Fernando Matthei was more open to the Chicago Boys, and indicated that he had no special interest in the project, but would support it because it interested Pinochet: I would like to establish that I personally have absolutely no interest in this legal initiative. It was presented today by the Executive and if he agrees with our looking at it, I agree with supporting it. If Mr. President has any reservations about this and does not yet wish to present it or wishes it to be studied again, that’s fine. So only if you are interested, President, am I willing to look at it and in general I agree with the philosophy behind this draft; but I repeat, only if you agree to present it and think it is a good draft.112

Matthei avoided referring to the viability of the AFPs, since this would create a system whose results would be apparent in a very distant future, making it difficult to clearly foresee its problems. He shared Piñera’s political arguments,

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considering the distributive system a “huge electoral coffer” that would continue to be used for political ends when the military left power: Today we know in whose hands the State is. This system will still be working 50 years from now and we do not know who will control the State in 20 years. The State has not been a good manager; it has not taken good care of things . . . tomorrow it ends up in the hands of the Christian Democrats and they are going to have a huge electoral coffer, as has already occurred: the great system for divvying up jobs; surplus funds are a magnificent system for getting votes and reapportioning things.113

However, the military authorities did not feel that their arguments were strong enough to block the project, and they feared appearing to oppose it only to defend their corporate interests.114 They agreed on a period of no less than one year to develop a bill that would determine how the military would join the system, something that never happened, leaving them outside the new system. Support for the Pension Reform The pension reform was supported by proregime union leaders associated with the National Associations Secretariat, under the General Secretariat Ministry. When Piñera took over the labor portfolio in 1978, he worked to develop personal relations with the union leaders; this bore fruit, since many of them praised his message, particularly Guillermo Medina, president of the El Teniente sector of CODELCO, who said that “we are a civilized country in terms of pensions.”115 The Gremialistas supported the proposal, since its fundamentals reflected their political ideas. The New Democracy Group (Grupo Nueva Democracia),116 which came together for the 1980 plebiscite campaign, held that the reform formed part of the country’s new institutional foundations, calling it a measure that would overcome “the obstacles that for decades have frustrated the prospects for Chileans’ well-being, making it possible to foresee a day in the not-too-distant future when everyone can aspire to social security compatible with human dignity.”117 The landowners belonging to the National Agricultural Society also backed the reform, stating that “now workers will be free to quantify their savings level, becoming genuine masters of their futures.”118 A former minister of labor and member of the Council of State, William Thayer, was cautious about the reform, arguing that the beneficial or negative effects “will only be known in 40 years.”119 The reform was questioned by opposition union leaders and many experts in social security, who considered it unworkable in the long term.120 They criticized it for relying on individualism and not solidarity, on which the previous system had been based. The Group of Ten (Grupo de los Diez), formed by the major union organizations, contended that “with the Labor Plan, workers lost 50% of our power. The other 50% will be lost with the pension reform.”121 Federico Mujica, president of the national private sector employees’ associa-

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tion (Confederación de Empleados Particulares), declared that the system was “a copy of the old concept of popular capitalism that doesn’t provide freedom to use the savings even when one meets the requirements for retirement.”122 Even a pro–military regime union leader, Manuel Contreras, of the national metalworkers’ association (Confederación de Trabajadores Metalúrgicos), disagreed with moving from a “social system to one that seeks profit, a forced savings system.”123 Another opponent of the new system was the military regime’s former minister of labor, air force General Nicanor Díaz Estrada, who questioned the fact that now everyone believed in workers’ ability to manage AFPs, compared to November 1975, when he had announced the new social security law. In 1975, “a lot of business people came to my office to criticize this project because according to them, workers would be incapable of effectively managing pension resources.”124 He added that workers should have more opportunity for participation, since they would be paying into the system from their wages, and “they’re the ones who have something to say about its management.”125 The new pension system was passed in November 1980, as Decree Law no. 3500, and came into effect in May 1981 with a dozen AFPs, which demonstrated the success of the original ODEPLAN Boys initiative and Piñera’s efforts. In the triumphalist atmosphere of the time, its supporters were sure they had created an institution that would have the effect promised during the debate in the junta. Through an effective publicity campaign offering economic incentives to workers, the government quickly convinced those employed in the formal sector to switch to the new system. As workers, they had to fully assume their pension costs, which previously had been shared with employers, and to avoid this resulting in a loss to their income, gross wages were raised to offset higher contributions, resulting in no major economic sacrifice. This was the main incentive to switch to the new system.126 By late 1984, 70 percent of the old system’s members had joined the new one.127 Businesspeople also pushed the reform, since its success would benefit them by eliminating their contributions to pensions from the previous system, as capitalization was now based solely on workers’ contributions.128 The military’s fears about too much control of the system by the major conglomerates were quickly realized. In 1985, AFP Provida, created by Manuel Cruzat’s group, captured 32.9 percent of members, and Santa María, belonging to Javier Vial’s group, signed up 27.6 percent, so the two groups held an enormous share of the market.129 In 1985, when the economy started to emerge from the crisis, the three main AFPs accounted for 62 percent of members, and the top five held 83 percent (see Table 9.3). This situation did not change much in the ensuing years, until the 1990s. In 1995, three main AFPs accounted for 69 percent of members, and the top five accounted for 81 percent. The concentration grew beginning in 1998, and in 2005 the percentages were 79 and 95 respectively.

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Private Pension System Concentration, by Affiliates, 1981–2005 (percentages) 1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

1990

1991

1992

67 76 82 87

60 69 77 84

58 67 76 83

59 67 75 82

62 74 83 89

62 74 83 89

63 75 84 89

64 75 84 88

65 75 84 88

66 75 83 87

67 76 84 87

68 75 83 86

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

68 75 82 86

67 74 81 85

69 75 81 85

69 75 81 87

69 76 82 87

74 82 89 94

78 86 93 98

78 86 93 98

79 87 93 98

79 87 94 98

80 88 94 99

79 88 94 100

79 88 95 100

Source: Estimates based on statistical bulletins from the Superintendent of AFPs. Note: Concentration as of December each year.

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Three largest AFPs Four largest AFPs Five largest AFPs Six largest AFPs

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Three largest AFPs Four largest AFPs Five largest AFPs Six largest AFPs

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Table 9.3

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In terms of the funds themselves, rapid concentration also occurred. In 1981, Provida and Santa María held 33.8 and 27.4 percent of funds, respectively. The other three main firms, Hábitat, San Cristóbal, and Invierta, held 10.1, 9.6, and 5.4 percent, respectively, for a top-five total of 86.3 percent of pension funds. This tendency held until the end of the military regime, growing weaker under democracy and falling to 56 percent in 1997 (see Table 9.4). The concentration of the pension funds by the top AFPs grew beginning in 1998, and in 2005 the three main firms accounted for 73 percent, and the top five for 96 percent. The Role of Private Pension Fund Administrators The rapid startup of the new system brought the need to find new targets for pension fund investment, since according to Decree Law no. 3500 they had to invest in very secure instruments, mainly state securities. At the time, supporters of privatization suggested that the AFPs should be allowed to purchase shares issued by public companies that were being privatized. Through December 31, 1983, 45 percent of the funds were invested in a single issuer, the state, 51 percent in a single type of instrument, bills of credit, and 100 percent in debt instruments. This concentration, it was argued, constituted unnecessary risk, encouraging indebtedness within the economy, because the main saver, the fund itself, could only lend money and not develop new projects as a shareholder.130 The government started to study changes to the pension reform in 1983, at the height of the economic crisis.131 At first, companies rejected its proposal, arguing that the moment was not right given the serious recession, and also for fear of speculative risk. Ignacio Cousiño, president of the Pension Development Committee (Comité de Desarrollo Previsional), the precursor of today’s Association of AFPs (Asociación Gremial de AFP), spoke against the government initiative, concluding that amendments could only be applied “when the circumstances [make necessary a] review of the relevant criteria; the analysis and studies must be beyond reproach, to maintain the trust that more than 1,800,000 Chileans have placed in the new pension system,”132 due to the lack of a developed market, solid supervision, and guarantees of “minimum profitability, in the event that business management were not efficient.”133 Some AFPs publicly argued that they were unwilling to start operating on the stock market due to the prevailing uncertainty.134 On March 24, 1984, the government sent the junta the bill to reform Decree Law no. 3500. The greater freedom of the press of the time (resulting from the apertura) explains why the text was published, for fear of it being leaked135 to the media. The draft amendment established that the AFPs could buy shares in publicly traded private firms, once they had been rated by an autonomous agency, the Risk Classification Commission (Comisión Clasificadora de Riesgo [CCR]).136 This body would establish a ranking of companies by risk and instruments, approving the firms in which pension funds could purchase shares.137 To

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Pension Fund Concentration, 1985–2005 (percentages) 1990

1992

1995

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

66 76 86 90

63 72 81 87

57 67 76 84

52 65 76 83

56 68 78 85

62 75 86 95

70 83 94 97

70 83 94 97

71 83 94 97

71 83 95 97

72 84 96 98

72 84 96 100

73 85 96 100

Source: Estimates based on statistical bulletins from the Superintendent of AFPs.

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1985

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Three largest AFPs Four largest AFPs Five largest AFPs Six largest AFPs

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Table 9.4

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avoid criticism of economic concentration, rules were established that set ceilings on investment per instrument and issuer, and a percentage of equity that an AFP could purchase in each company.138 This was an attempt to defend minority shareholders, preventing majority shareholders from having control over them, and actually hurt the AFPs’ interests more than it helped them.139 The bill put restrictions on AFP stock investments, forbidding any company from investing more than 5 percent of its fund in a single firm. Total investment in shares of different firms could not exceed 30 percent of the AFP’s total fund.140 These rules aimed at keeping ownership spread out, but they ignored the fact that AFPs could band together behind the scenes to influence company management. The government based the draft on “popular capitalism” arguments that it had used in the debate over Decree Law no. 3500. It argued that with this change, workers, through their AFPs, would become shareholders in Chile’s most important companies.141 This would have an important political impact, putting a limit on the regulatory authorities’ discretional powers, since “handing over a percentage of shares to the pension fund managers would create a desirable and positive balance of forces in the following sense: politically governments would be unable to demagogically reduce rates, because if they did so they would be criticized by workers, who would see the earnings on their investments in shares reduced; nor would increases above normal be favored, because these would be criticized by consumers. Thus a fair equilibrium would be achieved in the policies of these firms.”142 The reform to Decree Law no. 3500 was passed on December 31, 1985,143 and marked the start of the AFPs’ intervention in the privatization of public firms. This led to new modifications that made it even easier for the AFPs to buy shares of private firms.144 By late 1989, the AFPs had invested in the shares of twenty-three companies,145 with amounts reaching 10.1 percent of total funds. From then on, investment in the shares of limited companies became the main instrument preferred by the AFPs, generating enormous benefits that explain the funds’ high yields. In December 1997, the percentage of funds invested in state instruments stood at 39.59 percent, in financial institutions, 27.63 percent, and in shares, 22.62 percent. The first companies to open up to pension funds with the approval of the CCR were public firms in the process of being privatized. Fund investments went primarily to electric companies. These newly privatized firms received most of the AFPs’ investment in shares until the late 1990s.146 In practice, the idea of deconcentrating company ownership was entirely theoretical. The dispersion of ownership actually had the opposite effect: it favored minority groups’ control through pacts with other shareholders, including other AFPs.147 Businesspeople used their solid political and personal links to form coalitions to achieve majority votes in shareholder meetings and thus choose board members who would give them control of the companies. The law did not require that the AFPs reveal who they voted for, so they could act

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with complete freedom during shareholder elections of board members.148 An analysis of the board members elected by the AFPs reveals a political bias favoring professionals associated with the military regime, to the exclusion of independents who could express the plurality of interests among shareholders. The AFPs worked together to form networks of personalization and patronage, which came to characterize the privatization of these public firms. At the same time, shareholders who gained control of the companies changed their bylaws to ensure their leadership, appropriating voting rights and then issuing preferential shares that guaranteed their majority on the boards. This occurred, for example, in Soquimich and some electric companies (see below). Results of the Pension Reform More than two decades after its reform, the pension system “has become a cornerstone in the Chilean economy.”149 It was very important to privatizing public firms,150 an objective not made explicit by the promoters of the reform, although opposition economists warned of this.151 It must be measured against the ambitious objectives put forth by its supporters: giving workers more and better pensions, reducing the state deficit in social pensions, becoming a lever for economic development, and changing Chileans’ values to favor a marketbased economy. There is no evidence that this system will pay higher pensions than the old system, or that it has contributed to increased saving and investment.152 So far there has been no shrinkage of the budget deficit due to this policy; on the contrary, it has risen. Nor has it been demonstrated that the AFPs have contributed to increased saving and investment; rather the state has had to assume this role precisely to offset the pension deficit. One of the main specialists in pension reform concluded that “the rise in domestic saving within the Chilean economy during this period (1981–1998) can be explained by the public sector’s systematic absorption of the pension deficit. The alleged success of the pension reform in increasing Chile’s domestic saving could be more a reflection of fiscal discipline than private management of the pension system.”153 Nor has the new system helped to change Chileans’ economic values to favor a market-based economy, and it will be hard for the AFPs to influence public opinion, since they inspire little confidence. For 1997 and 2000 the AFPs enjoyed the confidence of just 29 percent and 27 percent of Chileans, respectively. Other financial institutions have much higher confidence levels, among them the banks (54 percent in 2000) and large firms (41 percent in 2000).154 The situation has not changed. In 2006 the AFPs had the confidence of 22 percent of Chileans, compared to 50 percent for the banks. The system also has major limitations. First, its coverage suffers from serious flaws, since contributors composed just 60 percent of the labor force in 1999, bringing the total covered to 64 percent, if the 3.8 percent who were still

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paying into the old system are included (see Table 9.2). This is much lower than before the reform; for example, 79 percent were covered in 1974, and 71.5 percent were covered in 1977.155 Second, the makeup of the membership also reveals substantial inequality, with medium- and high-income earners overrepresented and with low membership from women. Self-employed workers (1,200,000 people in 1995) have in practice been left out, since just 4 percent belong to an AFP. The AFPs have not been very well managed, either, since they still charge high administrative costs due to, among other things, their campaigns to attract new members from other AFPs and managerial turnover and instability.156 One of the Chicago Boys’ main arguments in favor of privatizing the pension system was the need to end the budget deficit that the distributive system had created. This objective was not achieved; indeed, the costs to the state were much higher than estimates made in the early 1980s. These costs come from several sources: 1. To pay the recognition bond, the state has annually spent a great deal on private bodies without obtaining contributions, spending that in the 1990s reached 0.7 percent of GDP and continued to rise.157 2. Minimum pensions guaranteed by the state to workers once they retire cannot be covered by the amount saved under the new system. The Ministry of Finance has estimated that in the future, workers will become “a contingent fiscal liability of significant proportions. Thus, for example, the current value of estimated commitments for 2000–2037 reach[es] US$7.2 billion, 75% of the total explicit central government debt today.”158 This constitutes “a costly legacy of the private pension system.”159 3. The payment of nonpension benefits, started in 1975 to support invalids, the elderly (over sixty-five years of age), indigents, indigenous people, and those lacking pensions, involves enormous cost to the government.160 4. The state continues to finance the military’s pensions, which carry a large historical deficit. Estimates from the Budget Directorate (Dirección de Presupuesto) indicate that, from 1981 to 1988, the military deficit due to pensions averaged 1.5 percent of GDP annually. In short, the impact of each of these disbursements caused a total pension deficit that reached 5.7 percent of GDP from 1981 to 1998, well above the figure prior to 1974–1980, when it stood at 2.4 percent of GDP.161 These limitations of the pension reform have not prevented the AFPs from becoming major economic institutions, thanks to their contribution to the development of capital markets. However, their capacity to fulfill the purpose for which they were created (paying more and better pensions to workers) cannot

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be judged until they begin to make massive payouts to the wage earners who have been paying into them for more than three decades. The weaknesses in the pension system have become more apparent with time, creating a very delicate situation for the government because the time is nearing when pensions will have to be paid out according to the rates of the new system. Studies undertaken by the Superintendent of AFPs offer a “moderately pessimistic” view of the future of pensions, because the number of people who will receive a lower-than-minimum pension that does not include a state guarantee represents 40–50 percent of pensioners. Only 60 percent of the work force is included in this system, and most of the excluded are women. Projections by the superintendent show that, at the current minimum pension rates, only 10 percent of the population could be covered. These failures will force the state to incur enormous costs to in some way cover the needs of the retirees who have not made payments into pensions in the private system. In light of these issues, the 2005 Concertación presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet announced that her priority would be to fix the pension system and the problems it had created (see Chapter 13). She also sought to control the military’s contribution to financing their allowances, which placed a major burden on the national budget.

■

Privatization of Electric Companies

Privatization of the electric system became one of the most profound economic reforms enacted by the military regime, for several reasons: • A regulatory framework was established well in advance of the privatization, whose objectives were to promote competition in electric power generation, protect the rights of consumers and power users, promote competition, and strengthen the bodies responsible for developing and monitoring the sector. • The two large companies that controlled this sector, Chilectra and Endesa, were broken up to prepare for the ownership change, to prevent public monopolies from becoming private ones (an objective that was thwarted by those responsible for the privatization). • A gradual privatization process began, aimed at creating a diversified, private system of power generation, so that no single firm would become dominant. • Privatized firms performed extremely well, growing in both size and efficacy, expanding into other business arenas, and forming major conglomerates, especially the Enersis group, which controlled the vertically integrated Endesa and Chilectra utilities, and the Chilgener group (now Gener). In the early 1990s, privatized firms expanded to other countries in Latin America, becoming important operators in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru.162

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The privatization of the electric system reveals the weakness inherent in the lack of transparency with which it was carried out, thanks to a highly centralized decisionmaking system, which allowed the executives of public firms enormous latitude, particularly in the case of Chilectra and Endesa, resulting in many serious legal and ethical irregularities.163 Neither the minister of finance, Hernán Büchi, nor CORFO’s authorities regulated the decisions made by the boards of companies being privatized. These boards created conditions favorable to their taking control once a company was privatized. To do so, they used the financing provided by “popular capitalism” and very favorable credit provided by the state-owned Banco del Estado. In short, privatization of the electric sector culminated in a higher degree of concentration than existed previously, since a vertically integrated monopoly appeared, formed by two firms that until then had been separate (Chilectra and Endesa), which in the process acquired enormous political and economic power. This was an exceptional case among Latin American privatizations, with the line between public and private interests becoming extremely muddy, reflecting the authoritarian context. In a democracy, this would have been considered a clear and serious case of corruption. Planning for the Privatization Early in the 1980s, almost all generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power was controlled by the state through Chilectra and Endesa.164 The former was launched in 1921 as a private firm responsible for generation and distribution in Santiago,165 before expanding to what is today the Fifth Region and building thermoelectric power generation plants. It was nationalized at the end of President Eduardo Frei Montalva’s government and became a CORFO subsidiary. Endesa was created as a CORFO department in 1940 and became an autonomous firm in 1943.166 Its purpose was to develop electric power generation and distribution in the country. It was set up as a vertically and horizontally integrated state monopoly, since it had the transmission networks necessary for this. It was a huge company with the resources to cover its various needs, including the building of hydroelectric power plants. It played a dominant role in power generation in each of the country’s two electric grids, the northern grid (Sistema Interconectado del Norte Grande [SING]), and the central grid (Sistema Interconectado Central [SIC]), which reached from Taltal to Puerto Montt, covering 93 percent of Chile’s population.167 Endesa held 70 percent of the latter, with Chilectra holding the remainder. Endesa became a powerful entry barrier to the sector, given the many and important water rights it held, which ensured the building of new power plants according to its expansion plans. In the 1970s, both Chilectra and Endesa had to adapt to the conditions established by the new regulatory authorities without state subsidies. This new institutional framework produced some major organizational changes aimed at boosting efficiency and focusing on specific activities, setting aside secondary activities such as building hydroelectric plants, in Endesa’s case.

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Privatization of the electric sector had been carefully planned due to its economic and technical complexities.168 In the late 1970s, the National Energy Commission (Comisión Nacional de Energía [CNE]), headed by executive secretary Bruno Philippi with cooperation from Sebastián Bernstein, began working on the new legal framework and a regulatory body to organize the sector’s functioning when it passed into private hands.169 The free access of any generator to the electric system was guaranteed, with an open use of the transmission system and distribution networks provided through tolls. The new system also allowed for arbitration in case of discrepancies between generators and the authorities, and a free but regulated price system for the large consumers, with generating firms coordinated by a power clearinghouse (Centro de Despacho Económico de Carga).170 Privatization developed slowly and was seriously questioned by various segments in the government. The military was concerned about the danger of conglomerates taking control of a strategic sector; workers, meanwhile, feared that the change of ownership would lead to job loss and reduce their economic gains;171 top management at Endesa believed that the electric sector should remain under state control, as occurred in European countries.172 It was even suggested that Chilectra and Endesa should merge to create a large electric firm, following the French model, which was rejected for going against the principles of deconcentration and decentralization that inspired the government.173 Ultimately, however, such a merger did occur, through the control that Enersis developed over both companies. Privatization would be politically possible only if the two major firms, Chilectra and Endesa, were first broken down into smaller components, especially the latter. The military did not want such a huge firm to fall into private hands, which would give the new owners considerable economic and political clout. Economics encouraged division as well—dividing the two into separate generating firms to be purchased by different parties—which would promote competition among generators and greater efficiency. Breaking up Chilectra was relatively quick and easy. It was divided into three firms, one a generator, Chilgener, located in both Greater Santiago and the Fifth Region, and two distributors, one in Greater Santiago, which retained the name Chilectra, and another in the Fifth Region, which became Chilquinta. Breaking up Endesa was much more complex and difficult, given its enormous size and importance to the electric grid; it comprised more than a dozen hydroelectric and thermal power plants throughout the country, plus transmission lines. Hundreds of top professionals worked for Endesa, and were imbued with a corporate mystique that was apparent in their opposition to the company’s breakup. Five large generating companies along with nine distributors nonetheless arose (see Table 9.5); three small integrated companies also arose in isolated regions.174 The first sale, in 1980, put two of Endesa’s distributing subsidiaries on the public auction block, Saesa and Frontel, in southern Chile.

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The Breakup of Endesa Under the Military Regime

Company

SING SING SING SING SIC SIC SIC SIC SIC SIC SIC SIC Aysen Magallanes

Capacity 240 megawatts 180,000 customers (total for Elecda, Eliosa, Emalari) 490 megawatts 143,000 customers 121,000 customers 50,000 customers 1,832 customers 585 megawatts 35 megawatts 49 megawatts 15,000 customers 35,000 customers

Form of Privatization Sold to employees Sold to employees Sold to employees Sold to employees Public auction, 1997 Public auction Sold to employees Sold to employees, 1988–1989 Sold to employees Public auction, 1996 Public auction, 1989 Public auction Public auction Sold to employees

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Power generation Power distribution, Antofagasta Power distribution, Iquique Power distribution, Arica Power generation Power distribution Power distribution Power distribution Power generation and distribution Power generation Power generation Power generation Power generation and distribution Power generation and distribution

System

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Edelmar Elecda Eliosa Emalari Colbún Emec Emel Emelat Endesa Continuadora Pehuenche Pilmaiquén Pullinque Edelaysen Edelmag

Activity

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Table 9.5

Source: Bernstein (1996). Note: SING = northern electric grid; SIC = central electric grid.

337

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In 1981, Endesa’s bylaws were reformed to bring them into line with Chile’s legislation regarding private companies (Ley de Sociedades Anónimas), with the new Endesa board being chaired by Hernán Büchi, who was closely linked to the economic team and the Gremialistas (see Chapter 8).175 This board went ahead with the company’s breakup, creating new limited companies as part of a holding in 1983, among them the Melipilla Electrical Industry (Empresa Eléctrica de Melipilla [Emel]), the first to be privatized through sale to its employees, which served as a model for later privatization of the rest.176 Starting in 1983, the National Energy Commission gave special priority to further privatization of the electric companies, letting them collect fees from new customers to help finance new facilities, which were repaid in shares that could later be traded on the stock exchange. This measure triggered the privatization of Chilectra. Personalization and Clientelism: The Role of José Yuraszeck One of the characteristics of the privatizations by the military regime was their lack of transparency, which allowed top executives of public firms to take over controlling interest as they were privatized. This was evident in the cases of Chilectra and Endesa, thanks to the leadership of José Yuraszeck, one of the many Gremialistas recruited by Miguel Kast in ODEPLAN (see Chapter 8). In the 1990s he became known as the “czar of electricity” in Latin America, because of his important role in the sector. In 1969, Yuraszeck became an engineering student at the University of Chile’s physical sciences and mathematics school.177 In those years, shaken by university reform and political struggle between Popular Unity and the opposition, he participated in right-wing organizations in the school, working with the extremist Fatherland and Freedom movement. He sympathized with the positions of the Gremialistas and admired Jaime Guzmán, but did not join the National Party Youth, the main right-wing organization at the University of Chile.178 In 1978, after graduating, Yuraszeck took a position in ODEPLAN, running the regional coordination secretariat in the Eleventh Region.179 He spent two years there before returning to the main office in Santiago in early 1980, to work under Miguel Kast (then minister-director of ODEPLAN), where he was put in charge of sectoral coordination. He ascended quickly, soon being appointed regional subdirector (the third highest position), an important job that involved directing the secretariats in the country’s thirteen regions and supporting the regional administrators, who were high-ranking army officers.180 Yuraszeck performed effectively and soon became the second in command of ODEPLAN, national deputy director, in 1982.181 This new position was very important politically, because the national deputy director was also the secretary of the ministerial council on social issues. He thus came into

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close contact with the main regulatory authorities, who were coordinated by the minister of finance, Carlos Cáceres. In late October 1983, Yuraszeck left ODEPLAN when the Gremialistas lost ground under the new interior minister, Sergio Onofre Jarpa.182 However, by November, Cáceres had appointed Yuraszeck general manager of Chilectra, instructing him to commence its privatization. Though he had previous connections to this sector, he reached the top management through political skill learned in his effective dealings with the military and the Chicago Boys, whose trust gave him the power he needed to lead the ownership change of this major company. In Chilectra, Yuraszeck brought together a group of executives to guide the changes, including the previous general manager, Marcos Zylberberg, a Gremialista economist from Catholic University who had efficiently modernized the company during his three years in the position.183 Zylberberg was well versed in the complexities of the electric industry and its financial needs, which complemented Yuraszeck’s political and management skills. Both went to work to privatize the firm. Privatization of Chilectra, which began in 1983 with the CNE’s decision on the reimbursability of fee payments through stock shares, sped up when the Risk Classification Commission authorized pension funds to invest in Chilectra on October 24, 1985. According to the resolution, CORFO decided to gradually sell off share packages primarily to workers, following the precepts of popular capitalism and with no special financing, since the workers were allowed to use the resources accumulated to cover retirement bonuses, which in Chile accumulate based on years of service. This gradual approach allowed Yuraszeck and Zylberberg to persuade most Chilectra workers to buy in, thus giving them considerable control. The workers’ buy-in defused any privatization opposition from unions (as occurred elsewhere in Chile and Britain),184 since it assuaged their concerns about job security, wages, and benefits after the privatization changeover. Access to ownership of an efficient company with enormous growth possibilities promised major gains in the medium term, as indeed occurred.185 As CORFO imposed limits on the amount of shares each worker could acquire, Yuraszeck convinced Chilectra employees to create small holding companies.186 This represented a break with “labor capitalism” (which would have left workers in charge), because he supported individual purchases by employees, a route by which they acquired a very significant package of shares, representing 18 percent of Chilectra. The state bank (Banco del Estado) provided cheap credit to finance the purchase, and several of these small holding companies were created, among which the most important were Inmobiliaria Luz y Fuerza and Inversiones los Almendros.187 These became Chilectra’s main shareholders, each with a 10.88 percent interest. The existence of a complex network of businesses and the use of legal devices made possible this power strategy, which gave control to Chilectra’s own top executives.

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Later, to purchase a new share package offered by CORFO, another company was created in April 1989, Inversiones Luz, which also included a significant percentage of workers. According to Yuraszeck, the resources again came from the retirement bonus fund and from workers themselves. At this point, the top executives made a daring leap in their decision to control Chilectra by assigning themselves four of the eight directors’ positions in this firm, while the workers, their employees, had a similar number.188 They did this without offering their employees any financial compensation. In August 1988, Chilectra became the main subsidiary of the Enersis holding company, which took a 97.69 percent controlling interest.189 The presidents and board members of this holding company were all associated with the military regime.190 Privatization, as a result, ended immediately before the 1998 plebiscite.191 Once they had consolidated their control over Chilectra, Yuraszeck and his cohorts started to acquire Endesa shares through Enersis192 to obtain vertical integration—that is, control over generation, transmission, and distribution, which in turn would give them tremendous economic power in the SIC, the central power grid. To help privatization along, CORFO paid off a substantial portion of Endesa’s debts, through a complex deal involving US$500 million in shares bought at well above the market price. This slashed the company’s liabilitiesto-assets ratio substantially, from 2.61 to 0.77,193 and there was “a substantial transfer of capital from CORFO to Endesa, making its shares more attractive to potential private buyers.”194 The change of ownership began in the winter (June–August) of 1987, at a time of great political uncertainty, since the presidential plebiscite was in the works. As a result, conditions were very poor in terms of attracting foreign investors. The Ministry of Finance and CORFO decided that ownership should remain in Chilean hands, although they did not foresee that Endesa would be controlled by its own senior executives. On July 16, 1987, CORFO’s board decided to sell 15 percent of Endesa, offering shares to employees at a better price than it would later set for sales to the public, recommending that they make use of popular capitalism to buy, once again using retirement bonus funds. Endesa’s privatization continued after General Pinochet’s defeat in the plebiscite on October 5, 1988, because the regulatory authorities wanted to complete it before the regime change, foreseeing the opposition’s victory in presidential and congressional elections that were to take place within a year. The Chicago Boys feared that a democratic government headed by the opposition would decide to stop privatization. As of December 31, 1988, Endesa’s ownership structure was as follows: CORFO, 46.19 percent; AFPs, 20.69 percent; company employees, 4.30 percent; other shareholders, 28.82 percent; with sale of shares held by the state continuing.195 One year later, after the December 1989 presidential election, in which Patricio Aylwin, the PDC candidate of the opposition coalition, known as the Concertación, won a solid victory,

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CORFO’s share had fallen to just 7.07 percent. The shares were largely purchased by the company Inmobiliaria Manso de Velasco, set up by Yuraszeck and his cohorts, which had taken control of 5.83 percent, while Enersis controlled another 5.83 percent.196 Yuraszeck managed to strengthen Endesa’s position in the SIC with the privatization of the Pehuenche hydroelectric power plant, which had belonged to Endesa before being deliberately separated to create competition. In a public auction held in late 1988, CORFO sold this major plant to Endesa, instead of Chilgener, for example, which held a smaller share of the SIC’s generating capacity. Enersis tried to prevent the Frei government from diversifying the hydroelectric companies when it privatized the 300-megawatt Colbún plant, which had belonged to Endesa and remained under CORFO’s control after Endesa’s privatization.197 Through Chilectra, international consortiums interested in participating in privatization were alerted to the high costs of distributing energy in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, which would hurt the profit from the investment.198 Concerns over these costs had an effect, albeit not total, as four of the five consortiums abandoned the process, leaving only one, a consortium formed by a Belgian company and a Chilean company that was part of the powerful Matte group. It was awarded the bid.199 This strategy for taking control of Chilectra and Endesa was favored by the AFPs, which contributed economic resources and acquired a considerable part of the capital. The AFPs concentrated their investment in electric companies that were being privatized, creating a close link between success of the electric companies and profitability of the pension funds. The AFPs’ preference for electric companies peaked during 1991, after the return to democracy, when 30.38 percent of shares acquired by the pension funds were in electric companies, of which 7.24 percent were invested in Endesa.200 Privatization of the electric sector worsened the institutional conditions that had prevailed in the past. The monopolistic structure of generation and distribution worsened, since the Enersis group took control of Chilectra and Endesa through a vertical integration that gave it enormous economic and political power. During the Frei government, the Enersis group tried to dominate thermoelectric power, after the signing of an accord between Chile and Argentina that cleared the way for importation of gas to Chile. The government’s goal was to diversify the power grid in order to diminish dependence on hydroelectricity, since this power source was dependent on weather conditions, and to weaken Endesa’s dominant position in hydroelectric power. Endesa partnered with the Argentine state enterprise Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, which had rights to major gas deposits in southern Argentina, to build a gas pipeline to Chile. That plan, as well as a plan to build a pipeline to Chile’s Eighth Region and then to Santiago, proved too costly to implement. A Canadian company’s plan, presented in partnership with Chilgener (known as Gener today), with Bruno

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Philippi at the helm, proved more cost effective: the proposed pipeline would lead directly to Santiago through Maipo valley.201 The latter pipeline exists in Chile today. The outstanding feature of this electric privatization was that Yuraszeck and his henchmen resorted to employee participation. It is understandable that a high percentage of employees would accept an invitation from Chilectra’s general manager to buy shares being issued by CORFO as part of a gradual privatization process. However, Yuraszeck went considerably further than anyone else had, since he created a system of governance for Chilectra and Enersis that allowed him to take control of the shareholding companies without having the enormous economic resources that would have been necessary under a legal and ethical procedure. To do so, Yuraszeck simply argued that the board of directors should comprise skilled managers and technicians, rather than workers themselves. He explained this in a booklet produced in 1991, when he was involved in a daring growth strategy for Enersis in Latin America: Given that the decisions that these companies must make, both now and in the future, require a high degree of specialization in legal, financial and electric aspects, among others, it was decided that their management should be handled by specialists in these areas. As a result, it was established that the management of both companies, according to the bylaws, would go to two administrative councilors who are company employees expert in these areas.202

Moreover, the three companies—Inmobiliaria Luz y Fuerza, Inversiones Los Almendros, and Inversiones Luz—established two types of shares: one involving ownership and one involving voting rights, the latter of which were acquired by top executives. In practice, this division of shares involved expropriation of workers’ rights, as they did not have the information necessary to measure the future implications of this legal technicality in terms of the value of the company should anyone decide to sell.203 Conditions abroad made it easier for this situation to arise in Chile, because of the scarcity in the late 1980s of foreign operators who were interested and able to participate in these privatizations. In the case of the United States, electric companies were not authorized to invest abroad; and in Europe, companies were still state-owned and similarly could not invest abroad.204 This delegitimizing fault in the origin of the shares was neutralized by the new controlling parties through an intense propaganda campaign in the media, highlighting the companies’ performance and their relationship with parliamentarians and public servants in Chile’s democratic governments. This campaign grew more intense from 1994 to 1997 as the controlling parties hoped to prevent the national antimonopoly commission from approving the lawsuit presented in 1994 by the national economic prosecutor against Chilectra, Endesa, and Enersis due to vertical integration, accusing them of hurting fair

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competition.205 Due to its legal defense by distinguished lawyers, the Enersis group managed to get this requirement rejected in 1997, thus speeding up negotiations to sell control of Enersis to Endesa Spain, which wanted to launch a major move into Latin America. The Spanish investors had to pay a large sum, because Yuraszeck and his fellows controlled 51 percent of voting-right shares, inflating their value to an extremely high US$256 million.206 Among other irregularities, this sale was negotiated without the knowledge of the board, in which the AFPs had representation, thus breaking insider-information rules.207 As a result, Yuraszeck and his collaborators were admonished by the Superintendent of Securities and Insurance (Superintendencia de Valores y Seguros [SVS]) and charged with use of inside information by the Council for Defense of the State (Consejo de Defensa del Estado).208 Yuraszeck presented the sale of Enersis to Endesa Spain, which had been recently privatized by the José María Aznar government, as “the deal of the century,” but it was promptly recognized as the scandal of the century. Although it wasn’t clear to Chileans initially, it turned out that the agreements with the Spanish violated the law governing limited companies. In resolutions of November 21 and December 17, 1997, the SVS imposed the highest penalties in Chile’s history, a total of UF 2,220,000 (inflation-indexed accounting unit), against six top Enersis executives for conflict of interest, use of inside information, and hiding information from directors and stockholders, which included AFPs.209 The affected parties sought justice and contacted the biggest lawyers in the country, launching a legal process that they initially won but lost in an appeals court, which ruled that the SVS fines were in accordance with the law. This judgment was later upheld by the Chilean Supreme Court in a ruling on July 7, 2005. The fines rose to US$56 million, plus interest. Those sanctioned, with one exception, gradually paid their fines and negotiated with the government for cancellation of 40 percent of the interest,210 to which the government agreed in order to avoid a long legal proceeding, since the sanctioned parties could have appealed to the courts for cancellation. In the end, they paid US$49 million.211 The Supreme Court’s ruling hit Yuraszeck hard. He had counted on his prestigious and large legal team to clear him, but instead he had to abandon his ambitions to launch a career in Congress. Since 2000 he has been part of the Independent Democratic Union’s political committee, which actively supported its candidates in the 2001 congressional election campaign. He has also shown interest in being a Senate candidate.212 Having wide popularity among all levels of party leadership, he was elected to the general council in May 2004 with the second largest amount of votes from the fifteen members of the political committee. He was reelected in May 2006. *

*

*

I have argued in this chapter that the privatizations of Chile’s public firms in the 1980s were carried out for political reasons: to dismantle the state and thus

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prevent it from playing a major role in the economy, and to create a new type of business class committed to the objectives of the military regime. These privatizations involved substantial patronage, with senior executives in some major public firms allowed to assume controlling interest, taking advantage of popular capitalism and labor capitalism. The political context favored this strategy, since the privatizations started during a period of apertura, in which intense political conflicts discouraged foreign investment. The pension fund administrators helped this process along, since they were the main buyers of shares issued by public firms, and their board members supported the actions of senior management. In part through the methods examined in this chapter, strong economic performance united with political elements became a major aspect of the authoritarian regime’s legitimation strategy.

■

Notes

1. Büchi (1993) and Castañeda (1992) stand out in the economic work. Critical views are offered by Meller (1996), Foxley (1982), Ffrench-Davis (2002). 2. Ariztía (1997). 3. On Enersis, see Raineri (1999). 4. Using the concepts defined by Marshall (1973). 5. Chilean social policy has followed a path of social integration directed by the owning classes, similar to that of Bismarck’s Germany; Bendix (1964). This is different from Britain’s democratic model, in which first political rights and then civil rights were institutionalized. The emphasis on different paces of state development is drawn from Rokkan (1973). Chile differs from Uruguay in this sense as well. There, political and social citizenship went hand in hand and was achieved earlier than in Chile. The information on political citizenship in Chile and Uruguay is presented in the appendices to Nohlen (1973). 6. Under this system, “the government practiced a sort of debt for capital swap”; Hachette and Lüders (1992), p. 86. 7. Feigenbaum and Henig (1993, 1994), Feigenbaum, Henig, and Hamnett (1998). 8. The president of the national manufacturers’ association (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril), Bruno Casanova, put it this way: “We live in constant uncertainty, unsure whether we’re on the right path anymore, or even if there is a way out”; quoted in Fernández (1994), p. 188. The economic crisis and its political effects are analyzed in the next chapter. 9. In general, buyers were Chilean businessmen, except for the Telephone Company of Chile, purchased by an Australian tycoon, Alan Bond, who would later sell out to Spain’s Telefónica. 10. This long-term goal of ending the state’s major participation in the economy was implemented with several policies, not just by selling off its companies. The 1984 tax reform, for example, slashed tax revenues by about 40 percent, while the 1988 reform reduced them a further 2 percent of GGP; Meller (1996), p. 273. 11. The list is presented in Hachette and Lüders (1992), pp. 264–272. It includes not only large companies and banks but also many medium-sized and small firms. Much else has been written on the privatizations, including Marcel (1989), Sáez (1993), Larroulet (1994a, 1996).

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12. The main beneficiaries were the conglomerates who could get credit in the banks they controlled; Dahse (1979). 13. On the origins of the entrepreneurial state, see Muñoz and Arriagada (1977), Ortega Martínez (1989), Pinto (1985). 14. Much has been written on the new pension system: Baeza and Margozzini (1995), Baeza and Manubens (1988). For a general introduction to the new pension system, see Superintendencia de AFP (1985). For a more critical perspective, see RuizTagle (1997). 15. General guidelines are provided in Hachette and Lüders (1992), pp. 83–88. 16. The economic arguments maintained that private businesses were, by nature, more efficient than public firms, and assumed that efficiency was associated with ownership and not the legal regime governing the company. Much has been written on this: Vickers and Yarrow (1997), Bishop, Kay, and Mayer (1994). 17. Privatizations in the United Kingdom during Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government (1979–1990), and under President Carlos Menem’s administration (1989–1999) in Argentina, confirmed this. For privatizations in the United Kingdom, see Swann (1988). For Argentina, see Gerchunoff and Cánovas (1996). 18. A close relationship between business and the government influenced the executives appointed to senior positions on the economic team. José Piñera was an executive of the Cruzat group when he was appointed labor minister in 1978; Rolf Lüders was a top executive in the Vial group when he became joint minister of economy and finance in 1982. 19. The discussion on the Panal case is presented in AHJG, sess. 200A, June 6, 1975, and sess. 201A, June 6, 1975. Soza was removed a few weeks later. 20. The idea of ethical inhibitions as a basis of development comes from North (1993). 21. Biographical information is available in Osorio and Cabezas (1995), chap. 6. He was General Pinochet’s son-in-law, adding an element of nepotism to the case. 22. Endesa (1982), p. 11. 23. For a history of CAP and a brief description of its privatization, see Echenique and Rodríguez (1990, 1996). 24. Among the few exceptions were some of the “political” military officers, per concepts found in Chapter 4. Generals Jorge Ballerino and Guillermo Garín, who had worked closely with General Pinochet, were appointed to the company boards of some companies after the change of regime. 25. On the political importance of regulations, I refer to Francis (1993). 26. “[On] the negative side, the lack of transparency of most of the privatizations stands out [but] possibly the lack of transparency did not significantly affect the share prices and distribution in most privatizations, since the investors involved were suitably informed, although this did give rise to criticism”; Hachette and Lüders (1992), p. 241, emphasis added. 27. Hachette and Lüders (1992), pp. 94–99, in the section titled “Organization and Implementation of Privatizations.” 28. Luis Larraín was deputy director of ODEPLAN from 1986 to 1988, and became minister after the 1988 plebiscite. He went on to become deputy director of a right-wing think tank, the Institute for Freedom and Development, in 1990. 29. This was Cristián Larroulet, a former adviser to the Economy ministry during the first round of privatizations, where he “made a decisive contribution to management policies for state-owned companies, such as centralized information systems to control their operation, among others.” Hachette and Lüders (1992), p. 96, n. 11. He

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has headed the right-wing think tank Institute for Freedom and Development, which advises UDI and National Renewal Congress members, since 1990. 30. Hachette and Lüders (1992), p. 96, n. 11, call this “an extraordinary example of what ‘privatization of the privatization process’ means.” 31. His thesis dealt with the first round of privatizations. 32. Hachette and Lüders (1992), p. 97. 33. The total value of the privatized public companies’ stock of assets was about US$3.6 billion; Meller (1996), p. 268. 34. Exposición sobre el estado de la Hacienda Pública, presented by Eduardo Aninat Ureta, October 1999, p. 60. 35. Nor were the privatizations promoted by the United Kingdom’s conservative government in the 1980s justified by lack of efficiency in public enterprises: “Economists are now generally agreed that simply changing the ownership of assets is not sufficient, and indeed is not even necessary, to improve efficiency. What is important is the threat of competition and, therefore, market condition and perhaps the regulatory regime”; Jackson and Price (1994), p. 16. 36. Mandakovic and Lima (1989). 37. Hachette and Lüders (1992), p. 251. 38. Ibid., p. 252. Another author noted that “when the privatization program began, public companies were in good shape from the point of view of their profitability and their state of indebtedness, with few exceptions”; Marcel (1989), p. 29. 39. These conclusions were reaffirmed by Lüders (1996). 40. Decision no. 988, July 2, 1986. 41. Decision no. 1010, October 10, 1986. 42. Decision no. 1021, October 10, 1986. 43. Decision no. 1117, June 19, 1987. 44. Decision no. 1118, June 19, 1987. 45. Decision no. 1121, June 26, 1987. 46. Meller (1996), p. 271. 47. Exposición sobre el estado de la Hacienda Pública, 1985, pp. 23–24; 1986, pp. 24–25; 1988, pp. 25–26; 1989, pp. 25–26. 48. The Junta’s Declaration of Principles already contained the thesis of a “country of owners,” although in a different sense: “The goal is to make Chile a country of owners, not proletarians [propritarios y no proletarios].” 49. For this policy, see Saunders and Harris (1994). 50. In the end, employment did not fall, because companies modernized and were helped along by economic recovery; Sáez (1993). 51. This concern existed in the United Kingdom as well. 52. Speech delivered by the minister of economy, Modesto Collados, quoted in “Capitalismo popular en las filiales de CORFO,” Estrategia, May 12–18, 1986, p. 18. 53. Ibid. 54. See “Capitalismo popular en regiones,” Estrategia, April 11–17, 1988, p. 3. 55. The taxation law was reformed, establishing major tax exemptions in Article 56, sections A and B. 56. Sapag (1997), pp. 156–157. 57. As per Marcel (1989). 58. This was done in Soquimich, Chilmetro, and CAP; Marcel (1989), p. 34. It was also used in Chilectra (discussed later). Some companies also offered their employees shares during collective bargaining instead of benefits or vacation time; ibid. 59. Marcel (1989), p. 34. 60. “All pension system members indirectly own the companies in which pension fund managers [AFPs] have invested the funds from their individual accounts”; ODEPLAN (1988), p. 68.

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61. See ODEPLAN (1988), p. 68. One author writes that in 1997, the Banks of Chile and Santiago had 55,071 shareholders, while other companies had 41,034; Valenzuela Silva (1988), pp. 175–217, tab. 2. Hachette and Lüders (1992), tab. 6.2, use much higher figures for nineteen of the twenty-seven privatized companies: 92,200 in 1987, 151,700 in 1988 and 1989. 62. Similarly, small owners who had gained access to land through agrarian reform sold it to agribusinesses and producers after receiving their deeds from the military. 63. This shareholder culture did not emerge in the United Kingdom either; Saunders and Harris (1994). 64. “We can feel satisfied that this system is becoming an international standard: Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico, and El Salvador are already implementing it; Poland is about to do so; the United States, the U.K., Russia and other countries are analyzing it and adapting it to their own reality. We can proudly speak of a ‘genuine Chilean export product’”; Infante (1990), p. 24. 65. See Arenas (1999) for a bibliography revealing interest among analysts in developed countries. 66. Feigenbaum and Henig (1994). 67. Arenas (1997), Arenas and Bertranou (1997), Marcel and Arenas (1992), Cheyre (1988). 68. In general, the pensions paid out by these sectoral funds were higher than state pensions, but not high enough to be called “privileged,” as the neoliberals argued. The exception represented by the military is examined later; it reflected conditions specific to their profession. 69. This was because many funds were devoted to small groups (the Bank of Chile’s employee fund, the Club Hipico fund, etc.). Because of this, of the thirty-two that existed in 1979, only five actually served more than 1 percent of paying members. 70. Affiliation peaked in 1973; in 1979, one year before the system changed, it stood at 64 percent of the labor force; Cheyre (1988). 71. One of the commissions to correct these weaknesses was presided over by lawyer Jorge Prat in the 1950s, and produced one of the most thorough studies of the pension system ever. 72. Mesa-Lago (1996), pp. 95–96. 73. This line of argument was repeated in the 1990s; see Godoy and Valdés (1994), esp. p. 159. This interpretation contradicts the view of some political scientists, which I share, about the functions of social integration and political stability achieved by congressional commitments, including social security. See Valenzuela (1978), chap. 1. See also Valenzuela and Wilde (1984). 74. The idea of individual capitalization was not new; it was based on the individual retirement insurance system in the United States. The neoliberal economists who prepared and promoted the social security reform were familiar with the US social system, since they had done postgraduate work there. They also were attracted to the US system because of the absence of a strong union movement, and of left-wing and Christian Democratic parties. Europe was intellectually and politically alien to them, since its social security system was based on intergenerational solidarity, its countries generally had strong left-wing and Christian Democratic parties, and its powerful unions participated fully in the political system. 75. For a summary of the political arguments against the old social security system from a Gremialista perspective, see former minister José Piñera’s book: Piñera (1991). 76. Piñera (1991), p. 37. 77. See the chapter on social security system reforms in Centro de Estudios Públicos (1992), pp. 122 ss. 78. Centro de Estudios Públicos (1992), p. 130.

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79. Ibid., p. 134. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. This was influenced by the idea of workers’ enterprises, defended by the Christian Democratic Party during the Allende government, as an alternative to nationalized companies that become state property. 82. They sought the advice of external consultants to examine the multiple legal and economic issues involved. One of these consultants was a lawyer with the bank employees’ pension fund, Sergio Fernández, who prepared the reports requested by Kast, and went on to become labor minister in 1976. 83. These ideas are developed in Infante et al. (1974). 84. Infante et al. (1974), p. 26. Roberto Kelly says that “the start of the social security reform will entail a remarkable development of savings and investment . . . strongly boosting the country’s economic growth”; ibid. 85. “Ministro de Planificacion habla sobre la reforma provisional,” Gestión I, no. 2, December 1975, pp. 25–26. 86. He was in charge of the government’s social area. 87. Its “faults” are criticized; these include being “regressive,” negatively impacting employment, encouraging excessive spending, and “management deficiencies”; El Mercurio, November 8, 1975, pp. 5–6. 88. Article 61, bill to “reform social security.” The text and the reasoning behind it were published in El Mercurio, November 8, 1975. 89. Article 62, ibid. 90. The bill argued that “corporations must compete to retain members with the quality of their services, as well as with profitability and optional benefits.” 91. He put off the issue, arguing that a law would regulate their operation by defining their “constitution and organization, resource management and investment, safeguard measures, minimum and maximum number of members, registration and transfer of same”; Article 70, clause 3. 92. “The system’s senior management is handled through the Ministry of Labor and Social Security. The senior management of the public healthcare system is through the Ministry of Health. All of this notwithstanding the policy-making and financial control exercised by the Finance ministry”; Article 68. 93. The reform was included in the “seven modernizations” presented by General Pinochet in his 1979 presidential address, in which he announced that his “new institutional order” would start with a new constitution. Leigh’s expulsion is analyzed in Chapter 3, and his role in the junta in Chapter 6. 94. For a professional and political profile, see Chapter 8. 95. Piñera had declared his preference for privatizing the pension system in the press; for example, Ercilla, March 29, 1978, p. 25. 96. Piñera (1991), p. 93. 97. This has continued. Humeres Magnan and Humeres Noguer (1994) only dedicate 6 pages to it in a 646-page book with tables containing quantitative data, pp. 595–600. Investment, central to the system, is given short shrift, pp. 597–598, which is little more than a paraphrase of Article 45 of Decree Law no. 3500. See also Humeres Noguer (1994), Thayer and Fernández (1989). 98. An excellent study clearly demonstrates that the bill’s financial criticisms of the old pension system were wrong; see Arellano (1985), chap. 3. 99. AHJG, sess. 398, October 14, 1980, p. 96. 100. Labor and Social Security Ministry, Fundamentos económicos, sociales y políticos, June 4, 1980, p. 18. This is a lengthy report to support the draft presented to

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the junta. The interpretation in the report complemented the 1979 Labor Plan, enacted to structurally weaken the union movement. 101. AHJG, sess. 398, October 14, 1980, p. 97. 102. The minimum capital required to set up an AFP was relatively low, making it relatively easy to create one. According to Piñera, it was half the annual dues for the national copper workers’ association, US$500,000. Unions were granted no special arrangements to set up AFPs, as their proposal of paying in the capital over a period longer than the six months, specified in the draft, was rejected because “it would break the rule of equality”; AHJG, sess. 398, October 14, 1980, p. 62. 103. Information on ownership and board members is from the Boletín Estadístico, published by the Superintendent of AFPs. 104. This was put forward by Arellano (1982). He estimated that the public sector’s annual revenues could decline by as much as 4.3 percent of GGP, as workers switched to the new pension system. Since contributions that normally covered family allowances and unemployment subsidies would gradually decrease from 1981 to 1983, state revenues could decline by as much as 1 percent of GGP; ibid., p. 112. 105. Piñera (1991), p. 30. 106. In view of the reform’s importance, the military members of the junta’s advisory committee (COAJ) took part in the debate in the Second Legislative Commission, headed by air force commander in chief General Fernando Matthei. The Secretariat of Legislation (Secretaría de Legislación), a direct advisory body to the junta, was also involved, forming a “mixed commission.” 107. The amount of the pension was very important, since military officers, unprepared for the labor market, have trouble finding jobs after retirement, making their pensions their main income. This point was argued by General Pinochet’s legal adviser, Fernando Lyon, in Acta de la sesión conjunta de las Comisiones Legislativas, el Comité Asesor y la Secretaría de Legislación, October 22, 1980, p. 276. 108. Argued by lawyer Walter Riesco, member of the Second Legislative Commission, in Acta de la sesión conjunta, October 21, 1980, p. 281. 109. The timing of this argument is interesting: just before the 1982 economic crisis, when the situation was compounded by conglomerates’ heavy debt. 110. Said Pinochet: “I maintain my comments on pensions. Why? Because there are two gentlemen here who are trying to take. . . . I won’t name them, but you know them perfectly well, because it was published in Hoy magazine. The machinery is enormous, but if you touch a screw on the bottom, the whole building will come tumbling down. It is clearly the makings of an empire. So I have figured out who will make the system bad”; AHJG, sess. 398, October 14, 1980, p. 45. Vial thought that the new system would operate through banks, which would give him great advantage, since he could use the Bank of Chile’s infrastructure throughout the country, whereas Cruzat believed it would require new companies and began to prepare the necessary staff. The latter was right. 111. AHJG, sess. 398, October 14, 1980, p. 44. 112. Ibid., p. 47. Matthei constantly uses ambiguous arguments in the junta’s debates to show his independence from Pinochet. 113. Ibid., p. 48. 114. It was presented by the army representative in the junta, General César Raúl Benavides: “the armed forces’ staff (do not wish to appear) excluded from this process, that is, it is expressed, but not noted”; Acta de la sesión conjunta, October 21, 1980, p. 274. 115. For union leaders’ various reactions, see “Reacciones ante la reforma previsional,” El Mercurio, November 8, 1980.

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116. This group gathered prominent Gremialista leaders, who would later form the Independent Democratic Union. Their first and only general secretary was Javier Leturia, a former president of Catholic University’s student federation (FEUC) and national representative of the National Unity Youth Front (see Chapter 8). 117. It was edited by Roberto Pulido and former Youth secretary Javier Leturia; El Mercurio, November 16, 1980. 118. “Ya viene la reforma,” Hoy, April 29–May 5, 1981. 119. He pointed out that he had created a proposal to reform the system earlier but “did not have enough political strength to carry it out”; El Mercurio, November 8, 1980. 120. “Ya viene la reforma,” Hoy, October 22–28, 1980, pp. 30–32; “En la puerta del horno,” Hoy, November 5–11, 1980, pp. 19–20; “Efectos de la reforma,” Hoy, November 12–18, 1980, pp. 14–15. 121. Hoy, November 19–25, 1980. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Hoy, October 1980. 125. Ibid. 126. Arellano (1985), p. 146. 127. Ibid., p. 145. 128. Piñera argued that the business sector’s savings in (worker pension) contributions would increase employment. 129. These two, plus another three AFPs—San Cristóbal, Habitat, belonging to the national builders’ association, and Summa, belonging to the Matte group—accounted for 84.3 percent of total members. The other AFPs were Alameda, Concordia, Cuprum, El Libertador, Invierta, Planvital, and Santa María. Months later, administrator Magister (of the national teachers’ association) also appeared. Habitat gradually increased its share, reaching 11.8 percent in 1985. That same year, Provida had 28.89 percent of members, and Santa María had 18.8 percent. 130. Historia de la ley no. 18,398, p. 46. 131. See interviews with the head of the Superintendent of AFPs’ financial division, Eugenio Camus: “Con lupa estudian inversión de fondos de pensiones,” La Tercera de la Hora, September 15, 1983; “Posibles Nuevas Inversiones para Fondos de AFP,” El Mercurio, December 12, 1983. 132. Interview with Ignacio Cousiño: “No hay que innovar en políticas de inversión de fondos de las AFP,” El Mercurio, July 12, 1983. He referred to the issue some time later, saying that it was an “idea that needed maturing”; “Soy partidario de que los afiliados participen en directorios de las AFP,” La Segunda, October 11, 1983. 133. Cousiño, “No hay que innovar.” 134. Benjamin David, president of AFP Summa, said that although he thought it vital to eventually invest in the stock market, he thought that “for the time being that is a long way from happening. We cannot enter the stock market without some guarantee that we will be able to recover our investment. Before investing in shares, the whole stock market would have to be regulated”; El Mercurio, August 7, 1983. Virgilio Perreta, president of AFP Cuprum, still controlled by CODELCO supervisors, had a similar opinion: “I am very concerned that the authorities might yield to these pressures and, for example, announce that we can buy stocks tomorrow, but if there is no real competition, the whole system could collapse.” Ibid. 135. “Exclusivo: texto del proyecto que permite la inversión de las AFP en acciones,” El Mercurio, April 20, 1984. The apertura is examined in Chapter 10. 136. It was to have five members: overseer of AFPs, overseer of banks and financial institutions, overseer of securities and insurance overseer, and two representatives

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of AFPs, elected by their peers. During discussion of the draft, the AFPs’ complaints about the government’s majority led to two new members being added: a representative of the Central Bank, which is constitutionally autonomous, and another AFP; Historia de la Ley no. 18,398, p. 299. 137. They were known as the “AFP-able” companies. 138. No legal entity could, directly or through others, hold more than 20 percent of the company’s shares, except the state, in which case the limit went up to 40 percent. In addition, 50 percent of shares had to be held by minority shareholders, and 15 percent by more than a hundred nonrelated shareholders. 139. Historia de la Ley no. 18,398, p. 52. Companies that wanted to open up to AFPs had to reform their bylaws to incorporate these regulations on the concentration of ownership. 140. The bill was criticized by the military regime’s supporters. Pedro Ibáñez, a former senator and member of the Council of State, questioned opening the AFPs to the stock market due to its instability, declaring “if this draft is passed, AFPs will enter the risky and volatile arena of the stock market, with its constantly fluctuating returns and its equity that can completely disappear”; “Urge un mercado accionario sano,” El Mercurio, June 17, 1984. The initiative was criticized by opposition union leaders as forming part of efforts to privatize public companies. See statements by Federico Mujica in “Previsión e inversión,” La Tercera, June 5, 1984, and a public statement by Bank of Chile’s Local Union 2 in “Declaración pública sobre reforma previsional,” La Tercera, June 6, 1984. 141. “Urge un mercado accionario sano,” El Mercurio, June 17, 1984. 142. Interview with Alfonso Serrano, acting labor minister, in “Proyecto resguarda plenamente fondos de afiliados a AFP,” El Mercurio, June 10, 1984. In the same context, AFP superintendent Juan Ariztía pointed out that, faced with any demagogic handling of the state-owned companies in which funds would be invested, “he has no doubt that under such circumstances, affiliates would organize in defense of their funds”; “Urge un mercado accionario sano,” El Mercurio, June 17, 1984. 143. Law no. 18398. 144. Law no. 18646, August 29, 1988; Law no. 18798, May 23, 1989. 145. The companies were Enersis, Chilquinta, Chilgener, Endesa, CAP, Soquimich, Laboratorios Chile, Compañía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones, Entel, the CTC, Pizarreño, Andina CCT, Copec, Elecmetal, Iansa, Lucchetti, Sudamericana de Vapores, Marinsa, Minera, Pesquera Coloso, Cementos, Madeco, and the Technical and Industrial Company (Compañía Técnico Industrial [CTI]). 146. In 1989, 94.4 percent of pension funds invested in company shares (representing 10.1 percent of the total) were in twenty-three firms, most of them privatized or reprivatized because of their ambiguous status. This share fell to 76.6 percent in 1997, which was still very high. 147. This happened with Chile’s national telephone company, the CTC, in which the Australian group, headed by Alan Bond, owned 45 percent of the shares and elected four of seven board members; Marcel (1989), p. 33. 148. Transparency in voting at shareholder meetings was achieved only through a law that reformed capital markets, passed in 1994 by the first elected government. Since then, the Superintendent of AFPs sends representatives to the meetings to monitor voting, and AFPs must publicly declare their voting. 149. Arenas (1999), p. 4. 150. The impact of AFPs’ economic and political power in the companies in which they hold shares should also be evaluated. This was not regulated until the capital market reforms of May 1994. 151. Arellano (1981), pp. 111–112.

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152. Arenas (1997), p. 46. 153. Arenas (1999), p. 7. 154. The public health system’s national health fund (Fonasa) is the most trusted (with 59 percent in 2000 and 63 percent in 2006), while private health insurance providers have the least support (21 percent in 2000 and 16 percent in 2006); Barómetro-CERC survey, July 2000 and May 2006. 155. Arellano (1985). 156. Costs were over 1 percent of members’ payments. Several studies examine AFP efficiency issues and their impact on administrative costs: de Gregorio (1997), Donoso (1997), Valdés (1997). 157. Arenas (1999), pp. 5–6. 158. Aspectos macroeconómicos (2000), p. 49. 159. Arenas (1997), p. 48. 160. As a gauge of its magnitude, in 1999 it was more than seven times the budgets of all the programs included under the planning ministry’s solidarity and social investment fund (Fosis); Arenas (1999), p. 6. 161. Arenas (1999), p. 7. 162. Per Bernstein (1995, 1996), Philippi (1993). For an overview of the electric system, see Blanlot (1993). 163. These people did not have moral inhibitions, as defined by North (1993). 164. By 1990 the situation had changed, reflecting the coming onstream of the Colbún-Machicura state hydroelectric plant in 1985, with 490 megawatts, or 19.3 percent of installed capacity, pushing Endesa’s share down to 59.4 percent, Chilgener’s to 15.9 percent, and other power generators’ to 5.4 percent. 165. It was the result of the merger of a US company founded in 1889 and a Chilean firm created in 1919. 166. Endesa (1982), p. 2. 167. There were also two small systems for each of the two regions in Chile’s far south; see Bernstein (1995). 168. Bernstein (1995, 1996), Philippi (1993). 169. This was established by the 1982 electrical law (Ley Eléctrica), Ministry of Mining, Decree Law no. 1, September 1982. Regulations governing the electric power clearinghouse (Centro de Despacho Económico de Carga), Ministry of Mining Supreme Decree no. 6, February 1985. 170. Bernstein (1995), p. 26. This new system came into force in 1980, before the law was passed. 171. According to Bernstein (1995), p. 27, the strongest opposition came from the workers, “who felt their job security and their so-called social benefits threatened. This situation changed with time, insofar as they were offered shares financed with a portion of their individual retirement funds.” 172. “The engineers’ union opposed its members buying stocks, but its good intentions were not respected by members”; Berstein (1995), p. 27. 173. Berstein (1995), p. 14. 174. Philippi (1993), p. 258. 175. Other members of the board included engineer Juan Hurtado Vicuña, a businessman and friend of Büchi’s, and economists Andrés Passicot, director of the National Statistics Bureau, and Ernesto Fontaine, a founding father of the Chicago Boys. Also present were General Pinochet’s son-in-law, Julio Ponce Lerou; army lieutenantcolonel Gustavo Latorre; and a lawyer from the army’s legal service, Juan Romero. Hurtado was also a board member at CAP and Chilectra Metropolitana, having previously been a board member of Chilectra; Endesa (1982), pp. 10–14.

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176. The list is presented in Endesa (1983), p. 2. Endesa employees’ opposition to the company’s breakup was apparent in 1981, when the power-generating company Colbún-Machicura, a hydroelectric plant to be built in the Seventh Region, was formed. This decision triggered a conflict with the National Energy Commission, which had prepared the initiative, and led to the resignation of its head, Bruno Philippi. 177. Biographical information from Osorio and Cabezas (1995), chap. 3. 178. He describes this in an interview with Cosas no. 1,479, December 19, 1994, pp. 33–36. 179. It could be said that Yuraszeck was interested in electricity from that moment on, since he had initially been hired as a consultant to study this subject in the Ninth Region, Contract no. 747, Interior Ministry, August 31, 1978. He was appointed as deputy on September 20, 1978, Decree no. 815, Interior Ministry, and acquired full rights on November 30, 1978, Decree no. 1087, Interior Ministry. 180. Decree no. 989, Interior Ministry, September 9, 1980. For more on military officers’ participation in regional governments, see Chapter 4. 181. Decree no. 1325, Interior Ministry, October 4, 1982. 182. His voluntary resignation was accepted by Decree no. 1258, Interior Ministry, October 28, 1983. For more on why the Gremialista movement’s power waned, see Chapter 10. 183. The board appointed him general manager in 1980. He was a member of Catholic University’s economics student association in 1971–1972 (see Chapter 7). 184. See, for example, Swann (1988). 185. Yuraszeck (1991), p. 27. 186. Ibid. These were the companies Chispas I and Chispas II, created in July 1986, which are not mentioned in a short book on Enersis’s history: Yuraszeck Troncoso (1991). These in turn created two more companies, Inmobiliaria Luz y Fuerza and Inversiones Los Almendros. 187. On July 31, 1987, Chile’s state bank processed two credit operations totaling UF 568,002 (inflation-indexed accounting unit) (US$16 million in 2000 dollars), to be paid in January 1996. This credit was used to buy 2,349,731 Chilectra Metropolitana shares from the government development corporation, CORFO. The assets of both companies, the shares bought from CORFO, and those contributed by the partners were left as a security deposit in favor of the bank, along with 100 percent of the earnings per share produced by the companies, which were to pay for these shares, according to Yuraszeck (1991), pp. 25–26. 188. Per Yuraszeck’s own account (1991), p. 26, in which he characterizes board members representing workers as “union leaders,” to show the unions’ support for this kind of appropriation of the business. We will return to this later, because senior management thus took control of half the voting rights in Enersis, without having a significant part of the capital. 189. Enersis emerged in August 1988. Its first president was José Piñera and its top manager was José Yuraszeck. The remaining shares were held by the AFPs (32.7 percent), Enersis and affiliate employees (25.1 percent), and shareholders represented by eleven companies (42.2 percent), with the rest held by other shareholders (1,081); Chilectra (1988), p. 5, Enersis (1988), pp. 6–9. In 1991, lawyer Luis Fernando Mackenna became president of Enersis, and one of Pinochet’s former mining ministers joined the board; Enersis (1991). 190. Aside from José Piñera, in 1988 a lawyer closely linked to the military regime, Hermógenes Pérez de Arce, joined the Enersis board; Chilectra (1988), p. 9. In 1989, former finance minister Sergio de la Cuadra (1982) was appointed to the board.

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191. Piñera left the presidency of Chilectra, which was assumed by Sergio de la Cuadra. Yuraszeck became vice president, and Marcos Zylberberg the top manager; Chilectra (1990), pp. 8–10. 192. On the structure of Enersis, see Raineri (1999). 193. Meller (1996), p. 271. 194. Marcel (1989), p. 37. 195. The board members were four military officers and five civilians. The president of the company was Brigadier-General Fernando Hormazábal Gajardo, a military engineer, who was also the chief executive officer of the Chilean Copper Corporation; Endesa (1988), pp. 10–11. 196. Endesa (1989), p. 10. 197. Endesa and Gener were implicitly excluded from the bidding to establish that businesses already in the sector could not participate. 198. According to interviews that I conducted with high-level executives in the British power companies National Power and Power Gen, in London in September 1997. 199. Toward the end, the regime also decided to privatize the Colbún-Machicura hydropower generation company, whose shares were to be sold to government or city employees, based on the argument that this would benefit teachers, who were now officially employed by municipal governments rather than the Ministry of Education; CORFO Board Decision no. 1454, December 12, 1989. This privatization was interrupted by the return to democracy and was actually implemented during the Concertación’s second government (1994–2000). 200. For this period, the Superintendent of AFPs does not have complete information on the companies in which the AFPs held shares. A review of the annual reports of the main electric companies shows that in 1991, one-fourth (25.41 percent) of the AFPs’ total shareholdings were in Enersis (Chilectra), and just 5.36 percent in Chilgener. Of Endesa’s twelve largest shareholders, AFPs accounted for 25.02 percent; Endesa (1991). The AFPs’ share of Endesa was actually higher than this, since the report only examines the percentages for the twelve main shareholders and not the total, which would include those holding smaller percentages. 201. For months, both plans and their advantages were heavily promoted in the media, a campaign dubbed “the pipeline war.” 202. Yuraszeck (1991), p. 24. 203. Both types of shares were eventually offered on the stock exchange at different prices, with voting-right shares worth roughly 60 percent more than ownership shares. 204. Preparations for the privatization of electric power utilities in the United Kingdom began in the late 1980s and took place in 1990–1991; see Surrey (1996). In Spain, preparations started with José María Aznar’s government, elected in 1996. 205. The requirement also extended to Transelec, the power transmission company controlled by Endesa. 206. Raineri (1999), p. 134. This deal became known as the “scandal of the century,” because it was negotiated without the authorization of the board, on which AFPs were represented, and because voting rights were sold off at a spectacular price. 207. The Enersis board knew that it needed a strategic partner to finance the ambitious expansion plan being promoted by its executives. The problem was that in searching for the investor, a serious conflict of interest arose, as the defense of the holding company’s interests became secondary to negotiations involving the voting rights of its senior management, information that was withheld from the board until it was too late.

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208. This behavior was questioned by the business sector, and Yuraszeck had to resign from his position on the council of the national manufacturers’ association and his position on the executive committee of the influential Center for Public Studies. 209. José Yuraszeck, Marcos Zylberberg, Marcelo Brito, Arsenio Molina, Eduardo Gardella, and Luis Fernando Mackenna. 210. One exception was the case of Mackenna, who defaulted and whose heirs argued that they were not responsible for the fine. The government rejected their interpretation and in 2004 demanded US$30 million in penalties plus interest. 211. “Tesorería accede a condonar parcialmente intereses a exejecutivos de Enersis,” La Tercera, August 18, 2005, p. 23. 212. La Tercera, July 21, 2002, pp. 8–9. He then dropped this idea; see the interview in La Segunda, April 25, 2003, pp. 54–55.

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10 The 1982–1983 Economic Crisis and the Politics of Apertura

The new rulers decided early on that they would establish an authoritarian regime based on “goals and not deadlines,” to ensure the long life they needed to profoundly transform the country’s political and economic foundations and organize a political order different from democracy as it is understood in the Western world. This regime, a “protected and authoritarian democracy,” was to be overseen by the military and have limited pluralism, as announced by General Pinochet in his 1977 Chacarillas speech, written by Jaime Guzmán. The regime was to follow a multipronged legitimation strategy, involving historical, legal-constitutional, and economic legitimation, and was enshrined institutionally in the new constitution, approved in the September 11, 1980, plebiscite. The main promoters of this new political order were the Gremialistas, who treated the 1980 vote as if it had turned “a military government into a constitutional, pre-democratic government.”1 In several editorials in Realidad, a magazine published by this power group from 1979 to 1983, Guzmán argued this point of view. It was thought that the economic boom would take the country out of underdevelopment and further legitimize the regime, which was to progress gradually toward a limited democracy, expected to start in the late 1980s. The economic and political reforms would remain long after the armed forces left power, once they had achieved their “goals.” The political ideas of the Gremialistas were intimately linked to the economic proposals of the Chicago Boys. The 1980 constitution established the institutional architecture of the future and a “transition” to instate it, which began with its coming into effect on March 11, 1981. “Transitory” articles established that at this point a transition had begun, with the construction of new institutions to be completed after what supporters hoped would be the victory of General Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite and after the 1989 congressional election, during which promilitary groups were expected to form a broad majority.2 The political change would 357

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be pushed through amid an economic boom,3 which was to provide most people with material benefits, creating a favorable atmosphere for the plebiscite and increasing the chances that Pinochet would win. In these eight years, civilians were to participate more in the government, and the military was to gradually withdraw from the public administration, letting the former, and above all the Gremialistas, consolidate their dominance and thus become the main party by the 1989 congressional elections. The “transition” maintained the political recess established after the coup, to prevent the opposition from organizing against General Pinochet in the plebiscite.4 This recess was supposed to end only after the election, since if it were to end earlier, it might produce “a premature excitement, incompatible with the correct functioning of a military government and therefore bad for playing the role the country required of it, and which it had set itself.”5 The opposition had to accept the institutional order and the authority of General Pinochet and his government; if it failed to do so, it would have to assume the costs of its own mistake.6 This allowed the regime to justify maintaining the presidential powers established in the 1970s, including exile, which was covered by Transitory Article 24 of the constitution and could be applied through an administrative decision whenever the public order was thought to be at risk. Guzmán justified this state of affairs, arguing that it was “a rule necessary to allow the military government to prevail, within a legal framework, no matter how broad or fluid it became.”7 Nonetheless, reality quickly ruined these plans, which were based on the assumption that a new constitution and economic success could guarantee the consolidation of authoritarian rule. Several factors prevented this from happening, revealing the limitations of political engineering in a country with a long democratic tradition and well-organized political parties. The first flaw in the plan was General Pinochet himself, because he treated the 1980 plebiscite, which approved the new constitution, as a personal victory that had reinforced his authority. He behaved as if this event had turned him into a constitutionally elected president. Nor did the military withdraw to their barracks. General Pinochet considered them responsible for fighting terrorism. That led the National Intelligence Center, which since its creation in 1977 had tended to be less extreme than the National Intelligence Directorate, to become harsher. The Carabineros also became more involved in repression through a secret organization, the Carabineros Communications Directorate (Dirección de Comunicaciones de Carabineros [DICOMCAR]), which was created without the knowledge of the junta, the government, or the CNI. Optimism regarding the economy was also promptly dashed by the grave financial crisis that hit in 1982–1983, which in turn triggered severe political turbulence, forcing the regime to make some concessions, thus in essence ending the political recess. As well, the opposition started to mobilize against the government, revealing itself to be well organized, while at the same time the regime’s civilian supporters became involved in a power struggle, shattering

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the previously united governing coalition. And if this weren’t enough, the international scenario completely changed, as democratization spread through the rest of Latin America and Eastern Europe. The Pinochet regime was becoming the last surviving example of the postwar dictatorships. Each of these developments complicated the “transition,” causing institutionalization of the “protected and authoritarian democracy” to fail, revealing once again that the regime was extremely personalized in General Pinochet.8

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Reinforcing Pinochet’s Personalization of Power

The first development that the Gremialistas had not foreseen was General Pinochet’s interpretation of the plebiscite as a personal triumph that had enshrined him as constitutional president and indicated approval of the new constitution, giving him even more power and setting him squarely in the center of the political system. What was supposed to have been a major effort to institutionalize the political order ended up doing the opposite. Pinochet expressed his change of status as head of state symbolically when he moved his offices from the Diego Portales building, which he shared with the junta, the Interior Ministry, and the General Secretariat Ministry, to the traditional seat of presidential power, La Moneda. By doing so, he not only highlighted his identification with the historical tradition of presidents, but he also stressed a difference between himself and the junta and the Interior Ministry, then headed by Gremialista Sergio Fernández, who saw his power decline.9 The most explicit sign that Pinochet believed himself more powerful was his decision to build himself a luxurious residence, more characteristic of a sultanistic dictatorship than the modest approach taken by La Moneda’s more traditional residents.10 This new reality was also apparent in how Pinochet started making decisions. His activities were controlled by the military officers working in the office of the Presidential General Staff and involved a careful regard for protocol, all to underscore his new authority: The open and direct treatment typical of the Diego Portales [offices] was replaced by strict military ceremony. Military protocol appeared with a force hitherto unimaginable. No official, not even a minister, could arrive without an appointment; no deputy minister would continue the tradition of accompanying the President while he signed new laws; now these documents would enter the silent and discreet chain of the Casa Militar [military attachés] and the office of the Presidential General Staff: no meeting would be improvised; nothing would happen by chance. Senior officials who saw the change recall that in less than 48 hours the President became unreachable.11

The head of state’s new workplace facilitated his relationships with various public figures, some of whom were not part of the government and moreover were critical of the performance of some ministers. These meetings

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sowed uncertainty within the cabinet, because ministers did not know who was the latest person to influence decisions and were all too aware of the fact that “parallel” advisers were at work, weakening the cabinet’s authority.12 Pinochet now had more contact with the “hard-liners,”13 who insisted on the importance of keeping a very military orientation for the regime and warned him about the Gremialistas’ ambitions. Jaime Guzmán had been in constant conflict with the hard-liners, whom he called “fascists” and “corporativists” for opposing economic policy and the regime’s institutionalization, as did the democratic opposition.14 Pinochet acted swiftly to make the opposition feel his new power, striking out at the Christian Democratic Party, the largest opposition party in the plebiscite campaign. In early October 1980 he barred its president, Andrés Zaldívar, from returning to Chile.15 This effectively put the opposition on notice that no one was immune to government action, not even former presidents of Chile, such as Eduardo Frei Montalva. He also acted against Manuel Bustos of the PDC and Alamiro Guzmán of the Socialist Party, the two main leaders of the National Union Coordinator (Coordinadora Nacional Sindical [CNS]), a joint effort of leaders of the PDC and the left, including the communists. Minister of labor and Gremialista Miguel Kast was extremely anti-PDC and agreed with Pinochet’s decision to expel them from Chile, rejecting a recommendation from José Piñera, mining minister and former labor minister, who had convinced Pinochet of the damage this would do to the government’s image abroad. However, Pinochet would brook no defense and on August 11, 1981, he expelled both Bustos and Guzmán, along with two of the democratic opposition’s most outstanding politicians, Jaime Castillo Velasco (this was his second expulsion; he had also been exiled in 1976) and Carlos Briones, a well-known socialist lawyer and Chile’s last minister of interior under democracy, for having published a statement supporting the new union organization.16 Thus, with the new constitution’s approval behind it, exile, a typical tool of personalistic dictatorship, remained fully in effect, with no possibility of appeal before the courts.17 The importance of ensuring the stability of the economic model drove the government, with support from the Gremialistas, to use both legal means and coercion in its efforts to destroy the CNS. The National Associations Secretariat, under the General Secretariat Ministry, participated actively in this effort. It was controlled by union members associated with the hard-liners and the secret police. Its activities included eliminating the main union leader of the period: the president of the National Association of Public Employees (Asociación Nacional de Empleados Fiscales [ANEF]), Tucapel Jiménez, who was associated with the Radical Party. He was a highly respected man who had successfully unified leaders of the left and the center in what had been a very fragmented union movement against the regime. The measures against the CNS culminated in Jimenez’s murder in early February 1982, as demonstrated later in court by men belonging to army intel-

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ligence (DINE).18 This dramatic event revealed that the government did not control the secret police. Instead of advancing toward more liberal conditions, the regime was becoming more rigid, with no regard for the human costs i nvolved.

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Conflicts Among Security Services

One concern of the Gremialistas was the need to put some limits on the security services and reduce the use of coercion to prevent excesses that could provoke serious political problems. The DINA’s replacement by the CNI in 1977 and the removal of General Manuel Contreras were steps in this direction. These changes met with some success, since the number of deaths from repression declined. However, they did not expect Contreras’s resistance and the enormous influence he retained over the CNI agents who had worked under his command in the DINA. He used them in his quest to bring about the failure of the new agency. The interior minister had no real authority over the CNI, which was under General Pinochet’s control.19 Its director, a retired intelligence officer, General Odlanier Mena, could be considered an adversary of General Contreras, since he had criticized the DINA’s methods.20 As in authoritarian Brazil, security agencies were very autonomous and reluctant to accept the government’s political authority over them.21 Contreras’s campaign against General Mena grew more extreme when the Left Revolutionary Movement, which had been dismantled by the DINA in 1974–1976, reappeared. This group had successfully reorganized abroad, obtaining military training for dozens of its members. Many were young communists who had left their party, disillusioned by its refusal to take up armed struggle.22 After 1978, the MIR orchestrated Operation Return (Operación Retorno) to move its fighters back into Chile. The CNI only discovered this when the group robbed several banks to raise funds and influence public opinion.23 The MIR’s most spectacular action occurred on July 15, 1980, when the regime was preparing to approve its new constitution. It consisted of killing the head of the army’s intelligence school, Colonel Roger Vergara. This was a terrible blow, since it exposed the weaknesses of the military regime’s security services. The attack provided Contreras with the ammunition he needed to question the head of the CNI.24 Mena responded by leaking to the press information about tax scams involving Contreras. As the conflict escalated, Pinochet was forced to remove Mena and appoint General Humberto Gordon in his place. Gordon had been President Frei’s military attaché and had good relations with civilians involved in the opposition. Gordon had positive relations with General Contreras and Mena, so he was expected to be able to control conditions within the CNI.25 The CNI now briefly resumed the violent methods characteristic of the DINA, temporarily abandoning the techniques that had reduced the number of deaths from 1977 to 1980. One of its main concerns was university students.

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As the violence flared between the MIR and the CNI,26 in early March 1981, while the regime was preparing pompous celebrations to mark the new constitution’s coming into effect, a crime revealed that the secret police were beyond the government’s control. In the northern town of Chuquicamata, a major bank robbery occurred. Although initially attributed to bank officers, CNI members were soon proven to be responsible.27 The CNI did no better in its attempts to stop the MIR, which continued to rob banks and extended its violence to the Carabineros.28 These events shored up the hard-liners’ complaints about political liberalization and the need to exercise power firmly. The argument gathered steam when a MIR guerrilla camp was discovered in the south. The military responded, killing seven guerrilla fighters between September 13 and September 21, 1982. Nonetheless, the MIR refused to give up: in early November it attacked the residence of the president of the Chilean Supreme Court and then presidential chief of staff General Santiago Sinclair’s detail, leaving three dead.29 On August 30, 1983, the most spectacular terrorist attack to date resulted in the death of Santiago’s regional administrator, retired major-general Carol Urzúa. All this occurred as the apertura (a policy of permitting more open political activity and press coverage) was beginning and the government was attempting to control the tensions triggered by the economic crisis through political liberalization. However, the terrorist offensive was useful for Pinochet, since it allowed him to maintain his aggressive anti-Marxist rhetoric and resume his confrontations with opposition bodies, thus neutralizing the soft-liners’ efforts to institutionalize power.30

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The Weakening of Legitimation Through Efficacy

General Pinochet’s decision to deal with the MIR offensive using the secret police and the logic of warfare involved a profound political shift that hampered interior minister Sergio Fernández’s efforts to carry on with the “transition” as if there were an institutionalization of power.31 Economic crisis, meanwhile, had weakened General Pinochet’s confidence in the Chicago Boys, who were proving unable to resolve it. The general seemed both indifferent to the fact that it was worsening and not fully aware of its political consequences. Military officers in the regime were anxious about the economy, and the president’s staff were predicting tension due to unemployment, tension that could be exploited by the opposition. Fernández made a last attempt to save the transition. In early April 1982, he presented Pinochet with an economic and political plan, designed with help from Sergio de Castro, leader of the Chicago Boys, to create the legislation necessary to implement the institutions provided for in the new constitution, along with an administrative reform that involved eliminating some ministries. The economic plan called for deepening reforms, with an emphasis on privatizations.32 Pinochet rejected the plan, convinced his way was best. His priority was the fight against terrorism, which he would have to pursue by force and not po-

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litical maneuvers. Fernández understood that Pinochet did not want his role in the cabinet to continue, and promptly resigned. Pinochet quickly moved to fire de Castro, who was the target of criticism from the regime’s supporters.33 Days earlier, former president Jorge Alessandri had publicly thrashed the economic team during the shareholder meeting of his firm, the Paper and Carton Manufacturing Company. De Castro believed that the government should take no measures to deal with the crisis, because the market would resolve it, and because the banks’ responsibilities were the problem of private individuals, not the government. As far as the problems of public order, de Castro thought they should be left to the military. The economic model was collapsing due to flaws that were pointed out by opposition economists.34 Anti-inflation policy hinged on keeping the US dollar at 39 pesos, where it had stood from June 1979 to mid-1982, causing the real exchange rate to lose one-third of its purchasing power. This policy brought a frenzy of loans from abroad, with the money going mainly to consumption, doubling Chile’s foreign debt in just three years. Exports lost their momentum because of the fixed dollar, falling back to their 1981–1982 levels, as the current account deficit rose from 13 percent to 21 percent of GDP. De Castro expected no foreign exchange crisis, because the government was running a surplus and the debt was private, a colossal technical and political mistake. The conditions necessary to obtain more credit promptly vanished just when they were needed to pay interest and amortizations and cover the current deficit. The net payment of interest soared fourfold from 1978 to 1983, reaching 7 percent of GDP. Shortterm debt doubled, reaching 20 percent of total debt in 1981 (13 percent of GDP), while the amounts necessary to amortize private debt leapt skyward and projections revealed they would triple from 1981 to 1985.35 The economic team’s “miracle” had feet of clay. It was built on excessive borrowing, production was weak, unemployment was high, and workers’ income had not improved. Comparison to indicators from the 1975 recession made a mere recovery look like “success,” particularly in 1980. Blinded by their ideological view of the economy, a few positive indicators, and a closed circle of economic technicians, even the until-then-prestigious Sergio de Castro and his team ended up taking the country into its second recession in less than a decade. It was the worst in Latin America and saw Chile’s GDP plunge by 14.5 percent in 1982–1983. The emblematic figures heading the two groups in charge of official policy since 1978, Gremialista Sergio Fernández and Chicago Boy Sergio de Castro, were thrown out of the cabinet on April 22, 1982. Pinochet, however, did not bring in the hard-liners, choosing rather to change the faces but maintain the same general policies.36 This was because the decisionmaking powers in the antiterrorist offensive lay with his presidency and not the interior minister. The deputy minister, Enrique Montero, an air force lawyer with little political experience and less character, took over as minister. The new finance minister was an economist, Sergio de la Cuadra, who had worked closely with de Castro, and General Luis Danús took over the Ministry of Economy, revealing the

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Chicago Boys’ decline in influence, since Danús’s background was with Pinochet’s economic advisers in COAJ.37 However, neither of the two new ministers was skilled enough to take on the tasks required of them in the crisis. Montero had no political skill and was thrown into a very complex situation, amid growing activity from the opposition. De la Cuadra was an unimaginative academic, intent on continuing neoliberal policies, and willing to be more flexible only in the case of the foreign currency market, which caused dollar flight. He didn’t have his predecessor’s personality, and let Pinochet and his military advisers devalue the peso in early June. To save the Chicago Boys’ image in the face of the elimination of one of their model’s main symbols, the fixed dollar, Pinochet had General Danús announce the devaluation. This measure made the situation of companies, already staggering under an enormous burden of debt, even worse, and placed the conglomerates on the verge of collapse.38 His waning confidence in the Chicago Boys propelled General Pinochet into a series of cabinet changes as he searched for some solid economic leadership. The repercussions of the devaluation forced out de la Cuadra, who was replaced by another Chicago Boy, Rolf Lüders, in August 1982. Lüders was a senior executive with the Vial group. He was granted full powers to battle the crisis, as the minister of finance and of economy, but he couldn’t head off disaster and ordered the government’s takeover of five banks and several finance companies on January 13, 1983. He also was granted powers to provide substantial resources to contain the crisis.39 Lüders was replaced in finance by a neoliberal economist, Carlos Cáceres, who had been a hard-liner during the 1979–1980 constitutional debate (see Chapter 5), while a friend of Pinochet’s, Manuel Martín, took over the economy portfolio for a few months, before being replaced by an engineer, Modesto Collados, in 1983. Collados was a former minister in Eduardo Frei Montalva’s government, associated with the national builders’ association (Cámara Chilena de la Construcción). In April 1984, Pinochet removed Cáceres and replaced him with Luis Escobar Cerda, his fifth finance minister in barely two years. He was the first non–Chicago Boy to hold this position, and had spent the previous years working in Washington, D.C., where he had very good relations with international bodies, especially the International Monetary Fund, whose support had become vital to survive the crisis.40 However, criticism and intrigues from the Gremialistas tarnished his image in General Pinochet’s eyes and, in February 1975, he was replaced by an engineer, Hernán Büchi, a man Pinochet knew well because he’d held several positions of trust since 1975.41

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Political Clientelism

The military regime’s official history attributes the economic reforms to the team headed by Sergio de Castro in the 1970s and Hernán Büchi in the 1980s, while the 1982–1983 crisis was supposed to have been triggered by external

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events and not errors by the Chicago Boys. However, while external factors contributed, the crisis also reflected serious flaws in the economic model and the rigidity of those who applied it, as they believed the market would solve any problems. They also thought the military would remain calm during the storm, repressing workers’ protests as fiercely as they had since the coup. The military, however, proved sensitive to unemployment and widespread discontent. Plunging economic indicators pushed unemployment upward and fueled protests, confirming the military’s fears. In 1982, as the GDP fell by 14.5 percent, manufacturing and construction fared even worse, plunging by 21.1 and 23.4 percent respectively. Official unemployment stood at 19.6 percent in 1982, but if work-generation programs are included (PEM and POJH), it was actually 26.1 percent in 1982 and peaked at 31.3 percent (26.4 percent excluding PEM and POJH workers) in 1983.42 Worried that unemployment would weaken its support, the government enacted an active work-generation program. Starting in August 1982, it spent even more on this area, especially in the Metropolitan Region (Greater Santiago), where the crisis was most obvious.43 The 43,500 people in the PEM at the time rose to 54,800 in September and 69,500 in December. The POJH (which targeted heads of families) leapt from 15,600 individuals to 43,700 in just two months. Both programs continued to grow in 1983, with the number of PEM workers reaching half a million in May, while those in the POJH reached 132,449. By July, estimates indicate that 15 percent of the Metropolitan Region’s work force was employed in these two programs.44 Nonetheless, these community employment policies applied by municipalities did not dilute the growing frustration among workers. Quite the contrary. People in the PEM and the POJH began to join the protests. On May 11, 1983, the national copper workers’ association, a powerful group, called a first national protest against the government, which was a success. For the first time, the military regime faced an opposition protest supported by broad sectors of the population. The military officers in the regime leapt into action, applying drastic measures to stop the protests: they cut funding for their job creation programs to punish workers for mobilizing against the government.45 Political considerations again took charge of the economy, as a broad coalition of social groups formed, capable of generating enormous unrest, since it gave voice to discontent among workers, middle-income sectors, and small and medium-sized businesses. In May 1983, the month of the first opposition protest, the number of people working in the PEM peaked at 396,277 (see Figure 10.1). Three protests later, in September, this had fallen to 309,670, then to 263,763 by December, and to 175,790 by February 1984. The most drastic cuts affected PEM workers in the Metropolitan Region, where protests were loudest, with jobs falling from 67,160 in January 1984 to 8,198 in February.46 Nationally, figures stabilized in the following months—March, April, and May 1984—leaving 150,000 people working in the PEM.47

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Figure 10.1

PEM and POJH Workers, 1982–1985

450,000

Number of Workers

400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000

PEM

October 1985

July 1985

April 1985

January 1985

October 1984

July 1984

April 1984

January 1984

October 1983

July 1983

April 1983

January 1983

October 1982

July 1982

April 1982

January 1982

0

POJH

Source: Labor Economy Program (PET) of the Academy of Christian Humanism, using National Statistics Bureau (INE) data. Note: PEM = Minimum Employment Program; POJH = Employment for Household Heads Program.

This decline in PEM and POJH workers pushed unemployment up, although it did not influence the protests. Instead, the well-known political effect in which economic crises do not immediately trigger mobilization of the unemployed occurred. The newly unemployed were passive since, pressured by their financial needs, they gave priority to seeking work over political action. The protests bloomed in the poblaciones (poor urban communities), primarily led by young people not yet in the labor market, but rather still at school or seeking work for the first time. The statistics for those killed in the protests indicate that 37 percent were under twenty years of age, 15 percent were between twenty and twenty-five, 17 percent were aged twenty-six to thirty, and just 12 percent were older.48

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Renegotiating Debt and Neutralizing Small Business Discontent

The government’s second initiative to deal with the protests politically involved a practical plan for renegotiating the debts of small and medium-sized businesses to prevent their joining the protest movement. Small retailers, led by Rafael Cumsille, and truck drivers, led by León Vilarín, were being hit hard

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by their debts. To the military they were highly symbolic, since their national associations, the Confederación de Comercio Detallista (retailers) and the Confederación de Dueños de Camiones (truck drivers), were major participants in the opposition to the Allende government, and they supported the coup. Both Cumsille and Vilarín had headed these bodies since 1972–1973, when they had organized antigovernment strikes and worked closely with right-wing groups seeking Allende’s downfall.49 Now Vilarín was fighting the Chicago Boys and joining the National Democratic Project (Proyecto Democrático Nacional [PRODEN]), a coalition created by the PDC, right and left politicians who had called for the May 1983 protest. Precisely because of his role in the fight against the Popular Unity government, Vilarín became president of PRODEN. The situation affecting truck drivers was particularly serious, because their debts in dollars skyrocketed with the peso’s devaluation. Moreover, the Public Works Ministry had applied stiff fines for excess cargo, as part of an attempt to raise government revenues by more strictly controlling ground transportation. The fines were particularly onerous at a time of economic crisis.50 Truck drivers were also suffering from the decline in economic activity in general, which had hurt business. This policy was not specifically the responsibility of the Chicago Boys, since indebtedness had to be resolved by CORFO and the fines by the Public Works Ministry, both bodies headed by military officers. CORFO offered to renegotiate the debts using a preferential dollar, lower interest rates, and amortization payments over longer periods. CORFO did this to prevent creditors from joining opposition protests. Since CORFO was researching their debts, truck drivers did not participate in March 1984 protests. To make the government’s decision easier, the truck drivers signaled their willingness to back down by replacing the president of their confederation, León Vilarín, with one of the regime’s supporters, Adolfo Quinteros. On July 31, 1984, the junta approved a bill that forgave all debts due to fines for excess cargo, benefiting 90 percent of truck drivers.51 On October 28, two days before another national strike called by the opposition, including PRODEN, CORFO approved a plan to renegotiate the truck drivers’ debts, worth US$140 million,52 and they left the protest movement.53 The situation of retailers was also difficult. The drop in sales due to the recession had hurt their income, affecting mainly small and medium-sized businesses. The Chicago Boys had applied drastic spending controls, freezing the minimum wage in September 1981, which pushed down the real income of formal sector employees in the following months from a real 70.0 percent in December 1983 to 56.9 percent in December 1984 (see Table 10.1). Reality was considerably worse than even these figures indicate, as reflected in calculations by the Labor Economy Program (Programa de Economía del Trabajo [PET]), which was run by an opposition group and part of the Academy of Christian Humanism (Academia de Humanismo Cristiano). PET numbers showed a further difference of at least nine points in March 1985.54

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Table 10.1

Changes to the Legal Minimum Wage, 1981–1985 Minimum Wage (pesos)a

September 1981 September 1982 March 1983 June 1983 September 1983 December 1983 March 1984 June 1984 September 1984 October 1984 December 1984 March 1985 May 1985

5,185.71 5,185.71 5,185.71 5,185.71 5,445.00 5,445.00 5,445.00 5,445.00 5,445.00 5,445.00 5,445.00 6,667.00 6,667.00

Real Indexb

Real Indexc

100.0 89.8 78.7 74.2 78.2 70.0 68.4 65.7 63.1 58.3 56.9 64.4 61.7

100.0 85.0 74.9 66.0 64.3 62.2 61.5 58.5 51.2 — 50.7 55.8 —

Source: Labor Economy Program (PET) of the Academy of Christian Humanism, using National Statistics Bureau (INE) data. Notes: a. Valued per the corresponding year. b. Deflated using the official consumer price index. September 1981 = 100%. c. Deflated using PET’s consumer price index. September 1981 = 100%.

To obtain more revenue, economic authorities had also cracked down on tax evasion, particularly value-added tax. The Internal Revenue Service (Servicio de Impuestos Internos [SII]), run by Chicago Boy, Gremialista, and former FEUC activist Felipe Lamarca, carried on in the tradition of Sergio de Castro and was extremely thorough. In a very controversial move, the SII accused Rafael Cumsille, president of the national retailers’ association, of tax evasion in his own personal business (see Chapter 7).55 This was doubly provocative, since it was an attack against the main leader of a key group and it flew in the face of the policy being enacted by interior minister Sergio Onofre Jarpa, who was trying to keep interest groups from joining the regime’s opponents. Jarpa had refused to act against Cumsille for fear that he would complain of political persecution, which would bring solidarity to his organization and eventually push them into the arms of the opposition. Lamarca, arguing Diego Portales’s example of applying the law without exception (as the government proclaimed), went ahead anyway, with support from the proregime media and the Gremialistas. The measure against Cumsille was only lifted once Lamarca had left the SII, after Luis Escobar Cerda became finance minister.56 Escobar was more flexible with interest groups, in line with Jarpa’s efforts, reducing tax-related measures against small retailers. Nor did the government forget big business. Policies were more varied and more complex, because economic regulators did not want to give up the main elements of their model, and because military officers thought poorly of

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the conglomerates. Sergio de Castro had refused to offer big businessmen subsidies when times were hard, resisting considerable pressure. He had also refused to negotiate the conditions of overindebtedness, arguing that private companies should solve their own problems. New economic authorities were more pragmatic, allowing businesses and individuals to renegotiate with the banks, which the government had taken over in early 1983. Tariffs on some products were also raised to protect national businesses hard hit by the crisis, and government-owned companies were encouraged to buy domestic products and materials. The rigidity that had characterized the Chicago Boys was replaced with a more flexible approach, a change of style that Jarpa had been demanding since he took office. Ángel Fantuzzi, president of the metal manufacturers’ association, Asimet, which represented one of the sectors most affected by more open trade, publicly expressed the industry’s collective gratitude for government support in his regular column in a Santiago business magazine, under the headline “Thank you, Mr. President.”57 The government also helped small homeowners and taxi drivers (see Table 10.2), as it encouraged banks to renegotiate debts with their customers. However, these efforts were not too effective, because the economic crisis had reduced the wages even of those employed in the formal sector. As of July 30, 1986, just 42 percent of the banking system’s debtors were able to take advantage of the new repayment plans.58 As a result, major changes were introduced into Sergio de Castro’s economic system. The trade reforms became more flexible and tariffs rose, before being gradually reduced, and surcharges were applied to many products. This new policy was successful, helping to reactivate the economy and create jobs.59 This passive monetary stance, in which the Central Bank “suggested” or “guided” the interest rate, went by the boards, and the bank decided to involve itself in the market, which had proven unable to correct itself. Financial sector regulations were considerably strengthened, and the human and institutional resources available to regulatory bodies were boosted. A series of legal and administrative rules were enacted to improve the functioning of the banks and finance companies. Moreover, privatization resumed apace, affecting not only the companies in the state’s hands historically, but also those it had taken over as the conglomerates went bankrupt (in what became known as the área rara, the “odd sector” of the economy), and even those that had remained under public control because the military considered them strategic. This new wave of privatizations became a major incentive to businesspeople, who saw the chance to expand their operations. The model itself was not being changed, but some of its flaws were being addressed. The resulting economic system, therefore, was not so much a result of Sergio de Castro’s leadership as it was the product of the finance ministers who succeeded him in the 1980s, particularly Hernán Büchi, who held that portfolio from 1985 to 1988.

Date

Beneficiary

3,000 homeowners

Jan. 20, 1986

Truck owners

Feb. 1, 1986 Feb. 22, 1986

Freight transporters and taxi drivers 77,000 mortgage owners

Feb. 26, 1986

7,072 debtors

Mar. 5, 1986 Mar. 6, 1986

Freight transporters and taxi drivers 5,554 debtors

Apr. 1, 1986

Freight transporters and taxi drivers

State Insurance Institute (ISE) Bill no. 18,482, National Properties Ministry

Public Works Ministry

Presidency Housing and Urbanization Service (SERVIU)

Technical Cooperation Service (SERCOTEC, of CORFO) Presidency Private Employee Pension Fund (EMPART) Mining Ministry continues

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10% discount on insurance for more than 10 registered vehicles 50% of debt on state-owned urban homes condoned; remaining debt payable in 5 years at 6% interest Decrease in fines for exceeding weight limits established in May 1983 Decrease in fuel prices Law no. 18,502 allowed debtors to exchange dollar-denominated debts for UF denomination Debt repayment rescheduled to 5 years in UFs plus 7% or 8%, up to 10 million pesos Decrease in fuel prices Mortgage payments reduced by up to 10% of net monthly income Decrease in fuel prices

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Benefit

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Table 10.2 Patronage Policies for Small and Medium Debtors, January–June 1986

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Table 10.2 Continued Date

2,000 taxi drivers

June 30, 1986

Freight transporters and taxi drivers

Simplified procedures for collecting on freight charges by recognizing waybills (rather than requiring official tax bills) Debt repayment rescheduled to 8 years at 7% interest Decrease in fuel prices

National Petroleum Industry (Enap) Housing Ministry Finance Ministry Transportation Credit Administration Agency (SACRET, of CORFO) Justice Ministry

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June 2, 1986

Decrease in fuel prices 20% rebate on interest rate Condoned 60% of current debt with state and financial institutions Debt rescheduling

Authority Granting the Benefit

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Freight transporters and taxi drivers Mortgage debtors 910 truckers from the National Freight Transporters Registry 738 members of the Metropolitan Region’s Taxi Drivers Union Truck owners

Benefit

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May 1, 1986 May 13, 1986 May 16, 1986

Beneficiary

SACRET National Petroleum Industry (Enap)

Sources: La Nación, Las Últimas Noticias, La Tercera de la Hora, El Mercurio, and Hoy. Note: UF = inflation-indexed accounting unit.

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The Politics of Apertura and Liberalization

Economic crisis affected the vast majority of the population, including middleincome sectors, triggering a wave of protests unheard of under the military regime and reminiscent of the mobilizations against the Allende government a decade earlier. These protests occurred in residential neighborhoods, with people, particularly women, using the same methods to express their discontent as they had when Allende was still in power in 1973: banging their saucepans at night. Protests also occurred in middle-class areas that had been very active against the Popular Unity government. Unions and opposition leaders called the first protest in May 1983, there were more in June and July, and even more were promised for the 11th of every successive month.60 The regime’s military officers were worried, since the economic crisis was swelling the ranks of unions and the opposition, reflecting widespread loss of confidence in the economic model and the Chicago Boys’ ability to turn the crisis around, and stirring discontent among broad sectors of the population, including agriculturalists in the south, another group of Popular Unity opponents now being hard hit by the open trade policy.61 From early 1983, the Presidential General Staff had been working on a political plan with some civilians, including Sergio Onofre Jarpa, Chile’s ambassador to Argentina. Jarpa was an experienced politician who had been president of the National Party and had been elected senator for Santiago in March 1973. The military thought it important that the government recover the political initiative and apply measures to halt workers’ protests, without relying solely on coercion, since they considered its costs too high. Discontent was even spreading to some of the regime’s supporters, making a more flexible response to the political recess necessary, but from the regime’s point of view, it had to be a response that would not allow the opposition to regroup. This approach reflects Robert Dahl’s conditions for liberalization of an authoritarian regime, in which the soaring costs of repression become much higher than those associated with tolerance.62 A flexible response that would not allow the opposition to regroup was the objective of the new cabinet, sworn in on August 10, 1983, and headed by a new interior minister, Sergio Onofre Jarpa. The cabinet represented a major change, not only because of the eight new ministers, but also because most were well-known figures with considerable experience in government. Aside from Jarpa, there was Alessandri’s former labor minister, Hugo Gálvez, still in labor, and Frei’s former housing minister, Modesto Collados, still in housing.63 Pinochet had pushed the Gremialistas into the background, while Jarpa rejected them outright. General Pinochet did not share Jarpa’s ideas about the apertura, seeing it solely as a tactical maneuver on Jarpa’s part to hold on to his position. Moreover, he was not willing to let his interior minister become particularly prominent. The fragmentation of political functions, with public order in the hands

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of regional administrators (all military officers), limited Jarpa’s chances of imposing a new style. The fourth opposition protest, held the day after the cabinet was sworn in, met with the harshest repression to date. Eighteen thousand soldiers hit the streets of Santiago, treating the poblaciones with particular violence, killing twenty-six people and leaving hundreds wounded. This action, coordinated by Metropolitan Region administrator General Roberto Guillard, a COAJ member in the early years of the regime, raised serious doubts about Jarpa’s credibility. Despite the repression, the new interior minister introduced several major initiatives that were very influential in the apertura process. He allowed many leading politicians to return from exile, including the former PDC president, Andrés Zaldívar. Some left-wing leaders secretly reentered the country as well, among them socialist and former minister of foreign affairs Clodomiro Almeyda. Media censorship was also suspended for a while, and several new weeklies appeared.64 They provided broader coverage of issues critical to the government, including detailed reports on corruption and abuse, some of which involved General Pinochet.65 Radio stations’ news programs became much more active, reporting statements by opposition leaders who questioned government policies and put forth their own proposals.66 This increased the amount and quality of political information in circulation, encouraging mobilization. Opposition parties found that they had more room to maneuver as the political recess maintained since 1973 began to lose its edge. Jarpa also intended to change the confrontational dynamic between opposition and regime and move toward a dialogue with the former, accepting an offer from Juan Francisco Fresno to become the new archbishop of Santiago. An additional benefit of this initiative was that the government and General Pinochet would now support the head of Santiago’s Catholic Church, in comparison to Fresno’s predecessor, Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez,67 who had been the subject of constant criticism by the regime for his defense of human rights. The interior minister met with PDC and right-wing leaders belonging to PRODEN on three occasions, and agreed to a dialogue with leaders of an opposition coalition, the PDC-led Democratic Alliance. This attempt was initially hampered by some opposition leaders who demanded Pinochet resign before they would talk, but Jarpa refused to accept this. The meetings with Democratic Alliance leaders were well covered by the media, including journalists supporting the government, who wanted to demonstrate the regime’s new spirit. Although the “dialogue” produced no results, it did strengthen the visibility of opposition leaders, and showed that regime authorities recognized their legitimacy. The Democratic Alliance was permitted to hold a rally in Santiago’s O’Higgins Park, demonstrating its broad support by mobilizing 300,000 people.68 In addition, interest groups, especially professional associations, which had originally enjoyed broad powers over their members, as well as student

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federations, were allowed to directly elect their leaderships again. Whereas previously membership had been compulsory to exercise these professions, in late 1979 a decree law turned them into mere associations (asociaciones gremiales), using a section from the constitution that stripped them of their powers and made membership optional.69 Thus the laws that had created them were tacitly repealed, leaving them with no authority over their memberships and unable to establish compulsory fees and supervise ethics and professional performance, as they had done previously.70 This new policy did not prevent some associations from having major political influence anyway, and the elections of their leaderships stirred considerable interest among their members and the public, especially in the opposition parties. The opposition swept the elections of the main professional associations, filling the main positions with leaders who had considerable political experience from Chile’s more democratic years. The election of ten of eighteen members of the board of the national lawyers’ association (Colegio de Abogados) in 1985 was particularly noteworthy, as the candidate list that consisted of well-known figures from the Democratic Alliance opposition coalition won nine positions, and Jaime Castillo Velasco received the first majority.71 The opposition came to control the boards of all the main professional associations and created a national federation of associations (Federación de Colegios Profesionales de Chile), headed by Juan Luis González, president of the national physicians’ association (Colegio Médico).72 Business organizations also adapted to the new political conditions, electing figures who had become known before the 1973 coup.73 The student movement grew stronger and began to recover its political importance. Until then, student leaders had been chosen by the military’s appointed university presidents. From this point onward, however, the regime gave in to pressure and allowed competitive elections with broad participation from students on candidate lists presented by the various parties. Starting in 1984, the opposition pushed out promilitary student leaders, starting with the University of Chile’s student federation, the FECH. In September 1985, new elections took place, which again gave a sizable victory to whoever opposed the military.74 The election that had the most impact nationally occurred in April 1985, when Catholic University’s student association, the FEUC, which had been a major bastion of the Gremialistas (see Chapter 7), was taken over by a united opposition list, headed by a law student, Tomás Jocelyn-Holt of the PDC. They forced out the Gremialistas, who had held power continuously since 1968 and had used the FEUC as their main source of new recruits. The Gremialistas also lost their hegemony over the right, since in other universities, especially the University of Chile, the Gremialistas had never organized, neither before the coup, when they faced strong competition with the youth organization of the National Party, nor after the coup.75 Jarpa’s posting as interior minister also had consequences for power groups supporting the regime. He represented traditional politicians who had

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been treated as obsolete by the new political order and who were seen as antagonistic to the “new institutional order.” Moreover, Jarpa himself was very critical of the Gremialistas and had experienced a cold relationship with the movement, inspired by Jorge Alessandri and his “Alessandristas,” when Jarpa was president of the National Party.76 This hostile climate forced the Gremialistas into mid-level governmental posts. Jaime Guzmán responded swiftly, ignoring his own criticisms of political parties and moving to turn the Gremialistas into a political party. He started by creating a new arrangement that would carry forward his political plans as the political recess drew to an unofficial close. On September 24, 1983, the birth of the Independent Democratric Union was announced. Guzmán tried to present the party as being a broader party than the Gremialistas, by persuading the former interior minister, Sergio Fernández, to join the leadership, thus signaling the UDI’s intentions of representing the regime’s supporters.77 At the time, Fernández held a major post, by appointment from General Pinochet, as president of the commission that was studying the political laws.78 This body was working on bills that would develop the itinerary, established in the new constitution, to regulate the succession that was to culminate in the 1988 plebiscite. The commission was working with a time frame different from Jarpa’s, since Jarpa wanted to reform the constitution and establish an appointed congress to deal with the new political situation. As he had with Jarpa’s predecessors, Pinochet undermined his new interior minister with “parallel” advisers, whom he considered important to ensuring his reelection in 1988. The Gremialistas’ organization into the UDI triggered the creation of yet another right-wing party. The National Union Movement (Movimiento Unión Nacional [MUN]), with Jarpa’s support, was formed by Andrés Allamand, a National Party student leader prior to the coup.79 The MUN brought together well-known figures and young professionals who had belonged to the National Party and supported the military regime, having voted “yes” in the 1978 referendum and the 1980 plebiscite. They had nonetheless opposed the Gremialistas before the coup and throughout the Pinochet regime. Allamand wanted to bring together all the regime’s supporters who did not sympathize with the Gremialistas. He resolutely maintained an image that was different from that of the UDI, by emphasizing the MUN’s independence from the government and showing little sympathy for General Pinochet’s hope of remaining in power.80 The MUN tried to offer an alternative to General Pinochet, becoming a kind of “semi-opposition,” as per Juan Linz—that is, bringing together those groups who “are not dominant or represented in the governing group but that are willing to participate in power without fundamentally challenging the regime.”81 It was not easy to develop the MUN independently of Pinochet. For one thing, the support it received from Jarpa generated mistrust among National Party politicians who had battled with him under democracy, so they did not immediately join the new party. This was the case with two former Conservative Party senators, Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes and Sergio Diez, and a former

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Liberal Party senator, Pedro Ibáñez,82 who joined after Jarpa left the cabinet in early 1985.83 Similarly, General Pinochet had no tolerance for anyone who questioned his leadership or showed sympathy for opposition positions, and he kept a close eye on the MUN. Through government officials he limited Allamand’s efforts to organize the party, inviting its leaders to become involved in public tasks, such as the commission that was studying the political laws.84 Businesspeople, meanwhile, mistrusted an independent party and did not relate to the MUN. They identified with the government’s economic reforms and the privatizations, which offered them enormous opportunities to expand their businesses. They therefore tended to strongly support the continuation of the political regime with General Pinochet in charge, and thus felt appreciated by the UDI. The National Party, which had dissolved itself in October 1973, reappeared, this time under the leadership of a former deputy, Carmen Saenz de Phillips.85 After leaving the cabinet in early 1985, Jarpa too organized a party, the National Workers Front (Frente Nacional del Trabajo), which joined the proliferating right-wing organizations in 1985.86 The right’s division into at least four parties was the foreseeable result of its conflicts prior to 1973 and the different positions taken by its main public figures with regard to the military regime and especially the role of General Pinochet.87 This fragmentation affected support for the regime and favored the opposition, which found it easier to win elections of the major professional associations and student associations.

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The Catholic Church and the National Accord

Jarpa’s “dialogue” with the opposition through the archbishop of Santiago, Juan Francisco Fresno, unintentionally turned the Catholic Church into a major political player, smoothing over for a while a rather conflict-ridden relationship. The church’s new stance reflected the new archbishop’s wishes to distinguish himself from his predecessor. This, however, proved to be a canard, because although the public stance reinforced his image, Fresno continued to follow the same line as his predecessor.88 One characteristic of Chile’s authoritarian regime was the Catholic Church’s determined defense of human rights, especially through the Pro-Peace Committee (pre-1975) and later the Vicariate of Solidarity.89 The limited synchronization applied by the military encountered a major hurdle in the Catholic Church, which did not ignore the violence, unlike its counterpart in Argentina. The Catholic Church provided room for political leaders, especially the PDC, to remain organized underground. It was the presence of Catholics on the left, particularly those who came to the PDC by way of MAPU and the Christian left, that allowed the church to have good relations with leftist leaders.

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The church helped to develop union organizations through the workers’ vicariate (Vicaría Pastoral Obrera) of the Archbishopric of Santiago, and its radio station, Radio Chilena, provided political information that was more open and pluralistic compared to the official media, undermining the latter’s influence. An extensive network of Catholic schools and bishoprics also offered opportunities for thousands of parents to function freely and pluralistically, while young people received a less militaristic education. Chile’s Catholic Church played a role comparable to that of Poland’s during the communist regime. The new rulers did not like the Catholic Church and quickly distanced themselves from it. The military expected the clergy to support them as much as the judiciary and business and professional organizations had. Not surprisingly, the junta was angered by a September 13, 1973, statement issued by the bishops’ permanent committee (Comité Permanente del Episcopado), headed by cardinal and archbishop of Santiago Raúl Silva Henríquez. The statement expressed opinions that were unacceptable to the new rulers, who were convinced they had saved Chile from a communist coup: We are immensely hurt and oppressed by the blood that has reddened our streets, our poblaciones and our factories, the blood of civilians and soldiers, the tears of so many women and children. We ask that those who have fallen in this struggle be treated with respect, above all the man who until September 11 was President of the Republic. We ask that those defeated be treated with moderation. That there be no unnecessary reprisals and that the sincere idealism that inspired many of those who have been defeated be taken into account. May the hate end; may this be the hour of reconciliation.90

The tensions continued in the days that followed, as the junta asked the cardinal to preside over a thanksgiving Te Deum (Te Deum de Acción de Gracias) on September 18, to be held in the Military School. This request was rejected due to its overt political nature, and eventually a prayer for the homeland (oración por la patria) took place in the Church of National Gratitude (Iglesia de la Gratitud Nacional) in the presence of junta members and former presidents. The junta did not like the cardinal’s homily either, which echoed the bishops’ statement: “Today, given the painful circumstances, we are here to pray for those who have fallen and the future of Chile [and] we ask that there be no winners or losers among us.”91 The Catholic Church was also affected by the violence with which the military seized power. Authorities made no exceptions during the repression in lowincome areas, arresting and torturing any priests they considered Marxists.92 This revealed the regime’s rejection of the radicalization of some segments of the church during the 1960s, segments that had supported socialism and the Popular Unity government. The right had caricatured the church as an institution infiltrated by communists and led by priests anxious to teach Marxism.93 Nor did

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it sympathize with the changes in the church represented by the Second Vatican Council, and it could not accept that the Chilean hierarchy supported social reform and justice.94 This history may explain why the military acted so harshly against priests living in poblaciones, some of whom were tortured and killed. Cardinal Silva Henríquez recalled in his memoirs: “Many priests have been arrested, interrogated, or their premises have been searched, especially in working class neighborhoods; others have had to leave the country or been expelled. One priest who had been an assistant in Valparaiso, Michael Woodward, died of torture in Valparaiso. Another, Antonio Llidó, who left the priesthood, is still among those who were arrested and disappeared.”95 As in Poland, the relationship between the church and the military regime in Chile cannot be understood without understanding the leadership of the main authority, Santiago’s cardinal and archbishop Raúl Silva Henríquez.96 An extraordinary pastor with a powerful personality and intelligence, he was also a great organizer who restructured each of the dioceses that he led (Valparaiso and Santiago), bringing together priests and laypeople to cooperate on numerous tasks and making these bodies considerably more effective.97 As the archbishop of Santiago starting in 1961 and a cardinal starting in 1962, he had very good relations with every Chilean president until democracy ended, and was open to social change, promoting agrarian reform in the three large farms (fundos) belonging to the diocese, to the right’s dismay. As chancellor of Catholic University, he supported the university reforms that began in 1967 under the Christian Democrat students running the FEUC, and was the subject of criticism from the Gremialistas, led by Jaime Guzmán. During the difficult years of the Popular Unity government, he made an effort to keep the lines of communication between government and opposition open, to try to defuse the crisis.98 As a result, he did not support the military coup. Nor did he remain silent when he saw the violence. He took a strong stance, defending human rights by creating the Pro-Peace Committee and the Vicariate of Solidarity. This earned him enormous international prestige, and he received support from many governments and nongovernmental organizations to finance the many tasks carried out in the diocese.99 This did not earn him the affection of the new rulers, however, who even tried to convince Vatican authorities to remove him.100 As time passed, relations between the cardinal and the regime became more complex, as the government continued to act against his priests and criticize his pastoral statements, documents, and homilies. It accused him of working with the opposition and even defending Marxism.101 All this meant that the government made no effort to hide its satisfaction when the cardinal turned seventy-five in September 1982 and had to leave the archbishopric. When the Vatican appointed his successor, Bishop Juan Francisco Fresno, the authorities expected him to be more friendly and cooperative with the regime and to leave behind the policies followed by Cardinal Silva Henríquez. This was a mistake. The new archbishop’s personality was different, but

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Fresno continued the pastoral and social work and kept on many of those who had worked closely with Silva Henríquez. Tension with the regime had united the church, pushing style differences into the background. Defending human rights was a position thoroughly supported by bishops, priests, and laypeople, although they might disagree on the best way to deal with the regime. The violence used by the regime during the apertura also touched the Santiago church. In one action in a población, the police shot and killed a French priest, André Jarlan, in circumstances that particularly struck Fresno: after a day of protests, during which he had worked hard to head off confrontations between police and protesters, Jarlan had retired to his room and was reading the Bible when a bullet fired by police killed him.102 This outraged a wide sector of the public, particularly Catholics, and led to an enormous funeral several days later. The violence came from both Carabineros and CNI agents, and received enormous coverage thanks to greater press freedom and the growing activity of opposition media.103 The police also acted violently against other dioceses whose bishops were critical of the regime’s human rights record. The most serious attack occurred in Punta Arenas in early October 1984, during which an army lieutenant died while setting off a bomb in a church. In March 1985 the brutal murder of three professionals, one of whom worked for the Vicariate of Solidarity, convinced the new archbishop of the need to prevent further divisions. He assigned three laypeople to prepare a unifying document that would seek the support of all politicians, of the left, center, and right.104 They were Sergio Molina, a former finance minister in Eduardo Frei Montalva’s government; Fernando Léniz, the military regime’s former economy minister; and businessman José Zabala, who was very close to the church. After several meetings, in August 1985, the parties, including MUN leaders, signed a national accord on the transition to full democracy, thereby showing their independence.105 This was a very important document, because for the first time, opposition and proregime right-wing figures agreed on some major points crucial to changing the constitution’s rules for Pinochet’s succession and making it more democratic. The document included fundamental agreements regarding economic measures, since it recognized the market system and therefore the validity of that part of the military regime’s new institutional order. The government rejected the national transition accord in no uncertain terms. It feared the accord would create a broad civilian coalition in support of the Catholic Church that might persuade the junta to hold free presidential elections with a consensus candidate, preventing General Pinochet’s reelection. This consensus candidate could have been the former interior minister, Sergio Onofre Jarpa; thanks to the apertura, he was seen as a politician capable of national leadership. The UDI condemned the accord, but it was worried that it could become isolated as the only party supporting General Pinochet. It argued that the accord was ambiguous on communism, a crucial point to the UDI, which had

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filed a writ before the Constitutional Tribunal asking that the parties belonging to a second opposition coalition, the Popular Democratic Movement (Movimiento Democrático Popular [MDP]), be declared unconstitutional. Unlike the PDC-led Democratic Alliance, the Communist Party formed part of the MDP.106 The government’s and the UDI’s pressure against the national transition accord was aimed at damaging the credibility of its contents. The proregime media actively campaigned against the leftist parties that had signed it, resuscitating the memory of right-left confrontations that occurred during the Allende government prior to the coup. This campaign forced the MUN to stop working with the Democratic Alliance and withdraw its support for the accord (see Chapter 11 for more on this point).

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Opposition to the Apertura

The apertura went beyond the plans of interior minister Sergio Onofre Jarpa and the democratic opposition. Jarpa’s initiatives did not enjoy Pinochet’s full support, who continued his confrontational style with the opposition, because he thought the new stance had gone too far in helping his enemies. Moreover, the interior minister met with opposition among his own colleagues in the cabinet, starting with justice minister Hugo Rosende, who also had considerable political experience as a former Conservative Party deputy,107 and supported the hard-liners’ view that the liberalization was a bad idea. Francisco Javier Cuadra, who had been appointed minister of the General Secretariat in early November 1984, also criticized the accord.108 Cuadra, a bright young lawyer from Catholic University who had participated in the youth organization of the National Party before the coup and had maintained his distance from Guzmán while a law student,109 thought Jarpa had performed poorly, making too many concessions to the opposition. As minister, Cuadra adopted a confrontational style toward the regime’s adversaries, and reinstated press censorship (suspended by Jarpa), giving DINACOS the powers it had enjoyed during the 1970s. The Communist Party took advantage of the protests called by the Democratic Alliance, encouraging confrontation through acts of violence in hopes of preventing a peaceful solution. In the poblaciones, Communist Party activists instigated incidents to provoke the police into using force. The military also intervened, repressing activists and attacking various communities at night, and arresting people in an effort to intimidate them.110 The number of people killed by the police and the military soared. With the DINA’s dismantling in 1977, the number of deaths due to repression had fallen, from 164 in 1976, to 44 in 1977, to 14 in 1982. In 1983, this situation changed as a result of the protests and repression, with deaths rising to 94, while hundreds were injured. Figures for 1984 were similar, and remained

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July 1983: Paratroopers take arms against a student protest at the University of Chile’s medical school. At the center is Colonel Zara and at the right is a CNI member shooting rubber bullets at students.

high in the following years, including during the plebiscite campaign, which saw 48 deaths. The protests caused the regime to harden and use them as an excuse to discredit the opposition. Every opposition proposal was presented by the proregime media as if it were an extremist or Communist Party initiative and part of a campaign to create chaos that would likely lead to armed confrontation. Indeed, the Communist Party’s actions fed the logic of war applied by General Pinochet, who considered them evidence of the need to continue to limit pluralism.111 This convergence of the Communist Party’s and Pinochet’s interests stimulated a climate of polarization that left little room for Jarpa’s policies and limited the choices open to the democratic opposition, leaving no room for the apertura to continue. In late 1984 the government declared a state of siege, despite Jarpa’s opposition. The ninety-day measure was extended on two occasions but lifted early, on June 17, 1985.112 The country went without a state of siege for just over a year, when it was again declared on September 8, 1986, after the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front attacked General Pinochet, killing five members of his detail. It was extended for several weeks in December of that year, in Santiago only.113

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With the regime’s consolidation, its use of coercion did not lessen and it assumed the costs of repression with no hesitation, as Dahl would say.114 There is no sociodemographic and political information available for those years, but we can take note of the 3,197 deaths that occurred, including soldiers killed by terrorist attacks (5.4 percent). Most of the victims were young males under thirty who belonged to leftist parties and the Left Revolutionary Movement. The MIR had more victims than the Communist Party, despite the greater membership and larger organization of the latter, a sign of the efficacy of the war against the MIR (see Table 1.2). These conflicts led to Jarpa’s removal from the government in early 1985. He was replaced by a lawyer, Ricardo García, who had no political experience. Pinochet had chosen to harden his tactics against the opposition, primarily through the General Secretariat Ministry, headed by Francisco Javier Cuadra. Nevertheless, the suspension of the apertura proved unable to turn back the clock and eliminate the new waves of political action that arose with the plurality of media, the politicization of interest groups, and parties’ more active leadership. Independently of General Pinochet’s decisions, the political system had changed, but this did not fully register with him.115

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Radicalization of the Carabineros: DICOMCAR and the Degollados

The Carabineros acted with extreme brutality and without distinguishing between the democratic and the antidemocratic opposition, treating them as if they were allies. Operations in the poblaciones became extremely violent, and the police fired on protesters and homes in an effort to intimidate. This can be explained as a reaction to the terrorist actions of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front against police stations, which had caused considerable commotion.116 The Carabineros considered themselves at war with a terrorist organization that was supported by part of the opposition and some citizens. To deal with this, Carabineros director César Mendoza set up a secret police organization, the Carabineros Communications Directorate (DICOMCAR), without the knowledge of the junta, in addition to the riot police, known as the Special Operations Group (Grupo de Operaciones Especiales [GOPE]), created in 1979. Both were run by officers working directly under General Mendoza. On March 30, 1985, three people were kidnapped and later brutally killed by having their throats slit, horrifying the public. The incident became known as the “case of the men with their throats cut” (el caso de los degollados). They belonged to the Communist Party, and one was a long-standing employee of the Vicariate of Solidarity and the son of a well-known actor and actress. The church considered this a direct attack on the Archbishopric of Santiago.117 The incident had followed the kidnapping, two days earlier, of five leaders of the opposition teachers’ association (Asociación Gremial de Educadores de Chile

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September 11, 1984: Carabineros at Alameda Avenue.

[AGECH]), which was formed by, among others, members of the Communist Party. Other Communist Party leaders had also disappeared, revealing a security service offensive against the party similar to the offensives that took place during the DINA years.118 The government requested a special investigating judge on the case, as did the Vicariate of Solidarity. The request was approved and a Santiago appeals court judge, José Cánovas, was appointed. He was relatively independent and pursued his investigation with great determination.119 The changes involved in the apertura also affected the courts, since judges began to feel they had more authority to investigation human rights violations. DICOMCAR’s activities produced friction with the CNI, which considered itself the only body responsible for fighting terrorism. The friction became obvious when the CNI gave Judge Cánovas information revealing the participation of DICOMCAR officers. They also gave him proof that DICOMCAR had kidnapped the AGECH leaders.120 Cánovas indicted some of DICOMCAR’s and GOPE’s main officials, and ordered them to remain in Chile. For the first time since the Lonquén case in 1978,121 the judiciary was prosecuting Carabineros members for their role in repressive actions. Since the Carabineros came under the Defense Ministry, Cánovas forwarded the case to the military justice system after announcing his findings, which included a detailed description of the crime itself.122

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When the media published the description, the crime became a public scandal and received unanimous condemnation from political figures and the Catholic Church’s hierarchy.123 The crime also affected the regime’s supporters, especially the soft-liners, who loudly and publicly condemned it. In an article in Qué Pasa, former education minister Gonzalo Vial Correa blamed Pinochet, in a historical sense, since “he embodies for many the ethical and political principles that inspired the September 11, 1973 [coup], which are tarnished and damaged by such a detestable crime.”124 The official investigation triggered a serious crisis in the Carabineros. The service’s high command feared that General Pinochet might take drastic action, such as taking over the institution and appointing a new director (as he had done with the air force in 1978). To prevent this, Carabineros director Mendoza resigned and appointed his own successor, General Rodolfo Stange, who was next in line.125 Stange made radical changes in the high command, removing seventeen of twenty-one generals and dozens of colonels.126 He dissolved DICOMCAR and reorganized GOPE, redefining its functions to prevent further criminal actions. To improve their public image he also decided that the Carabineros would cease to participate in coercive actions ordered by the government127 as a sign of protest against the CNI, which had seriously damaged the Carabineros by providing the information about DICOMCAR’s participation in the degollados case. Stange thought the costs of repression should be assumed by the army, not the Carabineros.

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The End of Apertura and the Militarization of Politics

The gap left by the Carabineros’ withdrawal from protest control was filled by the military, thus contradicting the spirit of the “transition,” which called for the military to gradually leave politics. The army was deeply involved in its fight against terrorism at the time.128 Soldiers in full combat gear, with their faces painted, began to intervene in every protest called by the opposition, in scenes reminiscent of the coup. On April 10, 1986, they harshly repressed a rally organized by opposition party youth in one of Santiago’s main intersections, Plaza Baquedano.129 They also prevented May Day events organized by opposition unions. Three weeks later, on May 20, the military was on the streets of Santiago because of an Interparliamentary Union event, which had brought delegations from Western Europe and Latin America into the capital. This troop presence was widely covered by the foreign press, which revealed a city besieged by its own military. The military also acted during protests on July 2–3, 1986, called by the Assembly of Civil Society (Asamblea de la Civilidad), which comprised organizations and individuals belonging to the democratic opposition. The military was extremely violent, killing seven and injuring over one hundred people.130

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A military patrol beat up two young people and burned them alive, killing one, Rodrigo Rojas. The other, Carmen Gloria Quintana, was very badly burned. This incident horrified Chileans and people abroad, particularly in the United States, since Rojas was the son of an exile and had US citizenship.131 The US government protested, as part of its efforts to advance the return to democratic rule in Chile.132 The support of the US government was shown with the appointment of Harry Barnes, a highly regarded diplomat, who was ambassador to India and was transferred to Santiago in early 1985. Barnes was the first US ambassador to meet politicians of the democratic opposition, which had been a regular activity of diplomats of the countries belonging to the European Community, with the exception of Germany, for several years. After this the disagreements between the army and the Carabineros over control of public order had become even more obvious, with senior Carabineros officers criticizing the military.133 The opposition did not abandon its efforts to bring the regime to an end, in what was now a very adverse environment, given that the military’s actions left more room for the Communist Party to act. The government was polarizing the situation, favoring a climate of confrontation that in turn justified the soldiers’ measures to control public order. Searches were ordered by the military courts on the executive’s initiative, as an attempt to strengthen Pinochet’s leadership at a time of great confusion among his civilian supporters, due to the political changes produced by the apertura.134 The climate of repression thus created was more reminiscent of the establishment of authoritarian rule than a “transition.” It was in this atmosphere that the FPMR attacked General Pinochet in Maipo canyon on September 6, 1986, although he survived.135 Given the gravity of the event, the government reacted with some moderation, although the CNI kidnapped and killed four people associated with the Communist Party and the MIR, including a journalist, José Carrasco.136 General Pinochet was more interested in capitalizing on the attack politically to consolidate his public image in order to achieve reelection in the 1988 plebiscite. To do so, the Civilian Organizations Directorate, headed by an army lieutenant-colonel, organized a mass rally without the participation of right-wing parties of the time.137 *

*

*

The regime’s original plan was to gradually advance toward the building of new institutions and economic reforms that would ensure General Pinochet’s reelection in the 1988 plebiscite. He sought a balance among institutionalization, personalization of power, and economic success, to ensure his confirmation in the plebiscite and the establishment of a “protected and authoritarian democracy” in 1989–1990. However, General Pinochet himself tipped the balance after the 1980 plebiscite, feeling strengthened and reacting accordingly, as did the police services, which increased repression. Another factor was the 1982–1983 economic

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crisis, which weakened the strategy of legitimation through efficacy, triggering a protest movement among workers and middle-income sectors. This drove the government to enact its policy of apertura, whose effects went far beyond its proponents’ expectations, politicizing society, encouraging opposition parties, and dividing proregime groups, who took different stands on Pinochet’s succession and turned to the constitution to change the regime by defeating Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite.

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Notes

1. Jaime Guzmán, “11 de marzo: ante nueva etapa jurídico-política,” Realidad no. 22, March 1981, p. 4. 2. “It is not a question of waiting eight years for the advent of full democracy, but of achieving conditions during that period of time that will allow its stable and fruitful consolidation in the future”; “Transición: compromiso y desafío,” Realidad no. 23, April 1981, p. 4. 3. “Attaining conditions for a stable democracy involves achieving sufficient economic, social and educational development, so that its material and spiritual benefits, significantly extended to all citizens, will engage each one of them in the defense of the system’s foundations”; “Transición: compromiso y desafío,” Realidad no. 23, April 1981, p. 4. These ideas were inspired by Lipset’s classic study on modernization: Lipset (1959). 4. Transitory Article 10 of the 1980 constitution was very clear in stating that political parties were banned from “executing or promoting any political or partisan activity, action or negotiation, be it through individuals, organizations or groups. Whoever breaks this prohibition will be sanctioned following the law.” 5. Jaime Guzmán, “El sentido de la transición,” Realidad no. 38, July 1982, pp. 9–28; quote from p. 16. Guzmán changed this political stance a year later, accepting in effect the legalization of parties by founding the Independent Democratic Union. 6. “Only the development of those democratic opponents who, apart from their legitimate disagreements with the current constitutional text, loyally agree to abide by both the political process designed in it and the role assigned to President Pinochet and the present government, would demonstrate genuine political maturity. The total absence of this condition today makes any transition towards a stable democracy extremely difficult”; “Transición: importancia y exigencias,” Realidad no. 41, October 1982, p. 4, emphasis in original. 7. Guzmán, “El sentido de la transición,” p. 19. The nuances in Guzmán’s defense of Transitory Article 24 reveal his clear defense of exile: “Notwithstanding certain questionable exceptions, I believe that a suitable balance between firmness and moderation has prevailed until now, and thus one could not objectively say that this transitory article’s powers have been exercised in a generally abusive way.” 8. These factors explain why the Pinochet regime did not evolve toward making more room for limited pluralism, as Franco’s Spain did in the late 1960s as it became more economically developed; see Beyme (1974). 9. At the Diego Portales building: “my contact with the President was not just daily, but virtually permanent”; Fernández (1994), p. 172. Pinochet appealed to the tradition of a very powerful, excessively centralized form of presidentialism, which has been criticized, using various arguments, by Linz (1990a, 1990b). 10. Pinochet ordered the construction of a huge and lavishly equipped presidential residence in Lo Curro, an exclusive sector of Santiago, a move that was opposed by public opinion and criticized even by his supporters, as it did not fit his image of austerity. Criticism grew with the economic crisis, and Pinochet had to cancel the move

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in early 1984 and settle into the residence assigned to army commanders in chief on Presidente Errázuriz avenue. 11. Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 341. 12. “[Parallel advisers] had been operating for months as a sort of parallel cabinet, to the detriment of the coordination and coherence of governmental tasks, creating confusion among citizens”; Fernández (1994), p. 180. 13. From 1980 to 1982, Jaime Guzmán constantly campaigned against the hardliners, calling them fascists who pretended to support Pinochet and the government, but questioned the constitution. See the following Realidad editorials: “El camino político en debate,” no. 10, March 1980, p. 10; “Alcances de una declaración ministerial,” no. 12, May 1980, p. 12; “Ante una decisión política trascendental,” no. 15, July 1980, p. 3; “Transición: compromiso y desafío,” no. 23, April 1981, p. 3; “Dos frentes antagónicos contra la Constitución,” no. 24, May 1981, pp. 3–7. 14. In a memorandum on the political situation written in early 1980, Guzmán described the opposition as coming from “two poles, but whose approaches are extraordinarily similar and convergent: on the one hand, Marxist, Christian Democrat and social democrat groups, and on the other, fascist sectors.” In that same document, he pointed to the fact that Pablo Rodríguez, the hard-liners’ main spokesman, had used arguments from a book by Fernando Dahse (1979) on “the map of extreme wealth” to criticize economic concentration. The text is at the FJGE. 15. The excuse was that they had made statements in a foreign newspaper, but it was really in retaliation for Zaldívar’s leading role in the campaign against ratification in the plebiscite, even trying to persuade former president Alessandri to vote against it. 16. The others were Orlando Cantuarias of the Radical Party and Alberto Jerez, a former Christian Democratic Party senator, who had resigned in 1969 to create MAPU and then returned to the PDC after the military coup. The circumstances of the expulsions are described in Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), pp. 357–358. 17. This provision was questioned by the opposition during the 1980 plebiscite campaign, on the basis that General Pinochet would use it against his adversaries. This decision proved that those accusations were well founded. 18. The investigation was suspended for years because of the judge’s lack of interest, until a Supreme Court decision reversed him in 1999. The new judge concluded that he had been murdered by agents of the army’s intelligence directorate, DINE. 19. Legally, the CNI came under the Interior Ministry, but in fact it reported to General Pinochet. 20. Mena had good human rights credentials, because as commander of the Arica regiment at the time of the coup, he prevented the intervention of the “caravan of death” when he heard about the crimes that Sergio Arellano’s entourage had committed in Calama and Antofagasta (see Chapter 2). 21. Lamounier (1988). There was also tension between CNI agents and civilian detectives in the Investigaciones, headed by a retired general, Ernesto Baeza, who was called upon by Pinochet to participate in the antiterrorist struggle. 22. Bascuñán (1990), pp. 47–48. 23. They robbed three bank branches in April 1980, then attacked the “flame of freedom,” one of the regime’s symbols, shooting a Carabineros officer. In June, they attacked two police stations and a branch of the state-owned Banco del Estado. A week later, a dozen MIR members robbed three bank branches, all in Santiago. See Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 300. 24. An anonymous interview in La Tercera de la Hora gave figures illustrating that the struggle against terrorism was being lost, as 198 terrorist attacks had taken place since 1978, over a dozen of which had been armed attacks against military and Carabineros quarters and staff, and no arrests had been made; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 301.

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25. Contreras blamed Mena for disclosing the documents as a move against him. Mena’s removal was considered a victory for the hard-liners and was criticized by El Mercurio, August 26, 1980. Contreras defended the decision, arguing that he had been fired because of his inefficiency; Jaime Moreno, “Cambios en la CNI,” Hoy, July 30, 1980. See Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), pp. 302–303. 26. A reporter from the Chilena radio station was also arrested, irritating the church. 27. On December 28, 1980, a Fatherland and Freedom member and CNI collaborator was murdered; on January 12, 1981, CNI agents killed a Communist Party member who had returned from exile in October 1980. See Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), pp. 344–345. 28. The robbery was committed by an army major in charge of the CNI in Arica, who killed the branch manager and the cashier to put the blame on them. Their bodies were destroyed using dynamite. In the weeks following this event, three people linked to this CNI officer were found dead. See Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 346. 29. On June 22, 1981, a commando unit made up of several dozen MIR members simultaneously attacked two branches of the state-owned Banco del Estado, at Apoquindo and at Manquehue; a Carabineros station; and an Investigaciones police station in the same area. At that time, Óscar Polanco, a former member of the Socialist Party who had collaborated with the secret police, was killed, probably in retaliation. See Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 347. 30. I draw from Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), chap. 33. 31. He was appointed in the April 1978 cabinet change. 32. A summary of the proposals is presented in Fernández (1994), pp. 179–181. 33. In its editorial of March 30, 1982, El Mercurio suggested adjusting some aspects of the economic program due to political necessities: “[Steps must be taken to] let this year go by without excessive political costs and without overly compromising economic growth expectations”; quoted in Fernández (1994), p. 179. 34. Since the late 1970s, CIEPLAN had been warning through press and academic articles of the extreme vulnerability of the economy due to excessive external borrowing and unregulated credit. Articles criticizing neoliberal policies appear in Foxley (1985). 35. Ffrench-Davis (1999), p. 190. 36. Pinochet wanted to include one of them, Gastón Acuña, as minister of the General Secretariat in the February 1982 cabinet change, which was strongly criticized by some of his advisers; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 395. 37. Another military officer from COAJ, General Gastón Frez, who had frequently disagreed with Sergio de Castro, became head of ODEPLAN. COAJ’s role is analyzed in Chapter 3; conflicts between the Chicago Boys and COAJ are presented in Chapter 8. 38. The president of the Central Bank, Miguel Kast, was visiting Germany and was not informed of the decision; Lavín (1986), pp. 86–87. 39. The state had to make emergency loans and authorize overdrafts to financial institutions that were in distress or liquidation, for up to 15 percent of 1982 GGP; Arellano (1983), p. 49. 40. Escobar was economics dean at the University of Chile (1955–1964), which, together with the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, was the center of “structuralism,” a school that was essentially an opposite to neoliberalism; he was minister of economy (1961–1963) under Jorge Alessandri, when the Radical Party (to which he belonged) joined the government. He gave his version of his participation in the military regime in an informative book: Escobar Cerda (1991). 41. Former minister Fernández ridiculed Escobar’s conduct: “In the first place, the new Finance minister promoted a policy that expanded fiscal spending; the Central Bank had to issue currency to finance public works. Three months after Escobar took office, a tariff was imposed on the import of over 240 products; with that, the economy

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stopped being open to global competition and was once again headed towards protectionism”; Fernández (1994) p. 199. Büchi’s political career is examined in Chapter 8. 42. Meller (1996), p. 198. 43. Community employment programs had started in 1974 and were run by municipalities. 44. Labor Economy Program (PET), Academy of Christian Humanism, Serie de indicadores económicos y sociales, several issues in 1982 and 1983. On the minimum employment program, PEM, and its social implications, see Ruiz-Tagle and Urmeneta (1984). 45. I have analyzed this in Huneeus (1985a). See also Morales (1987). 46. PET, Serie de indicadores económicos y sociales, several issues, 1983 and 1984. 47. Public spending cuts were also aimed at relieving the fiscal deficit, as required by the International Monetary Fund. 48. Deaths estimated using information from Vicariate of Solidarity bulletins, various months, 1983–1985, in Huneeus (1985a), tab. 9. 49. Since union elections were suspended, Vilarín and Cumsille remained in their posts throughout the military regime. 50. As of August 19, 1984, 7,500 fines worth 260 million pesos (US$3.26 million in 2000 dollars) had been ordered due to excess weight from September 7, 1981, to March 4, 1984. 51. El Mercurio, August 2, 1984. 52. El Mercurio, October 29, 1984. 53. There was also a policy of economic patronage of taxi drivers, who were also carrying debt on their vehicles. The patronage allowed them to refinance the debt so they could repay over longer periods. 54. The National Statistics Bureau said that real income had fallen to 64.4 percent of its September 1981 level, but in actual fact it had fallen to 55.8 percent. 55. Cumsille had a business in the city of San Fernando, south of Santiago. 56. “La renuncia de Lamarca,” Qué Pasa, May 2–9, 1984, pp. 10–16; “Lamarca, Cumsille y . . . ¿Portales?” Qué Pasa, May 2–9, 1984, pp. 12–14; “Lo que le hicieron a Lamarca,” Entretelones no. 4, 1984; “La caída de Lamarca” (cover story), Hoy, May 9–15, 1984. 57. Estrategia, March 25, 1984. 58. I have analyzed this, including the various terms offered by banks, in Huneeus (1986c), pp. 83–84. 59. These rose as much as 20 percent, then fell to about 5 percent; Meller (1996). See also Meller (1998). 60. For more on the demonstrations, including information on the main organizations that took part in them, see de la Maza and Garcés (1985). 61. The government had expelled one of the small farmers’ leaders from the country; Campero (1991), p. 137. 62. Dahl (1971), p. 15; Dahl (1973), p. 13. 63. Historian Horacio Aránguiz, professor at Catholic University and Gremialista sympathizer, was appointed education minister. Hernán Büchi was appointed ministerdirector of ODEPLAN. The cabinet’s composition irritated the Gremialista movement, as former minister Fernández admitted: “The groups that joined the government with Jarpa did not get along with the Gremialistas who already held positions in it, and whose general displacement opened wounds which were particularly untimely considering the crisis that was going on”; Fernández (1994), pp. 193–194. 64. The main weekly that emerged was Cauce, which due to international funding was able to carry out investigative reporting and denounce serious irregularities, enormously impacting public opinion. Other weekly publications were Apsi, Análisis, and

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Hoy magazine, founded in 1978. Each one of them achieved large circulation, especially in Santiago. Later, in late 1987, two newspapers emerged, El Fortín Mapocho and La Época. 65. In early May 1984, a large group of lawyers made a presentation to the Supreme Court against General Pinochet due to irregularities in the purchase of land at the village of El Melocotón. A few days later, PRODEN lawyers denounced General Pinochet for unlawful activity in the purchase and subsequent sale of land in Limache. 66. The radio stations Cooperativa and Chilena stood out, the latter belonging to the Archbishopric of Santiago. Both of them achieved national coverage through links with other stations. 67. Pope John Paul II promptly accepted Cardinal Silva Henríquez’s resignation when he turned seventy-five, the retirement age for bishops and cardinals, in June 1983. 68. This opposition organization was formed by the Christian Democratic Party, the segment of the Socialist Party headed by Ricardo Núñez, and the Radical Party; Ortega Frei (1992). 69. Article 19, sec. 16, of the constitution provided that “no one could be compelled to belong to an association” and that “to carry out a given activity or work, affiliation to any organization or entity cannot be required by any law or provision by any public authority.” 70. Aylwin (1998), p. 301. 71. Jaime Castillo Velasco received 1,339 votes. The only right-wing candidate elected was Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes, a former National Party senator with the National Union. The results are presented in the minutes of the extraordinary session, May 13, 1985, of the Colegio de Abogados. Also on the winning list were Christian Democrats Patricio Aylwin, Mariano Fernández Méndez, and Hernán Bosselin; Radical Party members Heriberto Benquis, Gonzalo Figueroa, Juan Agustín Figueroa, and Gilberto Villablanca; Héctor Correa Letelier, of the National Party; and human rights lawyer Hernán Montealegre. In 1985 the counselors unanimously named Raúl Rettig president. He had been elected councilor in 1983 and was a former Radical Party senator and law philosophy professor at the University of Chile. Patricio Aylwin was named vice president. See Colegio de Abogados, minutes of the extraordinary session, May 22, 1985, p. 2. The opposition had elected five members in 1983, including Enrique Silva Cimma, Rettig, and Luis Ortíz Quiroga; see Aylwin (1998), pp. 301–302. On that occasion, Ortíz won the majority with 1,460 votes, followed by Hales with 1,431; Colegio de Abogados, minutes of the extraordinary session, May 9, 1983. 72. Elections at the national engineers’ association (Colegio de Ingenieros) were also politically important. Christian Democrat Eduardo Arriagada, who had already held the position in 1972, was elected. Juan Luis González, president of the national physicians’ association (Colegio Médico), was also a Christian Democrat. 73. Manuel Valdés, president of the National Agricultural Society, and Jorge Fontaine, of the industry and trade confederation (Confederación de la Producción y el Comercio), had assumed these posts prior to the coup. Two confederation presidents, Rafael Cumsille of the national retailers’ association (Confederación de Comercio Detallista) and León Vilarín of the national truck drivers’ association (Confederación de Dueños de Camiones), stayed in their positions during ten years of the military regime. 74. Seventy-five percent of the students participated. The PDC-led Democratic Alliance won with 5,650 votes, followed by the Communist Party–led Popular Democratic Movement with 5,574, the Socialist Bloc with 1,427, and the right-wing National Union Movement with 4,008. This was a good result for the MUN in its campaign to replace the UDI as the main right-wing student organization. Results from Aylwin (1998), p. 303. 75. Elections were held throughout the country, and the opposition won them all. Interest in politics spread to the faculty, who organized groups demanding the end of

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governmental intervention in universities and more participation in decisionmaking. At the University of Chile, the faculty and school authorities mobilized against the appointed president, economist José Luis Federici, in what became known as the “deans’ rebellion,” forcing the government to remove him. There is an interesting account of this conflict by one of the deans: Valenzuela Erazo (1993). 76. This criticism was shared by the military and General Pinochet. Pinochet’s criticisms of the Gremialista movement and Guzmán had been an open secret since late 1982, influencing ministers’ appointments. During the cabinet change in February 1983, Pinochet had harshly said about Ramón Suárez, “But this guy is a Gremialista! He’s with Guzmán and all those others!”; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), p. 395. 77. The other members were Javier Leturia, Pablo Longueira, Luis Cordero, and Jaime Guzmán, the latter of whom was the party’s president. Businessman Guillermo Elton joined them, representing his sector. 78. This was formed by the members of the commission that had researched the new constitution, Jaime Guzmán, Raúl Bertelsen, and Luz Bulnes; the general secretary of Catholic University, Francisco Bulnes Ripamonti; Hermógenes Pérez de Arce; and Gustavo Cuevas. 79. The MUN was being blamed for the expulsion of the Gremialistas: “From the Interior Ministry, the MUN promoted the UDI’s removal from all governmental functions. The attempt extended to the members of the economic team, but proved more difficult because the MUN lacked the experts to replace them”; Fernández (1994), p. 197. 80. On the emergence of the National Union, see the account by its main organizer: Allamand (1999), pp. 59–65. 81. Linz (1973b), p. 191. 82. Ibáñez had belonged to the Council of State and rejected universal suffrage in a minority vote, together with Carlos Cáceres, in 1980 (see Chapter 5). Bulnes had been ambassador to Peru. 83. Bulnes joined in August 1985, while Ibáñez had done so earlier; Allamand (1999), pp. 62–65. 84. In August 1985, she persuaded Gustavo Alessandri, National Union vice president, to leave this position and join the commission instead. 85. Other right-wing parties were created, such as the Social Christian Movement (Movimiento Social Cristiano), organized by Juan de Dios Carmona and William Thayer, and Social Democracy (Democracia Social), headed by Luis Angel Santibáñez. They later joined the National Workers Front (Frente Nacional del Trabajo), created by Jarpa when he was dismissed from the government in early 1985. 86. Its declaration of principles was published as an insert in El Mercurio, March 23, 1986. The general secretary was businessman Angel Fantuzzi; see interview in Las Últimas Noticias, March 16, 1986, pp. 16–17. See the interview with Sergio Onofre Jarpa in Estrategia, January 13, 1986, pp. 12–13. 87. See the story “¿Qué se hizo la derecha?” Qué Pasa, July 4–10, 1985. 88. He had been archbishop of La Serena. Before that, he was president of the bishops’ conference (1976–1977), then vice president (1978–1979), and later a member of the same (1982–1983). 89. The Catholic Church’s active role was not a novelty in Chile. For an analysis of its development in the twentieth century and the role it played during the Pinochet regime, I refer to Smith (1982), an excellent study. There is a well-documented book on the Vicariate of Solidarity: Lowden (1996). 90. The full text of the statement is published in Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez’s memoirs: Silva Henríquez (1994), vol. 2, pp. 285–286. 91. The cardinal included in his homily a paragraph that he had read before President Allende in November 1970: “We are all builders of the most beautiful work: the

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nation, the earthly nation that prefigures and prepares the nation without borders. That nation does not start with us today; but it cannot grow and bear fruit without us. That is why we receive it respectfully and gratefully, as a task begun many years ago, as a legacy that fills us with pride and engages us at the same time. We would like our look at the near or remote past to be more curious than condemnatory, more of an experience sensor than a judge of omissions; more like a disciple who learns than a master who teaches. We receive the nation as a sacred trust and an unfinished task”; Cavallo (1988); quote from p. 16. 92. On that same day, September 18, 1973, Santiago’s auxiliary bishop, Fernando Ariztía, wrote the first letter to General Pinochet reporting specific human rights abuses; Silva Henríquez (1994), vol. 2, p. 292. 93. See Sociedad Chilena de Defensa de la Tradición, Familia y Propiedad (1976), in which Silva Henríquez was singled out for attack. This Catholic organization was a continuation of Fiducia (see Chapter 7). 94. Agrarian reform began in Chile in 1962 on rural properties belonging to the Archbishoprics of Santiago and Talca, with the lands being handed over to the peasants. 95. Silva Henríquez (1994), vol. 3, p. 15. 96. Pope John XXIII appointed him bishop of Valparaiso in 1959, and archbishop of Santiago two years later. He was elected cardinal in 1962. See Oviedo Cavada (1996), pp. 216–217. 97. Oviedo Cavada (1996), pp. 140, 217, 239. His auxiliary bishops were also outstanding figures. Under the military regime, they were Fernando Ariztía (1967–1974), Sergio Valech (1973), Enrique Alvear (1974–1982), Jorge Hourton (1974–1987), and Manuel Camilo Vial (1980–1983), the latter of whom was the vicar of the southern zone of Santiago. 98. At President Allende’s request, he organized a meeting in his house between Allende and Aylwin, then president of the Christian Democratic Party, in early August 1973. He described how the meeting was planned and the conversation that took place in memoirs: Silva Henríquez (1994), vol. 2, pp. 267–274. 99. The Vicariate of Solidarity delivered extensive aid to the poor with a staff of over 200 people, whose salaries added up to US$4 million a year; Lowden (1996). See also Silva Henríquez (1994), vol. 3, p. 211. 100. The governing junta’s annoyance with the cardinal explains why it agreed that “the foreign affairs minister should contact the ambassador to the Holy See to explore the possibility of replacing the cardinal”; AHJG, sess. 8, September 24, 1973. At that time, the junta members felt in total control and were not aware that Pope Paul VI had no sympathy for authoritarian regimes, as he had repeatedly demonstrated with Franco’s Spain. See Payne (1984). 101. The regime constantly harassed the cardinal and questioned his performance, as did Jaime Guzmán (see Chapter 7). The cardinal’s homily in the funeral mass for Eduardo Frei Montalva, on January 22, 1982, was rejected by the leader of the Gremialista movement, who called it a “political” text and asked: “Can Cardinal Silva Henríquez and other Chilean church dignitaries continue to miss that their words constantly outrage millions of Catholics who disagree with the Christian Democrats?” Jaime Guzmán, “Impropio de un cardenal,” La Segunda, January 29, 2000, p. 3. 102. See Verdugo (1985). 103. In November 1983 a Communist Party member, Sebastian Acevedo, burned himself alive to protest the arrest of his son and daughter by the CNI; in March 1984 the editor of the newspaper Fortín Mapocho, former senator Jorge Lavandero (PDC), suffered a beating, and documents linking General Pinochet to the purchase of a property in El Melocotón were stolen from him; in September 1984 two students were killed in Copiapó; in October 1984 a trucker and PDC member died in La Serena after being tortured by CNI agents.

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104. The text is printed in Avetikian (1986). 105. “The signing of the Accord clearly demonstrated [our] independence from the regime”; Allamand (1999), p. 103. 106. UDI statements are published in Avetikian (1986), pp. 100–104. 107. He had represented the Conservative Party (1949–1965) and advised President Jorge Alessandri. He was also a prominent civil law professor at the University of Chile, dean of the law school since the 1970s, and adviser to the Interior Ministry. 108. Cuadra joined the cabinet after working with lawyer Sergio Rillon, one of Pinochet’s legal advisers, who was in charge of relations with the church. 109. Biographical information from Osorio and Cabezas (1995), chap. 8. 110. The large scale of the raids and the violence undertaken moved the archbishop of Santiago to ask the government to stop its military intervention. 111. A different interpretation, calling it a “situation of transition to democracy,” is developed by Cañas Kirby (1997), pp. 185–188. 112. Barros (1996) describes a number of times when the junta refused to go along with Pinochet in applying the state of siege. Fernández proudly proclaimed that a state of siege was not declared on his watch, except in the zone of Loa due to an incident in Chuquicamata; Fernández (1994), p. 158. 113. Barros (1996), esp. p. 207. 114. Dahl (1971). 115. The failure to perceive change becomes an obstacle to the leadership’s abilities to face new challenges and situations; Hirschman (1968). 116. In early November 1984, the bombing of a bus full of officers left four dead and ten injured; two days later, two Carabineros died in an armed attack against a police station in La Cisterna. 117. José Manuel Parada, son of former Congress member María Maluenda and a beloved actor, and Roberto Parada, Manuel Guerrero, and Santiago Nattino, who had been kidnapped two days earlier. Parada and Guerrero were violently kidnapped by civilians outside a school in Providencia, and a teacher who tried to defend them was shot and badly wounded. 118. See the series of articles “La guerra oculta,” Hoy, January 13, 1986–February 24, 1986. For actions against the Communist Party, see Hoy, February 10, 1986. 119. The minister delivered interesting background information on this investigation in his memoirs: Cánovas (1989). 120. The text of the CNI report and the response from DICOMCAR are printed in Análisis, September 1, 1985, pp. 7–10, and in Cauce, September 10, 1985, pp. 58–60. 121. The remains of a dozen campesinos were found hidden near Santiago, and the official investigation concluded that they had been assassinated by the Carabineros; Pacheco (1980). 122. The press published it in full in El Mercurio, August 2, 1985; see also “Yeran Carabineros,” “La decisión del magistrado,” and “Investigación rigurosamente vigilada,” Hoy, August 5, 1985. The investigation later ended with the release of the accused by Cánovas. However, the Carabineros forced the retirement of those considered most responsible, Colonel Luis Fontaine and Captain Julio Michea, while a third officer was accepted back into the force. 123. A public statement by the bishops’ committee said that the country had learned about the contents of Cánovas’s decision with “astonishment,” adding that “it is striking that the public bodies involved were incapable of establishing for themselves the facts that the courts have now clarified”; Mensaje, September 1985, p. 372. 124. Gonzalo Vial, “Como un cáncer,” Qué Pasa, August 1, 1985, pp. 14–16. 125. This was announced in a massive meeting of a thousand officers on August 1, 1985. Fear surrounding General Pinochet’s actions was revealed in “La caída de Mendoza,” Hoy, August 5, 1985, pp. 6–9; it was indirectly confirmed by General Mendoza

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in an interview with Raúl González Alfaro: “El bisturí de papel,” Las Últimas Noticias, August 3, 1985. See also “El choclo se desgrana,” Qué Pasa, August 8, 1985, pp. 16–20; “Del asesinato político a la crisis institucional,” Mensaje, September 1985, pp. 333–335. 126. Ascanio Cavallo, “Carabineros: los silenciosos cambios,” Hoy, September 1, 1986, pp. 6–9; Renato Hevia, “Carabineros de Chile,” Mensaje, September 1985, pp. 521–528; Blanca Arthur, “Carabineros: nueva etapa,” El Mercurio, August 11, 1985, p. D1; “Cambios en el alto mando,” Qué Pasa, February 27, 1986, pp. 16–17. 127. Stange’s position was laid out in an interview with El Mercurio, April 27, 1986, p. 3, and in his speech marking the anniversary of the Carabineros, printed in La Tercera de la Hora, April 27, 1986, p. 5. The institution’s new style was outlined in interviews with the director of order and security, General Óscar Torres, in El Mercurio, November 10, 1985, pp. D1–D2, and the head of the Metropolitan Zone, General Idelberto Duarte, in El Mercurio, April 13, 1986, pp. D1–D2. For comparison, see the interviews with the previous director of order and security, Carlos Donoso Pérez, in Apsi, August 14, 1984, pp. 13–15; Apsi, April 2, 1985; El Mercurio, September 2, 1984. 128. The army organized an antisubversion unit to fight terrorism. 129. The pretext for the protests was to watch Halley’s comet fly over Chile and collectively wish that it would take Pinochet away. 130. Many were arrested by the military, including the leaders of the organizing entity, and Juan Luis González, president of the highly respected national physicians’ association. 131. It became known as “the case of the burnt” (el caso de los quemados). 132. Harry Barnes had just taken over as ambassador. One of his first actions was to deal with the burning to death of Rojas, which he did by attending the massive funeral, infuriating the regime but also signaling a new change in US policy toward Chile. 133. For the disagreements between the Carabineros and the army on how to control public order, see Elizabeth Subercaseaux, “Antecedentes de la crisis: revelaciones de oficiales de Carabineros,” Apsi, August 26, 1986, pp. 10–14. 134. In May 1986 the bar association made a presentation to the Supreme Court questioning the legality of the raids, which had impacted a large number of poblaciones and approximately a hundred thousand people. 135. Five of General Pinochet’s bodyguards died. The government had previously made full use of the media to reveal the discovery of thousands of weapons brought into the country by the FPMR, at Carrizal Bajo. 136. That night, several leftist leaders such as Ricardo Lagos and Germán Correa were arrested, and strict media censorship was applied, which included the confiscation of opposition weekly publications. 137. Only the tiny Social Christian Movement and National Advance (Avanzada Nacional), an ultra-right-wing group formed by former CNI officers, supported the demonstration. The UDI emphasized that it played no role in its organization; La Segunda, September 12, 1986.

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11 Pinochet’s Defeat and the Question of Succession

Authoritarian regimes have a structural weakness: their inability to resolve the question of succession, which becomes their Achilles heel, as Giovanni Sartori so perceptively noted.1 The political order may become stable and the dictator may govern for many years, but he lacks the resources to ensure continuity beyond the moment he dies or leaves power. The authoritarian order is tremendously dependent on the dictator’s ongoing leadership, which pushes the regime to see its fate as being linked to this individual, thus explaining the weaknesses stemming from the high degree of personalization of power and the relatively reduced importance of institutionalization. When the leader is gone, the regime can easily collapse. This is what happened in Spain, where in 1975 General Francisco Franco’s successor, King Juan Carlos, who had been carefully chosen to ensure the continuity of the political system,2 nonetheless applied sweeping changes that dismantled Franco’s regime and opened the way for a new democracy. These profound changes occurred in the framework of Franco’s own institutions.3 In Chile, the transitory articles of the 1980 constitution regulated succession based on an eight-year “transition” to prepare the institutions necessary for a protected democracy, which was to culminate in a plebiscite that was supposed to ratify a single candidate as president of the republic.4 No specific date was set for this “electoral” event, so the regime could choose the best moment to hold it. This also created enormous uncertainty among the opposition, which could do little to prepare. This chapter examines the factors that led to the failure of the regulation of Pinochet’s succession and with it, General Pinochet’s defeat in the 1988 plebiscite. These include changes triggered by the 1982–1983 economic crisis and the politics of apertura, applied in response to national protests. Another factor was the complex institutional order designed to ensure the plebiscite’s 395

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credibility, which made for a more balanced electoral contest. Conflicts among Pinochet’s civilian supporters also hurt his image, while the opposition revealed itself to have both the capacity and the electoral support necessary to defeat Pinochet. Finally, the institutions created by the constitution to regulate the succession boomeranged,5 restricting Pinochet’s power and providing the opposition with the political resources necessary to run a simple but effective campaign to vote against Pinochet’s succession. Transitory Article 27 of the 1980 constitution required that the commanders in chief of the three branches of the armed forces, along with General Pinochet and the director of the Carabineros, meet at least ninety days before the end of Pinochet’s mandate, March 11, 1989, to “unanimously propose to the country the person to occupy the position of President of the Republic in the next presidential period”; the constitution required that citizens “approve” or “disapprove” this proposal. This candidate, therefore, would be an official candidate of the armed forces. If approved, he would become president for eight years. He would also call congressional elections. If this candidate were to be defeated, General Pinochet’s “presidential period” would last another year, and presidential and congressional elections would be held together. The constitution considered the candidate’s defeat a theoretical possibility, but in fact the plebiscite’s purpose was to ensure Pinochet’s reelection. The state of General Pinochet’s presidency after 1988–1989 was evidence of the military-civilian consensus approval of the 1980 constitution. He was the regime’s undisputed leader and the text was tailored to him, carrying the assumption he would be president for a very long time.6 Jaime Guzmán provided the arguments behind his remaining as president, based on General Franco’s failed succession in Spain. In one of his most important articles on the Chilean authoritarian regime, written during Spain’s return to democracy, Guzmán warned of the need to avoid Franco’s “great mistake”: his failure to consolidate the political order or foresee events once he was no longer in power. Guzmán thought it imprudent to change the leader before the new political order was completely ensured. General Pinochet, therefore, had to remain head of state not only during the “transition,” as per the 1980 constitution (1981–1989), but also after the plebiscite defining the succession (1989–1997): “[It is Pinochet’s job to] establish the foundations of a stable democracy [and] moreover realistically and opportunely assume the responsibility for pushing and guiding the country into the full functioning of the new democracy. To separate the transition from the eventual institutionalization would be to deprive it of its main outcome and meaning.”7 The plebiscite was a major political event, since it would implicitly define the future political regime, the so-called protected and authoritarian democracy to which the military regime aspired, so it had a dual purpose: to bring the transition to an end and mark the establishment of the permanent political order. The defeat of the official candidate would mean the failure of the attempt to regulate Pinochet’s succession and a rejection of the political order

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established in the constitution, given that the two were closely identified with each other. The succession depended on the constitution’s transitional provisions and support from the various civilian groups behind the regime, along with economic success. It was thought that consolidating the economic reforms during the eight-year transition would provide material goods and other benefits to the vast majority of Chileans, leading them to vote for General Pinochet. This consolidation was also supposed to change Chileans’ civic culture, distancing them from the values implicit in the welfare state in place since the early twentieth century. General Pinochet was convinced that he would repeat his “electoral victories” of the 1978 referendum and the 1980 plebiscite (see Chapter 3). Pinochet expressed his confidence in the success of the economic model, which was expected to produce solid growth during the 1980s, in a speech on the night of the 1980 plebiscite. He described the future of Chile as he saw it: Now I want to tell every one of you, showing you the path that Chile is going to follow, what will be our future. In the first place, there will be a million new jobs; a million new sources of work; in this period nine hundred thousand housing units will be built, but at the same time we must carry out a major reform of social security, bringing benefits to citizens. We also visualize that in this period, at the end of it, one of every Chileans will have a car; one of every five will have a television set; and one of every seven will have a telephone. These are the goals we have set for ourselves.8

The political and economic conditions predicted in 1980, however, did not materialize. The economic model experienced a grave crisis in 1982–1983, which led to a political crisis, forcing the government to liberalize political conditions with an apertura, which in practice ended the political recess (see Chapter 10). The regime’s civilian supporters became bitterly divided over the question of succession, with one segment considering General Pinochet an unsuitable candidate. This unexpected development changed the foundations of the future plebiscite, because parties reappeared at least five years sooner than planned, giving the opposition an opportunity to organize and raising its profile in the public eye.

■

Institutional Consequences

The first factor behind the failure of the succession plans was of an institutional nature. As Brazilian political scientist Bolivar Lamounier correctly observed with regard to the military in Brazil,9 noncompetitive elections play an important role in authoritarian regimes, since they are the mechanism that legitimizes the political order. At the same time, however, they provide the opposition with room to organize and become an alternative power. Electoral dynamics generate

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tensions that impact the unity of the power elite and create a situation that is hard for the authorities to control, because the institutional resources established to improve their credibility may be used by the opposition to defeat the official candidate. The 1988 plebiscite was the third occasion on which the military regime resorted to an electoral mechanism. It had done the same in its 1978 consulta (referendum), using the excuse of defending the country’s sovereignty after the United Nations had condemned the regime for human rights violations. It did so again in 1980, to ratify the constitution. Both occasions served as noncompetitive elections for the president of the republic, and Pinochet had all the resources he needed to ensure his success. There were no voter lists, the press completely supported him, and there was no independent body to guarantee the honesty of the plebiscites. The opposition objected to those realities, which found no recognition abroad, as they were generally considered fraudulent. The third noncompetitive “election” was to be different, because it had a single purpose: to reelect General Pinochet under conditions that would guarantee his legitimacy. The “new institutional order” was virtually in place, with a constitution that would cover both a victory and a defeat of the official candidate. Moreover, the plebiscite itself would be governed by a series of political laws as required by the constitution, which together would create an institutional framework for this event that was more complex than the framework for the previous plebiscites. These laws were to create voter lists and regulate registration through the same electoral service that had existed during Chile’s previous democratic periods, an independent body whose directors were appointed by a former senior official of this same body.10 Political parties would also become legal, including those of the opposition, and able to participate in the campaign and observe voting and the count. In its static analysis of the effects of these new institutional components, the junta saw only their positive side, in terms of the legitimacy they would provide and the victory of the official candidate. They did not foresee the possible negative effects. They did not realize that they were giving the opposition much needed room to maneuver, which could lead to General Pinochet’s defeat. Their detailed institutionalization would end up making the political process so rigid that it would actually hurt the official candidate.11 The opposition did not believe that genuine participation in the plebiscite was possible. Some leftist and PDC sectors argued that it was unthinkable that the regime would organize a genuine plebiscite, with the possibility of defeat for the dictator. They were concerned that people would refrain from voting out of fear, despite public opinion surveys that showed enormous interest in registering to vote and in participating in the plebiscite.12 Many thought the only way to progress toward democracy would be through free elections, after a constitutional reform carried out voluntarily by the military. This alternative enjoyed enormous public support. In November 1987, 71 percent preferred free elections and just 12 percent the plebiscite.13 Segments of the opposition

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and the right-wing National Union supported an election featuring a consensus candidate, another alternative with broad support (43 percent in April–May 1988), similar to preferences expressed in November 1987.14 The opposition’s main concern was that the military and the regime would interfere in the electoral process to prevent their candidate’s defeat. Their enormous mistrust of General Pinochet was further enhanced by an element of the new institutional architecture. The decisive body charged with ruling on the validity of elections, the Election Clarification Tribunal (Tribunal Calificador de Elecciones), would not be set up for this occasion, but rather (according to Transitory Article 11 of the 1980 constitution) for the first election of senators and deputies to be held after the plebiscite. The institutional situation was even more complex as a result of the apertura, because political parties now existed, interest groups enjoyed substantial support, participation among students was up, and the media, especially radio stations and weekly magazines, had achieved considerable freedom to inform, so Chileans were relatively aware of the alternatives open to them. The constitutional framers had created another body, the Constitutional Tribunal,15 without foreseeing that it would play an important role in defining the context of the plebiscite. Its purpose was to support the “transition” and ensure that the laws passed by the junta respected the constitution. The junta, which created the 1980 constitution, believed that its decisions would remain in line with the regime’s general guidelines. The way its members were appointed certainly encouraged this view: three judges appointed by the Supreme Court; two by the military, through the National Security Council; a former judge appointed by General Pinochet; and another former judge by the junta.16 These new institutions, however, were grappling with the challenge of their own consolidation, which would depend on their ability to function autonomously.17 The interests of the Supreme Court’s appointees in showing their autonomy was offset by their performance during the military regime in human rights trials, when they consistently showed their subservience to the government, damaging the credibility of the legal system. Now they saw their chance to improve this image. One judge, José María Eyzaguirre, had been Supreme Court president (1976–1979) and author of minority votes supporting the arguments of Vicariate of Solidarity lawyers in human rights cases.18 A judge appointed by the military-controlled National Security Council was particularly active. Judge Eugenio Valenzuela Somarriva was a wellknown lawyer from the Council for Defense of the State, who not only revealed his independence when it came to making decisions, but also was skilled at convincing the other judges that in their rulings on points of constitutional law they should seek to make the plebiscite’s conditions fairer to both sides. The first time that the Constitutional Tribunal had anything to do with the succession issue (although indirectly) was in 1984, when the Independent Democratic Union filed charges against the Popular Democratic Movement, which had been formed by the Socialist and Communist Parties and the MIR,

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in an effort to have this body declared unconstitutional because of its Marxist orientation, and because it was in violation of Article 8 of the constitution. This action was also designed to provoke a division within the democratic opposition by forcing it to exclude the Marxist parties in general, and specifically from participation in the plebiscite. The tribunal ruled in favor of the UDI by a divided vote,19 which had important consequences. It confirmed government supporters’ confidence in the tribunal as a defender of the regime’s interests. It also significantly restricted political pluralism, a situation that would bear on future rulings by the tribunal on other political laws. The democratic opposition doubted that the plebiscite would be honest, partly due to the lack of a higher body to guarantee this, since the electoral tribunal was to be set up after the plebiscite, as per Article 17. However, Article 84 stated that the electoral tribunal would “also supervise plebiscites,” leaving some room for interpretation. The junta resolved this contradiction in favor of Article 17, and this text proceeded to the Constitutional Tribunal as part of the law governing the Election Clarification Tribunal.20 Judge Valenzuela convinced his colleagues to study its constitutionality from a broader perspective, beyond its literal meaning, arguing in favor of an interpretation based on its consistency with the objectives established by the permanent and transitory articles. Valenzuela argued the plebiscite’s enormous importance, because it would represent both the last act of the transition and the inauguration of democracy.21 To represent those things, it had to be impeccable, so it was necessary for the electoral tribunal to supervise the plebiscite, which meant that it should be set up before, not after, the plebiscite.22 This would make the law unconstitutional. He managed to convince his fellow judges José María Eyzaguirre, Julio Philippi, and Luis Maldonado of this interpretation, thus achieving a majority ruling. This decision meant that the electoral tribunal would be able to rule on any doubts arising during the plebiscite campaign through resolutions that would be binding. This made it possible to guarantee, as one constitutionalist said, that the plebiscite “would be a free, informed, sincere and secret consultation.”23 The regime accepted this ruling and created the electoral tribunal, which became a major contribution to ensuring equal chances for both the “yes” campaign and the “no” campaign. Later, closer to the moment in which the plebiscite was officially announced, the Constitutional Tribunal made another ruling that improved the balance of elections. When it examined the constitutionality of the popular voting law (Ley de Votaciones Populares y Escrutinios) it found a gap with regard to observers, since only those representing parties were considered, leaving independents uncovered. This created an inequality unacceptable in such an important event. The tribunal could simply have opted for declaring all observers unconstitutional and left parties without observers as well. However, since this would have hurt the legitimacy of the plebiscite, and because the op-

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Photo courtesy of Centro de Documentación–La Tercera.

position was already preparing to have observers at every polling station, the tribunal corrected this flaw using a constitutional technicality—a “warning to the legislator.” The junta accepted this decision for permitting observers and the problem was considered solved.24 This decision defined the rules for the plebiscite in another way. In August 1988 the Constitutional Tribunal reexamined the new text of the voting law, and Catholic University’s Channel 13, still controlled by the Gremialistas, argued that the provision for free and equal electoral time on national television was unconstitutional in hope of preventing it. The tribunal unanimously ruled that it was constitutional, opening the way to free election advertising for government and opposition. In practice, this meant that for the twenty-seven days prior to the plebiscite, each side had fifteen minutes a day to present its viewpoint.25 In an attempt to reduce its impact, the regime relegated it to a time of low viewership, 11:00 P.M. However, there was so much interest in watching this programming that the attempt to obscure it failed.26 The single most important difference between the 1988 plebiscite, and the 1978 consulta and the 1980 plebiscite was the fact that in 1988 there were proper voter lists. The constitutional law on the voter registry and the electoral service27 established a clear electorate, thus making it very difficult to manipulate ballots on election day. Initially, opposition constitutionalists viewed this law with considerable mistrust, finding important gaps that left room for gov-

August 5, 1988: Jaime Guzmán, General Augusto Pinochet, and Jovino Novoa, days before the plebiscite to determine Pinochet’s “reelection.”

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ernmental manipulation,28 but ultimately it became recognized as a major instrument in ensuring the plebiscite’s honesty. Voter registration opened in February 1987. For the opposition, this marked the beginning of the campaign, since the government made no effort to encourage registration and in fact made it quite difficult.29 The opposition called on Chileans to register, and together with nongovernmental organizations organized a national registration drive.30 Things moved slowly at first, but picked up steam. In June 1987 the Catholic Church, as well, called on Chileans to register.

■

Conflicts and Divisions Among the Regime’s Supporters

Unlike the previous plebiscite, in 1988 General Pinochet’s supporters were scattered among various parties and divided over his candidacy. At the time, there were four right-wing parties: the National Union, the Independent Democratic Union, the National Party, and the National Workers Front (Frente Nacional de Trabajadores [FNT]) (see Chapter 10).31 The National Union opposed the plebiscite and General Pinochet’s candidacy. It believed the plebiscite would be confrontational in nature and would risk the defeat of the military’s candidate, which would be a serious humiliation. The most appropriate formula would be free, competitive elections, making a constitutional reform necessary. If the government were to opt for the plebiscite, the candidate should not be General Pinochet, but rather an individual chosen through consensus, a civilian with broad support among the regime’s supporters and the respect of some segments of the opposition. The UDI, in contrast, favored the plebiscite and Pinochet’s candidacy. It opposed a competitive election for president, which it considered too confrontational.32 The announcement of free elections would require reforming the constitution, and the Gremialistas knew that the junta would not accept this, because the junta believed that the constitution should be given time to determine its workability in practice before making any amendments. As the UDI was convinced that Pinochet would go for “reelection,” its leaders considered it unrealistic to expect anything but the plebiscite. The position of the Gremialistas was very pro-Pinochet in form, but in practice was really quite pragmatic. The UDI had nothing to lose in the plebiscite, since the electoral campaign could help to strengthen the party by putting its leaders and activists to work. If Pinochet were to win, the UDI would make the most of it in the congressional elections to be held afterward, since it was the organization most loyal to the head of state. If he were to lose, it would have a solid grassroots party able to deal with a new political scenario involving a change of regime through simultaneous presidential and congressional elections, and could therefore aspire to become a major party in the new democracy.

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However, National Renewal and the UDI were pressured to define themselves through a common position in support of General Pinochet, since they needed a broad coalition and therefore a single list for the congressional elections to make the most of the binomial electoral system.33 In that system, two seats per district were up for election, which forced the parties to form an electoral coalition to win one seat in each. If the UDI and National Renewal were to compete separately, they would run the risk of being badly beaten by the opposition, which would probably form a single list and could win both seats. If they were to run separately, they would risk an overwhelming triumph of the opposition, as had occurred during the professional association elections in 1985–1986. The National Union was the most affected, since it had little capacity to act autonomously, given the high cost it had paid for its independence from the government, especially for having signed the national transition accord (see Chapter 10). The UDI, meanwhile, enjoyed the government’s support and, above all, the participation of many leaders and activists who worked with the municipal governments and with the federal government’s Youth Secretariat. Given this political situation, the National Union proposed creating a single right-wing party comprising itself, the UDI, the National Party, and the FNT. The things that the UDI and the National Union agreed on outnumbered the things that had divided them during the apertura.34 They shared a common struggle against the Popular Unity parties, which was very much alive in the memories of most leaders.35 Their platforms were very similar, since both supported the economic reforms and the Chicago Boys. They held the same views of the opposition, considering it a group run by the left-wing parties acting under pressure from the Communist Party. Finally, most UDI and National Union leaders had worked in the government, supporting Pinochet in the previous two plebiscites.36 Initially the UDI viewed this National Union initiative with considerable mistrust.37 UDI members found it difficult to consider uniting with the National Union, given the historical differences between them. The Gremialistas had committed themselves to the authoritarian regime, paying a high cost, while the National Union had generally remained aloof and in some cases had criticized it. The Gremialistas also feared that Sergio Onofre Jarpa, who had persecuted them when he was interior minister, would work with Andrés Allamand to control the new party.38 Nonetheless, both the UDI and the FNT ultimately accepted the National Union’s invitation and founded a new party, National Renewal, with only the National Party refusing to join. This right-wing organizing followed a path similar to that taken in 1966 by the Conservative, Liberal, and National Action Parties, when they founded the National Party after their defeat in the 1964 presidential and 1965 congressional elections.39 However, the environment now was different, since the National Union, the UDI, and the FNT supported the government and were not in the opposition as they had been previously. Moreover, the National Union and the UDI had clear political identities, their own organizations, a youthful

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leadership, and important differences over some issues, such as human rights violations and who should succeed Pinochet. Ricardo Rivadeneira, a lawyer for the Council for Defense of the State, became president of National Renewal. He had little political experience and hadn’t held any posts in the military regime. The general secretary was a lawyer, Gonzalo García, son of the first National Party president, Víctor García Garzena, and a former party member who, like Rivadeneira, had been outside politics in recent years. The vice presidents were Andrés Allamand (National Union), Jaime Guzmán (UDI), both presidents of their respective parties, and Juan de Dios Carmona (FNT), since Jarpa refused the position. This composition of the party executive, with a little-known president and general secretary, accompanied by two well-known vice presidents, revealed the fragility of National Renewal as a body independent of its creators.40 The selection of twenty members of the political committee confirmed National Renewal’s fragmented nature: each party named three members and proposed eight independents, largely identified with each group.41 Unity, moreover, was mainly formal, since each group maintained its own organization. Leadership is decisive in consolidating a new party, especially during regime changes, since its decisions either strengthen the party or cause it to fail.42 This is not a simplistic view, but rather recognizes that party presidents are particularly important in these unusual conditions.43 For the right, the challenge of leadership consisted of creating a single, united party rather than a federation or electoral coalition; it would have to absorb organizations with major political differences, whose leaders, moreover, had been involved in personal confrontations in the recent past. The most difficult issue for this new party was Pinochet’s succession. As president of National Renewal, Rivadeneira had to apply a policy that would integrate everyone and avoid conflicts between the UDI and the National Union. It was a difficult task because he personally was critical of Pinochet’s candidacy. In a decision that proved counterproductive, he expressed his opinions in interviews with the media on issues such as the need to end exile, criticized the plebiscite, and questioned General Pinochet’s role.44 These comments were well received by the opposition, condemned by the government, rejected by the UDI, and supported by the National Union.45 The question of the succession made National Renewal appear divided just when it most needed to consolidate.46 The party needed to demonstrate cohesion. Differences within National Renewal became more obvious in early July 1987, when a prominent UDI member, Sergio Fernández, who had not joined National Renewal, became interior minister. His main responsibility was to ensure General Pinochet’s reelection, so he needed the support of all civilian groups, including National Renewal. One of his first efforts was to inform the National Renewal executive that the government was rejecting a constitutional reform calling for free elections, and that it had decided to call the plebiscite.47 Junta members confirmed this decision when party leaders visited them in an effort to determine National Renewal’s united position.48

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Fernández also worked to push National Renewal’s internal decision in favor of Pinochet, through regional administrators and mayors. This initiative was very productive, since some regional leaders publicly announced their support for General Pinochet’s candidacy.49 Unable to unite National Renewal and facing both the opposition and the impossibility of avoiding a Pinochet candidacy, which he personally opposed, Rivadeneira unexpectedly quit the party’s presidency.50 This forced National Renewal into the delicate situation of choosing a new president who would have to organize general council elections, determined through a direct vote of members. The general council was to elect the party’s permanent executive.51 After lengthy meetings and several votes of the political committee, Sergio Onofre Jarpa was elected president of National Renewal, with support from the National Union and the FNT, while the UDI voted against him. This was a setback for the Gremialistas, but Guzmán accepted it because he was certain the UDI would win internal elections. General council elections were set for March 17–19, 1988. The National Union achieved a slight edge over the UDI by forming a joint list with the FNT in several regions where it had more influence than its competition. Elsewhere, the three parties formed joint lists, and in Valparaiso and metropolitan Santiago there were multiple candidates. The National Union–FNT campaign was based on appeals to the right’s historical traditions, and called for the defeat of the Gremialistas. Competition between the UDI and the National Union was particularly fierce in metropolitan Santiago.52 The UDI thought itself stronger, because it had a powerful organization in the poor urban communities (poblaciones) thanks to the work it had carried out through the Youth Secretariat and the municipalities (see Chapter 7). More recently, it had enjoyed the backing of the housing minister, Miguel Ángel Poduje, who was a “historical” Gremialista.53 The National Union, meanwhile, only had a strong presence in the wealthy neighborhoods that traditionally preferred the right, such as Providencia and Las Condes, which were politically important because they attracted considerable media interest.54 As election day approached, the defeat of the Gremialistas was looking very likely. At the last minute, and with support from the government, Jaime Guzmán tried to call off the elections. The day before, he had given a news conference demanding Jarpa’s resignation, accusing him of not being impartial and calling on his own supporters to boycott the vote. A defeat of the Gremialistas would have been devastating in terms of the succession, since National Renewal might have tended to favor free elections, especially if it had a good candidate, Sergio Onofre Jarpa,55 a scenario that would have impeded Pinochet’s candidacy. Despite Guzmán’s maneuver, the elections went ahead and the National Union–FNT list obtained the majority of members on the general council. Their triumph was overwhelming in the municipal areas of Providencia and Las Condes, and they barely lost to the UDI in Valparaiso,56 a noteworthy result since

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the Gremialistas had a powerful organization there, and since their candidate was the former mayor. The UDI attacked Jarpa with enormous vehemence, reminiscent of party relations prior to the 1973 coup.57 National Union leaders condemned Guzmán’s behavior. The National Renewal executive filed charges against him in the party’s highest tribunal and asked for exemplary sanctions.58 For weeks the media reported on the conflict, which involved some of the regime’s best-known supporters.59 In fact, the media had acquired enormous influence due to the changes during the apertura. The proregime media covered the battle between the National Union and the UDI in great detail, because it was useful to General Pinochet’s candidacy, showing that civilians were unable to even choose their own leaders, never mind settle on a presidential candidate.60 On April 21, National Renewal’s highest tribunal voted to expel Guzmán from the party, its worst punishment.61 This ruling signaled National Renewal’s collapse, since the other Gremialistas would obviously follow their leader. Guzmán rejected the measure and, with other UDI members, left National Renewal; they immediately announced their support for General Pinochet’s “reelection,” calling themselves “UDI for the Yes.”62 As if there had never been any attempt at unity with the National Union, Guzmán resumed the Gremialistas’ old rhetoric, presenting the party as a youth organization and calling for a generational change to introduce new habits into the political arena.63 These resignations did not stop National Renewal, since both the National Union and the FNT proceeded to replace the political committee’s members with their own representatives. On July 16–17 the general council met and elected Jarpa as president and Allamand as general secretary of National Renewal. The conflict in National Renewal impacted preparations for General Pinochet’s plebiscite campaign. The long months of tensions and internal conflicts delayed the organization of civilian support, an effort that was reliant mainly on public officials and military officers. High-ranking army officers who held government posts and ran the military’s schools publicly announced their support for Pinochet. Those working closely with Pinochet played the most prominent role, among them Brigadier-General Patricio Serré, deputy minister of regional development, who had worked with Pinochet for years, and Lieutenant-Colonel Hernán Núñez, head of the civilian organization department in the General Secretariat Ministry (see Table 11.1). Each of these officers made at least nine public announcements in support of Pinochet’s leadership in 1987, and a similar number supporting his candidacy during the early months of 1988. Serré’s constant electoral announcements also reflected his position as deputy minister of regional development within the Interior Ministry. As such, his role in the campaign was to work with regional administrators and mayors. One of his department’s initiatives involved preparing a “civic action plan,”

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407

Statements by High-Ranking Army Officers in Favor of Pinochet’s Candidacy, 1987–1988 Post

MG Manuel Barros C Sergio Candia C Carlos Carvallo C Luis Cortés C Eugenio Covarrubias MG Eduardo Ibáñez BG Raúl Iturriaga C Jaime Izarnótegui LC Hernán Núñez C Luis Rivas BG Patricio Serré LG Santiago Sinclair Total

Head of General Staff Director, Noncommissioned Officers School Director, Military Polytechnic Institute Director, Infantry School Director, Military School Regional administrator, Eighth Region Governor of Valdivia Director, War Academy Director of civilian organizations Undersecretary of state Deputy minister of Regional Development Deputy commander in chief

1987

1988

1 1 1 2 1 4 2 3 9 1 9 1 35

— 3 — — — — 3 — 11 6 9 — 32

Sources: El Mercurio, La Época, La Nación, La Segunda, La Tercera de la Hora, Las Últimas Noticias, Fortín Mapocho. Note: BG = brigadier-general; C = colonel; LC = lieutenant-colonel; LG = lieutenant-general; MG = major-general.

which was distributed at a national conference of mayors held in August 1986. The plan’s purpose was to guide the mayors’ election work.64 These announcements were complicated, since they made the military’s support for Pinochet’s candidacy obvious, raising doubts about the neutrality of the campaign and the likelihood that the regime would accept any eventual defeat. This undoubtedly fed the left’s conviction that the plebiscite would not work.65 The appearance of these statements in the media placed the military’s commanders in chief in a difficult position, because there was only one choice: to nominate General Pinochet as the presidential candidate. Thus, in an attempt to direct attention away from Pinochet’s obvious candidacy, they had to emphasize that they were open to every possibility. In private conversations, which were leaked to the public, they suggested that a civilian could conceivably be chosen, and Admiral Merino went even further, telling The Economist that he would prefer a fifty-year-old civilian.

■

The Launch of Pinochet’s Electoral Campaign: Regional Tours

This questioning of Pinochet’s candidacy influenced his campaign and he decided to tour the regions to demonstrate his support among civilians. This would make the junta’s confirmation of his candidacy look like the natural result of his broad support, especially among working-class sectors.

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An analysis of regional tours reveals the electoral strategy. In 1986, when the question of succession still lay in the distant future, Pinochet made eighteen visits to towns outside Santiago (see Table 11.2). The next year, when the campaign actually began, this rose to twenty-six visits. The pace picked up even more in the first half of 1988 as the nomination approached, when Pinochet wanted to demonstrate his widespread support so that the decision would touch off no conflicts in the governing coalition. In the first eight months of 1988 he made twenty-three tours, almost as many as he’d made the entire previous year. A closer look at where Pinochet went reveals that he toured the Fifth Region (the Valparaiso area) twenty-three times in three years (1986–1988); the First Region, ten times;66 and the Eighth Region, eight times. These were quick visits that involved stopping at various places.67 His itineraries had him participating in various events, often handing over the deeds to new homes, presenting housing subsidies, and cutting ribbons on public works,68 which had been priority policies in 1988, and which were reflected in the announcements and promises Pinochet made in his speeches.69 Meetings with communities also took place, and were political in nature. Another purpose of these tours was to visit military units, with Pinochet studiously fulfilling his role as army commander in chief and never forgetting that the military was the main source of his power. Pinochet emphasized the government’s successes, particularly the housing program developed by minister Miguel Ángel Poduje, who was the person most often at his side, participating in ten of the twenty-six tours he made in Table 11.2

January February March April May June July August September October November December Total

Pinochet’s Tours in Preparation for Presidential Nomination, 1986–1988 1986

1987

1988a

Total

— 2 2 1 3 1 1 1 1 3 2 1 18

— 1 2 2 3 2 3 3 1 3 5 1 26

— 3 2 5 5 3 4 1 — — — — 23

— 6 6 8 11 6 8 5 2 6 7 2 67

Sources: El Mercurio, La Segunda, and La Tercera de la Hora. Note: a. Until August 31.

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1987. Public works minister General Bruno Siebert also played a prominent role in Pinochet’s campaigning. It was no coincidence that the two ministers responsible for the policies that had the most effect on people and that therefore were most likely to capture support were held by a Gremialista and a military officer, the two most influential groups within the government and the two most committed to his winning the plebiscite. Pinochet also participated in rallies organized by mayors. In 1986, 45 percent of his tour events took place in public squares; in 1987 this rose to 48 percent. Some rallies were organized on the initiative of his supporters, even Avanzada Nacional, an ultra-right-wing movement formed by former army (DINA) officers. He also went to events organized by the university, businesspeople, and the National Women’s and Youth Secretariats.70 At these meetings, General Pinochet avoided referring to the plebiscite, because he had no doubts that the junta would choose him. He read speeches written by his advisers and at times improvised, throwing out political messages and gauging their impact. On one tour to the Eighth Region, for example, he announced that his presidential period would be sixteen years, touching off infighting among his supporters and rejection from the opposition.71 On August 30, 1988, the junta duly appointed General Pinochet the official candidate, and the electoral campaign began.

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The Opposition’s Role: The Long March to the “No” Campaign

The opposition also played a role in the failure of General Pinochet’s plan to become his own successor. The creators of the 1980 constitution expected a fragmented opposition, controlled and led by a communist left, which would force the PDC and moderate socialists into a campaign like those of 1978 and 1980, when they had little hope of winning and campaigned mainly to get their ideas on record. Reality, however, proved to be totally different. The opposition was not divided into many parties, into an “alphabet soup” as had occurred at the end of Franco’s regime in Spain,72 nor did it turn out to be weakly organized or ambivalent about the plebiscite campaign. On the contrary, it had united into the Concertación de Partidos por el “No”—formed by the major political segments that existed before the coup (Christian democrats, socialists, radicals, and some right-wing groups)—with considerable organizing ability and enormous spirit. It was the continuation of the Democratic Alliance, created in 1983 on the initiative of then–president of the PDC Gabriel Valdés, that succeeded in creating this opposition group. Unlike in Spain, where the main political forces were the Communist and Socialist Parties,73 in Chile, centrist parties held sway, led by Patricio Aylwin, who had been PDC president at the time of the coup and had been reelected in early 1988. He was an experienced politician and a lifelong democrat. Despite

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having opposed the Popular Unity government, he worked with the major leftist leaders who worked against the Pinochet regime, especially in his work in the Constitutional Study Group (Grupo de Estudios Constitucionales), better known as the Group of 24, of which he was vice president. The government’s efforts to break the long tradition of centrist politics and reveal a communist-dominated opposition had failed.74 The Concertación was unique among authoritarian regimes, given its breadth and its enormous ability to mobilize. That its existence was possible reflected Chile’s history, particularly a long tradition of political parties and the presence of a very imaginative leadership.75 The Concertación was the result of much work carried out in concert by opposition leaders who successfully overcame the mistrust and divisions among Popular Unity and PDC members that existed prior to the coup. Their coming together was visible in three fundamental areas: 1. The defense of human rights, with the participation of former Congress members, ministers, and lawyers, to protect those arrested. 2. Work by the Group of 24, created in 1978 by politicians, lawyers, and academics of the left, center, and right to prepare an alternative constitution to that of the Ortúzar Commission (see Chapter 5). 3. Academic work undertaken by hundreds of professionals in many private research centers that helped to prepare a governmental program different from that of the dictatorship and also offered professional teams trained to assume posts in the future government.76 Gradually, in each of these spheres, people who had been in conflict in the past began to make their peace, forming the foundation for the Democratic Alliance in 1983 and the Concertación in 1988. This common ground was possible because the elites had learned the lessons of Chile’s dramatic past, in which the crisis in democracy was aggravated by conflicts among party leaders. This view of political development made cooperation among well-known figures from different blocs possible.77

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Pinochet’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

For the seventeen years that it lasted, the Pinochet regime used an antiopposition strategy, inviting what Dahl referred to as a self-fulfilling prophecy.78 On the one hand, Pinochet tolerated the presence of some opposition organizations, such as the PDC and the Radical Party (which had been declared “in recess”), provided they remained ineffective. As soon as he thought their actions were exceeding his narrow margins of tolerance, Pinochet took drastic measures against some of their best-known leaders, exiling them.79 In 1977 he ordered the dissolution of all parties.

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On the other hand, its “friend or enemy” logic led the regime to treat the opposition as if it were involved in a secret alliance with the Communist Party, with the goal of overthrowing the government. Catholic organizations, such as the Vicariate of Solidarity, were said to be infiltrated by Marxism, which was supposed to be the reason behind the church’s public expressions of concern about human rights violations. Coercion of the “enemy” worsened whenever General Pinochet thought there might be some threat to political stability.80 Pinochet’s constant fight against the opposition also had another characteristic considered by Dahl: he felt himself to possess the truth and was convinced that his was a historic mission, which no one could oppose without risk of falling into the “enemy” camp. The military had saved the country from communism, and were the only ones capable of rebuilding it. They held the key to the only conceivable economic solutions, offered by the Chicago Boys. From Pinochet’s perspective, criticism of the government’s performance had absolutely no value, since it came from politicians incapable of breaking with the past. The attacks on the opposition also helped the regime politically. With no ideology of its own to give meaning to its rhetoric and help maintain the unity of its supporters, the regime resorted to attacks on its adversaries to help keep the governing coalition and public opinion behind it. Thus the regime kept the memory of the Popular Unity government alive and blamed the opposition for the events of that period in an effort to increase its political and ideological distance from the past, to prevent its own supporters from deserting and joining its opposition. This sort of desertion had occurred in authoritarian Brazil and in General Franco’s Spain, becoming a significant source of support for the opposition.81 In these two cases, a no-man’s-land became apparent between the regime and the opposition. It was dominated by those in technocratic roles rather than political party positions. The public service provided a place for those who had fallen out with the authoritarian regime, in what often became the first step toward joining the opposition.82 This did not happen in Chile, because General Pinochet permanently maintained a sharp divide between his supporters and the opposition, based on his “friend or enemy” dichotomy. General Pinochet rejected the 1985 national transition accord, because it threatened to heal the divisions between regime and opposition and establish a common program between segments of two hitherto antagonistic blocs. Pinochet’s self-fulfilling prophecy regarding the opposition found solid support in the policies promoted by the MIR, which used terrorist methods from the late 1970s onward, upon the return of its members to Chile (see Chapter 10). The Communist Party also condoned terrorism, announcing a new slogan of using “all forms of struggle”; in practice this translated into support for the terrorist activities of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, which led attacks and provoked confrontations with the Carabineros during each of the protests called by the democratic opposition during the apertura. The Communist Party tried hard to ensure the failure of the democratic opposition’s strategy of pushing for

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a peaceful end to the Pinochet regime, because it thought that the only way of ending the dictatorship was a popular rebellion like those that had taken place in Central America, where this strategy had defeated the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.83 This approach was useful for General Pinochet, who sought to keep the dynamic permanently within the “friend or enemy” dichotomy. The Gremialistas also supported a confrontation, since polarization into two blocs separated by an enormous ideological divide and bitter personal disputes would favor them, given that they expected the confrontation to push centrist thinkers toward the right, which would help them to form a great movement when the military left power. Jaime Guzmán played a major role in developing this logic. Through his articles in the press and his memoranda to the junta and to General Pinochet, he insisted on describing the opposition as a coalition of Popular Unity and the PDC, supported by sectors of the Catholic Church. Even when the opposition was weak and the regime had all the momentum, as occurred in early 1980, Guzmán continued to attack the regime’s opponents.84 Guzmán’s approach also involved keeping strict control over opposition organizations through the full use of all institutional resources, including exile and arrests, although without “returning to the style and methods of the exDINA.”85 The leader of the Gremialistas justified exile, covered by the constitution’s Transitory Article 24, as a method for controlling the opposition, and he thought this resource should be used throughout the transition. This article allowed Pinochet to expel opponents from the country, since the president could “forbid the return to national territory or expel from it those who propagate the doctrines referred to in Article 8 of the Constitution, those who are associated with or have a reputation for being activists of these doctrines and those who carry out acts contrary to Chile’s interests or constitute a threat to internal peace.”86 The way it was written made this a sword of Damocles threatening all opponents, including the PDC.87

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The Opposition’s Three Arenas for Political Action

Opposition parties followed a game plan that mirrors the kind of legal opposition described by Juan Linz,88 making use of every opportunity to act left open by the regime. The decision to act within the established order, making the most of every possibility, led the opposition to participate in the plebiscites of 1978 and 1980. Despite their conviction that the results would go against them, given that the government had the resources necessary to flood the country with propaganda and manipulate the plebiscites, the opposition rejected the idea of abstention or a boycott and called for its supporters to vote “no,” making the most of every chance to speak out and prevent Pinochet from winning without dissidence.89 As mentioned previously, the opposition was active in three institutional areas during the Pinochet regime that became important during the 1988

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Photo courtesy of Centro de Documentación–La Tercera.

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August 10, 1980: Eduardo Frei Montalva at Caupolicán Theater in the only opposition rally calling for votes against the 1980 constitution.

plebiscite campaign: first, the defense of human rights, with lawyers leading the efforts; second, criticism of the strategy for constitutional legitimation by jurists and politicians; and finally, preparation of an alternative political program, shaped by private social research centers headed by academics from various disciplines, especially economists, who questioned the political order and the neoliberal economy. During the early years of the regime, the opposition’s activity was minimal because of strict control by the police, and they struggled to survive. The courts became the main arena for political action.90 The primary lawyers in the military courts were from the PDC and the Radical Party, parties declared “in recess,” and they received significant support from the various churches that were working to defend human rights through the Pro-Peace Committee and later the Vicariate of Solidarity. Legal action became the first evidence of rejection of the new regime. In 1976, when opposition figures criticized the state of human rights by sending a letter to ministers who were attending the assembly of the Organization of American States, the government immediately threw them out of the country.91 This defense of human rights made it possible to demonstrate the widespread nature of repression and bring together extensive documentation confirming abuses and identifying victims. The long and difficult legal battle carried out by opposition lawyers was constantly hampered by the passivity of the

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courts, which were extremely reluctant to respond (see Chapter 2). These professionals sought out legal loopholes to force the judges to defend prisoners. With these efforts they achieved a political and moral legitimacy that enabled them to use the same laws as the regime to defend freedom, a strategy that would later be echoed in the opposition’s use of the military government’s own constitution to defeat it. The second initiative that was very influential in the opposition’s decision to use peaceful means to oppose the regime was the creation in 1978 of the Constitutional Study Group, better known as the Group of 24.92 Bringing together public figures known for their antagonistic positions in the past, this cooperative effort exercised considerable power93 in both Santiago and the main regional cities. This willingness to overcome the divisions that had occurred during the Popular Unity government was represented by the appointment of Manuel Sanhueza, Allende’s former justice minister, as president, and Patricio Aylwin as vice president. The Group of 24’s work was very important in seeking a consensus on democratic institutions that included previously critical left-wing segments.94 This consensus also dealt with the institutional factors that were considered the causes of the crisis and breakdown of democracy in 1973, particularly the limits stemming from presidentialism and the politics of confrontation among elites. The Group of 24 also played a significant role among opposition academics and politicians in the effort to learn from past failure, which was important in designing a strategy for the return to democracy. It was concluded that the best way to achieve and consolidate democracy was through broad coalition politics, and this helped the democratic opposition achieve success during the 1980s. The Gordian knot of the democratic opposition was its stance on the 1980 constitution. It had worked for years to prepare a draft different from that of the Ortúzar Commission, whose content, preparation, and approval it considered antidemocratic. The opposition therefore considered it vital to reform the constitution in order to move toward democracy. This possibility was blocked, however, since it required the military’s agreement, and the military was under the control of General Pinochet. The second obstacle to democratization was Pinochet himself, as he wanted no changes to the constitution, since he was confident he would win the succession plebiscite and retain the presidency for eight more years. Thus, during the apertura the Democratic Alliance made a priority of demanding General Pinochet’s resignation as a condition for reaching an agreement with the government. In any case, the armed forces remained fully behind Pinochet and his refusal to change the constitution. The opposition would be doomed to witness General Pinochet’s ratification as president if it continued to deny the constitution’s validity, since the military would proceed with the succession process as outlined. Patricio Aylwin tried to break the deadlock on this issue, arguing that the opposition could move toward democracy using the regime’s own institutional order. Aylwin was very familiar with the transition to democracy in Spain, car-

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ried out using the institutions created by Franco in the hopes of ensuring the continuity of his authoritarian order after his death. This experience offered useful lessons to Chile, since the Pinochet regime was not about to fall due to popular pressure or divisions among members of the military.95 While remaining critical of the constitution because of its undemocratic nature, Aylwin nonetheless became convinced that the only way forward was to accept the constitution, without arguing over its content or origin, and use it to mobilize the country in favor of reforms that would force a change to democratic rule. The weight of the country’s legal tradition and the commitment of the military to the electoral mechanisms established in the 1980 constitution made it essential to act within the existing legal structure. Aylwin argued his position at a seminar organized by a nongovernmental organization associated with the PDC, with participation from opposition and right-wing politicians who supported the regime.96 Later, in a political gathering of the PDC, Aylwin emphasized: “I’m willing to accept the current institutional order, but only for the purpose of changing it.”97 His proposal was supported by the president of the PDC, Gabriel Valdés, which added to its power, because it implied that Aylwin had the backing of the principal opposition party. Aylwin’s proposal was rejected for some time by figures representing the moderate wing of the Socialist Party and its allies. However, he eventually won them over, in light of the evidence that there was no alternative to end the authoritarian regime, not only because the military was determined to make the constitution respected, but also because the Communist Party was promoting armed struggle, thus feeding into the polarization that General Pinochet sought. Once this was settled, the opposition started to discuss the option of participating in the plebiscite. Another element that contributed to the opposition’s ability to constitute a viable alternative to govern the country was the many private research centers that appeared in the 1970s, especially those dedicated to the social sciences and economics.98 These arose and were able to function thanks to the support of Santiago’s cardinal and archbishop, Silva Henríquez, who by creating the Academy of Christian Humanism had provided refuge and some freedom for many academics fired from the universities, thus making it unnecessary for them to leave the country.99 The cardinal’s initiative was possible thanks to support from development agencies run by European governments and US foundations. The work of hundreds of professionals combined political commitment with extensive academic work, including training youth and union leaders, an important contribution to civic education.100 Party leaders made the most of the information that social scientists offered them, while researchers at private centers played an important role in modernizing parties and their platforms. Thus, when General Pinochet started his campaign, he found himself facing a highly skilled opposition running a modern campaign against him, which in-

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cluded everything from public opinion surveys to the new advertising style used in the “no” television spots.101 The opposition was able to offer an alternative program and the skilled professionals necessary to apply it, thus somewhat neutralizing General Pinochet’s accusations that the country would return to 1973 conditions if the regime didn’t win the plebiscite.102 One of the strongest disciplines in this sense was economics. Political persecution led to the firing of many economics academics at the University of Chile and Catholic University, who went on to organize private institutes.103 Opposition economists from various parties formed a joint work group, the Group of Economists at the Academy of Christian Humanism (Círculo de Economistas de la Academia de Humanismo Cristiano).104 Because the Chicago Boys were so sure of their success, they allowed some criticism after the 1975 recession, once positive indicators pointed to recovery. This tolerance of limited debate had important political consequences, since it revealed the economic model’s weaknesses, among them the lack of financial regulation and excessive indebtedness abroad,105 the manipulation of inflation data,106 the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of conglomerates in the 1970s,107 privatizations in the 1980s,108 and other issues that were examined in detail and addressed in journals.109 The media gave some space to dissidents’ opinions as well, especially on a few radio stations and in weeklies. These criticisms were often shared by the regime’s hard-liners and a small core of public figures associated with the newspaper La Tercera de la Hora, whose influence grew within the governing coalition. This led to further politicization of the economic debate, which lent more weight to opposition remarks in public, within parties, and within the Concertación itself.110 Thus, from the 1970s onward, the opposition enlisted economists, together with lawyers and politicians, to develop a critique of the economic model, which was studied by the military officers in the regime and helped them to prepare alternative proposals for the day when the opposition might eventually govern.

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The Opposition’s Decision to Participate in the 1988 Plebiscite

Although Patricio Aylwin had convinced other party leaders of the need to accept the constitution, there was still a long way to go before they decided to participate in the 1988 plebiscite. Aylwin did not show any support for participation in the plebiscite, but rather promoted a constitutional reform that would allow free and competitive elections. The opposition campaigned actively for this through united efforts, such as the Committee for Free Elections (Comité de Elecciones Libres [CEL]), created on March 13, 1987, and headed by Sergio Molina, who worked closely with Archbishop Fresno on preparing the national transition accord.111 The goal was to have the junta reform the constitution to make free and competitive elections possible.

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Sergio Fernández’s appointment as interior minister in July 1987 confirmed that the constitution would be applied and that the plebiscite would be held. Opposition parties started an internal debate to decide if they would give up the proposal for free elections and start working to win the plebiscite. Those engaging in this debate eventually settled on participating in the plebiscite, because it was seen as the only realistic way of ending the Pinochet regime, and because the majority of Chileans did not want him to remain in power. The opposition had plenty of information on public opinion at this stage, provided by various surveys made possible thanks to the greater political freedom afforded by the apertura. Several private research centers112 and marketing companies had started to conduct regular political surveys. Prior to this, surveys were banned by the government and any questionnaires had to be authorized by DINACOS. The political apertura that followed the 1982–1983 economic crisis brought with it freer information in the media, which influenced public opinion (see Chapter 10). Opposition leaders were interviewed by the media, which also reported on party and other opposition organizations. Surveys provided valuable information to opposition leaders on the best strategy for dealing with the plebiscite, and suggested that participation by the opposition would be appropriate.113 The majority of Chileans supported a peaceful road to democracy, rejecting violence and the political radicalization promoted by the Communist Party. There was considerable support for a “no” vote in the plebiscite, which gave rise to hopes that Pinochet could be defeated. In a national survey by CERC in November 1987, 40.1 percent said they would vote “no” if there were a plebiscite, while 31.1 percent said they would vote “yes.”114 However, among those registered to vote, the “yes” option was receiving greater support than the “no,” with 37.1 percent and 35.6 percent respectively, a difference that in fact was undoubtedly higher, because prior surveys had underestimated the “yes” vote. Until then, voters were clearly more pro-Pinochet, since 71 percent of right-wingers were registered versus barely 54 percent of left-wingers and 67 percent of centrists. Just 55 percent of young people aged eighteen to twenty-five were registered, compared to 73 percent of people over forty. Citizens were ambivalent, however. On the one hand, the majority were interested in voting in the plebiscite, possibly reflecting the resurgence of Chile’s electoral traditions. In the November 1987 CERC survey, 89.8 percent said they would vote in a plebiscite,115 a percentage that rose to 92 percent in Santiago five months later.116 In July 1988 the desire to vote was strong among the people, even in difficult conditions—for example, if they had to line up for a long time (94 percent) or if they found it difficult to reach the polling station (90 percent). Even if disturbances were expected, a very high percentage of Chileans (72 percent) said they would nonetheless vote (see Table 11.3).117 At the same time, there was well-founded concern that the government would manipulate plebiscite results to ensure Pinochet’s victory, as had occurred in 1978 and 1980. This remained an issue until well into 1988. In June,

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Table 11.3

Decision to Vote in the 1988 Plebiscite (percentages affirming)

If you had to stand in a long line to vote If you had a lot of housework If you had to run a personal errand If you had transportation difficulties If there were disturbances on the streets

July 1988a

August 1988b

September 1988b

94.0 95.1 89.1 90.2 71.7

94.1 94.5 89.3 89.4 78.8

95.9 96.5 92.4 92.8 85.4

Notes: Respondents were asked, “I would like to know if you would (still) be willing to vote on the day of the plebiscite if one or more of the following situations occurred.” a. CERC-Diagnos survey, national sample of 2,400 interviews, representing 80% of the population. b. CERC survey, national sample of 2,400 interviews, representing 98% of the population.

44 percent of Chileans thought the plebiscite would be honest, but 43 percent predicted fraud or trickery; 64 percent believed the vote would be secret, but 29 percent believed it would not, an indicator of the insecurity that Chileans felt about the whole process.118 Faced with factors unfavorable to a peaceful outcome, opposition parties put even more effort into political education through the media and through activities in the home, at universities, and in the workplace, teaching people about the guarantees that would be in place, especially those preserving the secrecy of the ballot. Distrust fell steadily as a result to 23 percent in September, while the conviction that the ballot would be secret rose to 71 percent.119 The first to decide to participate in the plebiscite was the PDC, which on November 27, 1987, announced that if there were no elections, it would participate in the plebiscite. On January 4, 1988, it called on people to vote “no” in the plebiscite.120 In the weeks that followed, the opposition formalized several agreements, and on February 2 it created a coalition of seventeen parties to defeat General Pinochet, the Concertación de Partidos por el “No.”121 The Concertación was a broad coalition that brought together not only former members of the Democratic Alliance, but also the Socialist Party, as well as another sector of communists and socialists whose main figure was former foreign affairs minister Clodomiro Almeyda.122 This wing of the Socialist Party had united with the Communist Party to form the Popular Democratic Movement during the apertura, resuming the old alliance of socialists and communists from the 1960s and early 1970s. It had also led protests with the aim of going beyond the Democratic Alliance’s strategy, which led General Pinochet to respond by filling the streets with soldiers and using violence. The Communist Party pressured the MDP to provoke confrontations with the military and police to generate the conditions for a “popular rebellion,” a policy the Socialist Party questioned and considered useful to the regime. The

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Communist Party supported armed struggle, the main features of which became the FPMR’s attack on General Pinochet in September 1986 and the smuggling of thousands of weapons into the country, which was detected by US intelligence services and widely publicized by the regime to demonstrate that a guerrilla movement was in the works. This turnaround in the Communist Party’s former nonviolent strategy was questioned by the Almeyda socialist-communist sector, which considered Pinochet’s military defeat infeasible. Patricio Aylwin’s election as PDC president in late 1987 encouraged a closer opposition between Almeyda’s sector and the rest of the opposition, since Aylwin and Almeyda were old friends. Aylwin worked hard to turn Almeyda to his point of view, an effort that culminated in the Almeyda sector’s decision to join the plebiscite campaign.123 Because the voter lists had been destroyed after the coup, the government had to begin a reregistration process, which it did somewhat tardily in February 1987. There was no registration campaign, based on the assumption that General Pinochet’s supporters would register quickly; the regime took little interest in the rest of the population. This contributed to the opposition’s mistrust of the new registration system. Registration was made more difficult by a requirement that voters obtain new identity cards. The “no” campaign officially began in February 1988, after the Concertación had formed and the opposition had decided to use the party law to allow it to place observers at voting stations and monitor the count, and to obtain coverage of its views during election time on national television. The parties started to prepare their observers and their own parallel counting system, independent from the government’s.124 The day of the plebiscite, the “no” campaign had observers at almost every polling station, who immediately sent the counts from their locations to a central office, making it possible for the opposition to report the result, which showed a solid victory within hours of the vote.125 The televised campaign spots became tremendously important to the opposition, since it could broadcast its messages at no cost during the three weeks prior to the plebiscite. The Concertación’s experts prepared some very high-quality programs, much better than those of the “yes” campaign, which undoubtedly played an important role in moving people to vote.126 Postelectoral surveys showed that almost 90 percent of Chileans watched this programming, and that there had been a clear preference for the “no” segments.127 Nonetheless, conditions were far from equal, because General Pinochet’s candidacy was supported by right-wing and business organizations. He also mobilized governmental resources, especially through mayors and regional administrators, and used the media intensively. The national television channel clearly favored the “yes” campaign in its daily news programs, as did Catholic University’s Channel 13, although less flagrantly. From July 16 to August 16, their news programs (on Channel 13) spent much more total news time on the Pinochet campaign, 83.7 percent, reporting on the authorities’ activities,128 than

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on the opposition, which received just 16 percent. Pinochet’s time fell somewhat to 76 percent, in the first two weeks of September, while the opposition’s time rose to 24 percent.129 Preferences did not change significantly during the months prior to General Pinochet’s nomination as candidate; the intention to vote “no” remained at around 40 percent in July and August 1988 (see Table 11.4). In September, after the nomination and when the electoral campaign began, the intention to vote “no” leapt up to 47 percent, while the “yes” intention fell, becoming masked among the “don’t know” and declined responses.130 The rise in the “no” intention was confirmed in a survey in late September, when it jumped to 54.5 percent, which was the actual result in the plebiscite. The “yes” vote, meanwhile, held at 21 percent, while a large percentage of votes remained hidden among the “don’t know” and declined responses. This important change reflected the strength of the “no” campaign, especially its excellent televised spots, and the weakness of the “yes” campaign. Participation in the plebiscite was very high, confirming Chileans’ interest in this extremely important issue. The opposition won a substantial majority, 54.7 percent, over General Pinochet’s 43.0 percent, while just 2.3 percent abstained or cast a spoiled or blank ballot. The opposition did particularly well in working-class areas, receiving over 65 percent of the vote in many, while the “yes” campaign took the wealthier districts in Santiago, with 64.2 percent in Vitacura and 58.2 percent in Las Condes.

Table 11.4

Voting Intentions in the 1988 Plebiscite (percentages) Survey of Intention

No Yes Undecided Don’t know/ No response Will not vote Blank

November 1987a

July 1988b

August 1988c

September 1988d

September 1988e

Actual Vote

40.3 31.1 8.0

42.0 36.6 7.9

40.6 30.8 11.0

47.0 19.6 13.5

54.5 20.8 11.1

54.7 43.0

13.3 4.9 2.2

7.7 1.5 4.2

9.2 1.9 6.5

17.5 0.3 2.3

11.3 0.2 2.2

2.3

Notes: a. CERC survey, national sample of 2,053 interviews, representing 75% of the population. b. CERC-Diagnos survey, national sample of 2,400 interviews, representing 80% of the population. c. CERC survey, national sample of 2,400 interviews, representing 98% of the population. d. CERC survey, national sample of 2,400 interviews, representing 98% of the population. Fieldwork: September 9–17, 1988. e. CERC survey, national sample of 1,700 interviews, representing 62% of registered voters. Fieldwork: September 25–27, 1988.

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The explanations for General Pinochet’s defeat are to be found in the Concertación’s better campaign, but also in the long-term factors analyzed in this chapter, which made it possible for a majority of citizens to express their support for a return to democracy similar to the support existing in other Western countries. This occurred because there was an alternative capable of taking power, created by political leaders of the center and the left who had earned substantial credibility and offered a solid electoral program. The military accepted these results and respected their consequences, following the itinerary established in the constitution, although they knew the opposition would win the presidential and congressional elections. Pinochet’s failure to regulate his own succession triggered the transition from dictatorship to democracy, an outcome he had not foreseen when including in the constitution provisions for a plebiscite to reaffirm his authority. As had happened in Brazil and Uruguay, democracy in Chile was regained through the elections.131

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Notes

1. Sartori (1987). On the question of succession in general, see Rustow (1964). 2. Analyzed and compared to other cases in Huneeus (1986a). 3. The work on the transition to democracy in Spain is extensive: see Carr and Fusi (1979), Maravall (1982), Huneeus (1985b), López Pintor (1981), Linz (1981b). 4. On the concepts of noncompetitive and semicompetitive elections, I refer to Hermet (1982). 5. Huneeus (1987b). 6. The original plan in 1980 was to establish a sixteen-year presidential term, but it was divided into two eight-year periods as a tactic to win the plebiscite (see Chapter 5). 7. Jaime Guzmán, “El camino político,” Realidad 1, no. 7, December 1979, pp. 13–23; quote from p. 23. It is also published in Estudios Públicos no. 42, 1991, pp. 369–383. 8. The full text is printed in La Nación, September 12, 1980, p. 16A. 9. Lamounier (1988, 1989). 10. According to Article 87 of Law no. 18556 of 1986, on electoral registration, this directorate was “an autonomous body, with its own legal status and equity, which will report to the President of the Republic through the Interior Ministry.” Its director was Juan Ignacio García, whose appointment was greeted with satisfaction by the opposition. Pre-1973 voter lists were burned after the coup. 11. See Kesselman (1970). 12. This concern emerged from the results of focus groups that showed that “fear was Chileans’ main illness”; Arriagada (1998), p. 224. However, surveys did not reveal this; rather they revealed enormous interest in registering and voting. Contradictions in results from focus groups and surveys also occur under democracy, for example, in the United Kingdom’s 1997 elections: see Worcester and Mortimore (1999), pp. 211–212. 13. CERC national survey, 2,053 interviews, representative of 80 percent of the population, fieldwork conducted November 1987. 14. CERC-Diagnos survey in Santiago, conducted from April 26 to May 13, 1988, with 900 interviews. 15. Law no. 17997, May 19, 1981. 16. Its members were José María Eyzaguirre, a former president of the Supreme Court (1976–1979); Luis Maldonado, Marcos Aburto, and Eduardo Urzúa, all appointed

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by the junta; Enrique Ortúzar, a former member of the Council of State, appointed by General Pinochet; and Julio Philippi, a former member of the Council of State, and Eugenio Somarriva, both appointed by the National Security Council. 17. I refer to the classic definition by Huntington (1968), pp. 20–22. 18. Matus (1997), p. 247. 19. The majority ruling was announced on January 31, 1985, with Judges Eugenio Valenzuela, José María Eyzaguirre, and Julio Philippi presenting a minority opinion, drafted by Judge Valenzuela. They considered the request useless, since Marxist parties had been legally banned after the military seized power in 1973; Zapata (1994), pp. 208–211. The analysis of this issue is based on Zapata (1994). 20. There was division within the government on this issue. On the one hand, the interior minister favored constituting the electoral tribunal for the plebiscite to give it more legitimacy, and this was included in the government’s bill, which was submitted to the junta. On the other hand, justice minister Hugo Rosende thought the tribunal should be set up after the plebiscite. The junta agreed with Rosende, arguing that it should be constituted as established in the constitution. See Zapata (1994), p. 210. The story of this division among the regime’s supporters is interesting. The government’s bill was prepared by a commission made up of representatives of the four legislative commissions: Luz Bulnes Aldunate, José Bernales, Hermógenes Pérez de Arce, and Carlos Cruz-Coke. The commission approved Pérez de Arce’s proposal in the sense that the tribunal should be set up for the 1988 plebiscite. However, the naval representative in the first commission, Justice Aldo Montagna, a vice admiral, opposed it, arguing that Article 84 of the constitution should take precedence, stating that it should be operational in the first election. See Cruz-Coke (1985). 21. Cruz-Coke (1985), p. 90. The ruling pointed out that “the doctrine and jurisprudence of the elections tribunal itself clearly show that it is an essential and vital phase in elections and plebiscites, whose absence practically prevents them from being legitimately carried out.” 22. The government was alarmed when it found out that the ruling would be adverse, and justice minister Hugo Rosende personally visited each judge to persuade them to change their decision, without result; Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), pp. 556–557. 23. Cruz-Coke (1985), p. 145. 24. This was a unanimous verdict, drafted by Judge Eugenio Valenzuela on April 5, 1988; Zapata (1994), p. 33. 25. This was an amendment to Law no. 18700, on voting and ballot counting; La Época, August 27, 1988. 26. Television advertising operated properly. The tapes had to be delivered to the National Television Council (Consejo Nacional de Televisión) thirty-six hours in advance of being broadcast. Only once was a spot for the “no” option censored, moving General Pinochet to suspend the broadcast of the “yes” spot the next day. 27. Law no. 18556 (Ley Orgánica Constitucional Sobre Sistema de Inscripciones Electorales y Servicio Electoral), October 1, 1986. 28. A constitutionalist member of the Group of 24 concluded that this law had “eliminated indispensable and essential control measures to avoid the creation of a fraudulent electoral register, and thus it does not offer indispensable guarantees for a legitimate and democratic statement of citizens’ opinion”; Nogueira (1987), p. 88. 29. It established an additional step to become a citizen: a new identity card to be obtained at the Civil Registry Directorate. 30. The work of the nonprofit organization Participation (Participa), headed by Mónica Jimenez, stood out. 31. There was a fifth group, National Advance, with few supporters, created by former DINA and CNI agents.

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32. Jaime Guzmán’s opinion was that presidential elections were inappropriate, given the “exceptional and delicate situation such as the transition from one regime to another”; Las Últimas Noticias, June 1, 1987. 33. On the binomial electoral system, see Huneeus (2004a). For the history of the binomial system, see Gamboa (2006). 34. Andrés Allamand, general secretary of the National Union, wrote a letter to the other parties on January 8, 1987, published in El Mercurio, January 9, 1987. 35. Allamand describes the impact of the historical memory of the conflicts with the left on his efforts to unite the forces supporting Pinochet, including the Independent Democratic Union; Allamand (1999), chap. 5. 36. The exceptions were the younger National Union leaders Andrés Allamand and Alberto Espina, but senior leaders did hold posts in the government, such as former senators Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes (ambassador) and Pedro Ibáñez (member of the Council of State). 37. Sergio Fernández, former interior minister and member of the UDI’s executive committee, said that “I was not opposed to unity, but I did not believe it was possible then. I did not wish to become an obstacle”; Fernández (1994), p. 215. 38. On the emergence of National Renewal, see the following Qué Pasa articles: Ana Victoria Durruty, “No a la Unidad,” January 1–7, 1987, pp. 31–34; Luisa García, “¿Habrá matrimonio? las gestiones unitarias,” January 22–28, 1987, pp. 6–8; Patricia O’Shea, “Paso a paso en derecha,” February 5–11, 1987, pp. 6–8; Luisa García, “El escenario se remece,” February 12–18, 1987, pp. 6–7. 39. The Liberal and Conservative Parties saw their electoral support collapse in the 1965 parliamentary elections, when they obtained 12.8 percent of the votes, electing just 9 of the 120 deputies and no senators. In the face of this situation, they agreed to create a new and different party. 40. On National Renewal, see the following Qué Pasa articles by Patricia O’Shea: “Los devaneos de la derecha,” June 18–24, 1987, pp. 6–8; “Rondando La Moneda,” July 30–August 5, 1987, p. 6; “Las corrientes de Renovación,” August 13–19, 1987, p. 8. 41. Gremialista Ernesto Silva, who worked closely with Kast at ODEPLAN, was among the eight independents. The supreme tribunal was made up of seven members (two for each party), and its president was lawyer Walter Siebel. The list is presented in Allamand (1999), p. 122. 42. This was the case with Adolfo Suárez in Spain’s UCD, which I have examined in Huneeus (1985b). 43. Leadership in the modernization of parties established under democracy is also important, as in the case of the Christian Democratic Union, which I have analyzed in Huneeus (1996b). 44. “Exile must end. A case by case analysis is unfair and arbitrary; I prefer candidates for 1989 to be chosen by the parties and not by the commanders-in-chief. The armed forces should not be exposed to any risks, least of all electoral ones. . . . I believe that General Pinochet does not fit the image of a portaliano politician [in the image of Diego Portales]. . . . Renovación Nacional is not the party of the wealthy classes, or an owners’ organization, nor is it Pinochet’s or the Junta’s party”; interview in El Mercurio, March 15, 1987; he expressed similar opinions in La Tercera that same day. An interview on less immediate issues appeared in Qué Pasa, April 16–22, 1987, pp. 36–41. 45. The government published its main criticisms in La Nación, portraying Rivadeneira as an inexperienced political leader, isolated within his own party. La Nación devoted editorials to attacking Rivadeneira, especially on March 20 and March 28, 1987. He insisted on his position, stating that, in the event that General Pinochet was the candidate, “I wouldn’t like to vote”; La Segunda, March 30, 1987.

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46. Allamand reaffirmed that if the plebiscite was used to “attempt the re-election of Pinochet,” there would be a confrontation; La Época, August 8, 1987. Guzmán replied that National Renewal had not ruled out any presidential candidate, and thus was supporting Pinochet’s candidacy; El Mercurio, August 9, 1987. Juan Antonio Coloma defended the plebiscite; El Mercurio, August 10, 1987. And Alberto Espina, former president of the National Union youth organization, stated he was against Pinochet’s candidacy; La Época, August 15, 1987. The general secretary of National Renewal had to intervene to stop further public statements before the party took a stance; La Época, August 15, 1987; La Nación, August 24, 1987. 47. His words were devastating for Rivadeneira, who said to Allamand about his meeting with Fernández: “This is beyond repair. Each passing day I have less to do at the head of Renovación Nacional”; Allamand (1999), p. 132. 48. The meetings with junta members were held in August and September. Jarpa said he was willing to support General Pinochet; El Mercurio, October 11, 1987. Guzmán also favored this possibility; El Mercurio, October 12, 1987. Allamand remained silent on the issue, arguing that the party had not reached a decision; El Mercurio, October 12, 1987. 49. National Renewal executives in the Third and Seventh Regions; El Mercurio, November 24 and November 26, 1987. The national executive committee ordered the regional presidents not to comment on the succession problem, to avoid divisions becoming public. 50. He resigned in December 1987, after collecting the 30,000 signatures required to legalize the party. His resignation had not previously been known by the general secretary or the vice presidents, although it was expected by some, as Rivadeneira “did not improvise a single line of his ill-timed resignation”; Allamand (1999), p. 135. 51. In the elections, 209 delegates would be elected by the regions and 130 by the Metropolitan Region, and a total 69,226 members would vote. Elections were announced in January, and the voting rules were carefully prepared by a commission formed by leaders of the two main parties, Andrés Chadwick (UDI) and Andrés Allamand (National Union), who worked with the general secretary of National Renewal, given the importance of the electoral process; La Segunda, January 21, 1988; El Mercurio, January 24, 1987. 52. On the candidacies, see Luisa García, “RN: a dos bandas,” Qué Pasa, February 25–March 2, 1988, pp. 8–10; “Al calor de la contienda,” Qué Pasa, March 10–16, 1988, pp. 32–37; “El candidato puesto a prueba,” Hoy, February 29–March 6, 1988, pp. 6–8. 53. Pablo Longueira, president of the UDI in the Metropolitan Region, was one of his advisers. 54. He presented the sector’s symbolic figures as candidates: former senator Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes and Miguel Otero, respectively. The UDI lacked nationally known figures and put forth Cristián Irarrázabal and Jorge Swett, the latter of whom had been an appointed president at Catholic University. 55. UDI leaders in the Metropolitan Region tried to physically boycott the elections, causing incidents that forced the intervention of the Carabineros. Pablo Longueira, regional president of the UDI, mobilized pobladores, who invaded National Renewal’s central headquarters. His statements against Jarpa appeared in El Mercurio, March 18, 1988. 56. In Providencia, Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes (National Union) obtained 876 votes versus 84 for Cristián Irarrázabal (UDI). In Las Condes, Miguel Otero (National Union) won with 1,059 votes versus 245 for Jorge Swett (UDI). In Valparaiso, former mayor Francisco Bartolucci (UDI) won a close victory with 2,190 votes versus 2,101 for Raúl Urrutia (National Union). See El Mercurio, March 21, 1988.

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57. “An executive committee incapable of guaranteeing elections certainly does not have the moral authority to lead the party. That is the problem,” said Pablo Longueira; “La UDI va a proclamar ganadoras a sus listas: Pablo Logueira calificó de tongo las elecciones,” La Época, March 20, 1988; “Leturia anunció que pedirán nulidad del proceso interno,” La Nación, March 20, 1988; María Eugenia Oyarzún, “RN: guerra de caciques, no de indios,” La Tercera de la Hora, March 20, 1988. 58. Prominent National Renewal figures demanded that Guzmán be “drastically punished,” and one of them directly demanded his expulsion; El Mercurio, March 23, 1988. Guzmán’s defense was published as an insert in El Mercurio, April 2, 1988. 59. On the conflict in National Renewal, see Luisa García, “La operación Guzmán,” Qué Pasa, March 24–30, 1988, pp. 8–10; “RN: corrientes subterráneas,” Qué Pasa, March 31–April 6, 1988, pp. 8–9; “Prueba para La Moneda,” Hoy, March 21–27, 1988, pp. 9–12; “RN: la crisis se alarga,” Hoy, March 28–April 3, 1988, pp. 9–11; “Gobierno: peligro de infarto en el corazón del régimen,” Hoy, April 18–24, 1988, pp. 6–9; “Fin de una ilusión para La Moneda,” Hoy, April 25–May 1, 1988, pp. 6–8; “Terremoto en la derecha,” Análisis, March 21–27, 1988, pp. 4–5; Rodolfo Paredes, “¡Qué semana!” Ercilla, March 23, 1988, pp. 8–11. 60. There is extensive information on this conflict in Las Últimas Noticias and La Época, March 20, 1988. 61. The ruling was approved by four votes to three, and was published in El Mercurio, April 22, 1988. 62. On the UDI leaders’ position, see José Armendáriz, “Pablo Longueira: ganamos las elecciones,” Ercilla, April 13, 1988, pp. 14–15; Magdalena Silva, “No a las fusiones, sí a las alianzas,” Ercilla, October 26, 1988, pp. 12–13; Luisa García, “Proceso a la UDI,” Qué Pasa, April 28–May 4, 1988, pp. 9–11; Rodrigo Moulian, “La íntima historia de la UDI,” Apsi, April 18–24, 1988, pp. 11–16. 63. Jaime Guzmán, “UDI: generación creadora,” Ercilla, May 18, 1988, p. 13. 64. This document revealed the original objective of the plebiscite, reelecting Pinochet, because the military regime was to be “planned” after 1988–1989 to attain the full consolidation of political institutions. The different initiatives to be promoted were explained in detail. The goal of the initiatives was providing political arguments to stimulate citizens’ interest in the political campaign, and the government was to provide the necessary funds for the many activities necessary to win. The document was leaked (Hoy, June 8–14, 1987), and PDC lawyers formally reported the irregularities to the comptroller-general’s office. It was published in Hoy, October 5–11, 1987. Serré was the deputy minister of regional and administrative development from 1986 until the end of the military regime. The deputy interior minister was Alberto Cardemil, who later became president of National Renewal. 65. The memory of the 1985 presidential elections in the Philippines, when dictator Ferdinand Marcos manipulated results to block opposition candidate Corazón Aquino’s victory, which triggered church-backed social protests that brought his downfall, was still fresh. 66. Visits to the First Region were justified for institutional reasons, since it is the seat of the army’s Sixth Division, and a concentration of a large number of military units was there. As for the other two, the reasons were political, given that they were home to a large percentage of the population (not as large as the Metropolitan Region). 67. For example, during a tour of the Fifth Region from July 1 to July 3, 1987, he visited seven cities on the first day and four on each of the remaining days. I take this information from CERC (1987), pp. 10–13. He visited nine towns on a tour of the Tenth and Eleventh Regions on March 2, 1988, and another six on March 3. 68. By September 1987, Pinochet had inaugurated 9,151 new homes, handing out 5,564 subsidies and 5,986 deeds.

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69. During his visit to Iquique on February 20, 1988, he announced a project to build a stadium, an extraordinary housing project to build 150 homes for teachers, the eradication of all shantytowns (campamentos), a 5 percent reduction in power prices in the First Region, and additional funding for Tarapacá and Arturo Prat Universities; see CERC (1987), p. 21. 70. CERC (1987), tab. 5. 71. I do not consider it important, because Pinochet was in the habit of making sudden announcements to distract his supporters’ attention or to provoke the opposition. 72. Huneeus (1985b), chap. 3. 73. Carr and Fusi (1979). 74. Scully (1992). Anticommunism had lost ground with political changes in Eastern Europe, particularly democratization in Poland since the early 1980s and the liberalization policy promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. 75. During the transition in Spain, united opposition organizations emerged only after the death of the caudillo, whereas in Chile they united while the dictator was still in power. 76. There is an interesting study on the functions of private research centers: Brunner and Barrios (1987), chap. 5. 77. I refer to the extensive work on consociational democracy undertaken by Lijphart (1968) and Lehmbruch (1967). See also Daalder (1974). This approach was applied to Chile by van Klaveren (1984). 78. Dahl (1973), p. 13. 79. Examples included the expulsions of PDC leaders Claudio Huepe in 1974 and Renán Fuentealba in 1975. 80. A few days after the 1978 “referendum,” the government banished twelve PDC leaders to the extreme northern part of the country, where some of them lived in very harsh conditions. There is an interesting account by former deputy and human rights lawyer Andrés Aylwin: Aylwin (1989). After the 1980 plebiscite, PDC president Andrés Zaldívar was not allowed to return to Chile. 81. One of the most important political initiatives to begin building a united opposition against the Franco regime was the magazine Cuadernos para el Diálogo, created by former education minister Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, in which intellectuals and professionals published articles dealing with the future and gathered in its offices to discuss political alternatives for democratization. On the opposition to the Franco regime, see Tusell (1977). 82. I have analyzed this in Nohlen and Huneeus (1984). 83. A critical vision of the Communist Party’s actions is provided in Arriagada (1998). 84. A memorandum by Jaime Guzmán developed these arguments: “They reject economic policy and advocate replacing it with a more socialist or statist one. . . . The Popular Unity–Christian Democratic (UP-PDC) sector wants to return to the classic old liberal democracy, helpless in the face of totalitarianism and demagoguery.” Guzmán tried to prove that the regime’s opponents were directly or indirectly “under the church’s protection,” referring to the Santiago Vicariate of Solidarity’s defense of human rights. See “Memorandum sobre situación política” (no date, possibly prepared in early 1980), a three-page document at the FJGE; quote from p. 2. 85. “Memorandum sobre situación política,” p. 2. He considered the DINA’s methods counterproductive because of their high international political costs and the harm to the government’s image. 86. “Exiliados: la razón del bien común,” Realidad nos. 20–21, 1981. It argued in favor of exile, because “among the 10 thousand Chileans affected by exile are most of

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the top leaders of Marxism, who are always ‘agents of civil war.’” Later, subtle distinctions would be introduced in his support of exile (“El exilio y la oposición,” Realidad no. 42, 1982) to keep up with General Pinochet’s announcement that “the issue of exiled persons would be re-examined through a high-level commission, to allow the prompt return of a significant number.” 87. Andrés Zaldívar, president of the PDC, was the first victim of this punishment, when he was banned from returning to the country in early October 1980, due to statements he had supposedly made in a Mexican newspaper. However, as analyzed in the previous chapter, he was actually being punished for his participation in the “no” campaign during the September 11 plebiscite. 88. Linz (1973). 89. In the 1980 plebiscite, the opposition was able to organize a rally at the Caupolicán Theater, where former president Eduardo Frei gave a keynote speech that was broadcast nearly nationwide through a network of radio stations; Ortega Frei (1992), p. 171. 90. The first habeas corpus was submitted by several public figures, including a former interior minister, Bernardo Leighton (PDC). 91. This measure moved hundreds of politicians from different parties to file a writ of habeas corpus before the courts. Human rights lawyers Jaime Castillo Velasco, former minister under President Frei Montalva and a PDC member, and Eugenio Velasco Letelier, former dean of the University of Chile’s law school and a Radical Party member, were expelled because they wrote a letter to the foreign affairs ministers who were attending an OAS assembly in Santiago, raising the issue of restrictions to human rights in Chile. See Aylwin (1998). 92. It was created on July 21, 1978, as a result of the “referendum” held on January 4 that year. The signatories of the initial document were twenty-four public figures, including politicians, lawyers, and academics with different political viewpoints. Among them were a former socialist senator, Ramón Silva Ulloa, and a socialist lawyer, Eduardo Long; former senator Patricio Aylwin and the former president of the University of Chile, Edgardo Boeninger, both from the PDC; Radical Party members Gonzalo Figueroa Yáñez and Juan Agustín Figueroa; and from the right, former Conservative Party deputies Héctor Correa and Julio Subercaseaux. See the wellresearched study by Ortega Frei (1992), chap. 3. 93. Former president Aylwin has very eloquently recalled the role of the Group of 24: “Seen from a distance, the experience of the Group of 24 had a profound human and political significance. Within it, we learned to know and respect each other in our diversity and we even became friends, people coming from different positions and who had been adversaries until recently, separated not just by conceptual differences, but also by prejudice, mistrust and animosity”; Aylwin (1998), p. 155. 94. Names of founding commission members in the various regions, as well as the commission’s main documents, are presented in Chaparro (1992). 95. Democratic opposition jurists had proposed since the 1970s that the king’s authority as Franco’s successor could allow the change to democracy through the regime’s own institutions. The fundamental study in this sense was Herrero de Miñón (1972). I have analyzed this in Huneeus (1985b), pp. 77–87. 96. The seminar was organized in July 1984 by the Chilean Institute for Humanist Studies (Instituto Chileno de Estudios Humanísticos [ICHEH]), associated with the PDC and supported by Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation. Other participants were Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes, Enrique Silva Cimma, and Manuel Sanhueza. The presentations were published in ICHEH (1985). Former president Aylwin explains his position in his book: Aylwin (1998), pp. 260ff.

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97. Aylwin (1998), p. 266. His proposal did not yet involve agreeing to participate in the plebiscite, since he envisioned a scenario of competitive elections. 98. An interesting analysis of private centers is made by the Ford Foundation’s representative for the Southern Cone in those years, Jeffrey Puryear: Puryear (1994), esp. chap. 3. 99. On the functions of private research centers, see Brunner and Barrios (1987). 100. Information on private research centers within the Academy of Christian Humanism and elsewhere is provided by Lladser (1986). 101. On the contribution of private centers to the modernization of opposition parties, see Puryear (1994), chap. 5. 102. The Center for Development Studies (Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo [CED]), founded by PDC member Gabriel Valdés and directed by Edgardo Boeninger, stood out in the 1980s because of several seminars and workshops it organized to encourage a rapprochement with right-wing public figures connected to the government. 103. The study center CIEPLAN, formed by PDC economists expelled from Catholic University, and the Labor Economy Program, formed by University of Chile economists (associated with a branch of the Socialist Party known as the “renewed” socialists), were particularly important. CIEPLAN’s origins are discussed in Chapter 7. 104. Its president (1977–1981) was Ricardo Ffrench-Davis (PDC), and its vice president was Humberto Vega (Socialist Party). 105. CIEPLAN economists, especially Alejandro Foxley and Ricardo FfrenchDavis, prepared and published numerous articles on this, particularly in Hoy, which are collected in Arellano et al. (1985). 106. Cortázar and Marshall (1984). 107. Dahse (1979). 108. For example, Marcel (1989). 109. A vast amount of work on this is available from CIEPLAN, which published the periodical Colección Estudios CIEPLAN, and from PET. 110. On the leading role played by economists in the opposition to Pinochet and the transition to democracy, see Montecinos (1998). See also Silva (1992). 111. The Left Committee for Free Elections (Comité de Izquierda por las Elecciones Libres [CIEL]) also emerged, organized by the Socialist Party of Ricardo Núñez’s sector and headed by Ricardo Lagos. It was formed by some leftist parties and the Committee of Parties for Free Elections (Comité de Partidos por las Elecciones Libres [COPPEL]), which brought together parties within the Democratic Alliance, headed by Patricio Aylwin, then PDC president. Its executive director was Andrés Zaldívar. CIEL helped build confidence among leftist parties seeking to embark upon the electoral path. 112. These included the Latin-American Faculty of Social Sciences (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales [FLACSO]), CERC, Sur Profesionales, and the Center for Public Studies (Centro de Estudios Públicos). During the plebiscite campaign, a joint project by the CED, the Latin American Institute for Transatlantic Studies (Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales [ILET]), and Sur Profesionales conducted regular surveys to bolster the “no” campaign. 113. Puryear (1994), pp. 134–141. 114. Additionally, 8.0 percent were undecided, 4.9 percent said they would not vote, and 15.5 percent did not respond; CERC national survey, 2,053 cases representing 75 percent of the population. The “yes” option was winning among registered voters at the time, with 37.1 percent, while the “no” option stood at 35.6 percent. 115. CERC national survey, November 1987, 2,053 interviews representing 75 percent of the population. 116. CERC survey, 900 interviews in the thirty-two municipalities of Santiago; the fieldwork was conducted from March 25 to April 10, 1988.

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117. CERC survey, July 1988. In a survey carried out three weeks prior to the plebiscite, in September 1988, 96 percent said they would vote; in the event that riots occurred, 85.4 percent said they would still cast a ballot. Willingness to participate was virtually unanimous. 118. CERC-Diagnos survey, June 24–July 10, 1988, with 2,400 interviews in 111 towns from the First to the Tenth Regions, including rural areas. 119. CERC national survey, with 2,400 interviews, conducted from September 9 to September 17, 1988; applied to registered voters and representing 98 percent of the population. 120. Boeninger (1997), p. 337. 121. This high figure did not reveal the extensive fragmentation, because there were four relevant parties: the PDC, the Radical Party, the Socialist Party–Núñez, and the Socialist Party–Almeyda. The Concertación was no “alphabet soup,” as some had described the opposition in Spain after Franco’s death. 122. It became known as the Socialist Party–Almeyda, in contrast to the Socialist Party–Núñez, according to Bascuñán (1990). 123. The change in the Socialist Party–Almeyda is described in Boeninger (1997), pp. 334–337. The Christian Democratic Party had refused to cooperate with the Communist Party. See Subercaseaux (1998), p. 194. 124. Three parties were registered under the political party law, whose main requirement was having 30,000 members. As well, all members had to be named on the voter list. These were the Christian Democratic Party, the Radical Party, and the Party for Democracy, the latter of which was the instrument that allowed the “renewed” Socialist Party and Humanist Party to legally register. 125. The Committee for Free Elections predicted the results on the basis of a representative sample of polling booths, which clearly showed the opposition’s victory. 126. The impact of the televised political ads, prepared by the “no” and “yes” campaigns, was enormous, since many Chileans were undecided. According to a postplebiscite survey by CERC, 6 percent of voters made their decision during the television spots, and 14 percent made their decision in the voting booth; CERC survey, December 1–15, 1988, with 2,988 interviews of a national sample representing 98 percent of the population over eighteen years of age. 127. The best evaluation of the television spots is a survey by CENECA–Department of Sociology IV of Complutense University in Madrid, conducted from October 27 to November 7, 1988. I have used a version of the survey report that contains the main results as delivered to the press. 128. The CENECA survey revealed that this news program was preferred over the national television channel’s news program, and that its most interested followers were “no” voters. 129. Sergio España, “La labor informativa de Canal 13: el caso de Teletrece,” CERC, Informe no. 3, September 1988. According to this CERC survey, 54 percent of Chileans said they received their information from television, 24 percent from radio, 13.5 percent from newspapers, and 2 percent from magazines. This wide range of sources reduced television’s impact in favor of the “yes” candidacy. 130. The fieldwork was conducted from September 9 to September 17, 1988. 131. On the transition to democracy in Brazil, see Stepan (1989). On Uruguay, see Gillespie (1990).

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12 The Limits of the New Democracy

Aside from their frustration with their defeat in the plebiscite, the military officers in the Pinochet regime remained calm and, after some hesitation on the night of October 5, 1988, decided to respect the institutional itinerary established in the 1980 constitution. This behavior clearly contradicted analysts’ most pessimistic predictions on what would transpire following a Pinochet defeat. This was a unique case among authoritarian regimes, in that the government recognized its political failure and accepted the consequences, which meant giving up power. The setback at the polls revealed no “management crisis” (per Robert Fishman’s concept),1 but rather a “crisis of obsolescence,” as the authoritarian regime had tried to persist amid adverse international conditions in which democracy was taking the world by storm, especially in Eastern Europe.2 There was no crisis, moreover, because, as illustrated in Chapters 1 and 4, the regime was built on a solid foundation consisting of the institutional participation of the armed forces in both the executive and the legislature, and the puppet of various right-wing political groups and powerful business interests, all of which had supported Pinochet’s “reelection.” The regime had also developed a strategy of multiple legitimations in the legal-institutional sense, through the new 1980 constitution, which even considered the possibility that voters would not approve the military’s candidate. This situation was covered by the constitution’s transitory articles, which called for presidential and congressional elections within a year. The military’s respect for the constitutional order made it difficult for it to ignore the plebiscite results. Pinochet, the military, and the Gremialistas had insisted on the plebiscite’s supreme importance, and had demanded that the opposition respect it. As a result, the constitution became a powerful barrier to regime supporters who considered refusing Pinochet’s defeat.3 Moreover, the governing coalition had to remain united to face presidential and congressional elections, due within the year, to prevent the Concertación 431

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from taking control of Congress, since under the binomial system the coalition stood to take all the seats in both chambers if the military’s supporters ran on separate lists.4 Since it was obvious that the Concertación would form the next government, the military and civilian power groups decided to establish a series of institutional limitations, known as amarres (ties), on the new authorities’ power resources. Thus, in analytic terms, this last phase of the Pinochet regime, from October 5, 1988, to the official transfer of power on March 11, 1990, should not be considered as simply the beginning of the end of the regime, but rather as the last stage of the authoritarian government, during which it sought to complete its objectives.5 No effort was made to facilitate the incoming democracy; rather the regime sought to complete its program and establish significant limits on the first democratic government, to be controlled by the opposition coalition, the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia. All these conditions combined to make the transfer of power from the authoritarian regime to the newly elected authorities unique compared to similar experiences in other countries, since there was none of the fragmentation or paralysis that characterized the last phase of the power groups in Franco’s Spain or Argentina’s “El Proceso” (1976–1983).6 In Spain, the regime’s end was triggered by Franco’s death, and despite the fact that his succession was supposedly “all wrapped up and well wrapped up,” it had suffered a serious setback in late December 1973, when the president, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, was assassinated by the Basque Fatherland and Liberty terrorist group. His replacement, Carlos Arias Navarro, proved weak politically, unable to retain dominance,7 which gave the “reformers” the edge. They wanted to establish a parliamentarian monarchy.8 The Franquistas were thus divided over the succession problem, with an influential sector opposed to simply continuing with Franco’s institutions, which they argued should be dismantled.9 In Argentina, under “El Proceso,” the military had been defeated in the Falklands War (called the Malvinas War in Latin America) by British troops. These southern Atlantic islands, considered part of the British Commonwealth, had been invaded in April 1982 on the orders of Argentine president General Leopoldo Galtieri, in an effort to reinforce his shaky rule. The Argentine military’s defeat was received with contempt by the public, forcing it to surrender power quickly and leave without having the necessary legitimacy in place to protect its corporate interests.10 These conditions allowed the first elected government, headed by Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989) of the Radical Party, to implement strict policies involving justice for victims of human rights violations and significant cuts to the defense budget, all made possible because of the military’s weakness.11 There is no evidence to support the idea that the Chilean government had a plan to overrule an unfavorable decision in the plebiscite,12 despite delays in announcing results, which raised fears of manipulation among the opposi-

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tion.13 This delay could better be interpreted as a sign of the perplexity that overcame the authorities as they watched the solid “no” vote roll in.14 Nevertheless, in the dramatic hours that followed the closing of polling stations and the regime’s acceptance of its defeat at 2:00 A.M. on October 6, 1988, some sectors did hesitate to publicly accept the triumph of the “no” vote. The silence of the UDI’s leaders, especially its president, Jaime Guzmán, spoke volumes as they awaited announcement by General Pinochet on the next move. This ambiguity led National Renewal to quickly recognize the results. Before midnight, as the Interior Ministry was still announcing partial results favorable to the “yes” vote, National Renewal president Sergio Onofre Jarpa was admitting the “no” victory on a television program, accompanied by Patricio Aylwin, the Concertación’s spokesperson and president of the PDC.15 Their friendly conversation before millions of viewers uncertain about the plebiscite’s outcome symbolized the willingness of an important sector of the regime’s supporters to respect the voters’ decision and start moving toward democracy.16 The behavior of the Concertación’s leaders also favorably influenced the decision to respect the constitution. They called for prudence and avoided any incidents or potential sense of conflict that might have caused a rupture. The navy took the results calmly.17 For some time its officers had wanted to return to their own role, as they were uncomfortable with the growing personalization of the regime and the army’s primacy in the main positions of authority. The navy was only marginally involved in the government’s day-today operations, and its role in decisionmaking was restricted to the junta.18 Its commander in chief held a strong position in the regime’s power structure as junta president, along with considerable influence over General Pinochet. He considered himself the author of the coup and therefore responsible for setting the date on which the regime had met its “goals.” He underscored this fact during the junta’s meeting with Pinochet on the night of October 5, 1988, when he said that “we’ll walk in together and we’ll walk out together,” at the same time that he announced the decision to respect the constitution. Nor was the air force too surprised by the results. It had not particularly identified with General Pinochet since the conflict with General Gustavo Leigh, which had culminated in his removal in 1978.19 The army, of course, was most affected. Its commander in chief had been defeated, and its position as his main source of support had been undermined. Early in the morning of October 6, 1988, through its interior minister, the government officially accepted the plebiscite’s results, mentioning as well the “solid vote” obtained by General Pinochet. This speech sought to generate optimism among civilian and military “yes” supporters at a time of bitter frustration following their expected victory.20 General Pinochet was forced to accept his defeat. To the last, he thought he would be able to overcome the left and the PDC, as he had done during the

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previous referenda, in 1978 and 1980. Only on the night of October 6 did he briefly address the country, seeking to infuse his supporters with confidence and repeating his decision to accept the results. He then left Santiago to recover from his failure and determine the next steps to be taken. Ten days later he resumed his post in government, and on October 21 he resorted to a cabinet shuffle to regain political initiative, as he had in the past. To restore confidence among business and party supporters, he made some profound changes, removing nine ministers and appointing Carlos Cáceres, a former finance minister (1982–1985) and Council of State member, to the Interior Ministry.21 The nine ministers ran the gamut of the governing coalition’s various components to express civilian-military unity. General Pinochet reviewed conditions with calm demeanor, deciding he had lost a battle but not the war.22 His withdrawal from power would not be total, since he would remain army commander in chief for eight years. This position gave him the power to ensure that the new authorities would respect his model of a “protected and authoritarian democracy,” and save his subordinates from having to submit to the courts in cases of human rights violations. He had repeatedly warned that “not one of his men” could be touched, and had made it clear that he would ensure that they were not judged by the courts. He was convinced that the Concertación government would pursue antimilitary policies, as Alfonsín had in Argentina, causing friction between the military and the government. Moreover, he imagined a catastrophic future in which the leftist parties would make crushing political and economic demands on the new government until it ultimately collapsed. The military government therefore outlined three main objectives to deal with the upcoming change of regime: 1. To consolidate the economic reforms, in order to reinforce the neoliberal institutional order, specifically by completing the privatizations already under way and selling off more companies, so the new government would be unable to reverse these processes.23 2. To establish a series of limitations on the elected government, which would make its work difficult, based on the assumption that the same politicians who had caused democracy to fail in 1973 would again hold power. Pinochet had no intention of making the job of the new authorities any easier.24 3. To put forward its own presidential candidate and congressional lists to win ample representation in Congress, because the Concertación was expected to win the congressional election. There were other measures of great political importance taken by the government in those months, one of which was favorable to two of the major newspaper companies in Chile, El Mercurio and Copesa (the latter of which publishes the daily La Tercera). The companies had sizable debt with the state-

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owned Banco del Estado, which worried the military government, because this put the companies in a dependent position with respect to the new government; if the debt were called in and the resources to pay were not available, the companies could be taken over, as the Popular Unity government had done with numerous businesses. This implied that the democratic government could have the print press at its disposal. To remedy the situation, the Banco del Estado, under the leadership of Álvaro Bardón, a former El Mercurio editorialist, transferred the debts of the two businesses to other debt portfolios under the control of private banks, putting the debts out of reach of the authorities of the future government of the opposition.25 The debts started to yield economic benefit, especially to El Mercurio. The arrangements were illegal, however, and financially damaged the Banco del Estado, which brought the matter to the courts. Bardón was arrested and spent a month in custody, then returned to his work at El Mercurio, a daily that has maintained a constant line of opposition to the Concertación governments.

■

Partial Dismantling of the “Protected Democracy” and Military Prerogatives

The categorical victory of the “no” campaign clearly represented a rejection of the regime’s plans to maintain its “protected and authoritarian democracy,” since its main components had depended on General Pinochet’s retention of the presidency. The limitations on pluralism and military guardianship established in the constitution were incompatible with the country’s democratization, especially given the new wave of democratization worldwide.26 After October 5, 1988, the Concertación argued the need for constitutional reforms to eliminate its authoritarian components, referred to as “enclaves,”27 and put forward the issues that required amendment. Once a new, elected government took over, it would be virtually impossible to change the constitution, because it was so rigidly designed that any amendments required the approval of two successive congresses (eight years). Amendments also required a majority in both chambers, which was impossible since the right controlled the Senate, having the votes of nine appointed senators who would oppose constitutional reforms. This made it essential to negotiate constitutional amendments before the change of regime, despite the obvious limitations this entailed. To facilitate the process, the opposition made a major concession, proposing that the presidential term of the first administration be reduced from eight to four years. For several months General Pinochet refused to even discuss reforming the constitution. He and his allies were divided on this point, however. National Renewal believed the reforms were necessary.28 After considerable debate, Pinochet finally became convinced of the advantages, since it would help to legitimize his constitution, and announced he would accept some reforms in a speech on March 11, 1989. Reforms carried out while he was still head of

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state would allow him to control their contents and prevent the Concertación from dismantling the constitution, a key point given that the military officers in the regime considered the 1980 constitution its main legacy. Finally, as a soldier it was not traumatic for Pinochet to have to negotiate with the enemy. He promptly delegated this task to his interior minister.29 The contents of this reform were defined by politicians and experts from the Concertación and National Renewal. Some of the main features of Pinochet’s “protected and authoritarian democracy” were removed.30 Article 8, which established limited pluralism and was a symbol of the regime’s anticommunism, was eliminated. The text was broad and affected not only the Communist Party but also any party admitting to being influenced by Marxism. The military’s political influence was also reduced through changes in two key components: the National Security Council, which placed the military clearly over and above all other governmental bodies, and the appointed senators, who accounted for a high percentage of their chamber. The military’s majority on the CSN was reduced through the addition of another civilian, the national comptroller-general.31 Broad powers allowing the CSN to “deliver a binding opinion to any authority established in the Constitution” became reduced to merely “expressing an opinion” to the president, Congress, and the Constitutional Tribunal. The weight of the nine appointed “institutional” senators (of which four represented the armed forces) was also diluted, through an increase in the Senate’s elected membership from twenty-four to thirtyeight. Article 5 was amended to guarantee respect for human rights, as called for by the international treaties that Chile had signed. This reform had major juridical repercussions, since it supported cases being brought before the courts for abuses committed during the military regime. The regime accepted this, confident that its appointees in the Supreme Court would not go ahead with any trials (see below). The constitutional reforms, despite their limitations, represented a positive step for the opposition. Sociologist Tomás Moulián, who had been critical of the Concertación’s performance, recognized this, pointing out that the Concertación “was faced with an inevitable negotiation. Given the conditions, the cost of not negotiating was greater than the cost of the worst negotiation,”32 in reference to the fact that the presence of appointed senators would prevent the government coalition from obtaining a majority in Congress and the ability to reform the constitution. The constitutional reforms did not remove all the limitations implicit in the “protected and authoritarian democracy,” since the regime refused to consider some. The Chamber of Deputies, for example, was not empowered to make constitutional accusations against senior governmental officials because of illegal decision or corruption, under Article 48, since the congressional law (Ley Orgánica Constitucional del Congress, Transitory Article 3) would only cover actions carried out after March 11, 1990.

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The limitations on the military’s supervisory powers were offset by financial benefits. The government demanded guarantees of the military’s financial independence from the executive by establishing a floor on annual budgets, using 1989 as the basis and indexing this amount to inflation.33 It chose this method because it foresaw a hyperinflationary scenario like the one that had affected the Popular Unity government, which proved to be a great mistake for the military. Following the budget floor, single-digit inflation prevailed for five years, amid sustained economic growth that averaged 7 percent annually until 1997. This formula saw the government’s budgets, expressed as a percentage of GDP, fall from 1.79 percent in 1989 (excluding the copper law’s contribution) to 1.35 percent in 1995 and to 1.05 percent in 2004 (see Figure 12.1). Once the constitutional reforms had been ratified in a plebiscite, and just days before the authoritarian regime drew to a close, the government provided the armed forces with further prerogatives through a special law governing implementation of constitutional provisions (Ley Orgánica Constitucional).34 This law established that all promotions and retirements would be proposed by the respective commander in chief, thereby severely limiting presidential authority over the armed forces and police, because the ultimate decision came

Figure 12.1

Public Defense Expenditure as Percentage of GDP, 1963–2004

7.00

6.02

6.00 5.84

4.91

Percentage

5.00

4.77 4.82

3.89

4.00

4.06

3.89

4.15

4.01

3.43 3.65

3.52 3.26

2.95

3.22

3.00 2.57 2.30 2.30

2.00

2.38

2.98

2.70

2.53 2.45

2.37 2.08

2.13 2.03 1.99 1.72

1.99 1.71

1.81

1.87

1.57 1.35

1.00

1.64 1.73 1.69

1.31

1.41

1.32

1.65 1.51

1.18

1.05

Source: Ministry of Defense.

04

03

20

01

20

99

20

97

19

95

19

93

19

91

Including secret law

19

89

19

87

19

85

19

83

Budgeted

19

81

19

79

19

77

19

75

19

74

19

73

19

71

19

69

19

67

19

65

19

19

19

63

0.00

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from the commander in chief rather than the president. This law, passed just days before the regime’s end, became an important obstacle to democratization, because the new president was left with no powers to deal with any problems with members of the military.35 Another of these amarres, or limiting ties, that the new government had to deal with was General Pinochet’s decision to appoint the new naval commander in chief, thanks to Merino’s decision to retire. Merino deliberately resigned to allow General Pinochet to appoint his successor, proposing Jorge Martínez Busch, the son of a former army officer, a choice that was much to Pinochet’s liking (see Chapters 4 and 13).

■

Political Criteria in Supreme Court Appointments

This carefully woven web meant to protect the military’s collective interests failed to include a new amnesty law to shield against human rights investigations,36 for three reasons. First, it was difficult to justify this initiative from a political point of view, since it involved admitting that the abuses that occurred during Chile’s “unconventional war” were criminal acts. This would have been rejected by the opposition, would have received no support from National Renewal, and would have tarnished Chile’s international image. Second, it seemed unnecessary for the military, because the amnesty law protected the military from everything that had occurred from the coup until 1978, when the law was passed.37 Finally, the military assumed that the Supreme Court would oppose any attempt by human rights lawyers to bring military personnel to trial. The court had already interpreted the amnesty law in favor of the military, ruling against any investigation. The military regime’s confidence in the Supreme Court’s backing was also based on its careful policy of appointing new members through the justice minister, who received the court’s proposals. The regime had veto power over any nominee not favored by the executive, thus forcing the court to propose proregime judges. Justice minister Hugo Rosende (1983–1990) applied this policy with particular skill. He had been a Conservative Party deputy, an adviser to Jorge Alessandri during his presidency, and dean of the University of Chile’s law school since the mid-1970s. Rosende took great pains in his relations with the Supreme Court to avoid interfering with Pinochet’s policies for maintaining public order.38 The first initiative to stack the Supreme Court was to increase its membership from thirteen to sixteen, making it possible to appoint three new judges.39 The second step occurred after the 1988 plebiscite, with the government offering a very substantial cash bonus to any judge leaving the bench, thus allowing the government to appoint nine new judges.40 Any judge choosing to retire early received a cash bonus equal to a twenty-eight-month salary,41 a very strong economic offer that was promptly accepted by six of the

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court’s sixteen judges.42 Thus, as Chile’s new democracy was being inaugurated, the Supreme Court contained fourteen justices who had been appointed during the military regime, twelve of whom had been appointed while Rosende was in office. General Pinochet could look to the future confident that the court would not change its position on human rights violations. Yet human rights violations weren’t the only reason why maintaining control of the Supreme Court was important. The court also played a crucial role in the institutions governing the new democracy: it was to appoint three of the nine “institutional” senators, and its president was a member of the National Security Council.43 The presence of judges appointed by the regime ensured that appointed senators, and the Supreme Court’s president, would support General Pinochet in the CSN, who would remain head of the army for another eight years as well.

■

Deepening Economic Reforms

Another objective of the regime after its defeat was to complete the economic reforms, particularly those aimed at reducing the state’s role in the economy. This included an active privatization policy and involved a series of laws dealing with various institutional issues. This fever of legislative activity was reflected in the many laws (226), some of them very important, passed from October 6, 1988, to March 11, 1990, when the first elected government took power. Using Jean Blondel’s typology,44 which distinguishes between regulatory and distributive laws (the latter providing goods and services to individuals), the regime acted in both areas, particularly in the case of the armed forces (see Table 12.1).45

Table 12.1

Economic regulations Political regulations Armed forces Distributive regulations Other Total

Laws Passed by the Military Regime After the 1988 Plebiscite Reducing Protected Democracy

Binding

Administrative

Total

22

24

7

53 (23%)

51

33

24

108 (48%)

10

9

4

23 (10%)

15

2

7

24 (11%)

12 110 (49%)

1 69 (30%)

5 47 (21%)

18 (8%) 226 (100%)

Source: Author calculations. I thank Ricardo Gamboa for clarification of the laws.

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A quantitative analysis does not illustrate the importance of a great number of the laws that were approved. However, a qualitative analysis of some laws reveals the importance of this last-minute legislation. A good example is the law governing the Central Bank (Ley Orgánica Constitucional del Banco Central).46 The 1980 constitution defined the Central Bank as an “autonomous body with its own equity” to ensure its independence from the government, and forbade the government from financing its policies with support from the Central Bank.47 The bank was created to prevent the government from financing expansionary policies, as occurred from 1970 to 1973. Because the constitution was based on the assumption that Pinochet would be reelected and that he would need state resources for this purpose, finance minister Hernán Büchi had not bothered to proceed with the law (Ley Orgánica) that would give life to this body. This left the general free to apply expansionary policies in the run-up to the 1988 plebiscite and later in the 1989 presidential campaign. The law governing the Central Bank determined that it would be headed by a five-member board of governors, chosen by the Senate from a list of nominees proposed by the president. Along with approving the new law, the military government appointed the board’s members, after negotiating the appointments with the opposition.48 Although the government vetoed some individuals proposed by the opposition, the interior minister managed to convince General Pinochet of a more pluralistic board, with two members proposed by the government,49 two by the opposition,50 and an independent, Andrés Bianchi, deputy executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), who, although he had voted “no” in the 1988 plebiscite, had the regime’s approval because of his stance on public spending.51 These appointments legitimized the Central Bank, especially with the Concertación, which saw two of its distinguished economists join the board. Another set of neoliberal initiatives aimed to reduce the government’s role in the economy by restricting the role of the national development corporation, CORFO. CORFO’s ability to create new public companies or acquire equity became subject to a special law for each proposal,52 which could be blocked by the appointed senators. Thus CORFO, which had been very active during the military regime, was abruptly deprived of one of its main functions. The government also conducted a flurry of privatizations, auctioning off shares in those companies whose privatization was incomplete, selling additional firms, and privatizing still others that had remained public until then, as was the case with water treatment utilities. An analysis of CORFO board meetings reveals many initiatives along this line. Table 12.1 shows the speed with which privatizations begun before the plebiscite went ahead, impacting major public companies such as Endesa, the Telephone Company of Chile, the telecommunications company Entel, and the State Insurance Institute (Instituto de Seguros del Estado [ISE]). The pressure to complete these processes before the regime change also favored people and companies with good relations with CORFO (see Chapter 9). José Yuraszeck,

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CORFO Decisions on Privatization, 1988–1989

Company CTC

Edelmag (Magallanes) Elecda (Antofagasta) Eliq S.A. (Iquique) Emelari (Arica) Endesa

Entel

ISE Generales

ISE Vida

LanChile

Pehuenche

441

Agreement Number

Date

1201 1349 1350 1383 1383 1383 832 1314 1341 1304 1305 1405 1277 1358 1361 1298 1300 1302 1374 1411 1297 1299 1302 1411 1251 1082 1373 1286 1420 1442

Jan. 25, 1988 Feb. 10, 1989 Feb. 10, 1989 May 16, 1989 May 16, 1989 May 16, 1989 Feb. 6, 1989 Dec. 6, 1989 Dec. 1, 1988 Aug. 28, 1988 Oct. 28, 1988 Aug. 14, 1989 Aug. 19, 1988 Mar. 16, 1989 Mar. 20, 1989 Sept. 29, 1988 Sept. 29, 1988 Oct. 10, 1988 May 8, 1989 Apr. 14, 1989 Sept. 29, 1988 Sept. 29, 1988 Oct. 10, 1988 Aug. 14, 1989 June 22, 1988 Sept. 23, 1988 May 8, 1989 Sept. 23, 1988 Nov. 27, 1989 Nov. 8, 1989

Economic Area Telecommunications

Power distribution Power distribution Power distribution Power distribution Power generation

Telecommunications

Insurance

Insurance

Airline

Power generation

Source: CORFO board minutes.

chief executive officer of Chilectra and Endesa, convinced CORFO to auction off the Pehuenche hydropower station, which had belonged to Endesa and had been deliberately separated to create competition. Yuraszeck had already been buying shares in Endesa to take control and thus form a vertical monopoly in combination with Chilectra. CORFO’s decision went against the military regime’s own regulations for this sector, which were supposed to promote competition in electric power generation by making Pehuenche an independent company. This firm’s return to Endesa strengthened the economic clout of the Enersis group within the

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central power grid, which controlled 70 percent of generation, had transmission lines, and dominated distribution through Chilectra, thus creating a level of vertical integration unprecedented in Chile. To force the elected government to continue the privatizations, the junta approved laws that turned several public companies into private limited firms, among them Santiago’s water treatment company (Empresa Metropolitana de Obras Sanitarias [Emos]), Valparaiso’s water treatment company (Empresa Sanitaria de Valparaíso [Esval]), the Santiago subway, and the state-owned shipping company (Empresa Marítima del Estado [Empremar]).53 To complement the privatization of utilities, the government created an oversight body, the Superintendent of Sanitation Services (Superintendencia de Servicios Sanitarios).54

■

Obstacles Limiting the Elected Government

The regime also sought to severely limit the new government’s ability to act. Convinced that the Concertación would apply irresponsible populist policies, the regime did everything possible to make its establishment and its functioning as difficult as possible. One of the main measures along this line was to lock in the public administration, forcing the new government to work with personnel chosen by the military regime. The discretionary powers that the military regime had exercised from the start abruptly ended. The military regime fixed the staff for the vast majority of public services—seventy-two entities in all—from ministries to very low-level positions, permitting the future democratic government only a very small number of people to be hired into the public administration.55 It also passed an administrative statute that made it virtually impossible to change any of its appointed personnel.56 The 1990 budget law also made it very difficult for the new government to actively influence economic policy. Revenues were overestimated by assuming a higher-than-market copper price, and inflation was estimated to be lower than economic growth, which had risen thanks to the expansionary policies used to win the 1988 plebiscite and influence the 1989 elections.57 The Pinochet regime also spent much of the 1990 budget or left behind commitments, making it hard to finance any new policies. When the new democratic government took over on March 11, 1990, it faced a deficit of US$300 million and therefore had to cut spending, making it difficult to meet the population’s many expectations. Thus the new administration did not have the resources it needed to assume the enormous tasks ahead.58

■

Preparations for the 1989 Electoral Campaign

The Pinochet regime’s third objective during this period was to organize winning candidacies for the December 14, 1989, presidential and congressional elections. The presidential candidate was the former finance minister, Hernán Büchi, whose successful management of the 1982–1983 financial crisis had

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positioned him as the genius behind the country’s economic recovery. General Pinochet liked Büchi’s personality as well as his style (see Chapter 8). Büchi was highly respected by both National Renewal and UDI leaders, making it easier to gain their approval, and the fact that he had not belonged to any party before the coup was to the military’s liking. During the campaign, however, it became clear that he had little political skill, although the regime’s enthusiasts and big business did unite to support him. Congressional candidates were carefully chosen from among the regime’s public figures. In this, differences among the civilian members of the regime were apparent: the Gremialistas succeeded in offering up many candidates for the Chamber of Deputies elections, but interior minister Carlos Cáceres, working with former interior minister Sergio Onofre Jarpa, blocked some of them from the lists for the Senate, and was seen as favoring National Renewal. Former mayors, especially UDI members who had participated systematically in local governments (see Chapter 7), did well in the Chamber of Deputies. Of UDI and National Renewal deputies elected in the three elections after the plebiscite, 48 percent had previously served as appointed mayors, while 24 percent had held other positions in the military regime (see Table 12.3). Just 27.6 percent had never held public office before. This clearly revealed the Gremialistas’ importance at this level of the regime. In the Senate, the Gremialistas’ leader, Jaime Guzmán, ran for one of the two Metropolitan Region positions, and Sergio Onofre Jarpa ran for the Seventh Region. The UDI included some military officers on its candidate list, among them retired general Luis Danús, a former economy minister and COAJ member, who ran in the Twelfth Region. Jarpa persuaded some regional administrators to join the list too, among them Enrique Larre (Los Lagos) and Alberto Cooper (Fourth Region). He also convinced retired general Bruno Siebert, a former public works minister, to join National Renewal’s list as senatorial candidate for the Eleventh Region. All but Danús were elected. The right’s only senatorial candidate who had not supported the regime and had voted “no” in the three prior plebiscites was Sebastián Piñera (of National Renewal), who was elected in the Metropolitan Region’s eastern district (see Table 12.4).59 Table 12.3

UDI and RN Deputies’ Participation in the Military Regime, 1989–2001 UDI

Mayors Government positions Without positions Total

Total

RN

Participants

%

Participants

%

Participants

%

14 7

48.3 24.1

16 12

31.4 23.5

30 19

37.5 23.7

8 29

27.6 100.0

23 51

45.1 100.0

31 80

38.7 99.9

Source: Author calculations.

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UDI and RN Senators’ Participation in the Military Regime, 1990–2010 Period as Senator

UDI senators Jorge Arancibia Carlos Bombal

2002–2010 1998–2006

Eugenio Cantuarias Marco Cariola Juan A. Coloma

1990–1998 1998–2006 2002–2010

Andrés Chadwick

1998–2006; 2006–2014

Sergio Fernández

1990–1998; 1998–2006

Jaime Guzmán

1990–1991

Hernán Larraín Pablo Longueira Evelyn Matthei

1994–2002; 2002–2010 2006–2014 1998–2006; 2006–2014

Jovino Novoa Jaime Orpis Víctor Pérez

1998–2006; 2006–2014 2002–2010 2006–2014

Rodolfo Stange

1998–2006

Beltrán Urenda RN senators Arturo Alessandri B. Andrés Allamand Carlos Cantero Alberto Cooper

1990–1994; 1994–2002 1990–1998 2006–2014 1998–2006; 2006–2014 1990–1998

Positions in the Military Regime Navy Officer, General Pinochet’s navy attaché Director, National Youth Secretariat; Mayor of Santiago (1981–1987) Mayor of Talcahuano (1981–1988) President of the commission for reducing bureaucracy Director, National Unity Youth Front (1976/1977) Member of the Concil of State (1976–1980) Director, National Unity Youth Front (1977/1978) Prosecutor ODEPLAN (1987–1989) Labor minister (1976–1977); Comptroller General (1977–1978); Interior minister (1978–1982) (1987–1988); President of the commission to study constitutional laws (1983–1987) Member of the commission to study the new constitution (1973–1980); Member of the commission to study constitutional laws (1983–1989) — Advisor of the Minister of Housing (1985–1987) No position in the Military Regime, daughter of the Junta Member Air Force General Fernando Matthei Deputy minister General Secretariat (1979–1982) Mayor of San Joaquín Provincial chief National Youth Secretariat; Mayor of Los Angeles General director of the Carabineros (1985–1997) and Junta member (1985–1990) President of the Social and Economic Council

— — Mayor of Sierra Gorda, Tocopilla y Calama (1983–1987) Regional representative (Seremi) of the Economy minister (1975–1998); Regional representative (Seremi) of the Finance minister (1976–1977); Regional governor, Fourth Region (1988–1989) Sergio Diez 1990–1994; 1994–2002 Permanent ambassador to the UN (1977–1981) President of Fundación Chile (1982–1990) Alberto Espina 2002–2010 — José García 2002–2010 Mayor of Toltén (1980), Lautaro (1984) y Temuco (1986–1989); Regional representative (Seremi) of The Secretary General of Government Antonio Horvath 1994–2002; 2002–2010 Regional representative (Seremi) of the Public Works Minister (1986–1989) Sergio O. Jarpa 1990–1994 Ambassador to Colombia (1976–1978) Ambassador to Argentina (1978–1983) Interior minister (1983–1985) Carlos Kuschel 2006–2014 Mayor of Puerto Montt (1989) Julio Lagos 1990–1994; 1994–2002 — Enrique Larre 1990–1998 Mayor of La Union (1974–1988) Regional governor, Los Lagos Region (1989) Hugo Ortiz de Filipi 1990–1994 — Miguel Otero 1991–1998 — Ignacio Pérez Walker 1990–1994; 1994–2002 Secretary of the Economic and Social Council Baldo Procurika 2002–2010 Provincial governor of Huasco Sebastián Piñera 1990–1998 — Francisco Prat 1994–1994; 1994–2002 Provincial governor of Malleco (1989) Mario Ríos 1990–1998; 1998–2006 Mayor of Los Angeles (1974); Deputy minister of Agriculture (1973–1976) Sergio Romero 1990–1994; 1994–2002; Deputy minister of Agriculture (1973–1976) 2002–2010 Bruno Siebert 1990–1998 Member of the COAJ and presidential General Staff; Public Works Minister (1982–1989)

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This mix held in the successive parliamentary elections of 1993, 1997, 2001, and 2005. In 1997, former director of the Carabineros and junta member General Rodolfo Stange was elected with UDI support, as was former interior minister Sergio Fernández, who was named senator by Pinochet in 1990. Fernández was defeated in 2005 when he campaigned for reelection. The differences between UDI and RN concerning the participation in the military regime is clear in the senate. Of the sixteen senators that UDI elected in the five parliamentary elections, only one did not have a political position in the military regime. In RN, the situation was different because a third of the twenty-one did not have a post in the regime, neither in the executive nor in any of the four commissions of the junta. By carefully selecting their candidates in this fashion, the right ensured that many of the military regime’s best-known figures filled the benches of both congressional chambers. There was no radical change in the political elite; on the contrary, there was so much continuity that it made the elected government’s legislative work extremely difficult. The bloc of National Renewal senators, among whom were former regime ministers Siebert and Jarpa, maintained close relationships with Pinochet, who was worried that they would oppose government-proposed bills that were thought to be bad for the army. This continuity helped the UDI and National Renewal to win voters among the supporters of the military regime. However, this continuity represented a burden for the right in its attempt to win disappointed voters of the Concertación in order to win the presidential elections, because the linkages with the authoritarian regime were rejected by these centrist voters, who remained extremely critical of Pinochet. To widen the support among centrist voters of the Concertación, the opposition had to break with Pinochet. This began to happen after the disclosure of the personal accounts of Pinochet and his family at the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. (see Chapter 13). In short, the Pinochet regime went on to implement a series of very important political measures after his defeat in the 1988 plebiscite, whose purpose was to limit the new government’s ability to act. These policies of the military regime made inauguration of the new democracy very difficult.

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Notes

1. Fishman (1990), esp. p. 436. 2. On democratization in Eastern Europe, see Beyme (1994). 3. I have developed these ideas in Huneeus (1987b). 4. On the binomial electoral system, see Huneeus (2004b); on its origins, see Gamboa (2006). 5. This duality explains the institutional and economic limitations faced by the first postregime democratic government, led by President Patricio Aylwin, in which not only the continuity of General Pinochet as army commander in chief but also several political and even budgetary restrictions were well-known. In this I use the concept of “precursor conditions” as defined by Rose (1969).

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6. I use the concepts of transfer of power and seizure of power as defined by Lepsius (1971). 7. Thus one can say that toward the end, the Franco regime was in a state of crisis, as some analysts have noted, for example: Preston (1978), Esteban and López Guerra (1977). 8. I have analyzed this development in Huneeus (1985b), chaps. 1–2, and in Nohlen and Huneeus (1984), pp. 349–370. 9. For the history of the end of the Franco regime and the transition, see Carr and Fusi (1979). 10. A similar situation arose during the Regime of the Colonels in Greece, with the failure of the military invasion of Cyprus in 1974. See Alivatos and Diamandouros (1997). 11. Acuña and Smulovitz (1995), Acuña (2000). 12. General Fernando Matthei, air force commander in chief and member of the governing junta since 1978, said in a television interview in 2000 that on the night of October 5, 1988, General Pinochet wanted to deploy troops on the streets, and that he submitted to junta members the text of a decree granting him exceptional powers, a proposal that was rejected by the navy commander in chief, Admiral José Toribio Merino, and Matthei; see “Las incógnitas que revivió el general Fernando Matthei,” La Tercera de la Hora, October 8, 2000, p. 9. 13. As pointed out by the head of the “no” campaign; see Arriagada (1998), chap. 10. The “no” spokesman also points to the opposition’s distrust that night; see Aylwin (1998), pp. 369–371. 14. For a description of the atmosphere within the presidency that night, see Cavallo, Salazar, and Sepúlveda (1989), chap. 53. The account by former interior minister Sergio Fernández is also interesting; see Fernández (1994), pp. 277–287. 15. National Renewal’s general secretary put it this way: “Jarpa was the first supporter of the ‘Yes’ option to acknowledge the defeat on Channel 13. Explosions of joy at the ‘No’ campaign headquarters; suppressed rage in La Moneda. Decompression and relief throughout the country. At 1 am, I read a brief statement on behalf of the party, acknowledging the ‘No’ victory. The UDI did not open their mouths”; Allamand (1999), p. 165. 16. This important National Renewal decision shows that the “semi-opposition” can have a decisive influence on the course of an authoritarian regime; their intervention, which forced Pinochet to reform the constitution, was also decisive. I use this concept as defined by Linz (1973b). 17. The plebiscite results were no surprise to the navy, since the PDC had forwarded partial results from polling stations, clearly indicating the “no” victory, as they became available; Arriagada (1998), p. 258. The results of 1988 polls on the plebiscite were delivered to each of the junta members, and I myself met three times before the plebiscite, at the Diego Portales building, with two navy officers—who held postgraduate degrees in sociology from North American universities and who were part of Admiral Merino’s advisory team—to discuss the methodology and the results of the polls that were conducted under my direction at CERC. 18. The navy kept control of only one ministry, Defense, which had been held by retired rear admiral Patricio Carvajal since February 1983. Pinochet personally trusted him, since he had been head of the General Staff of National Defense during the coup, that is, the authority that coordinated the seizure of power that day (see Chapter 2). 19. See Chapter 3. In the 1980s, the air force was represented in the government only through the minister of transportation and telecommunications. 20. “At that time, it was difficult to encourage supporters. It was urgent to fight the feeling of catastrophe, the defeatist tendency to simply abandon the field to the enemy. We still had a year and a half ahead of us, with general elections in the middle, before the end of the military government. That was, precisely, one of the safeguard mechanisms of transition”; Fernández (1994), p. 287.

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21. Cáceres did not have the political biography of a “soft-liner” but that of a “hardliner,” as he had signed a minority vote, together with Pedro Ibáñez, during the constitutional debate in the Council of State, rejecting universal suffrage and proposing a democracy with corporatist elements (see Chapter 5). This was seen as a serious obstacle, as the interior minister at the time recalls: “The trouble caused by the minority report in decisive circles was so important, that, at some points, it seemed that the process leading to the new Constitution would be stopped”; Fernández (1994), p. 142. However, he was a Chicago Boy, trusted by the business sector and the military. He was appointed after Sergio Diez declined to serve as interior minister and after a failed attempt to appoint Hernán Felipe Errázuriz, former minister and ambassador to the United States. 22. The Chilean military has a long tradition of turning defeats into victories, and this was just such an occasion. 23. This was the case of the water utility companies, privatized at the end of the Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle administration (1994–2000). 24. Many of the studies on transitions examine the problems of new democracies from the point of view of the deficiencies in the democrats’ administration, without taking into account the negative impact of the conditions created by authoritarianism. For example, O’Donnell (1994), Merkel (1999). 25. See Dermota (2003). 26. Huntington (1991). 27. On authoritarian enclaves, see Garretón (1995). 28. Interior minister Sergio Fernández’s insistent rejection of changes to the constitution made continuation in his post untenable. He explains his position in his book: Fernández (1994), pp. 296–304. 29. The negotiations were conducted by “no” spokesman Patricio Aylwin and interior minister Carlos Cáceres. 30. The reform included fifty-four amendments to the constitution. For a detailed study, including party documents and statements by leaders and ministers, see Andrade Geywitz (1991). Some of the political players have provided interesting information on the negotiations’ significance: Allamand (1999), chap. 8; Arriagada (1998), pp. 265–272; Boeninger (1997), pp. 362–366. 31. He had been appointed by General Pinochet, who assured him of his support within this agency. The opposition had demanded that a civilian majority be established on the National Security Council with the inclusion of the president of the Chamber of Deputies, but this was rejected. 32. Moulián (1997), p. 355. 33. This was regulated in Title IV of Constitutional Law no. 18948, February 27, 1990, esp. Article 96. 34. I refer to “prerogatives” as defined by Stepan (1988). 35. As established by Constitutional Law no. 18948, February 27, 1990, for the three branches of the armed forces; for the Carabineros, by Constitutional Law no. 1961, March 7, 1990. Despite being passed virtually at the last minute, on the last day of the military regime, new provisions were added to further reinforce their autonomy: Law no. 18967 for the armed forces and Law no. 18973 for the Carabineros. It was evident on the occasion of the 1990 military parade, when the commander of the Santiago garrison, General Carlos Parera, did not request President Aylwin’s permission to begin the event. See Chapter 13. 36. This represented a difference with Argentina after the Falkland Islands defeat, where the military approved a very extensive amnesty law; Acuña and Smulovitz (1995). 37. It made a deliberate exception only of the attack that resulted in the death of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit. The text of Decree Law no. 2191, April 19, 1978, appears in Loveman and Lira (2000), pp. 462–463. 38. During the apertura, Rosende opposed the liberalization promoted by interior minister Sergio Onofre Jarpa (see Chapter 10).

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39. They were Hernán Cereceda, Servando Jordán, and Enrique Zurita. See Matus (1997), p. 178. 40. It was Law no. 18805, enacted on June 17, 1989. 41. The benefit was for senior Supreme Court judges and prosecutors who chose to retire within the ninety days following the law’s coming into effect (June 17, 1989), to allow the appointment of new judges by the military regime. 42. Judges José María Eyzaguirre, Octavio Ramírez, Victor Rivas, Osvaldo Erbetta, Abraham Meersohn, Estanislao Zúñiga, and Carlos Letelier claimed the benefit and were replaced by Judges Roberto Davila Díaz, Lionel Beraud Poblete, Arnaldo Toro Leiva, Germán Valenzuela Erazo, Hernán Álvarez, and Sergio Mery Bravo. 43. Two were elected in successive votes and the third had to be a former comptroller-general, according to Article 45, sections b and c, respectively, of the 1980 constitution. 44. Blondel (1992). 45. Several laws dealing with specific administrative issues are not covered by these criteria, for example, legislation governing the furnishing of the new Congress (Law no. 18823), establishing casinos in certain municipalities (18936), regulating the use and circulation of state-owned vehicles (18858), conferring the rank of rear admiral on Captain Policarpo Toro Hurtado (18761), and permitting monuments in memory of certain persons (18929). 46. Law no. 18840. 47. Articles 97 and 98 of the 1980 constitution. 48. There is information on these negotiations in Cavallo (1993). 49. General Enrique Seguel, former finance minister, and Alfonso Serrano, former deputy minister of labor and social security. 50. Roberto Zahler (PDC) and Juan Eduardo Herrera (PPD). 51. The negotiations were described by Cavallo (1993). 52. Law no. 18899, Article 32(a). 53. Law no. 18777 turned Emos and Esval into private limited companies, while Laws no. 18722 and 18722 did the same for the Santiago subway and Empremar, respectively. 54. The overseer of health services was created by Law no. 18902. The regime hastened to correct one of the weaknesses of the privatization of the health system, which was the lack of a regulatory body, thus creating the overseer of private health insurance companies (ISAPRES), through Law no. 18933. 55. Law no. 18827, which determined the staff of seventy-two public agencies and services, later amended in light of opposition criticism of its excessive rigidity, through Laws no. 18830 and 18831. 56. Law no. 18834. This was reaffirmed by a general public administration, Law no. 18575. The outgoing regime also “froze” the staff of local governments through a municipal law, Law no. 18923. 57. See the analysis on this issue by President Aylwin’s finance minister: Foxley (1993), pp. 59–61. 58. For example, the General Secretariat Ministry, whose annual budget rose steadily to 11.1 billion pesos (US$50.5 million) in 1989 due to its extensive political role (see Chapter 7), then plunged to 6.8 billion pesos (US$30.5 million) in 1990 (in constant 2000 pesos). 59. Senator Julio Lagos, elected for the First Region, and Arturo Alessandri, for the Second Region, had not held positions in the military regime, but supported the “yes” option in the 1980 and 1988 plebiscites. Senator Miguel Otero Lathrop joined parliament as a result of Jaime Guzmán’s assassination, and had voted “yes” in all three plebiscites.

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13 The Consolidation of Democracy

Chile’s political development since the return to democracy, following the transfer of power from General Augusto Pinochet to Patricio Aylwin (PDC) on March 11, 1990, has been a success. Aylwin was the candidate of the Concertación por la Democracia, a coalition of the left and center formed by the Christian Democrats, the Socialist Party, and the Party for Democracy. The Concertación won the presidential election on December 1989, after the defeat of General Pinochet in the succession plebiscite of October 5, 1988, which precipitated the end of military rule. The transition to democracy followed the institutional arena and the time frame set up in the 1980 constitution, which provided the legal legitimacy for the transition to succeed. Despite the strong institutional and political difficulties coming from authoritarian rule, including the continuity of General Pinochet as commander in chief of the army until March 1998, Chile was able to inaugurate the democratic order and consolidate the political institutions. Dismantling the authoritarian institutions was a complex process due to the authoritarian enclaves. This was attained by the leadership of President Aylwin (1990–1994), Presidente Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (PDC) (1994–2000), and Ricardo Lagos (Socialist Party/PPD) (2000–2006), all three belonging to the Concertación. In the 2005 election, Michelle Bachelet (Socialist Party) was elected president and her biography summarizes the dramatic Chilean political process.1 She is the daughter of General Alberto Bachelet, who occupied a high post in the last precoup democratic government, of president Salvador Allende (1970–1973). Alberto Bachelet was detained after the coup and died in early 1974 in prison. Michelle Bachelet was imprisoned, tortured, and exiled, first to Australia and later to the German Democratic Republic.2 The successful Concertación governments demonstrated that coalition governments are possible in a presidential system,3 and Chile’s case disproved the theory held by Juan Linz and other scholars that, given hindrance due to 449

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institutional elements, presidentialism could not produce a stable democracy,4 as the analysis of political development in the rest of Latin America would seem to demonstrate.5

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Difficulties of Democratization

Democratization in Chile was not an easy task, due to difficulties stemming from authoritarian rule and the way it ended; the military regime did not lose power because of a failure to successfully manage the economy, as was the case in most Latin American countries that moved from authoritarianism to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s. Chile’s authoritarian regime performed satisfactorily, overcoming the serious economic crisis of the Allende government and pursuing policies that promoted economic growth; by 1985, Chile’s economy was growing again (see Chapter 10). At the inauguration of democracy in 1990 the economy was in relatively good shape; the regime had not left a legacy of high unemployment, hyperinflation, and public debt, which was the prevailing situation that other newly democratic governments in the region faced. Nevertheless, when President Aylwin entered La Moneda, the presidential palace, there were serious difficulties to confront. First, the military as an institution was united in its conviction that the achievements of the Pinochet regime were laudable and good for the country, and that the democratic government should respect and follow the fundamentals of its policies. General Pinochet was able to continue as commander in chief of the army for eight years, a decision supported not only by the constitution, but also by the opposition parties, the business community, and his followers in society. Pinochet believed he had the legitimate right to be treated as a former head of state, outside the reach of justice, and that sympathy for him among parliamentarians on the right and among the population further authorized his political role. Every year on his birthday, until 2003, numerous figures from the opposition parties accompanied Pinochet in public declaration of their admiration for him. The Organic Constitutional Law of the Armed Forces, promulgated a few days before the end of the regime, gave the military great autonomy in choosing personnel and managing the budget. As a result, the military had strong institutional prerogatives at its disposal to defend its interests.6 This was in stark contrast to what occurred in countries where the armed forces had failed in their management of government or had been defeated in war, as was the case in Argentina following the British victory in the Falklands War (called the Malvinas War in Latin America). The Argentine military was discredited and weakened as an institution in that brief action. The first democratic government, of President Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989), vigorously pursued policies of military subordination to civilian power, including the prosecution of officers involved in human rights violations and a slashing of the defense budget, even though there were acts of resistance by military officers who opposed the government’s decisions.7

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Second, in Chile the Concertación did not control the Senate, since the electoral minority achieved by the UDI and National Renewal became a majority with the nine appointed senators as specified in the 1980 constitution, three of whom had been high-level officers in the armed forces, who systematically voted with the opposition against the new government. This had a major impact on democratization, as it prevented the government from making many of the profound institutional changes it thought necessary in order to achieve a genuine democracy. The changes that were made were approved by Congress only after long negotiations, which forced the government to make concessions to the opposition and abstain to pursue policies that were rejected by the opposition. For these reasons, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan were right when they concluded that, “politically, Chilean democracy began under more constrained constitutional circumstances than were the case in any of the Latin American or southern European countries we consider in this book.”8 Third, unlike the other new democracies in Latin America, in which the civilians who supported the dictatorships did not remain in politics, in Chile the leaders of the two opposition parties, the UDI and National Renewal, had held high positions in the military regime, and most of their congressional representatives had been high-level regime officials as well. The UDI’s president during the election campaign of 2005, Jovino Novoa, and Sergio Díez had been undersecretaries of the General Ministry (1979–1982), and National Renewal’s president had been ambassador to the United Nations (1977–1981). For a significant number of the right-wing elite, this allowed for continuity between the old and the new regime, a factor that complicated the political process, since the representatives on the right, especially from the UDI, supported General Pinochet’s political manipulation as commander in chief of the army. This provided legitimacy to Pinochet’s ambition to play a political role in democracy. The success or failure of a transition to democracy is very much determined by the performance of the first democratic government, particularly its performance on human rights policies. In Chile this issue affected the armed forces, since the security services that committed the human rights crimes under the Pinochet regime comprised military personnel. Success is also determined by a government’s economic performance, because one of the sources of legitimacy of a democracy is its ability to attend to the needs of the people, especially the poorest sectors.9 To understand the important achievements of the Concertación governments, one must take into account the role played by the parties and the changes that took place during the dictatorship. Party leaders had shown an enormous capacity for compromise in pursuing a peaceful, united opposition against the military regime from the center and left, made possible because they had learned from the failure of democracy in 1973, when there was little willingness to negotiate and reach consensus. This capacity for compromise cleared the way for the 1983 Democratic Alliance constitution, created by those who had opposed

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the collapse of democracy in 1973. That collapse inspired an effective antiauthoritarian strategy, which coalesced in 1988 into the Concertación de Partidos por el “No,” which called for the rejection of Pinochet’s candidacy and ultimately succeeded in defeating him (see Chapter 11). The parties were also able to reorganize their leadership, which made it possible for distinguished academics to reach public prominence and hold top party positions. This enabled Aylwin to select ministers with considerable political experience who were familiar with the complexities of administering the state and who had great technical abilities.10 Edgardo Boeninger (PDC), minister of the Presidential Secretariat and an engineer and economist, had been budget director.11 The finance minister was Alejandro Foxley (PDC), an engineer and economist with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1975 he and Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, who had a doctorate from the University of Chicago, founded CIEPLAN, the principal independent economic research center during the dictatorship, which earned an international reputation.12 The minister of economy was Carlos Ominami (Socialist Party), who had produced respected academic work and earned his doctorate in France, to which he had been exiled.13 Those three ministers had played an active role in their respective parties, which distinguishes them from the technocrats who ran the economic ministries in other countries, since with the exception of Fernando H. Cardoso in Brazil, none of them had experience in politics.14 Boeninger had been vice president of the PDC under Aylwin (1987–1989); Foxley had been a member of the PDC’s national council from 1985 to 1987, a position he won in direct elections of party members; Ominami had been a member of the Socialist Party’s central committee from 1987 until 2006 and vice president of the Party for Democracy in 1988, when the party was founded.

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Human Rights Policies and General Pinochet’s Reaction

Human rights policies, as Stepan has argued,15 were the most delicate in the transition to democracy during the “third wave,” because the oppression had been carried out by security services that were part of the military. In Chile, the coercion had been extreme, and human rights organizations, political parties, and the majority of the population expected the perpetrators to be prosecuted. This created tension among the Chilean armed forces, who sought to avoid such prosecution of their personnel.16 Aylwin, an outstanding professor of administrative law, a respected lawyer, and the son of a judge who became president of the Supreme Court,17 gave high priority to addressing the human rights violations, because he believed the wounds to society could only be healed through truth and justice. It would not be easy to obtain justice, because of legal barriers, such as the amnesty law of 1978, and because of institutional limitations, such as the judiciary itself, some

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of whose judges had tolerated the use of coercion under authoritarian rule and therefore were not well disposed to reviewing the rulings made during those years. To defend his and the military’s interests, Pinochet formed an advisory committee comprising members of the military and civilians and headed by General Jorge Ballerino.18 Its purpose was to provide Pinochet with information on political issues, to monitor the government and the parties, and to coordinate with opposition politicians to plan joint political action. One of President Aylwin’s first initiatives, which angered Pinochet, was to establish a commission to determine the number of people who had died under the dictatorship and the conditions in which their deaths had occurred. Formed in April 1990, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which became known as the Rettig Commission, was presided over by Raúl Rettig, a former Radical Party senator and president of the bar association during the military regime (1985–1987).19 To balance the commission’s representation, Aylwin asked not only members of the Concertación to join, but also individuals who had been part of the regime. General Ballerino, in an effort to thwart the initiative, tried to stop civilians who had held positions in the military regime from joining the commission, but was not successful. Ricardo Martin y Gonzalo Vial Correa joined the commission. Martin was an appointed senator, had been a Supreme Court justice, and was a member of a human rights commission that had been formed by minister Sergio Fernández at the end of the military regime. Vial was a minister of education (1978–1980; see Chapter 6) and had criticized some cases of human rights violations. The army publicly questioned the formation of the Rettig Commission20 and criticized its report when Aylwin released it to the public a year later. The report documented the deaths of nearly 2,279 people (see Chapter 2). Those in uniform tried to justify the excesses by claiming that Chile was involved in a special civil war, in which violence had been initiated by groups on the far left and not by the military, who were only reacting to the leftists’ actions. The leaders of the UDI and sectors of National Renewal shared and stressed this view of the root cause, blaming the Socialist Party, which had embraced armed struggle as a means of achieving power at its party congress in Chillán in 1967, for being the first to use political violence. In early September 1990, at a lunch the Rotary Club traditionally held to commemorate “Army Month,” Pinochet went further. In line with his decision to remain a political actor, he verbally attacked the German army in a clear attempt to provoke an incident between the Chilean and German governments, both of which were led by Christian Democrats.21 There was another political motivation behind Pinochet’s behavior. German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had been head of the Christian Democratic Union since 1973, maintained a close relationship with Aylwin and openly supported the PDC during the dictatorship. Two ministers of his government, Norbert Blüm of Labor and Heiner Geissler

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of Family and Women, openly and repeatedly criticized the human rights violations that occurred during the authoritarian period, and had traveled to Chile in the 1980s to support the democratic opposition and the PDC in particular.22 Pinochet’s actions had consequences among his subordinates, provoking new incidents with the government. A few days later, at a military parade on September 19, 1990, there were embarrassing demonstrations against the president and the defense minister by civilians invited to the event by the army. General Carlos Parera, who led the parade and who had invited the civilians, had not asked President Aylwin for permission to initiate the marching of the soldiers, which was considered an act of open aggression by the president. In response, Aylwin demanded that Pinochet take disciplinary action against Parera but Pinochet refused. Because Aylwin lacked the legal authority to punish this defiant act, the minister of defense stopped Pinochet’s proposal for a higher position. This decision of the minister of defense damaged Parera, because he had to take the higher position. To protect Parera, Pinochet sent him to South Africa, still under apartheid, as military attaché, after which Parera had to retire.23 Relations between Pinochet and the government were further complicated by an incident involving one of his sons. At the end of the regime, the army gave Pinochet’s son Augusto three checks for a large sum of money for services supposedly provided by a consulting business of his to a bankrupt business that had belonged to the army.24 The Chamber of Deputies convened an investigative committee, the first one formed by the body after the inauguration of democracy in 1990. Pinochet considered the committee to be part of a government effort to pressure him into resigning his position as head of the army. On December 19, 1990, Pinochet mobilized military forces to demonstrate his resistance in what was known as the “Liaison Exercise” (Ejercicio de Enlace).25 It was a bold act that jolted the young democracy, and some party leaders feared for the democratic order. José Antonio Viera-Gallo, president of the chamber, and Enrique Correa, minister of the General Secretariat, both socialists, negotiated an agreement with General Ballerino to end the military protest. As a result, the Chamber of Deputies softened its final report on the money Pinochet’s son had received.26 The problem did not end there, however, because the Council for Defense of the State pursued the matter, taking it to the courts to determine if there had been a fraudulent bankruptcy on the part of the business that had dispensed the checks to Pinochet’s son. Two years later, when the state-owned newspaper La Nación broke the news that Pinochet’s son would be charged, Pinochet organized a new protest, taking advantage of the fact that President Aylwin was in Norway attending to state affairs. Known as “El Boinazo,” after the berets (boinas) worn by special troops, Pinochet’s protest was an attempt to pressure Aylwin to cut short his trip and return to Chile to address the ongoing problems with the former dictator. It failed. Other matters prompted Pinochet to organize additional protests, such as the actions of the courts, which had summoned numerous officers to testify

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about human rights violations. The officers ignored the summons, following Pinochet’s instructions. This time, Pinochet’s antigovernment “El Boinazo” protest lasted seven days (May 25 to June 2, 1993), in an attempt to pressure the government to resolve the legal matters. Pinochet suggested the promulgation of an amnesty law, which was rejected. Furthermore, Pinochet complained about administrative issues that had not been dealt with by the minister of defense, which as a result were resolved. The extent of the military’s demands pushed aside his son’s personal problem. Pinochet took a different tone with the Frei Ruiz-Tagle government, sending signals that he was not looking for further confrontations. The new president ignored Pinochet and left his defense minister, Edmundo Pérez Yoma (PDC), to deal with the army commander in chief. Pérez Yoma, in contrast to his predecessor, Patricio Rojas (PDC), cultivated a cordial relationship with Pinochet to avoid tensions. The government did not make human rights issues a priority, although it did enforce the Supreme Court sentences given to General Manuel Contreras and Brigadier-General Pedro Espinoza, eight and five years’ imprisonment respectively, for the Orlando Letelier assassination (see Chapter 2). A special facility for convicted military officers was built, the Penal Peuco prison. For weeks, Contreras resisted being taken to the prison, with Pinochet and the navy initially supporting him. In the end, the army had to comply with the court’s ruling. The financial problem regarding Pinochet’s son reemerged two years after the “El Boinazo,” when the Council for Defense of the State decided to appeal the judge’s decision against prosecution. This time, the army pressured the government and tried to intimidate Frei, who asked the president of the council not to appeal the decision, “for the sake of the state,” to avoid a new conflict with the army. Officers in the Santiago garrison demonstrated in civilian garb outside the Punta Peuco prison. They had been legally assembled by a brigadiergeneral, but did represent a provocation to the government.27 The council, by a vote of ten to two, agreed not to appeal, heeding President Frei’s arguments.28 Pinochet’s term as commander in chief ended in March 1998,29 paving the way for the gradual return of the army to its professional role, although this would not happen without difficulty, given the gravity of the human rights abuses. His unexpected arrest in London seven months later reactivated interest in prosecution for the crimes committed during his regime. The victims’ relatives and human rights lawyers mounted an active campaign, which moved the government to form a roundtable (Mesa de Diálogo), convened through the efforts of defense minister Pérez, along with representatives from human rights organizations, academics, and members of the Chilean armed forces. After many months of work, they agreed on a document that summarized the participants’ positions, which was signed by the representatives of the armed forces. It established the military’s responsibility for the human rights abuses, a position that differed radically from that of Pinochet in the past, who had rejected the Rettig Commission’s report. However, in the report of the Mesa de Diálogo, the

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military admitted to disposing of bodies of the disappeared, which had been thrown into the sea. In 2003, on the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup, the media emphasized the violence the military had used during the seizure of power and in the first months of the new regime, which increased interest in this period of Chilean history and strengthened the desire for truth and justice. In November of that year, President Lagos formed the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Comisión Nacional Sobre Prisión Política y Tortura), composed of representatives from the parties and human rights organizations. Presiding was Sergio Valech, former Vicar of Solidarity and member of the Mesa de Diálogo. At the end of 2004, the commission released its report, covering more than 28,000 cases of torture, and President Lagos presented a proposal for reparations for the victims and their families, which was later approved by Congress.30

■

The Downfall of General Pinochet

After finishing his commission as commander in chief of the army in March 1998, Pinochet considered it appropriate to assume the position of senator-forlife, which Concertación members rejected but could not stop, because this position had been established in the 1980 constitution. In subsequent months, Pinochet tried to exert political influence, aiming to cultivate the image of an old statesman. But he blundered in traveling to London, convinced that the special consideration he was receiving in Chile extended abroad. He was arrested by Scotland Yard agents who were executing a warrant issued by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón on the request of lawyer Joan Garces, who had filed a lawsuit against Pinochet before the Spanish courts for the killing of Spaniards during the dictatorship and had asked for his extradition to Spain. Pinochet’s arrest had a major impact in Chile, and received the attention of the television media around the world; Pinochet became the first dictator subjected to justice in the new context of the International Criminal Court under the Rome Treaty. The Chilean government’s position could hardly have been more uncomfortable. Three members of President Frei Ruiz-Tagle’s cabinet had themselves been victims of the Pinochet regime. Foreign minister José Miguel Insulza (Socialist Party) had been exiled to Italy and Mexico. Minister of public works Jaime Toha (Socialist Party) had been held in a detention camp for several months, where he was tortured; his brother José, Allende’s interior minister, had died as a consequence of the physical and psychological abuse he had suffered while detained on Dawson Island in the extreme south of Chile, where ministers and leaders of Popular Unity had been held after the coup. Jorge Arrate (Socialist Party), minister of the General Secretariat, had been in exile in the Netherlands, and had been president of the Socialist Party at the beginning of 1990s. President Frei’s own father, Eduardo Frei Montalva, died at the end of January 1982 in a Santiago clinic while un-

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dergoing routine surgery. His death has been blamed on the dictatorship’s secret services.31 A group of Socialist Party deputies, among them a daughter of President Allende and the distinguished lawyer Juan Bustos, traveled to London to express their support for the measures taken against Pinochet. The Chilean government protested Pinochet’s arrest, arguing that he had diplomatic immunity as a former president and senator-for-life, and that he should instead be returned to Chile to face justice. At first, the UDI defended Pinochet, claiming the arrest was part of a “socialist conspiracy” that constituted an “assault on the sovereignty of the country.” UDI and National Renewal parlimentarians; Joaquín Lavín, who was the presidential candidate of the UDI and National Renewal; and business leaders traveled to London to express solidarity with Pinochet. But with the presidential campaign of 1999 under way, and with poll numbers looking strong for Lavín, leaders on the right knew they had to capture votes in the center, so they ceased supporting Pinochet.32 After strenuous negotiations between the Chilean government and the government of British prime minister Tony Blair, Pinochet returned to Chile on March 3, 2000, a week before Ricardo Lagos became president of the republic.33 Pinochet faced numerous lawsuits filed by families of the victims of the “caravan of death,” which had been led by General Sergio Arellano and resulted in the death of dozens of people in October 1973 (see Chapter 2). Pinochet was criminally charged and stripped of immunity as senator-for-life by a Supreme Court ruling in August 2000. In July 2001 the Santiago appeals court put an end to the trial, decreeing a temporary stay in the proceedings for reasons of Pinochet’s health. His defense argued that he suffered from “dementia,” a shameful recourse for a figure considered by his partisans to be the preeminent statesman of the twentieth century. Subsequently Pinochet renounced his position as senator-for-life and retired from politics. Pinochet’s desire to retire from politics and live the rest of his life as a respected statesman was shaken after the release in July 2004 of a report by a US Senate subcommittee that was investigating the financial ramifications of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The report revealed that Pinochet had numerous secret accounts with the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., in his name, his wife’s name, and his children’s names. From 1994 to 2002 he had accumulated US$8 million in the accounts, a particularly large sum in Chilean terms, and had taken illegal actions to prevent their discovery by US and Chilean authorities. This news had a devastating impact on his supporters, who had considered Pinochet as an honest authoritarian ruler and had justified the human rights violations on the grounds of “a war against communism,” but who saw no defense for Pinochet’s benefiting financially from power, which put him in the same category as the rest of Latin America’s dictators. The Council for Defense of the State charged Pinochet with misappropriation of public funds, and Chile’s Internal Revenue Service did likewise for

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tax evasion. A detailed investigation conducted by Judge Sergio Muñoz concluded that the sum accumulated by Pinochet approached US$27 million and was held in dozens of current accounts in his wife’s name, his children’s names, and personal advisers’ names in banks in diverse tax havens, with dozens of paper corporations set up to hide the origin of the money.34 To help Pinochet open some of the bank accounts, his representatives used passports that had been stolen from the Civil Registrar. The judge could not determine the origin of the money; it was presumed to have come from the expense reserves (gastos reservados) that Pinochet had access to as commander in chief of the army, which he had managed in total secrecy and which amounted to tens of millions of dollars. Table 13.1 shows transfers made into Pinochet’s acTable 13.1

Deposits and Interest in Pinochet’s Bank Accounts, 1973–2004 (US$) Interest in Checking Account

1973–1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 Total

Interest in Investments

5,045.17

5,631.12 8,171.76 20,239.82 28,260.57 35,501.50 33,687.33 38,540.84 35,913.09 8,479.25 17,024.04 11,055.33 11,055.82 123.08 0 258,728.72

12,484.45 24,343.35 18,347.07 10,163.89 10,982.87 16,594.65 25,164.79 31,234.82 39,085.49 86,771.42 30,370.76 54,770.80 130,451.49 225,695.38 305,326.39 800,563.80 533,021.54 295,389.28 268,428.06 1,104,958.84 394,595.50 4,418,744.64

Capital Deposits 17,040.00 30,000.00 70,000.00 0 332,720.18 191,309.00 8,500.00 0 56,350.00 110,611.00 1,190,354.00 2,148,518.61 849,956.16 3,123,330.18 2,241,924.11 3,021,995.36 3,229,788.00 2,819,621.13 1,407,635.04 191,304.79 941,474.26 0 200,000.00 132,000.00 0 22,314,431.80

Source: La Tercera, October 8, 2005, p. 4. Note: According to Justice Sergio Muñoz’s investigation.

Annual Total 22,085.17 30,000.00 70,000.00 0 345,204.63 215,652.35 26,847.07 10,163.89 67,332.87 127,205.65 1,215,518.79 2,185,384.55 897,213.41 3,230,341.42 2,300,555.44 3,112,267.66 3,393,926.82 3,083,857.35 1,748,874.52 1,000,347.84 1,491,519.84 306,444.61 479,483.88 1,237,081.92 394,595.50 26,991,905.20

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counts, which were substantial starting in 1990, when the total transferred topped US$2 million. Some of the money was taken after Pinochet left his position as head of the army, in 1999 and 2003, for example, when the amounts exceeded US$1 million. These actions brought the collapse of General Pinochet’s public image, especially in the eyes of UDI and National Renewal voters, who until 2004 had maintained a positive opinion of him. The results of a CERC poll of October 2005 confirmed this. Those who believed that Pinochet would be viewed historically as a positive force fell from 17 percent to only 8 percent; those who believed he was among the best rulers of the twentieth century fell from 23 percent to 14 percent; those who believed that he would be viewed historically as a dictator rose from 69 percent to 78 percent; those who believed that he had modernized the economy fell from 51 percent to 36 percent; and those who believed that Chile would have seen better development under democracy instead of the Pinochet regime rose from 20 percent to 29 percent. Changes in public opinion have occurred primarily among UDI voters, who most admired Pinochet. In a CERC poll in July 2006, there was an increase from 15 percent (in 2005) to 51 percent for those who believe that Pinochet will be remembered as a dictator, and a decrease from 64 percent to 41 percent for those who believe that Pinochet will be remembered as being among the best rulers of the twentieth century.35 Pinochet’s judicial problems have not ended. The Chilean judiciary has prosecuted several officers for their responsibility in the 1992 death of Colonel Gerardo Huber because of his opposition to the illegal sale of weapons to Croatia. This sale was likely authorized by General Pinochet without informing the Defense Ministry. The courts have been very active in seeking justice for the violations of human rights, work that is concentrated primarily on the military. By July 2005, 410 members of the military were in court; almost half of these belonged to the army (195), including 24 generals, 11 brigadiers, and 37 colonels; 129 were Carabineros. Of the total 410, 82 were Condenados, 40 were army, 37 were Carabineros, 7 were air force, 15 were Investigaciones, 1 was Gendarmeria, and 24 were civilians.36 These numbers show the active role of the judiciary since the late 1990s. There are important clues gathered by Judge Alejandro Madrid that demonstrate that the DINE took part in the death of President Eduardo Frei Montalva in 1982 (he was seventy-one years old) as a consequence of what was considered a routine operation in a private clinic. The proof shows that Frei was poisoned during his recovery from the operation, and suspicions point toward chemist Eugenio Berríos,37 who prepared a substance for the DINE—used against political prisoners—that produced severe illness. Berríos was taken in October 1991 to Montevideo, Uruguay, in a secret operation by the DINE, in cooperation with Uruguayan officers, and disappeared for two years. Apparently he was kept in a secret prison somewhere in Uruguay, where

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he was killed; his body was found in Montevideo in 1995. It is unthinkable that the DINE took these steps against Berríos, which required the cooperation of the Uruguayan army without the approval of Pinochet, who was at the time commander in chief of the army.

■

Economic Performance Under Democracy

The success of Chile’s democratization also depended on economic performance, since a positive performance would bolster the legitimacy of the new political order and reduce the distrust in some parts of the business community toward the Concertación parties. The democratic governments were successful in managing the economy, lowering inflation, achieving a high level of growth, and significantly reducing poverty. These results were achieved through a growth strategy that was consistently pursued by three administrations—Aylwin (1990– 1994), Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994–2000), and Lagos (2000–2006)—despite having different finance ministers: Alejandro Foxley (PDC), Eduardo Aninat (PDC), and Nicolás Eyzaguirre (PPD), respectively.38 The strategy was designed by Alejandro Foxley’s economic team. Foxley appointed several of his former CIEPLAN associates (see Chapter 8) to high positions in the Finance Ministry and other parts of the government, which helped him to implement his policies in a cohesive way. Pablo Piñera was undersecretary of finance,39 José Pablo Arellano was budget director,40 René Cortázar was labor minister, and Ricardo Ffrench-Davis was research director for the Central Bank.41 The influence of the CIEPLAN economists continued through the Frei and Lagos administrations. Manuel Marfán (Socialist Party), who had been coordinator of macroeconomic policies in the Finance Ministry with Foxley until February 1992, when he returned to CIEPLAN, was undersecretary of finance under minister Eduardo Aninat (PDC, 1994–1999). Aninat was also part of CIEPLAN before going to the United States to obtain his doctorate in economics. Marfán succeeded Aninat in December 1999, when Aninat was named one of the vice presidents of the International Monetary Fund. In December 2003 the Senate appointed Marfán to the board of the Central Bank. José de Gregorio was director of macroeconomic policies with Aninat and minister of economy, mining, and energy in the Lagos government (2000–2001).42 He was then named to the board of the Central Bank, eventually becoming vice president. Two of the five Central Bank board members in place in 2006 had come from CIEPLAN. The strong influence of CIEPLAN in the management of Chile’s economy was also demonstrated by the fact that the three budget directors of the three democratic governments were CIEPLAN economists. Arellano was followed by Joaquín Vial, who fulfilled the role until the end of the Frei government. Vial started at CIEPLAN in 1988, and accompanied Foxley to the Finance Ministry when the latter designated him Marfán’s successor as coordinator of

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macroeconomic policies, a job he carried out until the end of the Aylwin government. Vial then served as CIEPLAN director until he was named budget director in 1996. The third director was Mario Marcel, who held the position throughout the Lagos government.43 In the Aylwin government, he was head of research and budget management and then assistant director of the Agency for Public Effectiveness, of which he became budget director in March 2000. President Bachelet appointed Marcel as coordinator of a group of experts who studied the weaknesses of the pension system, and submitted a report with deep reform proposals aiming to overcome some of the weaknesses (see Chapter 9). The pension reform is one of the main priorities of President Bachelet. The governments pursued policies that ensured the continuity of the institutional framework of the economic system in order to avoid a political clash with the opposition, and in order to strengthen economic confidence in the business community to create better conditions for economic growth, yet simultaneously introduced institutional changes in specific parts of the economy in order to reorient the economic system away from the neoliberalism of the dictatorship. The policies had a strong emphasis on combating poverty, strengthening the labor movement, and encouraging labor organizations to follow a politics of agreement with business organizations in order to attain better economic and working conditions. Also pursued were regulations to bolster competition.44 The democratic governments established institutions to handle priorities that had not been considered by the military regime because of opposition from the neoliberal economists, such as environmental protection, with the creation in 1993 of the National Commission of the Environment (Comisión Nacional de Medio Ambiente [CONAMA]), and consumer rights protection, with the creation of the National Consumer Service (Servicio Nacional del Consumidor [SERNAC]). In the end, the economic performance of the three governments was remarkable. They achieved a reduction in poverty, a drastic drop in inflation, and a high level of growth that averaged 7 percent annually until 1998, when the Asian crisis dragged down the economy, a situation the Central Bank did not manage to alleviate. There was a return to strong growth in 2004. The governments were highly effective in reducing poverty. In 1990, 40 percent of the population were in poverty, compared to 18 percent in 2005. Key economic indicators (growth, exports, inflation, minimum wage, and others— see Table 13.2) demonstrate the clear superiority of the three Concertación governments compared to the Pinochet regime, confirming empirical research by several scholars that has shown democracy to be superior to authoritarianism in its economic performance.45 Gross inequalities in income levels continue to be the weak point of economic performance for the Concertación administrations. The disparities became a major issue in the 2005 presidential elections, and were labeled “scandalous” by Catholic bishops.

Comparison of Key Economic Indicators, 1974–2005

5.6 8.5 7.8 8.3e 122.3e 23.8 0.8e 0.7e

7.7 9.6 17.7 7.3 99.8 21.0 1.6 0.4

Frei Ruiz-Tagle 1994–1999 5.4 9.7 6.1 7.4 123.4 25.4 1.1 0.8

Lagos 2000–2005 4.3 6.5 2.9 10.1e 138.9e 24.5 0.0e 0.8e

Sources: Taken from Ffrench-Davis (2003), tab. 1.1, and updates. Based on data from the Central Bank of Chile and DIPRES. Figures for 2005 are very preliminary. Notes: a. Aggregate annual rate. b. Annual average, December to December. c. Annual average. Includes workers in community employment programs (PEM and POJH), without which the percentage is 13.3 for 1974–1989, 7.3 for 1994–1999, and 9.0 for 2000–2004. d. In 1996 pesos. e. 2004.

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Growth in GDPa (%) Growth in exportsa (%) Inflation rateb Unemployment ratec Real wages (1970 = 100%) Gross fixed investment (% of GDP)d General government surplus (% of GDP) Structural surplus (% of GDP)

Concertación 1990–2005

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Table 13.2

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The political conditions surrounding the economic policymaking of the three Concertación governments left important burdens on the institutional structure of the economic and social system. The decision to undertake a moderate reform of the economic system, inherited from the Pinochet regime, particularly the weak position of labor and trade unions vis-à-vis the strong position of business, the lack of revision of the privatization process of the 1980s, and others, is to be explained in this context. However, as the economists of the opposition had severely criticized the economic reform and the privatization process (see Chapters 9 and 10), Concertación voters are disappointed with the tolerance toward the businessmen involved in that process. The economic modernization under authoritarian rule produced a low legitimacy of the economic order, which severely damaged the image of success of the economic performance of democracy, because the people are very critical about who has benefited from economic growth. CERC data polls since 1993 show that 80 percent think that the rich have benefited most from economic growth; a small minority (15–20 percent) think that the poor have benefited most; and a minority (25–30 percent, but 43 percent the first time the question was asked in 1993) agree with the statement “all Chileans have benefited from economic growth.” Despite the profound economic transformation undertaken since the military regime, most Chileans have a critical view of businessmen and private enterprises, and are in favor of a strong role for the state in the economy. The economic transformation has not produced a cultural change.

■

Consolidation of Democratic Institutions

Chile’s democratization was successful because there were important institutional changes in the way presidentialism worked, which led to a larger role for the Senate and a more balanced use of power by the president.46 One of the preconditions for the consolidation of democracy is the integration of the opposition, which should have institutional resources to control government and have incentives to seek the presidency through elections. Pinochet’s intention to remain a political actor was something that embarrassed the UDI and National Renewal, because both parties wanted to strengthen their electoral base, independent of the decisions of the former dictator. Democratization was a more dynamic process than Pinochet had imagined, since the interests of the opposition did not square with his interests. The UDI and National Renewal obtained major electoral support in the congressional elections of 1989, 33.5 percent (19 percent for National Renewal and 14.5 for UDI), capturing a large number of seats in both houses. This went far beyond the 21.1 percent the National Party had received in the elections of March 1973, the last vote before the coup, and permitted the UDI and National Renewal to play a major role in Congress, independent of the military and of General Pinochet.

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The opposing interests of the military and the parties on the right first became apparent with the election of the president of the Senate, the official who would have the duty of presiding over the ceremony marking the transfer of power from Pinochet to Aylwin. Senate president was a very important position, not only because of the role of the chamber in the legislative process, but also because the person in this position was a member of the National Security Council, one of the authoritarian enclaves. The opposition’s control of the Senate, with the help of the appointed senators, permitted the UDI and National Renewal to elect the president from among their members. However, this situation would allow the Concertación to blame the opposition for the government’s mistakes or failures, so it was better for the opposition that the Concertación take the Senate presidency. Moreover, this allowed the UDI to further diminish the credibility gap regarding its commitment to democracy, due to its participation in authoritarianism. Senator Jaime Guzmán, president of the UDI, enlisted his party to support Senator Gabriel Valdés for the Senate presidency. Valdés was a former president of the PDC (1982–1987) and the top figure in the party next to Aylwin. Guzmán had won his seat in the election of two districts of Santiago thanks to the advantage of the binomial system, since he had fewer votes than Ricardo Lagos, president of the PPD, who was defeated by a member of the same coalition, Andrés Zaldívar, president of the PDC, the other candidate elected from the district. The Gremialista leader trusted that Valdés would guarantee a ceremony without humiliation or mockery of Pinochet, and that he would enjoy a cordial relationship with Congress and the government.47 Valdés remained true to this agreement and maintained a respectful attitude toward Pinochet.48 The agreement was advantageous to the UDI, as it allowed the party to secure one of the vice presidencies of the Senate and the presidency of several commissions, which increased its prominence. The UDI became the major party of the opposition and the country, and it aspired to eventually reach La Moneda, the executive seat, through the ballot box. A Senate presidency for the Concertación was also advantageous because it had majority representation in the Chamber of Deputies. Moreover, a Senate presidency strengthened President Aylwin’s influence on the National Security Council, since with Valdés the PDC had an equal number of votes on the council compared to the military, giving Aylwin the decisive vote.49 The UDI-Concertación agreement affected executive-legislative relations in ways that were convenient for the government, since it convinced National Renewal to adopt a policy of cooperation toward the Concertación, as National Renewal aimed to prevent the UDI from gaining more prominence. This was manifested in support for the government’s tax reform bill to finance the social programs aimed at reducing poverty.50 National Renewal’s policy of cooperation with the government was maintained during the Aylwin government, in order to demonstrate a constructive opposition different from that put forth by the UDI, which was seen as too close to the interests of Pinochet and the military.51

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The fact that the Concertación didn’t have a majority in the Senate was a major hindrance to the fulfillment of its program. It was forced to adapt its legislative agenda to this reality, abandoning some initiatives rejected by the right and concentrating on those that could be approved with UDI or National Renewal votes. This was not understood by some Concertación party leaders, who thought it possible to impose what they believed to be a mandate achieved through the ballot box, without considering the constitutional authority of the appointed senators or the support of the military, or the fact that Pinochet was commander in chief of the army until 1998. This difficult situation forced the government to make an active effort to negotiate with the opposition, which strengthened the Senate and made it a decisive arena for accommodation between the executive and the legislature. This produced a change in the nature of the Senate and its limited role under the 1980 constitution, which established a powerful president to whom the legislature would be subordinate.52 According with the 1980 constitution, beyond participation in the legislative process, it fell to the Senate to choose the board of the Central Bank. The increasing role of the Senate was attained through several institutional changes. Before the regime change, the National Television Council was created to monitor the autonomy of television, since the regime believed that the Concertación was looking to control the medium.53 Its ten members were nominated by the president of the republic and appointed by the Senate. After the return to democracy, the Senate was given new powers to appoint members of public bodies. The Aylwin government changed the law that had created the state television channel to make television a more pluralistic and independent medium, a stark contrast to the role it played during the military regime, which had used it as a propaganda tool. The new text ensured television’s autonomy from the government, establishing that a board would oversee the medium and obliging private financing through advertising to avoid dependence on public subsidies. The board would consist of six people, elected by the Senate, nominated by the president. Each board member would be linked to a party to respect the balance between government and opposition. During the government of President Frei Ruiz-Tagle, as part of a broad judicial reform aimed at modernizing the justice system, particularly the criminal justice system,54 it was established that the Senate would appoint Supreme Court judges. One of the changes made by the judicial reform was the composition of the Supreme Court, which was tied by the Pinochet regime with the appointment of judges who were tolerant of repression during the dictatorship and could retain their appointment for life (see Chapter 12). The reform introduced a compulsory retirement age of seventy-five years for all judges and the incorporation of four members from outside the judiciary. These changes in the composition of the higher tribunal strengthened the investigations of human rights violations, with very positive results.55 The Senate would also be involved in appointing the public prosecutor. These changes reduced the authority of the president, who

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until then had power to appoint members of the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, and strengthened the authority and influence of the Senate.56 The involvement of the Senate in the appointment of the judiciary forced the justice minister to clear the potential government nominees with opposition members of Congress, so they wouldn’t be rejected. The opposition had vetoed judges who had tried cases of human rights violations without applying the amnesty law and who had presided over the trials of military officers; the opposition had supported judges who declined to prosecute abuses of basic rights under the amnesty law. For example, appeals court judge Milton Juica, an outstanding jurist who investigated important human rights cases in the 1990s, was nominated to the Senate by President Frei in 1998, but was rejected by the opposition for the reasons indicated above. He was nominated again by President Lagos in 2001, and was approved after the government had negotiated with the opposition to name another judge who had the sympathy of the right. The system encouraged senators of the Concertación and of the opposition to use this mechanism for their political interests. The two senators representing Valdivia did this, as they proposed a longtime judge of the Valdivia appeals court, despite the fact that his career was mediocre. He was approved by the Senate.57 This mechanism is problematic because of the danger of a dynamic of politicization of the Supreme Court as a consequence of the bargaining process between the government and the opposition to name the judges. Another arena for integration of the opposition that strengthened the role of the Senate was the Council of High-Level Public Management (Consejo de la Alta Dirección Pública). Its role was to appoint high-level officials in public administration who in the past were appointed directly by the president, and now have to be appointed by this independent body with professionalism and impartiality. This means that the Senate has an indirect role in the bureaucracy of the executive branch. There are four members on the council named by the Senate, and a fifth named by the president. The four named by the Senate belong or are close to the parties,58 aiming for a balance between Concertación and the Alliance for Chile (Alianza por Chile).

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Reemergence of the Party System

The Pinochet regime failed in its goal of destroying the parties, which had a strong role in Chilean history.59 In the first postregime congressional elections, of December 1989, three parties that existed before the 1973 coup won representation: the Christian Democratic Party, which had been the major party in Chile since 1961 and again from 1989 to 2001; the Radical Party—later called the Radical Social Democratic Party (Partido Radical Social Demócrata [PRSD])—formed at the end of the nineteenth century, which rose to prominence with three presidents elected between 1938 and 1952 and remained a major force until the collapse of democracy; and the Socialist Party, founded

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in 1933, which in 1970 reached La Moneda with one of its founders, Salvador Allende.60 New parties emerged. One was on the center-left, the Party for Democracy, founded by Ricardo Lagos as part of the campaign for the 1988 plebiscite, and two were on the right, the Independent Democratic Union and National Renewal, both founded in 1983, although the latter included many leaders and activists from the National Party, which was founded in 1966 after the collapse of the liberals and conservatives in the 1964 presidential election and the 1965 congressional elections. Democratization in Chile did not imply a break in the political elite, as occurred in Argentina and Uruguay, since there was continuity of high-level officials from the regime in Congress and in the leadership of the parties and business interest groups. The continuity of the elites had two major effects on the political system. The first was negative, as the conservative elites had a tendency to defend the Pinochet regime, impeding progress toward justice for the human rights abuses. Also, they resisted the legal reforms necessary to weaken the economic order from its neoliberal orientation. The other effect was positive, because continuity integrated into the political system the social and elite groups who had supported the military regime. They could articulate their interests through the parties, especially the UDI, instead of pursuing a politics of cooperation with the military and General Pinochet that would have weakened the democratic process. The existence of six parties (including the small PRSD) having congressional representation and competing in a centripetal dynamic, not a centrifugal one, as was the case before the 1973 coup; the existence of candidates who tended toward the center; the abandonment of extreme positions; and leaders’ willingness to negotiate and compromise were the necessary elements to produce a party system of limited pluralism.61 There was electoral stability in the parties of the Concertación without shifts of favoritism, which would have damaged the political bases of the government, complicating management of the executive. Nor did support for the parties sharply diminish, as happened in Brazil and Peru after the end of their military regimes. Nor did the center collapse, as happened in Spain after the Franco dictatorship, with the crumbling of the UCD, the party that had led the transition.62 There was continuity in Chileans’ political preferences, as exhibited, for example, in the self-placement on the right and the left. The leaders and parliamentarians of the Concertación parties maintained a strong and constant support for the government, very different from what had happened in Chile up to 1973, when governing parties opposed the policies of the executive. The biggest break in continuity involved the Communist Party, which won no seats in any of the five legislative elections from 1989 to 2005, receiving low, yet significant, electoral support: 6.9 percent in the congressional vote in 1997, 5.2 percent in 2001, and 5.1 percent in 2005 (see Table 13.3). On the heels of the success that had brought Salvador Allende and the left to power in

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Table 13.3

Results of the Congressional Elections, Chamber of Deputies, 1989–2005

PDC PPD PS PRSD RN UDI Rightist Independents UCC Greens Humanists PC Others

1989

1993

1997

2001

2005

26.6 11.5 9.1 3.9 19.5 14.5 0.2 — 0.2 0.8 5.3 7.1

27.1 11.8 12.5 3.0 17.5 15.0 0.7 3.2 — 1.1 5.0 1.5

23 12.9 11.9 3.1 17.6 17.2 1.1 1.2 — 2.9 6.9 1.6

18.9 12.7 10 4.1 13.8 25.1 5.3 — — 1.1 5.2 3.7

21.4 16.5 10.4 3.5 15.9 22.8 — — — 1.5 5.1 2.9

Sources: Calculations based on information provided by the Electoral Registry Directorate and on interviews to identify party affiliation of independent candidates.

1970, the Communist Party managed to obtain 16.2 percent of the vote in the congressional elections in March 1973.63 On the international level, it was the third major party of the West, next to the communist parties of Italy and France. Nevertheless, unlike in Spain, where the communists supported a peaceful transition to democracy at the end of the Franco regime (1936–1975) and were active in the unified opposition,64 in Chile the communists remained outside the democratic opposition, adopted a violent strategy against the Pinochet regime,65 and did not support the “no” campaign in the 1988 plebiscite. Thus the Communist Party joined neither the Democratic Alliance nor the Concertación. It distanced itself from the socialists, with whom the communists had worked since 1957 until the military coup. The low electoral support for the Communist Party was also explained by the binomial system, which forced the formation of coalitions in order to generate the high electoral percentage (33.4 percent) necessary to win a seat.66 The historical parties were able to maintain their electoral strength because they survived the difficult years of the dictatorship and because they made major changes in their political strategy and leadership. The PDC abandoned its “go it alone” politics (camino propio), which had allowed it to reach La Moneda in 1964, but with the great disadvantage that the camino propio meant that the PDC suffered alone the costs of being in the government during the Eduardo Frei Montalva administration (1964–1970), which explains the electoral decline of the PDC and the defeat of PDC candidate Radomiro Tomic in the 1970 presidential election.67 During the campaign against authoritarianism, it opted for a strategy of cooperation with other parties of the center and the left, a posture it maintained after the return to democracy.68

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The Socialist Party experienced a major programmatic rebirth, abandoning Marxism and adopting a political strategy that approached Spanish socialism.69 This change was encouraged by politicians who belonged to small leftist parties that emerged at the end of the 1960s due to the split of the Christian Democrats and the Radical Party, after which the Socialist Party broadened its political appeal and increased its outreach with the public. It scored a triumph when Ricardo Lagos was chosen as the Concertación’s presidential candidate in 1999 and went on to become the third president of the new democracy. Overall, the Socialist Party has not managed to increase its electoral base, although the triumph of Michelle Bachelet in the 2005 presidential election is a major achievement that may have consequences for the future. The Party for Democracy was formed by politicians who belonged to other parties, including the Communist Party. The PPD ran in the congressional elections of 1989 on the joint list of the Socialist Party and did well, which encouraged its leaders to maintain it as a regular party and an alternative to the center-left, apart from the Socialist Party and as a competitor to the Christian Democrats. Nevertheless, its ideological and political heterogeneity hindered the development of an attractive platform, and it did not succeed in winning more votes. Its good congressional representation was the result of skillful negotiation with the Socialist Party concerning the electoral lists, particularly in the 2001 elections.70 The right was represented by two parties, the UDI and National Renewal. Although none of the parties recognized themselves as a continuation of any of the historical parties of the right—the liberal and the conservative—the fact that two parties emerged demonstrates the historical continuity of bipartisanism on this bloc. The UDI was founded in 1983 by the leaders of the Gremialista movement (see Chapter 7). It emerged with solid territorial organization, and, because many of its officials and members had held important central and city government positions during the authoritarian period, it was able to build a wide network of support. The UDI fared well in the 1989 elections, which validated the party’s electoral strategy to mobilize voters who had supported Pinochet and switched their support to UDI candidates to remain loyal to him. The intense political activity of the Gremialistas during the authoritarian period allowed them to count on a more territorially solid party organization than National Renewal’s, which proved to be very effective for the Gremialistas in subsequent elections. The assassination of Guzmán by members of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front in early April 1991 was a serious blow to the UDI, although this didn’t weaken its strategy of becoming Chile’s main party. It was the only party that had managed to win more votes since early 1989, and nearly doubled its support by 2001 to 25.1 percent, up from 14.5 percent in the first election, taking the PDC’s place as top party. One of the UDI’s leaders, Joaquín Lavín, who was general secretary of the party in 1990, was a scant 31,000 votes away from defeating Ricardo Lagos in

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the 1999 elections, requiring a second count in which Lagos narrowly triumphed. Nevertheless, Lavín didn’t establish a friendly political relationship with National Renewal, and his differences put him in conflict with the party from the 2001 elections onward, with the result that each party ran its own candidate in the 2005 presidential election. Errors committed by the UDI leadership concerning “the Spiniak case,” a pedophile scandal that involved false accusations against UDI leaders, opened the party up to scrutiny. The public saw that UDI leaders didn’t have the skill required to handle such a situation, which was more a media than a political affair. National Renewal was founded by individuals who were members of the National Party and had been less active in the military regime, although the majority of its deputies until 2005 held positions as mayors or high officials in the central government. It supported the “yes” vote in the 1988 plebiscite, but differed from the UDI and the government authorities in that it recognized the triumph of the “no” votes on the dramatic night of October 5, 1988, whereas the latter remained silent (see Chapter 11). After the return to democracy, National Renewal maintained a good relationship with the government, relying on policies of what it called “agreement democracy,” which party president Andrés Allamand translated into support for the tax reform of 1990. That reform allowed the state to obtain resources to finance its antipoverty program, fulfilling the constitution and addressing the deficiencies specified in the Rettig Commission’s report. Nevertheless, National Renewal maintained its linkages with the military regime; Allamand invited Francisco Javier Cuadra, minister of the General Secretariat (1984–1987), to join the party as vice president, although he was closely identified with a very aggressive phase of the military regime (see Chapter 10).71 One of the senators elected in 1989 was Sergio Onofre Jarpa, who had been interior minister. Allamand had no success in consolidating National Renewal as the main opposition, encountering fierce competition with the UDI in the 1997 congressional elections as they competed for one seat in the Senate for one of the two Santiago districts. The UDI candidate, Carlos Bombal, won, a bad loss for Allamand and his party. National Renewal’s support plunged after that election, falling to 13.8 percent in the 2001 congressional contest, almost half the votes that the UDI received in the 1997 contest. In the 2005 presidential election, in which support for the party rose to 15.9 percent, National Renewal initially supported the nomination of Joaquín Lavín, but the party’s general council eventually chose Sebastián Piñera as its La Moneda candidate. The rupture on the right in this election was the result of profound differences between National Renewal and UDI in terms of politics and background, which were exacerbated by the binomial system, heightening competition inside each bloc.72 Because of the high risk of damaging the cooperation of both parties, the UDI and National Renewal avoided competition in the 2001 parliamentary elections by naming one common candidate in each of seven of the nine sena-

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torial districts. This meant that these senators were practically appointed by their leaders. However, in the 2005 parliamentary elections, which were simultaneous with the presidential election, each party named its own candidates. The competition on the right helped the Concertación to win both seats in the Eighth Region, which gave it the majority in the Senate for the first time since the 2005 reform of the constitution had eliminated the appointed senators. *

*

*

Like Spain, Italy, and Germany, Chile has reached democracy after enduring an authoritarian regime. After three Concertación governments, Chile has consolidated its political system, seen advances in truth and justice for the human rights abuses committed during the authoritarian period, and seen prosecution of its former dictator. It has taken major steps in furthering the development of its pluralistic order, notably judicial reform, and its economic performance has been remarkable. Chile has signed free trade agreements with the European Union and China, which in turn China has signed with the United States, strengthening its exports and creating employment and diversification in the sector. The success of Chile’s democratization cannot be understood without reference to the country’s dramatic political developments of the past three and a half decades, which explain, for example, the fact that a politics of compromise now dominates, following abandonment of the politics of confrontation that led to the breakdown of democracy in 1973. This interpretation of Chile’s democratization differs from one that identifies elite behavior as the crucial precondition for a successful transition.73 That interpretation fails to recognize institutional factors and the complexity of the political context in which actors make decisions that have uncertain outcomes. Nor does it explain why elites in some countries come to terms with the fact that they have suffered traumatic national conflict (Spain, Chile, South Africa), but why elites in other countries do not (Argentina, Bolivia, Peru). Chile’s experience opens the way to new perspectives on presidentialism, forcing us to examine generalizations concerning its weaknesses. In light of the political developments since 1990—and also in certain periods before 1973—one cannot be sure that presidentialism is a form of government that makes democracy in Latin America unworkable, nor can one be sure that presidentialism should be abandoned in favor of a parliamentary system. Chile’s well-functioning institutions, and the more prominent role for Congress, particularly the Senate, disprove this generalization. Neither do the political developments that mean that Chile is moving toward parliamentarianism, or that presidentialism in Chile is functioning like parliamentism,74 which is just another way of affirming the unworkability of presidentialism. The case of Chile reaffirms the capacity of a presidential system to allow for democracy in the presence of the other political factors analyzed here. The success of presidentialism in Chile cannot be explained without accounting for the political learning that has stemmed from seventeen years of authoritarian rule and suffering.

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Notes

1. Chile was a unique case among the new democracies of the “third wave” (see Huntington [1991]), since the parties that won the first elections also won the three subsequent elections, in 1993, 1999, and 2005. For biographical information on Michelle Bachelet, see Insunza and Ortega (2005). 2. On the history of transition and the Aylwin and Frei administrations, see Cavallo (1993, 1998), Otano (1995). For the institutional changes and the policies, see Toloza and Lahera (1998). On the the policies of the Frei administracion, see Muñoz y Steffoni (2003). 3. On coalition governments in Latin America, see Deheza (1998), Cheibub, Przeworski, and Saiegh (2004). 4. Linz presents these arguments in various articles (1990a, 1990b, 1994). In this line of argument for Chile, see Valenzuela (1994). 5. During the 1990s, twelve presidents failed to serve out their term. In Ecuador and Brazil, Presidents Abdala Bucaram and Fernando Afonso Collor de Melo, respectively, were removed from office by Congress for irregularities committed during their terms. In Peru, President Alberto Fujimori resigned in November 2000 and fled to Japan, before Congress accused him of abuse of power, after he had won a third term. The first democratic government in Argentina after authoritarianism (1976–1983), of President Raúl Alfonsín (Radical Civic Union, 1983–1989), was plagued by problems, including two military revolts in protest of trials of military junta members and bad economic management, which led to a serious economic crisis. Alfonsín was forced to hand over power six months before the end of his constitutional term to the second democratically elected president, Carlos Menem (Justicialista Party, 1989–1999), for fear that a worsening of the crisis could threaten democracy. 6. On the military’s prerogatives, see Stepan (1988). 7. See Acuña (2000); Acuña and Smulovitz (1995); Alfonsín (2004), esp. chap. 2; Novaro (2006), chap. 7; Norden (1996). 8. Linz and Stepan (1996), p. 211. 9. Drawing from Linz (1988). 10. The first president after the period of military rule in Argentina, Raúl Alfonsín, chose ministers who had former political careers. He had to bring in technical experts two years later to handle the economic crisis, to shore up his party’s chances in the congressional elections of 1985. I have examined this in Huneeus (1998). 11. Boeninger was director for four years during the Eduardo Frei Montalva government; he resigned in 1968 when elected vice chancellor of the University of Chile, having been dean of economics previously. 12. This is examined in Chapter 12. See also Silva (1992). 13. In addition were, among others, Enrique Krauss and Patricio Rojas, both of the Interior Ministry. Both were ministers in Eduardo Frei Montalva’s government and active in the PDC. Also present was Enrique Correa (Socialist Party), minister of the Presidential Secretariat, who had been president of the Christian Democratic Youth in 1968; in 1969 he left the PDC and joined MAPU. Later he joined the Socialist Party. 14. Domínguez (1998), chap. 4. 15. Stepan (1988). 16. The best analysis of the civil-military relations since the inauguration of democracy in 1990 is Robledo (2006); for the civil-military relations during the Frei administration, see Atria (2003). See also Agüero et al. (1998). 17. I have analyzed his role in the democratization in Huneeus (2005b). 18. Ballerino was one of Pinochet’s closest collaborators in the 1980s, and became minister of the Presidential Secretariat after the defeat in 1988 (see Chapter 3).

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19. The other members of the commission were Jaime Castillo Velasco (PDC), who was president of the Human Rights Commission; José Zalaquet (PPD), former president of Amnesty International; José Luis Cea, professor of constitutional law; Laura Novoa, an independent right-winger; and Mónica Jiménez, who sympathized with the PDC. President Aylwin tried to persuade Francisco Bulnes Sanfuentes (National Renewal), and visited Bulnes at his house, but Bulnes rejected the invitation. 20. This was rejected by Aylwin, who met with Pinochet at La Moneda and was critical of his behavior. See Cavallo (1998). 21. Pinochet branded General Baudissin, who had reorganized the German army after World War II and was a highly respected figure in Germany, as a “General Traitor.” In Pinochet’s words, Baudissin had turned the organization into “an army of potheads, that is to say, drug addicts, longhairs, homosexuals, unionists”; Otano (1995), p. 151. I myself was Chile’s ambassador to Germany during Aylwin’s government and saw reactions of the German government, army, and press firsthand. German officials had a clear understanding of Pinochet’s political objective. 22. On the visits of Blum to Chile, see Brender (1990), pp. 115–119. Several Christian Democratic Union deputies had made the trip in 1987 and 1988, participating in the campaign for a “no” vote in the plebiscite. Blüm met with Pinochet at La Moneda on a visit in 1987 and decried the use of torture. 23. Otano (1995), p. 151. 24. It grew to 971 million pesos (US$2,895,137). Photocopies of the three checks were kept in the Banco del Estado and, unbeknownst to Pinochet, given to the new bank managers who came in with the return to democracy. 25. This episode is well covered by Otano (1995), chap. 10, and by Cavallo (1998), chap. 8. 26. Otano (1995), p. 159; Cavallo (1998), pp. 211–212. 27. Brigadier-General Espinoza was imprisoned and General Contreras had to appear. Contreras fought against having to serve the Supreme Court sentence for the Orlando Letelier assassination. 28. Cavallo (1998), pp. 291–294. Interview with Davor Haracic, November 2, 2005; Haracic was acting president of the Council for Defense of the State when Frei requested that the organization not appeal the court ruling that had come down on the side of Pinochet. 29. His successor was General Ricardo Izurieta, a respected professional officer, who had not been involved in repressive actions during the dictatorship and was a young captain in September 1973. 30. I analyze the political relevance of the Valech Commission’s report in Huneeus (2005a). 31. The Council for Defense of the State, just after the inauguration of Bachelet’s government on March 11, 2006, joined the judicial investigation of President Frei Montalva’s death, a decision that was long overdue. 32. The results of polls on Pinochet’s London arrest can be found in Huneeus (2003a). 33. Pérez and Gerdtzen (2000) offer the best account of his London arrest and his return to Chile. 34. “Cuentas de Pinochet recibieron U$20 millones en ocho años a partir de 1990,” La Tercera, October 8, 2005, p. 4. 35. Barómetro-CERC surveys, October 2005 and July 2006. 36. For this information I thank Carmen Hertz, the widow of Carlos Berger, the latter of whom was an active human rights lawyer and was killed by the “caravan of death” in early October 1973 (see Chapter 2). 37. “Juez alista procesamientos en casos similares a Frei Montalva,” La Tercera, August 19, 2006, p. 8. The medical doctor who operated on Frei confirmed the suspi-

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cion that Frei was poisoned in a television interview on August 17, 2006; “Caso Frei Montalva: las dudas y avances de la investigación,” La Tercera, August 23, 2006, p. 8. 38. The fourth finance minister was Andrés Velasco, son of Eugenio Velasco, the latter of whom was exiled in 1976 (see Chapter 6) and has lived in the United States since, working as an economics professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. He had no party affiliation, was affiliated with CIEPLAN in the late 1980s, and was adviser during a short period to finance minister Foxley. 39. He was undersecretary until 1993, when he was appointed by the Senate to the board of the Central Bank. 40. He remained in this post until 1996, when President Frei appointed him minister of education. 41. Ricardo Ffrench-Davis had previously rejected the invitation to be one of five bank board members appointed before the transfer of power in March 1990, because he did not want his appointment decree signed by Pinochet. Later, he joined ECLAC and continued doing research and publishing. He earned the National Social Sciences and Humanities Prize in 2005 for his outstanding work in the field. It was the second time an economist had won this honor; Aníbal Pinto was the first. 42. He started at CIEPLAN as an assistant in the 1980s and later became a researcher after finishing his doctorate in the United States. 43. He started at CIEPLAN as a research assistant in 1979. After returning from his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, he was brought back as a researcher. 44. For example, the reform of capital markets, won despite strong opposition, forced the AFPs to publicly disclose how they voted in shareholder meetings in the companies in which they hold stock, to prevent insider deals from being made outside public view, as happened during the regime, when minority shareholders were able to gain majority control of various businesses with AFP votes. 45. Ffrench-Davis (1999), Meller (1996, 1998). 46. On Chilean presidentialism, see Siavelis (2000). 47. Interview with Gabriel Valdés, June 24, 2003. 48. Several months after the transfer of power, Valdés invited Pinochet to the Senate for an official visit and indulged him with a lunch steeped in solemnity, complete with photographs. Members of Congress who had been persecuted by the dictatorship attended, angering those who had opposed the regime. 49. The makeup and powers of the National Security Council are analyzed in Chapters 5 and 12. 50. Marcel (1997). 51. Allamand (1999). 52. I have examined this in Huneeus and Berríos (2004). 53. Law no. 18838, modified in Law no. 19131. 54. On the judicial reform, see Correa Sutil (1999), Blanco (2003). 55. This was stressed by Judge José Benquis in the interview in La Nación, September 11, 2005, http://www.lanacion.cl. 56. I have studied the greater power influence of the Senate in Huneeus and Berríos (2004, 2005). 57. The proposal was made by Senators Marco Cariola (UDI) and Gabriel Valdés (PDC). 58. Rossana Costa, from the Institute for Freedom and Development, associated with the UDI; María Luisa Brahm, from the think tank Liberty (Libertad), belonging to National Renewal; José Florencio Guzmán (PDC), Frei’s former defense minister; and Mario Waissbluth (PPD). The president was Catalina Bau (Socialist Party). 59. On the role of the party system in Chilean political development, see Collier and Sater (1996), Valenzuela (1997). See also Carey (2002).

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60. On the continuity and change of the party system, see Scully (1995), Valenzuela and Scully (1997). On elections and parties in the early 1990s, see Agüero et al. (1998). 61. Sartori (1976). 62. I have examined this in Huneeus (1985b). 63. Not much research has been done on the Communist Party. See Ramírez Necochea (1965), Barnard (1977, 1981), Furci (1984). 64. Mujal-León (1983). 65. Bascuñán (1990), Wehr (1996). 66. I have examined the binomial system in Huneeus (2004b). 67. On the Christian Democratic Party; Grayson (1995). 68. I have examined this in Huneeus (2003c). 69. Bascuñán (1990), Walker (1990), Arrate and Rojas (2003a, 2003b). 70. On the Party for Democracy, see Heine (2002). I have examined the PPD in Huneeus (2002). 71. Afterward, Cuadra held a position contrary to National Renewal’s interest when he declared that members of Congress were using drugs, which earned him accusations from Congress and a conviction from the courts that his accusations were false, and he was condemned. Later he became vice chancellor of Diego Portales University, one of the first private universities created in the 1980s. He had to resign that position in face of opposition from professors for statements he made to a Santiago newspaper on October 24, 2005, concerning the arrest of opposition figures, among whom was President Lagos, who was arrested after the attack on Pinochet in 1986. 72. Conflict with the UDI arose in 2001, when the president of National Renewal, Sebastián Piñera, wanted to run for a seat in the Fifth Costa Region, a position held by Beltrán Urenda (UDI), who didn’t want to run for reelection. The UDI’s president, Pablo Longueira, rejected Piñera and convinced the commander of the navy, Vice Admiral Jorge Arancibia, to be the candidate of the UDI. This decision compelled President Lagos to ask for the immediate resignation of the admiral, who was to end his service in several months, in November 2001. 73. For example, see Burton, Gunther, and Higley (1992). 74. Colomer and Negretto (2005) affirm this.

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14 Conclusion

This book has analyzed the structures of power, the policies, and the factors behind the long duration of General Augusto Pinochet’s military regime, with a focus on authoritarianism and on its impact on democratization, in an effort to illuminate this difficult period of Chile’s history and reveal the fundamentals shaping the new democracy, which began in 1990. Unlike the other “new authoritarianisms” that arose in many Latin American countries from the 1960s onward, which generally failed and saw the military forced to leave power amid widespread opposition, Chile’s ended with a positive economic balance sheet, the support of a substantial part of the population, and a transition to democracy that followed an institutional itinerary originally established in the military regime’s 1980 constitution. General Pinochet enjoyed support from the business community and right-wing politicians, along with a considerable part of Chileans, receiving a 43 percent vote in the 1988 plebiscite, which no other dictator has managed at the end of his regime. The economic reforms enacted during the military regime established the institutional foundations for economic growth in the 1990s, under the governments of the parties that had once formed the regime’s democratic opposition, the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia. The authoritarian regime’s top officials continue to play an active role in the new democracy as members of Congress or leaders of the conservative parties, the UDI and National Renewal, revealing continuity of the political elite and not just of the economic order. An examination of authoritarianism is therefore necessary to understand this stage in Chile’s history and the nature of the pluralistic order that began on March 11, 1990, when General Pinochet handed the presidential sash over to the new head of state, Patricio Aylwin, leader of the opposition that defeated him in the October 5, 1988, plebiscite. Aylwin had been voted in by a broad absolute majority in the presidential election of December 14, 1989. 477

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This analysis has avoided seeking simplistic answers that, for example, reduce the continuity of military rule to the use of coercion, which undoubtedly was highly visible due to the many serious human rights violations. On the contrary, I have sought to explore a range of political and historical factors that explain the regime’s long life, including the influence of micropolitical variables, such as the leadership of its main figure, General Pinochet. Multiple factors gave the regime a complexity that goes far beyond its militaristic image and presence in many major positions. Those factors make it necessary to treat this as an authoritarian rather than a military regime. When military officers seized power in 1973, in the context of a serious political and economic crisis, they decided that this would not be a “mere parenthesis,” a footnote, between two democratic periods in Chilean history. Their purpose was to found a new phase in the life of the country, and to do so they set themselves some very ambitious goals: to eliminate poverty, to create the foundations for economic growth, and to establish a political order different from Western democracy, which they considered weak in its handling of Marxism. This was to be a “protected and authoritarian democracy” with limited pluralism, under the guardianship of the armed forces, that would continue to function once the military returned to their barracks. These objectives were also shared among the new rulers’ right-wing supporters. To achieve them, the regime enlisted the support of technocrats, the so-called Chicago Boys, who introduced economic reforms, and the support of right-wing groups that had been highly critical of the main democratic institutions since the late 1940s, particularly political parties and Congress. These political ideas of the regime in the early years were deeply influenced by the corporativist ideas of General Franco’s regime in Spain (1939–1975). In its politics of authoritarianism, the regime not only pursued a radical rupture with Chile’s political development, but also contained the seeds of continuity with a past represented by the thinking of major right-wing groups. In fact, the regime resorted to a multipronged legitimation strategy, composed of legal and constitutional measures, based on the country’s legal tradition. It also employed historical means, blaming the failure of democracy on factors that happened in past decades. And finally, it made good use of effective economic management, promising that Chile would achieve full development. One of the main institutional measures in Chile’s political development, regular elections, was not abandoned but rather transformed by General Pinochet into a noncompetitive event through the January 4, 1978, consulta (referendum) and the September 11, 1980, constitutional plebiscite, which also reinforced his hold on power. In this way, Pinochet managed to soften the impression of a rupture in the country’s development and strengthen his power as an elected president, and not primarily based on the military support he received as commander in chief of the army, an authority based on a military coup. The authoritarian regime was characterized by a low level of institutionalization, however, and remained extremely personalized in General Pinochet.

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Along with applying coercive measures based on severely limited freedoms and a “friend or enemy” logic, which created a spiral of violence and repressive excesses, the regime enacted reforms that were intended to expand economic freedom to produce the country’s economic modernization. Abuses were possible thanks to the passivity of the judiciary in the face of human rights violations and the tolerance shown by a broad range of civilian groups in power, which, although they did express some criticism of the excesses of the DINA and the CNI internally, did so in such a way as to avoid weakening their relations with General Pinochet. The judiciary’s and the right’s political and ethical responsibility for these events remains ever present even with the passing of time. Despite these excesses, the regime enjoyed the support of a broad percentage of the people, including the working class, and cooperation from right-wing civilians and businesspeople until the end. This began to change due to the discovery by a US Senate investigation of major funds in accounts of Pinochet, his wife, and his sons held at the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. (see Chapter 13). Right-wingers did not react to information about the killing and repression. Corruption had a higher impact than everything else. The change in public opinion was evident among UDI voters, who had constantly supported the military regime and Pinochet, and were extremely disappointed with him. Conservative politicians and businessmen began to trust the information on repression that they had mistrusted before, such as the Rettig report of 1991 (see Chapter 13). Joaquín Lavín, presidential candidate of the right-wing parties in 1999 and of the UDI in 2005, expressed that he would have voted against Pinochet’s “reelection” in the 1988 plebiscite had he known the information that is now available.1 There was unanimous approval of the Valech report on torture, published in late 2004, a very different reaction than toward the Rettig report, which was rejected by the military and politicians of the UDI and National Renewal. General Pinochet was the main figure of the period analyzed, since he controlled political and institutional instances to such a degree that he could boast that “not a leaf moved” without his permission. He led the governing coalition, consisting of different civilian groups and figures, along with officers from the three branches of the armed forces and the Carabineros, keeping them united and attending to their different needs and interests. He was head of state and head of government and remained army commander in chief, relying mainly on his substantial powers as president of the republic. His political role included coercive tasks, since the DINA (and later the CNI) came directly under his authority. To integrate the various civilian and military groups, he refereed their differences and conflicts with extraordinary skill, achieving an enormous sense of unity and preventing desertions to the opposition, as occurred under authoritarian rule in Spain and Brazil (1964–1985). No minister left him. They all voted “yes” in every noncompetitive election and supported him after he left

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power, even when he was arrested in London in 1998, and even when he faced trial in the Chilean courts, resulting in his loss of immunity as a lifelong senator in August 2000.2 General Pinochet remained the undisputed leader, especially after he managed to expel air force commander in chief General Gustavo Leigh in July 1978, and he proved able to hold on to the political initiative even at difficult moments, such as during the US protest of the DINA’s 1976 murders of Letelier and Moffit in Washington, D.C., during the economic crisis of 1982–1983, and during his defeat in the 1988 plebiscite. He quickly learned how to navigate the complexities of power, and he knew how to make the most of his support from the armed forces, apparent in the participation of hundreds of officers in the executive and the legislature, and in the repression of opposition protests, without hesitating at the human costs involved. Thus General Pinochet was a strong dictator,3 although his power had lim4 its. The limits arose from the unity of the armed forces, which through the junta applied a decisive policy of consensus, giving each commander in chief veto power. Legal legitimacy also proved a limitation, as Robert Barros strongly argued,5 because it required Pinochet to show some respect for the legal procedures and mechanisms and toward the judiciary, as did the country’s institutional complexity, which forced Pinochet to show some respect for the Catholic Church, with its enormous institutional power, and whose bishops demonstrated great intelligence and leadership under the cardinal and archbishop of Santiago, Raúl Silva Henríquez. Another limitation was imposed by civilian groups, especially the Gremialistas, who made a determined but subtle effort to restrict General Pinochet’s discretional powers in order to achieve their own objective of building a political movement. They did so by establishing some degree of institutionalization, which limited Pinochet’s authority. The rules for succession established in the 1980 constitution ultimately prevented him from remaining in power indefinitely and finally forced him out, helped along by pressure from the democratic opposition, which won the support of the majority of Chileans. I have said that the other face of the Pinochet regime was economic, through the reforms applied by a group of technocrats, the Chicago Boys, who changed the structure of production, redefined the state’s relationship with the economy and society, and launched the economy, pushing annual growth rates to 7 percent in 1985, a rate that the Concertación government was able to maintain until 1997. They stimulated the development of a large and dynamic business class and a noteworthy diversification of exports. These policies benefited not only businesspeople but also broad sectors of the population who had suffered shortages and insecurity during the last months before the 1973 coup, thus building public support for the regime. Pinochet’s dictatorship was the only developmentalist experience in the third world, and is comparable only to General Franco’s regime, which used an iron fist to turn a primarily agricultural country into the world’s tenth industrial power. Economic policy

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in Chile did not prove a failure, as it did in the other military regimes of Latin America, although with substantial faults and at enormous human cost. These structural changes were achieved despite the fact that economic results were rather modest in terms of growth, employment, and inflation and lower than those of democratically elected governments in the 1960s and 1990s. These achievements, moreover, were extremely uneven, since neoliberal policies also drove the country into its worst recession of the twentieth century, when in 1982–1983 the financial system collapsed and GDP plunged by 14.5 percent.6 The important role played by the private sector during the new democracy has not weakened the wide distrust of the population against businessmen, which is to be explained by the political context of the Pinochet regime’s economic transformation. An October 2005 CERC poll showed that 3 percent thought businessmen were honest, 11 percent thought they were innovative, 8 percent thought they had good relations with the personnel, 44 percent thought that they were exploiters, and 65 thought they were only interested in earning money. As to the question of whether businessmen were “the base of the economy” or were “interested only in their interest,” 26 percent preferred the first alternative and 67 percent the second. The fact that economic modernization occurred in an authoritarian context, as part of a legitimation strategy, is no mere detail. This influenced the content of the reforms and how they were enacted. Modernization’s role was clearly political, based on neoliberal views of the economy interpreted as a total worldview and applied in every sphere, turning the citizen into a consumer. The Chicago Boys were effective technocrats, but they were also politicians, thoroughly convinced of the fundamentals of their “protected and authoritarian democracy.” They made an effort to ensure economic success in order to legitimize the authoritarian order and the limited democracy that would come into effect when the military left power. Because of this, economic reforms were founded on both technical and political considerations. The centralization of power drastically blurred the distinction between public and private interests, encouraging their convergence in the case of economic authorities and businesspeople. This was very clear in the case of major public companies, whose senior executives became controlling partners through privatization. The economic model’s ideological elements were visible in the weakness of regulatory bodies, especially those promoting free competition; in the preference shown to large firms and the concentration of power in a small number of conglomerates; and in the monopolies that took over major sectors of the economy, which occurred amid the patent neglect of small and medium-sized firms. The institutional and political incentives offered to businesspeople led them to identify with the regime and become increasingly politicized, a situation that has had important ramifications for the return to democracy. Major leaders of big business organizations held important positions within the authoritarian regime,7 and since 1990 have publicly defended the previous order and Pinochet, demanding

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his freedom when he was arrested in London.8 This attitude is a contrast to what occurred in Brazil, where businesspeople kept their distance from the military regime and pressed for democratization.9 This politicization of the business community influenced its economic decisions. A glance at the members of the boards of major companies reveals a clear preference for proregime individuals; they are right-wing and most worked actively with the military regime. This is apparent even in sectors that should be somewhat pluralistic and that post very low levels of trust among citizens, for example the pension fund administrators. From 1995 to 1997, shareholder meetings of the nine firms privatized at the end of the military regime, in the electric, telecommunications, steel, and petrochemical sectors,10 in which the AFPs held an important percentage of shares, all voted for board members with clear political sympathies: thirty-nine of the forty people elected were from the right, and half had held positions on the military regime’s economic team (see Table 14.1). Voting in these firms’ shareholder meetings in 1998 reflected this: of the twelve directors elected by the AFPs, eleven were right-wing, and of the latter, eight had held posts in the Pinochet regime. This political orientation of the boards of companies elected by the AFPs has not changed much in successive years; a small number of former ministers and high bureaucrats of the Concertación governments remain. This reveals the close linkage with an administration that seeks to attain the AFPs, institutions that are regulated by the state and receive little confidence from society. These various factors resulted in major differences between Chile’s modernization process and the methods applied by democratically elected governments.11 In the case of the latter, there is a clear institutional separation between public and private interests; there is free and open access to the information necessary for economic agents to make decisions; and equality of Table 14.1

Profile of Board Members Elected by AFPs in Shareholder Meetings, 1995–1997 (total individuals) Right-Wing Post During Military Regime

1997 Activity Business Senior executive Consultant Academic Total

Minister or Deputy Minister

Other

No Post

Concertación

Total

— 4 1 — 5

3 5 6 1 15

9 6 3 1 19

— — — 1 1

12 15 10 3 40

Source: Statistical bulletins from the superintendent of AFPs.

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opportunity is better safeguarded by the authorities, with interest groups representing both workers and the business community being allowed to participate. The economic change applied by Chile’s authoritarian rulers reflected more of a “partial modernization,” to use Dietrich Rüschemeyer’s concept,12 which does not entail the institutionalization necessary for building up a market economy. The Pinochet regime confirmed Juan Linz’s view of the structural weakness of authoritarian rule based on a low institutionalization process.13 In the early years, Pinochet and his cohorts opted for a traditional military regime, with military officers holding most of the major positions of authority, an arrangement that failed to consolidate as an effective form of government. With a new definition, they aimed at institutionalization based on a hegemonic party, a “protected and authoritarian democracy,” with restricted pluralism, an eight-year “transition” to consolidate economic reforms, Pinochet’s ratification in the plebiscite, and the organization of a political movement based on government resources to win the first congressional elections. Led by Jaime Guzmán, the Gremialistas supported this option and were the main group to use this institutionalization formula, which assured them a bright future once the military left power. Unlike other authoritarian regimes, the Pinochet regime did not create an official party.14 Nonetheless, in practice the Gremialistas fulfilled this role in many ways. Hundreds of young professionals belonging to this power group worked for the regime, especially in areas that were of interest to this movement in its power strategy: ODEPLAN, the National Youth Secretariat, and municipal governments. The UDI’s founding in 1983 was a direct result of this work, and its excellent results in congressional and municipal elections under democracy reveal the long-term perspective of its founder, who was bent on creating a powerful party. While the Gremialistas are indeed a powerful party, the UDI has not been able to win the majority needed to win the presidency, which was Jaime Guzmán’s main goal.15 The Gremialistas fulfilled several functions in the Pinochet regime. They helped to develop and spread authoritarian political thinking, they actively recruited professionals to hold top decisionmaking and advisory posts, they mobilized support to help consolidate Pinochet’s power, and they were decisive in defining the regime’s institutional approach after the 1977 Chacarillas speech. They also actively organized electoral support in the 1978, 1980, and 1988 noncompetitive elections. Failure to examine the role of this political movement would make it impossible to understand the authoritarian government’s enormous ability to mobilize political support. Nor could we understand its broad support among young people and its ability to recruit scores of young professionals to work in the government. This study has also examined the authoritarian regime from the perspective of democratization. Democratic rule was reestablished in Chile after Pinochet’s loss in the 1988 plebiscite and the failure to regulate his succession,

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which triggered the regime change. Studies of transitions and the consolidation of democracy in the 1970s and 1980s16 tended to neglect factors rooted in the authoritarian regime.17 They start from the premise that, with the instatement of new authorities and then the first elections, there was a rupture with the previous regime, a new elite took over the government, the military returned to their barracks, and power groups and institutions started to make decisions in a scenario framed by factors arising after the return to democratic rule. However, this idea of a rupture does not correspond with reality, since the regime change reveals significant continuity in some areas. The transition to democracy took place within the institutional framework, with military regime and opposition negotiating to eliminate some of the more emblematic aspects of the “protected and authoritarian democracy.” There was continuity of the regime’s political elite, who headed right-wing blocs in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies during the elections of 1989, and their control became even more evident in the two elections that followed (see Chapter 13). This continuity is still evident in the UDI. Seven of the nine senators of the UDI for the period 2006–2010 began their political careers in the military regime. Jovino Novoa was deputy minister of the General Secretariat (1979–1982) (see Table 12.4); Juan Antonio Coloma, Andrés Chadwick, and Jaime Orpis were presidents of FEUC and worked at the National Youth Secretariat; Víctor Pérez played an important role at the National Youth Secretariat (see Chapter 7); retired admiral Jorge Arancibia was commander in chief of the navy in 2001 and was navy attaché to Pinochet; Pablo Longueira was president of FECECH and adviser to the housing minister in the late 1980s; Evelyn Matthei, daughter of the air force junta member General Fernando Matthei, was not involved in politics during the military regime; and Hernán Larraín worked at Catholic University. This continuity weakened the opposition strategy to win the presidential elections, and most leaders are convinced that to widen the electoral support after four presidential defeats, they need to distance themselves from the Pinochet regime. The personal linkages with that period still constitute a barrier, particularly for the UDI, because the memory of the past is still present. National Renewal is in a better situation, because none of the senators is identified with the regime, as in the case of the UDI senators, and because Sebastián Piñera, the presidential candidate who was defeated by Michelle Bachelet in the second round in January 2006, was in the opposition to the Pinochet regime. It is impossible to understand trends in public opinion in Chile since the return to democracy without examining politics under the authoritarian regime. For seventeen years of military rule, the population received messages questioning the role of politicians and parties, leaving profound scars in the civic attitudes of broad sectors of the population, especially young people, whose political socialization took place in these conditions.18 These scars do not disappear with the dismantling of authoritarian institutions, but rather appear as a critical attitude toward politics and politicians and tepid enthusiasm

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for democracy on the part of right-wing voters, who express their support for the previous regime and General Pinochet.19 This is very clear in the strong differences between right-wing voters (UDI and National Renewal) and Concertación voters (PDC, PPD, and Socialist Party) (see Table 14.2). The Pinochet regime did not fail in terms of economic performance, but rather transformed production, achieving strong growth, and three Concertación governments have followed in its footsteps, with annual growth averaging 7.7 percent until 1997, when the Asian crisis halted it. A strong growth trend began again after four years, achieving 6 percent annual average growth in 2005. The authoritarian regime took care to leave in place significant ties (amarres) to defend its interests and to obstruct the democratic governments. The regime’s supporters were united during the first competitive elections, in 1989, with Hernán Büchi, Pinochet’s former finance minister, and with a common list of parliamentary candidates from National Renewal and the UDI. Afterward, with support from General Pinochet’s appointed senators, most politicians of the right openly defended the authoritarian achievements, justified Pinochet’s remaining at the head of the army, and blocked initiatives from the new Concertación government when it attempted to eliminate these aspects left behind by the previous regime. Fears of an adverse reaction from the business community, which would have seriously damaged the economy, led Patricio Aylwin’s government (1990–1994) to enact a moderate economic program. These factors explain why the regime change was characterized more by reforms rather than rupture. Aylwin concentrated his efforts, as the first democratic president, on civil-military relations and on human rights, which are closely related, in a very complex political scenario. President Frei Ruiz-Tagle widened his priorities toward economic matters, but could not avoid facing human rights issues when Pinochet was detained in London in 1998. A unique characteristic of Chile’s democratization process is that the authoritarian elite (ministers and senior functionaries) continued to wield considerable power, unlike elsewhere, even in Spain (although the time factor makes comparisons somewhat dangerous, since the Franco regime lasted almost forty years). In Spain, former ministers were excluded when King Juan Carlos started to democratize in 1976: he did not pick Manuel Fraga Iribarne, who had carefully prepared himself to replace Franco, but rather made a young official, Adolfo Suárez, president. Fraga had been a successful minister of information and tourism during the 1960s and a minister of governance in the first government after Franco’s death in 1975, and was a well-known intellectual, but he symbolized the continuity of Franco’s political class. Suárez chose as his ministers politicians and senior government officials from his generation who were not associated with the harshest period of the previous regime. There was a clear rupture that favored consensus and opened the way to democracy and its successful consolidation. In Chile, by contrast, well-known figures associated with different phases of the authoritarian

Opinions on Pinochet and Democracy, by Vote Intention, 2004–2006 (percentages affirming) Totals UDI

National Renewal

PDC

PPD

PS

PC

2004

2005

2006

64

38

9

8

1

—

23

14

12

1/2/07

36 14 25

70 30 30

89 83 77

90 86 89

93 86 87

89 100 99

69 52 58

78 60 53

82 68 66

3:17 PM

30 55 71

58 33 46

32 9 11

22 6 10

28 2 2

26 — 11

64 18 29

29 13 21

— 9 17

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Pinochet will go down in history “as one of the best leaders.” Pinochet will go down in history “as a dictator.” The September 11, 1973, coup “destroyed democracy.” “Democracy is preferable to any other form of government.” “The country has stagnated.” Pinochet’s regime “was completely good.” Without the military regime Chile “would have developed less.” Pinochet is responsible for human rights violations. Pinochet’s leadership will last a long time. The human rights problem is in the past and should be forgotten. Number of respondents

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Table 14.2

23 65 47

30 67 54

82 28 8

91 27 6

92 21 5

79 16 7

57 39 22

— — —

— — —

185

93

105

91

78

17

1,200

1,200

1,200

Source: Barómetro-CERC surveys, September 2004, September 2005, August 2006. Note: The PPD, PS, and PC were not in the 2005 and 2006 surveys.

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regime who had supported the thesis of “unconventional warfare” used by the military to justify abuses were elected to Congress on UDI and National Renewal lists, or became party representatives. They did not hesitate to repeat this justification under the new democracy during the 1990s. Through the UDI, the Gremialistas were the power group with the most presence within the right-wing elite, but National Renewal also had important figures in leading power positions in the regime, among them former ministers such as Francisco Javier Cuadra and Sergio Onofre Jarpa, and the deputy minister, Alberto Cardemil, who served as party president (1999–2001). As we saw in Chapter 13, the background of the deputies and senators of the right who were elected in the first three congressional elections remains similar in terms of their participation in the military regime. This continuity helps to explain the opposition’s steady refusal to accept reforms proposed by the three Concertación governments until the end of the Lagos government in a vain attempt to make the constitution fully democratic. In September 2005, President Ricardo Lagos signed a constitutional reform that eliminated most of the authoritarian enclaves of the 1980 constitution, such as the appointed senators. The reform gives the president more authority over the armed forces, because he or she can dismiss the commanders in chief, which before had to be done with agreement of the National Security Council. The only authoritarian enclave that remains is the binomial system, which President Bachelet is committed to eliminating. These conditions were completely different from other experiences with authoritarian rule, which saw their political and social foundations collapse as the result of military defeat (Argentina in 1983 and Greece in 1974) or political defeat within a broader scenario of economic policy failure (Brazil20 in 1985 and Uruguay21 in 1983–1984), which forced the military to surrender power. This economic and political development since 1990 is not taken into account by critics of Chile’s new democracy. They conclude that little has changed since General Pinochet left La Moneda, the presidential palace. Notwithstanding, in actual fact there has been a profound regime change, because the real objective of authoritarian rule was to perpetuate itself well beyond 1990, an attempt that failed thanks to Pinochet’s defeat in the 1988 plebiscite. The myriad political and economic factors contributing to authoritarian rule, described in this book, prevented the new democracy from advancing further and underscore the important efforts of democrats since the regime change in 1990. The complexities of Chile’s political development cannot be explained without considering the authoritarian regime. As a result, it is an error of hindsight to accuse democrats of not trying hard enough to further democratize Chile, since they faced a high risk of making democracy itself fail had they done so. A retrospective fallacy is behind that critical argument. Democracy, however, will remain infused with the latent conflict implicit in the country’s historical memory of the Pinochet regime, because of the crimes committed in those years. As time passes and these crimes become better known

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thanks to investigations by an increasingly determined judiciary, which seems to want to make up for past complicity, their utter irrationality hammers away at the country’s moral conscience. The possible involvement of the DINE in the death of former president Eduardo Frei Montalva would make the memory of the past much stronger. Chile is an exception in Latin America in its strong pursuit of justice for human rights violations, because time has not weakened the memory of repression and dictatorship. An August 2006 CERC poll showed that 72 percent had not forgotten the divisions and hatred produced by the military regime.22 This strong memory of the past has been possible because of socialization in families, education, and the media, which have reported on the work of the judiciary in the most important cases of human rights violations.23 The many cases filed against General Pinochet and some top army officers raise the question of criminal responsibility of those who gave the orders and those who carried them out, but they also lay bare other dimensions of guilt, as German philosopher Karl Jaspers reflected in Germany in 1946: political and moral guilt for the horrors that were committed.24 The climate of hatred inspired by official rhetoric, which created an atmosphere favorable to seventeen years of coercion, was shared and spread by civilian collaborators from inside and outside the regime. Anticommunism and the fight against terrorism provided a handy pretext for the DINA and the CNI to carry on, along with other secret services controlled by the air force and the Carabineros. Responsibility will not simply disappear because a few of the regime’s top staff and collaborators argue that they had no knowledge of these crimes, since this has always been the pretext used in these situations, for example in Vichy France (1940–1944).25 The documents are there, bearing witness to the accusations of human rights violations, accusations consistently made by the Pro-Peace Committee until 1975 and the Vicariate of Solidarity from 1976 onward, and the constant questioning of the work of Raúl Silva Henríquez, Santiago’s cardinal and archbishop, as he defended the persecuted and clamored for peace. The guilt does not lie solely with the regime’s military officers, but also with the civilians who accompanied them, because this was an authoritarian, and not just a military, regime. Half of Pinochet’s ministers were civilians, and, moreover, they controlled the Economy, Justice, and (after 1978) Interior Ministries. An apology, therefore, is due not only from the military, but also from its civilian supporters. Historical memory contains a dimension that makes this process more difficult: the regime’s rational side, as its reforms created an economic boom and improved the welfare of broad sectors of the population. The regime’s supporters can continue to emphasize this side of Chile’s past, as if it had no relation to the irrational side of this dual state that ruled from 1973 to early 1990. These efforts find some support among part of the Concertación, which expresses its admiration for the Chicago Boys’ economic achievements and shares the “technical” beliefs behind Pinochet’s economic modernization. Tension within the governing coalition also springs from the historical memory left by the au-

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thoritarian regime. The Pinochet regime has been a source of latent conflicts not only in the sphere of human rights, but also in public policies and the behavior of democratic institutions. This is one more expression of the depth of the political changes that Chile underwent during those years and the magnitude of their influence on the country’s future.

■

Notes

1. He said this when he was presidential candidate of the UDI; interview reproduced in El Mostrador, May 8, 2005, http://www.elmostrador.cl. 2. Referring to ministers with a portfolio, because Raúl Sáez, who was a minister without a portfolio in the early days of the regime, did not support the “yes” option in 1988. 3. I take the concept of a “strong dictator” from Funke (1989), a German discussion of Hitler’s power. 4. Using the concepts in Peterson (1969). 5. Barros (2002). 6. Ffrench-Davis (1999), p. 264. 7. Walter Riesco, president of the Trade and Industry Confederation (Confederación de la Producción y el Comercio), belonged to several legislative commissions; Felipe Lamarca, president of the national manufacturers’ association (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril), was Sergio de Castro’s chief of staff when he was economy minister and, later, director of the Internal Revenue Service; general manager Andrés Concha was director of Pro-Chile, an agency created by the Foreign Affairs Ministry in 1974 to promote exports. 8. Riesco traveled to London to express his solidarity with Pinochet, and later Madrid in an unsuccessful attempt to garner support for this cause from the Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (Confederación Española de Organizaciones Empresariales [CEOE]). 9. Cardozo (1988). 10. Endesa, Chilectra, Enersis, Chilgener, and Chilquinta in electricity; Entel and the CTC in telecommunications; CAP in steel; and Soquimich in petrochemicals. 11. I developed this idea by analyzing the economic reforms carried out by Carlos Menem’s administration in Argentina, under the leadership of economy minister Cavallo (Huneeus 1998b). 12. Rüschemeyer (1969). 13. Linz (1973a). 14. The single party is not a central structure throughout authoritarianism, as shown in studies on Franco’s Spain; for example, Linz (1970). 15. In the 1999 presidential elections, a UDI member and former employee of ODEPLAN, Joaquín Lavín, was a few votes away from defeating the socialist Concertación candidate, Ricardo Lagos, who won the second round of voting on January 16, 2000. The UDI’s growth under democracy, to the point of becoming Chile’s second party behind the PDC, cannot be explained without considering the economic and political resources used during its participation in the military regime. 16. Much has been written on this: Santamaría (1982), O’Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead (1986), di Palma (1990), Huntington (1991), Beyme (1994), Gunther, Diamandouros, and Puhle (1995). 17. The exception being the issue of civilian-military relations, which depend on how human rights abuses and the military’s subordination to civilian power are handled. See Huntington (1991), chap. 5.

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18. This scenario was very different from that of post-totalitarian elites, in which there was a rupture, as in Germany after 1945. See Edinger (1960), pp. 58–82. 19. There are few studies on the negative legacy of authoritarianism in democracy: Herz (1982), Linz (1981a), Hagopian (1993), pp. 464–500. 20. Lamounier (1988), Stepan (1989). 21. Gillespie (1990), González (1991). 22. Barometro-CERC survey, August 2006. 23. I have studied the impact of the military regime on public opinion, thirty years after the coup, in Huneeus (2003a). 24. Jaspers (1965). 25. On the case of France and the impact of the Vichy regime, see Marrus and Paxton (1982), Rousso (1991). For the German case, see Herf (1997).

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Acronyms

AAA ACE AFP AGCI AGECH AHJG ANEF ANEPE ARENA ASEP CAEM CAP CCR CCU CED CEL CEOE CEPLAN CERC CGT CIDOC

Anticommunist Alliance of Argentina (Alianza Anticomunista Argentina) Minutes of the Council of State (Actas del Consejo de Estado) pension fund administrator (administradora de fondos de pensiones) Internacional Cooperation Agency (Agencia de Cooperación Internacional) National Teachers Association of Chile (Asociación Gremial de Educadores de Chile) Minutes of the Honorable Governing Junta (Actas de la Honorable Junta de Gobierno) National Association of Public Employees (Asociación Nacional de Empleados Fiscales) National Academy for Political and Strategic Studies (Academia Nacional de Estudios Políticos y Estratégicos) National Renewal Alliance (Aliança Renovadora Nacional) (Brazil) Political Adviser (Asesoría Política) Center for Advanced Military Studies (Centro de Altos Estudios Militares) (Peru) Pacific Steel Company (Compañía de Acero del Pacífico) Risk Classification Commission (Comisión Clasificadora de Riesgo) United Brewing Company (Compañía de Cervecerías Unidas) Center for Development Studies (Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo) Committee for Free Elections (Comité de Elecciones Libres) Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (Confederación Española de Organizaciones Empresariales) Center for Planning Studies (Centro de Estudios de Planificación) (Catholic University) Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality (Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporánea) General Workers Confederation (Confederación General de Trabajadores) (Argentina) Center for the Investigation and Documentation of Contemporary Chilean History (Centro de Investigación y Documentación en Historia de Chile Contemporáneo) (Finis Terrae University)

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CIEPLAN CIPIE CNE CNI CNS COAJ COAP CODECO CODELCO CONAF CONAMA CONARA COPPEL CORFO CSN CTC CTI CUT DCU DICOMCAR DINA DINACOS DINE ECLAC Emel Emos Empremar Enacar Enadi

ENU ERP

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Acronyms

CIEL

Enap Endesa Entel

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Left Committee for Free Elections (Comité de Izquierda por las Elecciones Libres) Corporation for Latin American Studies (Corporación de Estudios para Latinoamérica) Center of Investigation for Latin America and Europe (Centro de Investigaciones y Promocion Iberoamerica-Europa) National Energy Commission (Comisión Nacional de Energía) National Intelligence Center (Centro Nacional de Inteligencia) National Union Coordinator (Coordinadora Nacional Sindical) Advisory Committee to the Governing Junta (Comité Asesor de la Junta de Gobierno) Presidential Advisory Committee (Comité Asesor Presidencial) Communal Development Council (Consejo de Desarrollo Comunal) Copper Corporation (Corporación del Cobre) National Forestry Corporation (Corporación Nacional Forestal) National Commission of the Environment (Comisión Nacional de Medio Ambiente) National Commission for Administrative Reform (Comisión Nacional de la Reforma Administrativa) Committee of Parties for Free Elections (Comité de Partidos por las Elecciones Libres) Development Corporation (Corporación de Fomento) National Security Council (Consejo de Seguridad Nacional) Telephone Company of Chile (Compañía de Teléfonos de Chile) Technical and Industrial Company (Compañía Técnico Industrial) Central Workers Union (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores) Democratic Christian University (Democracia Cristiana Universitaria) Carabineros Communications Directorate (Dirección de Comunicaciones de Carabineros) National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) National Directorate of Social Communication (Dirección Nacional de Comunicación Social) Army Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia del Ejército) Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean Melipilla Electrical Industry (Empresa Eléctrica de Melipilla) Metropolitan Water Treatment Industry (Empresa Metropolitana de Obras Sanitarias) (Santiago) Public Shipping Industry (Empresa Marítima del Estado) National Coal Industry (Empresa Nacional del Carbón) National Company for Distribution (Empresa Nacional de Distribución) National Petroleum Industry (Empresa Nacional del Petróleo) National Electrical Industry (Empresa Nacional de Electricidad) National Telecommunications Industry (Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones) Unified National School (Escuela Nacional Unificada) People’s Revolutionary Army (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo) (Argentina)

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Acronyms ESG Esval FBI FECECH FECH FEUC FJGE FLACSO FNT FPMR GAP GDP GGP GOPE ICHEH IFOP ILET INE INI ISAPRES ISE JDC MAPU MDB MDP MIDEPLAN MIR MUN OAS ODEPLAN ORPLAC PC PDC PEM PET PN

493

Superior War College (Escola Superior de Guerra) (Brazil) Valparaiso Water Treatment Industry (Empresa Sanitaria de Valparaíso) Federal Bureau of Investigation (United States) University of Chile’s federation of student associations (Federación de Centros de Estudios de la Universidad de Chile) University of Chile’s student federation (Federación de Estudiantes de Chile) Federation of Students of Catholic University (Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad Católica) Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz Foundation Latin-American Faculty of Social Sciences (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) National Workers Front (Frente Nacional de Trabajadores) Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez) Group of Personal Friends (Grupo de Amigos Personales) gross domestic product gross geographic product Special Operations Group (Grupo de Operaciones Especiales) (Carabineros) Chilean Institute for Humanist Studies (Instituto Chileno de Estudios Humanísticos) Public Fishing Institute (Instituto de Fomento Pesquero) Latin American Institute for Transatlantic Studies (Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales) National Statistics Bureau (Instituto Nacional de Estadística) National Industrial Institute (Instituto Nacional de Industrias) (Spain) Health Pension Institutions (Instituciones de Salud Previsional) State Insurance Institute (Instituto de Seguros del Estado) Christian Democratic Youth (Juventud Demócrata Cristiana) United People’s Action Movement (Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria) Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro) Popular Democratic Movement (Movimiento Democrático Popular (MDP) Ministry of Planning and Cooperation (Ministerio de Planificación y Cooperación) Left Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) National Union Movement (Movimiento Unión Nacional) Organization of American States National Planning Office (Oficina de Planificación Nacional) regional planning office (oficina regionale de planificación) Communist Party (Partido Communista) Christian Democratic Party (Partido Demócrata Cristiana) Minimum Employment Program (Programa de Empleo Mínimo) Labor Economy Program (Programa de Economía del Trabajo) National Party (Partido Nacional)

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POJH PPD PR/PRSD PRODEN PRT PS RN SACRET SAG SERCOTEC SERNAC SERPLAC SERVIU SIC SII SING SNA SVS UCC UCD UDI UN UNESCO

Employment for Household Heads Program (Programa de Empleo para Jefes de Hogar) Party for Democracy (Partido por la Democracia) Radical Party (Partido Radical)/Radical Social Democratic Party (Partido Radical Social Demócrata) National Democratic Project (Proyecto Democrático Nacional) Workers Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores) (Argentina) Socialist Party (Partido Socialista) National Renewal (Renovación Nacional) Transportation Credit Administration Society (Sociedad Administradora de Créditos de Transporte) Agricultural and Ranching Service (Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero) Technical Cooperation Service (Servicio de Cooperación Técnica) National Consumer Service (Servicio Nacional del Consumidor) planning and coordination secretariat (secretaría de planificación y coordinación) Housing and Urbanization Service (Servicio de Vivienda y Urbanismo) central electric grid (Sistema Interconectado Central) Internal Revenue Service (Servicio de Impuestos Internos) northern electric grid (Sistema Interconectado del Norte Grande) National Agricultural Society (Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura) Superintendent of Securities and Insurance (Superintendencia de Valores y Seguros) Union of Centrist Center (Unión de Centro Centro) Union of the Democratic Center (Unión de Centro Democrático) (Spain) Independent Democratic Union (Unión Demócrata Independiente) United Nations United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization

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Chronology

September 11, 1973 A military coup overthrows the government of President Salvador Allende. September 30, 1974 A bombing attack by DINA agents in Buenos Aires, Argentina, kills former top army commander Carlos Prats and his wife. December 17, 1974 Pinochet is appointed president of Chile and head of state. April 14, 1975 Jorge Cauas is appointed finance minister and announces a shock-treatment stabilization plan. Sergio de Castro becomes economics minister. July 23, 1975 Publication in the Argentine and Brazilian press of the names of 119 people who disappeared after being detained. September 9, 1975 A Gremialista movement initiative creates the National Unity Youth Front in Chacarillas. October 6, 1975 A bombing by DINA agents in Rome, Italy, seriously injures the former vice president of Chile, Bernardo Leighton, and his wife. November 27, 1975 Governmental pressure forces the Pro-Peace Committee to disband. January 1, 1976 The Archbishopric of Santiago creates the Vicariate of Solidarity. January 9, 1976 The Council of State is created, headed by former president of Chile Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez. September 21, 1976 A bombing attack by DINA agents in Washington, D.C., kills Orlando Letelier and a US citizen, a woman named Ronni Moffit who was an assistant to Letelier. December 28, 1976 Sergio de Castro is appointed finance minister, replacing Jorge Cauas, who is appointed ambassador to the United States. Pablo Baraona becomes economics minister and Álvaro Bardón becomes president of the Central Bank. March 12, 1977 The governing junta orders all parties, declared “in recess” since 1973, to dissolve, a measure directed particularly at the PDC. September 9, 1977 General Pinochet gives a speech announcing his Chacarillas Plan, which includes the creation of a “protected and authoritarian democracy.” August 13, 1977 The DINA is disbanded and replaced by the CNI.

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January 4, 1978 April 14, 1978 April 19, 1978 July 21, 1978 July 24, 1978 March 21, 1980 July 14, 1980 July 25, 1980 September 11, 1980 May 1, 1981 February 22, 1982 February 27, 1982 April 22, 1982 June 14, 1982 January 13, 1983 May 11, 1983 June 10, 1983 August 10, 1983 August 11, 1983 August 22, 1983 August 30, 1983 September 19, 1983 September 24, 1983 November 18, 1983 November 27, 1983

A referendum called by the government takes place, in which a new United Nations decision condemning human rights violations is rejected and Pinochet’s power is strengthened. A lawyer, Sergio Fernández, becomes interior minister, and Hernán Cubillos becomes head of foreign affairs. Publication of the amnesty law. Creation of the Constitutional Study Group, better known as the Group of 24. General Gustavo Leigh is fired as the top air force commander and member of the governing junta, and replaced by General Fernando Matthei. General Pinochet is forced to suspend his trip to the Philippines. A MIR commando kills Colonel Roger Vergara, director of the army’s intelligence school. Army general Odlanier Mena resigns as head of the CNI and is replaced by Brigadier-General Humberto Gordon Rubio. In a plebiscite a new constitution is ratified and Pinochet is elected president for another eight years. The pension reform that creates the private fund administrators comes into effect. President Eduardo Frei Montalva dies in the Santa María Clinic after stomach surgery. DINE agents kill opposition union leader Tucapel Jiménez. Sergio Fernández and Sergio de Castro leave the cabinet. The peso, pegged at 39 pesos to the US dollar since 1979, is devalued. The government takes control of several banks. The first protest against the regime is held, staged by the national copper workers’ association. Monsignor Juan Francisco Fresno is appointed archbishop of Santiago, replacing Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, as Silva turns seventy-five. Sergio Onofre Jarpa is appointed interior minister. The policy of apertura (more openness to the regime’s political opponents) is launched. The government places 18,000 soldiers on the streets of Santiago to deal with the fourth opposition protest, which ends in dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries. The Democratic Alliance is created by the Socialist Party, the Christian Democratic Party, the Radical Party, Social Democracy, and the Democratic Republican Right. The administrator of the Metropolitan Region (Santiago, the capital), Major-General Carol Urzúa, is killed by an MIR commando. The Popular Democratic Movement is created by Clodomiro Almeyda’s socialist-communist sector, the Communist Party, the MIR, and MAPU. The UDI is created, with Jaime Guzmán as president. The Democratic Alliance organizes a massive rally in O’Higgins Park; more than 300,000 people participate. Creation of the National Union is announced, headed by Andrés Allamand.

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At a meeting of the Chilean Institute for Humanist Studies, Patricio Aylwin proposes bypassing the issue of legitimacy and recognizing the authority of the 1980 constitution in order to open the way to a transition to democratic rule. February 11, 1985 Sergio Onofre Jarpa resigns as interior minister, and is replaced by Ricardo García. Hernán Büchi becomes finance minister. March 30, 1985 Three members of the Communist Party are killed by Carabinero agents in what becomes known as the “case of the men with their throats cut” (el caso de los degollados). An appeals court judge, José Cánovas, is appointed to investigate. August 1, 1985 Judge Cánovas indicts two Carabineros and restricts twelve others from leaving the country. August 2, 1985 As fallout over el caso de los degollados, the director of the Carabineros, César Mendoza, resigns and is replaced by General Rodolfo Stange. August 26, 1985 Leaders of opposition parties and the National Union sign a national accord on the transition to full democracy, an initiative put forward by the cardinal and archbishop of Santiago, Juan Francisco Fresno. September 24, 1985 The Constitutional Tribunal rules that the Election Clarification Tribunal must be organized prior to the succession plebiscite. September 7, 1986 An FPMR commando attacks General Pinochet in Maipo canyon. January 25, 1987 Electoral registries open. Because the military had destroyed voter lists after the coup, Chileans have to reregister. February 8, 1987 National Renewal is created as an initiative of the UDI, the National Union, and the National Workers Front. Ricardo Rivadeneira is appointed president and Jaime Guzmán and Andrés Allamand are appointed vice presidents. April 1, 1987 Pope John Paul II embarks on a twelve-day visit to Chile. June 15–16, 1987 CNI agents kill twelve people associated with the FPMR in what becomes known as Operation Albania. December 9, 1987 Rivadeneira resigns as president of National Renewal after the party is legally registered. Sergio Onofre Jarpa is chosen to replace him. February 2, 1988 Representatives of thirteen parties create the Concertación de Partidos por el “No” to campaign against Pinochet’s succession in the upcoming plebiscite. March 16, 1988 Guzmán asks the board of National Renewal to resign and blames Jarpa for irregularities in elections for the party’s general council, calling on UDI members to boycott the elections. April 20, 1988 National Renewal’s ruling body passes a vote to expel Guzmán, who resigns and creates the “UDI for the Yes” party. August 30, 1988 General Pinochet is named a candidate in the plebiscite by the chiefs of the armed forces and the director of the Carabineros. September 5, 1988 Political advertising starts airing on television, from 10:45 to 11:15 P.M. Monday through Friday, and from noon to 12:30 P.M. on weekends. October 5, 1988 The “no” option wins the plebiscite on General Pinochet’s succession, receiving 54.7 percent of the vote; the “yes” campaign receives 43 percent.

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Chronology

July 30, 1989 December 14, 1989 March 11, 1990

April 25, 1990

December 19, 1990

April 1, 1991 March 4, 1991 February 8, 1992 May 23, 1993

May 30, 1995

October 20, 1995 December 17, 1996

January 20, 1998 March 10, 1998

March 11, 1998

A plebiscite ratifies the constitutional reforms negotiated by the government and the opposition. Patricio Aylwin, the candidate of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, wins the presidential election. The Concertación wins broad support in parliamentary elections. Aylwin is officially sworn in as Chile’s new president at the Congress, with General Pinochet participating. Aylwin receives the presidential sash, the symbol of executive authority, from Senate president Gabriel Valdés. President Aylwin forms the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to expose the most serious human rights violations committed between September 11, 1973, and March 1990. Raúl Rettig presides over the body, which becomes known as the Rettig Commission. In his “liaison exercise,” General Pinochet mobilizes soldiers to protest an investigation by the Chamber of Deputies into money paid by the army to his son Augusto (971 million pesos; approximately US$2.9 million) during the closing days of the regime, for a bankrupt business. Senator Jaime Guzmán Errázuriz (UDI) is assassinated by members of the FPMR. President Aylwin releases the Rettig Commission’s detailed report to the public, exposing 2,279 cases of human rights abuse that resulted in death during the military regime. The National Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation is created to continue the Rettig Commission’s investigation of cases involving insufficient record keeping. In his “berets’ protest,” General Pinochet mobilizes dozens of troops in combat uniform to protest again the actions against his son concerning money received from the army, as well as the prosecution of military members for human rights violations. President Aylwin is in Europe for a state visit, but doesn’t alter his itinerary there. The Supreme Court sentences General Manuel Contreras and Brigadier-General Pedro Espinoza to seven and six years in prison, respectively, for their part in the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in September 1976 in Washington, D.C. Contreras is sent to Punta Peuco prison to start serving his sentence for the Letelier assassination. The National Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation releases its report, exposing 899 cases of human rights abuse that resulted in death during the military regime, bringing total known deaths to 3,178. The Santiago appeals court accepts the first criminal complaint, filed by the Communist Party, against army commander in chief Augusto Pinochet for genocide. At a ceremony at the Military School attended by President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, General Pinochet transfers his position as army commander in chief, held for twenty-five years, to General Ricardo Izurieta, a captain at the time of the coup. Pinochet becomes a senator-for-life.

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September 22, 1998 Pinochet travels to London on the invitation of Royal Ordnance, a subsidiary of British Aerospace. October 16, 1998 Acting on a warrant issued by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón to extradite Pinochet to Spain so he can be prosecuted for the killing of Spanish citizens during his military regime, Scotland Yard agents arrest Pinochet at the London Clinic, where he is recuperating from a spinal operation. October 28, 1998 The British High Court declares Judge Garzón’s arrest warrant null because of Pinochet’s diplomatic immunity. November 25, 1998 The Law Lords reverse the High Court’s ruling, negating Pinochet’s immunity and leaving to home secretary Jack Straw the decision on whether to extradite Pinochet to Spain. December 1, 1998 In police custody, Pinochet moves to a private residence in the Virginia Water section on the outskirts of London. December 17, 1998 The Law Lords’ appeals committee annuls the previous ruling because one of their members, Lord Hoffman, did not disclose his ties to Amnesty International. March 24, 1999 The Law Lords’ appeals committee rules that Pinochet does not have immunity, opening the way to extradition. April 15, 1999 Straw authorizes the extradition of Pinochet to Spain. Pinochet’s defense appeals this decision. June 10, 1999 In the “caravan of death” case, Santiago judge Juan Guzmán orders the arrest of General Sergio Arellano, Brigadier-General Pedro Espinoza, Colonels Marcelo Moren Brito and Sergio Arredondo, and Mayor Armando Fernández Larios, who stand accused of killing opponents of the dictatorship while traveling the country in October 1973. August 21, 1999 At the request of the defense minister, Edmundo Pérez Yoma forms the Mesa de Diálogo, a roundtable comprising representatives from the armed forces and the Carabineros, human rights lawyers, and representatives from the Catholic Church and civil society, to determine the fate of disappeared prisoners. January 1, 2000 Pinochet is charged (in absence) by Judge Juan Guzmán, who has investigated more than 240 complaints against the general for crimes committed during his regime. The magistrate prosecutes Pinochet as the “author” of the kidnappings and murders perpetrated by the “caravan of death.” February 15, 2000 The British High Court rules that the decision on whether to extradite Pinochet is within the purview of Jack Straw. Pinochet’s defense appeal is rejected. March 2, 2000 Straw announces his decision not to extradite Pinochet to Spain. Pinochet travels to Chile after 503 days of detention. March 3, 2000 Pinochet arrives in Santiago and is received at the airport by army commander in chief General Ricardo Izurieta. May 23, 2000 The Santiago appeals court strips Pinochet, as president, of immunity from prosecution in the case of the “caravan of death.” June 5, 2000 At Judge Guzmán’s request, the Santiago appeals court revokes the parliamentary immunity Pinochet has, as a lifelong senator, for the “caravan of death” case. June 24, 2000 The Mesa de Diálogo roundtable completes its work. In an agreement signed by all participants, the military recognizes

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Chronology

August 8, 2000 October 27, 2000

December 1, 2000 December 27, 2000 January 7, 2001

January 10, 2001 January 15, 2001 January 23, 2001 January 29, 2001

March 8, 2001

March 22, 2001 May 29, 2001 July 9, 2001

March 10, 2002 July 5, 2002 November 11, 2003

the abuses committed during the Pinochet regime, including disappearances for which military officers were responsible. The Chilean Supreme Court upholds the stripping of Pinochet’s immunity from prosecution. The Argentinean judiciary requests that the Chilean Supreme Court order Pinochet’s extradition for his responsibility in the assassination of General Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires, a trial to be presided over by Argentine judge María Servini de Cubría. After medical examinations, Pinochet is charged by Judge Guzmán for his involvement in nineteen kidnappings and twenty-seven murders carried out by the “caravan of death.” Judge Guzmán interrogates Pinochet in accord with the most recent order of the Chilean Supreme Court. Following the Mesa de Diálogo agreement, the army and the Catholic Church deliver to the government their respective reports on the fate of 180 of the 1,187 prisoners and disappeared who went missing or were taken prisoner during the regime. Human rights lawyers denounce the fact that the military, though during the roundtable having recognized its role in the execution of prisoners, withheld information. New medical tests on Pinochet begin. The Chilean Supreme Court rejects a request from Pinochet’s defense to remove Judge Guzmán. Judge Guzmán receives the first report on Pinochet’s health, which shows he suffers from mild dementia. Judge Guzmán interrogates Pinochet in his home. Guzmán reorders the arrest of Pinochet for human rights violations in the “caravan of death” case. Pinochet remains under house arrest on his farm in Los Boldos, in Bucalemu near the coast, about ninety-five miles outside Santiago. The Santiago appeals court upholds the charges against Pinochet, but changes them from charges that he is the “author” to charges that he engaged in a cover-up. Pinochet is released from house arrest on bail. Argentinean judge María Servini de Cubría petitions Chilean authorities for Pinochet’s arrest. The request is definitively rejected. The US government reveals thousands of secret documents related to secret Central Intelligence Agency operations in Chile, before and during the military regime. In a divided ruling, the sixth chamber of the Santiago appeals court grants a temporary stay in the “caravan of death” coverup case for reasons of Pinochet’s health (“dementia or insanity”). In a ceremony at the Military School attended by president Ricardo Lagos, General Ricardo Izurieta transfer his position as army commander in chief to General Juán Emilio Cheyre. Pinochet resigns as senator-for-life hours after it’s learned that the Chilean Supreme Court ruled for a stay, due to Pinochet’s health problems, in the “caravan of death” case. The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture is created to investigate cases of loss of liberty and polit-

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ical torture that occurred between September 11, 1973, and March 10, 1990, at the hands of agents of the state. Sergio Valech, former director of the Vicariate of Solidarity (1987–1992), presides over the body, which becomes known as the Valech Commission. July 5, 2004 Judge Guzmán revokes Pinochet’s immunity in the Operation Condor case, a joint operation undertaken by the security services of South American dictators to hide killings. July 16, 2004 An investigation by the US Senate reveals that Pinochet had accounts, unknown to that point, in the amount of US$8 million with Riggs Bank, the first of which was opened in December 1994. September 21, 2004 The Council for Defense of the State reports that Pinochet’s personal fortune amounts to US$16 million. September 25, 2004 Judge Guzmán interrogates Pinochet about the killing of political dissidents perpetrated by Latin American governments in the 1970s and 1980s. November 28, 2004 President Ricardo Lagos informs the country about the Valech Commission’s report on political imprisonment and torture, based on the testimony of 35,000 Chileans who were imprisoned and subjected to illegitimate punishment starting September 11, 1973. Some 25,000 people are recognized as victims of torture. December 2, 2004 The Santiago appeals court again strips Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution for his involvement in the killing of Carlos Prats and his wife. December 13, 2004 Judge Guzmán charges General Pinochet for Operation Condor. January 4, 2005 The Chilean Supreme Court rejects a writ of protection (similar to habeas corpus) for General Pinochet in the Operation Condor case, clearing the way for prosecution. January 5, 2005 General Pinochet is placed under house arrest to await notification on prosecution in the Operation Condor case. A request from Argentina to strip Pinochet of immunity in the Carlos Prats case is rejected because a case concerning immunity is already pending in Chile. January 9, 2005 Judge Sergio Muñoz reports that accounts owned by Pinochet surpass US$15 million, a much larger amount than determined by the US Senate. January 11, 2005 The Santiago appeals court unanimously upholds the decision to free Pinochet from house arrest on bail in the amount of US$3,570. January 20, 2005 The Chilean Supreme Court authorizes Judge Muñoz to send eleven international requests for information on Pinochet’s accounts. January 27, 2005 The Riggs Bank of Washington, D.C., agrees to plead guilty to failure to accurately report suspicious transactions concerning Pinochet’s accounts. Riggs agrees to pay a fine of US$16 million and to provide the Justice Department with all information required to undertake its money-laundering investigation. January 28, 2005 DINA army officers Miguel Krassnoff, Marcelo Moren Brito, Fernando Lauriani, and Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda are sent to Cordillera prison.

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March 15, 2005 June 7, 2005

July 6, 2005

August 10, 2005 October 19, 2005

March 10, 2006

December 3, 2006 December 10, 2006 December 12, 2006

A new US Senate investigation finds that Pinochet, under various names, built a network of accounts with the help of US banks. Pinochet is stripped of immunity from prosecution by the Santiago appeals court for four of five financial offenses (see below) that came to light after the discovery of accounts containing millions of dollars in the Riggs Bank. Pinochet is stripped of immunity from prosecution by the Santiago appeals court for Operation Colombo, a disinformation campaign the regime implemented to justify the murder of 119 Chilean citizens. Pinochet’s wife, Lucía Hiriart, and his oldest son, Antonio, are charged as accomplices to tax fraud in the investigation of the former dictator’s secret accounts in the Riggs Bank. The Chilean Supreme Court upholds the stripping of Pinochet’s immunity from prosecution so he may face trial on four charges stemming from the Riggs Bank investigation: (1) obstruction of justice, (2) use of false passports, (3) modification and use of certificates of the War Subsecretariat, and (4) alleged perjury in a 1989 statement concerning his assets. In a ceremony at the Military School attended by President Ricardo Lagos, General Juán Emilio Cheyre transfers his position as army commander in chief to General Oscar Izurieta Ferrer. Pinochet suffers a heart attack and has a bypass operation. Pinochet dies in the military hospital in Santiago, Chile. A funeral ceremony for Pinochet, as former commander in chief, is organized by the army at the Military School. It is attended by senior politicians, including Senator Hernán Larraín, president of UDI; and RN president Carlos Larraís; along with representatives of business organizations, the business community, and numerous former ministers and undersecretaries of the military regime. The government rejects a state funeral, despite Pinochet’s role as former president, because he died still under investigation for criminal acts.

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Abarzúa, Gustavo: military assignments and government posts, 127(table) Accursed law (Law for Permanent Defense of the Democracy), 111 Ackercknecht, Christian, 135(n46) Acuña, Gastón, 388(n36) Advisory Committee to the Governing Junta (COAJ): Chicago Boys’ neutralization of military officers, 286–298; commanders of, 101(n71); establishing Pinochet’s personal power, 188; formation of, 84–85; organization of the junta’s political power, 183–184; tension with Chicago Boys, 284 Agrarian reform, 36, 146, 309, 378 Ahumada, Jorge, 170(n30) Air force: acceptance of plebiscite defeat, 433; Argentina’s Montoneros group attacking, 42; cabinet portfolio, 205–206; composition of the seven governments, 201(table), 202; criticism of DINA activities, 53; enforcing the weapons control law, 114–115; Leigh’s joint command, 185–186; military officers appointed university presidents, 131(table); opposition to pension reform, 321; organization of junta power, 183; participation in government ministries, 116–117, 128(table), 129–130; pension reform, 321, 325. See also Military Alessandri Cohn, Arturo, 190 Alessandri-Ortúzar constitutional reform draft, 173(n100) Alessandri Rodríguez, Jorge: advocating a presidential system, 194; civilian power groups, 23(table), 24; comparison of key macroeconomic indicators from 1959 to 1998, 273(table); constitutional debates over universal suffrage and presidential

powers, 157–158, 173(nn102, 103); Council of State membership, 174(nn121, 122), 189–190, 217(n71); criticism of Chicago Boys, 363; dissatisfaction with the Council of State, 218(n73); influence on Guzmán, 230–231; opposition to the referendum, 89; Pinochet’s rejecting Council of State report, 159; resignation from Council of State, 174(n123); senate proposal, 156 Alessandrists: cabinet portfolios, 208; civilian power groups under the Pinochet regime, 23(table); composition of the seven governments, 201(table); constitutional draft process, 151; demand for a new institutional order, 194; forcing Prats’s resignation, 62(n26); Pinochet’s relations with, 90; third government, 203 Alfonsín, Raúl, 42, 432 Allamand, Andrés, 375–376, 403–404, 406, 423(n35); council elections, 424(n51) Allamand, Miguel, 235(table) Allende Gossens, Salvador, xxi, 113 Allende government: comparison of key macroeconomic indicators from 1959 to 1998, 273(table); Leigh’s prosecution of ministers, 186, 215(n41); military political participation, 114–116; prerevolutionary conditions, 33–34; Supreme Court conflict over, 150–151. See also Popular Unity government Almeyda, Clodomiro, 373, 418 Altamirano, Carlos, 38 Álvarez, Gregorio, 181 Álvarez, Gustavo, 100(n57) Alvear, Enrique, 57 Amarres (ties), 432 Ambassadors, 207–208, 222(n154)

531

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Ambrosio, Rodrigo, 62(n32), 263(n45) Amigo, Julio, 118 Andraca, Roberto de, 311 Andrade, Julio, 126(table) Anticommunist Alliance of Argentina (AAA), 41 Anticommunist attitudes and activities: Catholic Church’s anticommunist stance, 229–230; Declaration of Principles, 181; expulsion of Supreme Court justices, 55; Guzmán’s defense of political coercion, 239; justifying military retention of power, 143–144; opposition to Allende’s education reforms, 114; Pinochet’s repression of, 79–80; Qué Pasa’s concerns over Chile’s international isolation, 193; roots of Chilean military tradition, 111; UDI’s attempted destruction of Popular Democratic Movement, 399–400; USEuropean opposition to authoritarian regimes viewed as, 278–279 Anti-inflation policy, 363–364 Anti-monopoly law, 301(n55) Antipoverty programs, 257 Anti-Semitism, 169(n27) Apertura (the opening), 372–376; church condemnation of violence during, 379; expanding media influence, 406; media liberalization during, 59; militarization of politics, 384–385; opposition to, 380–382; Pinochet’s appointment of Jarpa, 90; Pinochet’s opposition to, 92; political surveys, 417; pre-plebiscite institutions, 399; radicalization of the Carabineros, 382–384; Rosende and Cuadra’s opposition to, 203 Arancibia, Jorge, 484 Aránguiz, Horacio, 389(n63) Araya, Carlos, 100(n50) Arellano, José Pablo, 285 Arellano Stark, Sergio: caravan of death, 46, 48–50, 66(nn91, 95, 98), 100(n55); criticisms of, 53; Pinochet forcing out, 81; Pinochet’s relations with, 101(n58); view of Pinochet, 66(n92) Arenas, Gustavo, 118 Argentina: border conflict, 191, 218(n76); coup, 1; end of authoritarianism, 432; military institutionalization, 117(table), 180; military regime, 17; post-coup conditions, 39–42; regime leadership, 72 Armed forces. See Air force; Army; Carabineros; Military; Navy Army: Argentina’s Montoneros group attacking, 42; cabinet portfolio, 205–206; COAJ advisors, 84–85; composition of the seven governments, 201(table), 202; control of the executive, 107–108; DINA

control, 96; divisional organization of, 136(n64); enforcing the weapons control law, 114–115; generals in government positions during 1988 plebiscite, 125(table); generals not holding government posts in 1988, 126–127(table); government participation, 116–119, 128(table); military officers appointed university presidents, 131(table); Pinochet as high commander of, 80–83; Pinochet’s personalization of power, 187–188; regional and provincial governments, 120–123. See also Military Army Intelligence Directorate (DINE), 51, 81, 100(n53), 459 Arrest, Pinochet’s, 3, 97, 456–460 Arteaga, Claudio, 259(table) Arteaga, Domingo, 236(table), 255, 265(n59) Arthur, Guillermo, 207 Asimet association, 369 Assassinations and assassination attempts: by Argentina’s Montoneros, 41; attempt on Pinochet, 381; Bonilla’s DINA opposition and mysterious death, 100(n51); FPMR attack on Pinochet, 385; Guzmán, Jaime, 469; Jiménez, Tucapel, 246; Letelier, Orlando, 49–50; MIR killing of Roger Vergara, 361; Pérez Zujovic, Edmundo, 113; Pinochet and DINA’s role in, 96; post-Pinochet occurrence of continuing repression, 25(n15); Prats, Carlos, 79, 104(n141); prerevolutionoary civil conflict leading to, 34–35; Schneider and Prats, 61(n19). See also Letelier-Moffit assassination Assembly of Civil Society (Asamblea de la Civilidad), 384–385 Associations. See Gremios Astete, Ignacio, 70(n159), 253–254 Asylum, 4 Authoritarian democracy, 148 Authoritarian regimes: applying pension system reform, 319–322; defined and characterized, 18–21; economic reforms in democratic and authoritarian regimes, 8, 11–13, 272, 274–275; examples of, 72; exclusionary authoritarianism, 243–244; Frei’s opinion of the Council of State, 189–190; implementing economic reform, 163–164; military dictatorships and military regimes, 192–194; Pinochet’s leadership style and role, 76–78; political context of economic modernization, 9–11; privatization, 310–311; South America’s trend towards, 1; succession question, 395–396; totalitarian regimes and, 21–24, 266(n73) Authoritarian Republic, 144–145

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Authority: centralization precluding corruption, 298(n2); centralization under Prussian modernization, 275; change in military authority under Concertación, 437–438; 1980 plebiscite increasing Pinochet’s, 359–360; presidency as source of Pinochet’s power and authority, 83–89; totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, 22. See also Centralization of power; Power Autonomy: professionalization and autonomy in the military, 109 Avanzada Nacional, 409 Avello, Eduardo, 124 Awad, Jorge, 302(n64) Aylwin, Patricio: “no” campaign, 409–410; using institutional order to move towards democracy, 414–415 Aylwin administration, xxii; comparison of key macroeconomic indicators from 1959 to 1998, 273(table); difficulties of democratization, 450–452; economic moderation, 485; economic performance, 460–461; electoral victory, 477; human rights policy, 452–456; Pinochet relinquishing power to, 71; Rettig Commission, 243; success of, 449–450 Azaña, Manuel, 31–32 Bachelet, Alberto, 449 Bachelet, Michelle, 317, 334, 449 Badiola, Sergio, 122(table), 124, 125(table), 135(n57) Baeza, Ernesto, 52, 80, 100(n48), 101(n60), 387(n21) Ballerino, Jorge, 81–82, 101(nn61, 62), 102(n72), 124, 126(table), 453 Banco del Estado, 435 Banking sector: Büchi as superintendent of banks, 280–281; Central Bank intervention in economic crisis, 369; civilian-military integration in, 118; economic crisis, 177(nn170, 176); government takeover of banks, 167–168; Gremialistas’ savings and credit union, 234, 264(n56); pension system reform, 320–321, 349(n110); Pinochet’s secret bank accounts, 457–459; political and economic results of pension reform, 332; popular capitalism and, 315, 317 Bank of Chile, 165, 167–168 Bank of Santiago, 165, 167–168, 315 Bank robberies, 361, 387(n23), 388(nn27, 28, 29) Baraona, Pablo, 176(n167), 202, 276, 282 Bardón, Álvaro, 277, 282, 435 Barnes, Harry, 385 Barrios Tirado, Guillermo, 111

533

Bartolucci, Francisco, 258, 259(table), 269(n159) Beagle Channel Islands, 191, 218(n76) Belaúnde Terry, Fernando, 32, 134(n25) Benavides, César Raúl, 94(table), 153, 188, 193, 209(table) Berger, Carlos, 49 Bernales, José, 422(n20) Berríos, Eugenio, 459–460 Bertelsen, Raúl, 132, 153 Beyme, Klaus von, 19 Bezanilla, Manuel, 231 Blair, Tony, 457 Boeninger, Edgardo, 137(n80) Boetsch, Eduardo, 62(n26), 86 El Boinazo, 455 Bombal, Carlos, 258, 259(table), 265(n62) Bond, Alan, 351(n147) Bonilla, Oscar: composition of the seven governments, 202; criticism of Contreras, 52–53; criticism of military justice, 185; Pinochet’s seven governments, 200(table); as victim of cabinet shuffle, 80–81, 188 Bordaberry, José María, 28(n79), 152, 172(n78), 180–181 Born, Juan and Jorge, 42 Brady, Herman, 81 Braun, Juan, 301(n51) Bravo, Héctor, 81 Bravo, Julio, 122(table), 124, 125(table) Brazil: business sector’s lack of politicization, 481–482; coup, 1; growing opposition to the regime, 411; level of institutionalization, 22, 29(n112); military participation in government ministries, 17, 117(table); ministry desertions, 93; national security doctrine, 110; noncompetitive elections, 397–398; ODEPLAN study, 288; parties, 225; political institutionalization, 179; as putative source of the “people’s army,” 37; regime leadership, 72 The Brick (El Ladrillo), 165, 211, 276, 280, 282–283, 320 Briones, Carlos, 360 Bruna, Guillermo, 62(n21) Büchi, Hernán: business experience, 222(n160), 223(n161); Chicago Boys leadership, 271–272, 278, 280–281; civilian power groups, 23(table), 24; electric company privatization, 335, 338; fifth government leadership, 203–204; as finance minister, 364; introducing privatization, 312; ministerial instability under the military regime, 1973–1990, 209(table); ministries involved in The Brick, 211; 1989 candidacy, 442–443; pension system reform, 176(n165);

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political role, 16; post-crisis economic model, 369; post-regime solidarity with authoritarianism, 485 Bull, Juan Carlos, 259(table) Bulnes, Luz, 153, 422(n20) Bulnes Sanfuentes, Francisco, 29(n111), 264(n53), 302(n71), 375–376 Burgos, Alfredo, 236(table) Business sector: AFP investment in privatized companies, 329–332; Chicago Boys neutralizing military officers, 287–289; CORFO-controlled companies’ boards of directors, 303(n83); debt renegotiation during the crisis, 368–370; effect of economic policy on, 13; goals of privatization, 307; politicization of, 481–482; pre-coup civil conflict, 33–36; Spain’s economic modernization under Franco, 15 Bustos, Manuel, 360 Cabinet function and personnel: under Allende, 114; apertura as response to economic crisis, 372–376; creation of ministries to accommodate power groups, 205–206; decreasing authority after 1980 plebiscite, 360; economic crisis leading to upheavals in, 363–364; Fernández cabinet, 196–199, 389(n63); generals in government positions during 1988 plebiscite, 125(table); generals not holding government posts in 1988, 126–127(table); longest-serving ministers of the Pinochet regime, 94–95(table); military participation, 116–120, 123–130, 125(table), 126–127(table); ministerial instability under the military regime, 1973–1990, 209(table); ministers of the Pinochet regime from 1973 to 1989, 210–211(table); Pinochet’s appointees, 207–212; Pinochet’s reshuffling, 91–93, 166, 188; post-regime power of authoritarian elite, 485; post-regime support for Pinochet, 479–480, 489(nn2, 7, 8); proportional control of political conflict, 204–207; seven governments during Pinochet regime, 199–204 Cáceres, Carlos: basis for political regime, 173(n108); civilian power groups, 23(table); constitutional debates, 157–158; Council of State, 217(n71); electric company privatization, 339; ministerial instability under the military regime, 1973–1990, 209(table); replacing Lüders in the finance ministry, 364; retreating government, 200(table); seventh government, 204 Caja de Empleados Particulares, 319 Caja de Empleados Públicos, 319

Caja de Seguro Obrero, 319 Calderón, Alfredo, 126(table) “El Camino Político” (Guzmán), 230 Campaign government, characteristics of, 200(table) Campamentos (shantytowns), 203 Cámpora, Héctor, 41 Camps for youth training, 249, 268(nn128,129) Camus, Carlos, 266(n88) Canessa, Julio, 84, 102(n72) Cánovas, José, 383 Caorsi, Atilio, 232, 235(table) Carabineros Communications Directorate (DICOMCAR), 358, 382–384 Carabineros (national police force): as agents of coercion, 4; apertura violence in poblaciones, 379; cabinet portfolio, 205; civilian assassinations, 25(n15); composition of boards of directors of CORFO-controlled companies, 287(table); composition of the seven governments, 201(table), 202; DINA formation, 51; investigating guerrilla groups, 215(n42); junta participation, 213(n17); the junta’s legislative power over, 17; militarycivilian relations, 107–108; organization of the junta’s political power, 184; participation in government ministries, 116–117, 128(table), 129; plebiscite validating use of coercion, 358; provincial government, 122–123; radicalization of, 382–384; terrorist activities against, 39. See also Military Caravan of death, 46, 100(n55), 215(n37), 387(n20) Cardemil, Alberto, 487 Cariola, Patricio, 242, 267(n90) Carmona, Juan de Dios, 112, 134(n21), 153, 190, 217(n71); National Renewal, 404 Carrasco, José, 385 Carrasco, Washington, 43 Carrero Blanco, Luis, 432 Carter, Jimmy, 191, 219(n99) Carvajal, Patricio, 129, 205–206 CASEN surveys, 295 Case of the burnt, 385 “Case of the men with their throats cut,” 382 Cassidy, Sheila, 267(n89) Castellón, Eduardo, 126(table) Castillo Aránguiz, Sergio, 113 Castillo Velasco, Fernando, 302(n63) Castillo Velasco, Jaime, 193, 219(n86), 302(n71), 360, 374 Castro, Jorge, 124 Castro, Ramón, 127(table) Castro, Sergio de: Alessandri’s rage against policies of, 159; the Brick, 282; Chicago

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Boys, 271–272, 280–281; civilian power groups, 23(table); control of Catholic University’s economic School, 276–277; currency devaluation, 167; ministerial instability under the military regime, 1973–1990, 209(table); ministry tenure, 92–93, 94(table); neoliberal economic reforms, 166; Pinochet firing, 363; Pinochet’s ministers, 210–211; Pinochet’s toleration of, 91; privatization, 164; radical economic strategies, 278; recruiting students for the Gremialista movement, 232 Catholic Church: Chicago Boys, 271–272; civilian tolerance of violence against priests, 37; DINA campaign against, 52; FEUC elections, 263(n46); Guzmán’s stance on human rights violations, 241–243, 266(n88), 267(n93); Guzmán’s sympathy with Spanish Catholic political stance, 229–230; Jarpa’s attempt to establish dialog with, 373; limiting Pinochet’s power, 480; National Accord, 376–380; opposition to Allende’s education reforms, 114; Opus Dei members, 27(n69); political aggression against, 267(n98); Portada’s criticism of, 170(n32); Pro-Peace Committee, 192–193, 218(n83), 240, 243, 266(n88), 378; protecting MIR members, 218(n83), 267(nn89,90); referendum rejection, 87; Silva’s resignation, 302(n64), 390(n67); terrorist attacks on, 382–383; voter registration drive, 402 Catholic University: cabinet portfolios, 207; Chicago Boys, 276–277, 284–285; Fernández’s implementing the new political order, 196; Gremialista movement, 227; Gremialista presidents of the FEUC, 235–236(table); Gremialistas’ savings and credit union scheme, 264(n56); limited synchronization, 59–60; naval officers involved in running, 132; ODEPLAN Boys, 289–291, 295–296; ODEPLAN’s joint academic projects, 294(table); opposition success in 1985 FEUC elections, 374; Silva’s resignation, 302(n64); student association’s role in the construction of the Gremialista movement, 231–237 Cauas, Jorge: cabinet shuffle, 188; FEUC candidacy, 300(n26); as finance minister, 166; ministerial instability under the military regime, 1973–1990, 209(table); PDC leadership, 217(n70); radical economic strategies, 278 Caudillismo (leadership by a strong personality), 73, 182

535

Censorship of the media, 373, 389(n64), 390(n66) Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM), 110–111 Center for Planning Studies (CEPLAN), 284–286, 302(nn63,67) Center for Public Studies (CEP), 265(n60) Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality (CERC) survey, 417 Central Bank, 286, 439–442, 465 Centralization of power: economic modernization and, 9–11; establishing Pinochet as central figure, 1 Central Workers Union (CUT), 21 Chacarillas Plan: constitutional draft process, 152–157; constitutional suspension of, 88–89; implementation of, 195–196; Pinochet’s new institutional order, 194–195; as response to Carter administration, 219(n99); Unity Youth front involvement in, 251–252 Chadwick, Andrés: council elections, 424(n51); government participation, 234, 265(n59); Gremialista presidents of the FEUC, 236(table); Gremialistas’ control of ODEPLAN, 290; National Unity Youth Front, 251; post-regime political continuity, 484 Chamber of Deputies, 159–160, 436, 468(table) Channel 7, 57 Charismatic legitimation, 168(n5) Cheyre, Juan Emilio, 122(table), 136(n66) Chicago Boys: antagonizing small businesses, 367; the Brick, 282–283; cabinet portfolios, 207; cabinet shuffles, 202–203; civilian-military integration in government ministries, 118–119; civilian power groups, 23(table); composition of the seven governments, 201(table); conditions of privatization, 310; economic crisis damaging credibility, 362–364; establishing regime legitimacy through economic success, 162–165; failure to support pension reform, 321; in government ministries, 176(n167); Gremialista coalition, 198; Gremialista movement and, 227; Leigh’s relationship with union leaders, 187; limited synchronization, 22, 24; neutralization of academic centers, 283–286; neutralization of military officers, 286–298; partial economic modernization, 10; pension system reform, 317, 319, 333; Pinochet’s civilian support, 89–97; Pinochet’s concessions garnering ongoing support, 90; political objectives and implications of

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modernization, 481; political orientation of, 276–278 Chilectra privatization, 269(n158), 311–314, 334–337, 342–343, 352(n165), 353(nn187,190) Chilgener group, 334, 336, 341–342 Chilquinta company, 336 Chinchón, Winston, 206 Chispas companies, 353(n186) Christian Democratic Party (PDC): the Brick, 282; Catholic University’s FEUC election results, 232, 233(table); Chicago Boys, 276; Council of State appointments, 189–190; criticism of Allende government, 69(n143); dissent as part of new political order, 195; German-Chilean relations, 453–454; Guzmán’s criticism of, 262(n28); increasing political disunity, 36; junta disbanding, 21–22, 65(n82); Leigh’s antagonism, 186–187, 214(n33); 1988 plebiscite, 418; Piñera’s support of, 282; Pinochet’s post-plebiscite repression of, 360; political disunity within, 36; Portada’s criticism of, 147; pre-coup civil conflict, 33–36; reemergence under Concertación, 466–470; referendum reprisals, 87–88; response to coup, 44–45; roots of, 262(n35) Christian Democratic Youth, 62(n32), 263(n45) Citizenship, pension system reform weakening the welfare state, 308, 344(n5) Civilian-military movement, 225–226, 248–252 Civilian Organizations Directorate: function of, 189; National Associations Secretariat, 245–246; National Unity Youth Front, 250–256; National Women’s Secretariat, 244–245; National Youth Secretariat, 247–250 Civilians: civilian support for Pinochet, 89–96; composition of CORFO-controlled companies’ boards of directors, 287(table); Council of State, 189–190; decline in civilian-military relations, 112–113; fear of the 1988 plebiscite, 398–399, 421(n12); Fernández cabinet, 196–199; Guzmán’s preparation for Gremialista rule, 239; impeding democratic transition, 451; importance in economic and institutional development, 18; lack of participation in constituent commission, 153; legislative commission membership, 184; legitimation of exclusionary authoritarian regime, 243–244; military-civilian relations, 107–108; military excluding civilians from political participation, 182; military

legitimation of power, 143–144; military participation in government ministries, 116–120, 129–130; National Unity Youth Front and, 250–256; National Women’s Secretariat, 244–245; 1988 plebiscite candidates, 407; participation in university government, 132; Pinochet’s personalization of power, 187–189; power groups, 23(table); privatization irregularities, 288; provincial government, 136(n68); role in Pinochet’s power structure, 77; seven governments, 202–203; tolerance of violence, 36–38. See also Gremialista movement; Private sector Civil movement, 141 Civil Registrar and Identification Service, 186 Civil servants, training programs for, 295–296 Civil war thesis, 37 Clericus, Guillermo, 132 Clientelism: electric company privatization, 338–343; Housing ministry, 207; municipal governments, 258; pension system, 322–323; political clientelism and economic reform, 364–366; winning popular support through, 274–275; Youth Secretariat, 249–250 Coercion, political: as byproduct of national security doctrine, 110–112; Carabineros ceasing coercive activities, 384; DINA as instrument of, 96–97, 191–192; economic reform and, 9; in Franco regime, 19–20; Franco’s continuing use of, 28(n99); Guzmán’s defense of, 238–243; legitimation of, 139–140; military involvement in terrorist activities, 384–385; post-Pinochet continuation of, 25(n13); post-referendum transition period, 89; against priests, 243, 267(n97); as regime identity component, 3–8; transition period allowing, 161–162. See also Violence, political Colbún-Machicura plant, 341, 352(n176), 354(n201) Collados, Modesto, 203, 314, 364, 372 Coloma, Juan Antonio: Council of State, 218(n71), 269(n157); government participation, 234, 265(n59); Gremialista presidents of the FEUC, 236(table); National Unity Youth Front, 251; postregime political continuity, 484; Youth Day, 255 Colombia, human rights violations, 240 Committee for Free Elections, 416 Communism. See Anticommunist attitudes and activities; Marxism Communist Party: Concertación’s constitutional reform, 436; constitutional

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prohibition, 155; DINA’s violent campaign against, 51; discrediting referendum opposition through, 88; military persecution of, 111–112; 1988 plebiscite, 411–412; 1988 plebiscite participation, 418; opposition to apertura, 380–381; prerevolutionary conditions, 33–34; reemergence under Concertación, 467–468x; terrorist activities, 39; terrorist activities against, 382–383; UDI’s attempted destruction of, 399–400 Community development department, 256 Comptroller-general’s office, 34 La Concepción, Battle of, 251–252, 269(n142) Concertación de Partidos por el “No,” 409–410, 418 Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, 449, 477 Concertación governments: consolidation of democratic institutions, 463–466; dismantling the authoritarian regime, 435–438; economic performance, 460–463; economic reforms, 439–442; human rights policy, 452–456; limits placed on, 442; military acceptance of, 431–433; opposition establishment of, 432; Pinochet’s downfall, 456–460; reemergence of the party system, 466–471; success of, 449–450; Supreme Court appointments, 438–439; transfer of power to, 431–434 Concha, Manuel, 118, 124, 125(table), 302(n75) Conflict, prerevolutionary conditions for, 33 Conglomerates, 10, 324–325, 364 Congress: Concertación’s proposed constitutional reform, 436–437; constitutional changes to, 156; junta disbanding, 44; 1989 electoral campaign, 442–445; post-regime changes in, 484; Senate, 156, 160, 173(nn100,111), 265(n68) Constitutional reform, xxiii, xxiv(n8); Alessandri-Ortúzar constitutional reform draft, 151–152, 159–160, 173(n100); allowing military retention of power, 143; Concertación government, 447(n29), 435–438; constitutional acts, 152–157; constitutional debates, 157–159; Council of State, 173(n102); Fernández’s role in the approval of, 198–199; Guzmán’s influence on the design of, 227, 261(n12), 265(n65); legal-constitutional legitimation, 140, 151; Ortúzar report and Council of State draft, 159–160; “protected and authoritarian democracy,” 4; ratification referendum, 88; supporting

537

democratic transition, 431–433; third government, 203; transition period allowing continuing coercion, 89; transitory articles regulating succession, 395–396 Constitutional Study Group. See Group of 24 Constitutional Tribunal, 399–401, 421(n16), 422(n20) Consulta (referendum), 478; implementation of, 219(n100); Leigh-Pinochet power struggle, 187; noncompetitive elections, 87(table), 398; outcome of, 87(table); ratification of power through, 195; as source of legitimacy, 87–88 Contreras, Manuel: Baeza’s opposition to, 100(n48); conflict with CNI’s Mena, 361–362, 388(n25); Covarrubias’s opposition to, 84; creation of DINA, 66(n99); Guzmán’s criticism of, 240–243; hard-liners, 205; as head of DINA, 8; Martínez’s support of, 130; military delay of imprisonment, 137(n78); pension reform, 327; personalization of terror, 50–53; Pinochet misjudging, 73; sentence, 106(n142). See also DINA Contreras, Raúl, 100(n50) Cooper, Alan, 263(n43) Copper Corporation (CODELCO), 323 Copper mining, 282, 323 Corbo, Mario, 276–277 Cordobaza (protest), 40 Corporation for Latin American Studies (CIEPLAN), 285, 460–463 Corporativism: Council of State composition, 190; Guzmán’s support for, 262(n30); influencing draft constitution, 152–153, 181–182; influencing Guzmán’s political views, 228–230; institutionalizing the political order, 179; Qué Pasa’s concerns over corporative parliament, 193; Youth Day speech, 252–254 Correa, Enrique, 263(n45) Corruption: centralization of authority precluding, 298(n2); electric company privatization, 335; investigations of Allende administration, 215(n41), 479; Pinochet’s accumulation of wealth, 457–459; Yuraszeck’s sale of Enersis to Endesa Spain, 343 Corvalán, Luis, 100(n53) Council of Generals, 85, 121, 124 Council of High-Level Public Management, 466 Council of State: Alessandri’s dissatisfaction with, 218(n73); Alessandri’s membership, 173(n102); constitutional debates, 157–159; constitutional report, 159–160; creation of, 189–190; Gremialista

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participation in, 227; members of, 217(n71); Pinochet’s first constitutional act, 153; Qué Pasa’s criticism of the regime, 192–194 Coup of 1973: caravan of death, 48–50; efficient execution of, 43–44; military decision to retain power, 140–143; Pinochet’s organizational role, 78–80; political violence leading to popular discontent, 32; prerevolutionary conditions, 33–36; right-wing support of, 34–35; Silva’s refusal to support, 378 Coups and coup attempts: Brazil and Argentina, 1; 1968 coup, 134(n25); 1970’s military regimes, 17; tacnazo, 112–113, 134(n23), 146 Cousiño, Ignacio, 329 Covarrubias, Sergio: cabinet shuffling, 81–82; as chief of Presidential General Staff, 135(n54); criticism of Contreras, 53; demand for a new institutional order, 194; development of the Gremialista movement, 239; emergency government, 202; implementation of the Chacarillas Plan, 195–196; military involvement in government ministries, 118; Presidential General Staff formation, 84–85; relations with Guzmán, 228; traditional military government, 200(table) Crav sugar company, 166 Credit union, Gremialista control of, 234, 264(n56) Crespo, Edmundo, 259(table) Crimes perpetrated by MIR and CNI, 361, 387(n23), 388(nn27,29) Crisis government, characteristics of, 200(table) Crisis of obsolescence, 431 Cruzat, Manuel, 165, 282 Cruzat group, 167–168, 315, 325, 327 Cruz-Coke, Carlos, 422(n20) Cruz Martínez, Luis, 253 Cuadra, Francisco Javier: ambassadorial appointment, 105(n133); cabinet portfolios, 207–208; civilian power groups, 23(table); decline of Gremialistas’ power through, 238; National Renewal elites, 487; opposition to apertura, 92, 203, 380; transition government, 200(table); Youth Secretariat, 256 Cuadra, Sergio de la, 209(table), 363–364 Cuba: perception as political threat, 63(n40); prerevolutionary sympathies for, 36; as putative source of the “people’s army,” 37 Cubillos, Hernán, 104(n119); as foreign affairs minister, 197; Pinochet’s neutralization of, 91–92; removal from office, 198, 220(116)

Cuevas, Gustavo, 62(n21) Cumsille, Rafael, 366–368, 389(n49), 390(n73) Cuprum AFP, 323 Currency devaluation, 135(n58), 167, 364 Cuthbert, Sofia, 25–26(n24 Danús, Luis, 119, 135(n58), 302(n75), 363–364 Darrigrandi, Héctor, 127(table) David, Benjamin, 350(n134) Deans’ rebellion, 390–391(n75) Deaths: human rights violations and political violence, 4–6, 5(table); justifying the use of political coercion, 38–39; sociodemographic and political characteristics of human rights and political violence victims, 6–7(table). See also Assassinations Debt, 166–167, 363–364, 366–371, 389(n54), 434–435 Debtors, 370(table) Decadence, political, 148–149 Declaration of Principles: as basis for Chacarilla speech, 194–195; Guzmán’s role in writing, 239; justifying political coercion, 181; military retention of power, 142–144; on privatization, 346(n48); provision for political parties, 225 Decree Law no 460, 101(n70) Decree Law no. 1, 54–55, 168(n8) Decree Law no. 3, 54 Decree Law no. 25, 45 Decree Law no. 77, 64(n72) Decree Law no. 98, 46 Decree Law no. 128, 213(n16) Decree Law no. 527, 216(n56) Decree Law no. 604, 45 Decree Law no. 2881, 51 Decree Law no. 3500, 327 Defense Ministry, 206, 216(n54) Deficit, budget, 166–167, 332–334, 363–364 De Gaulle, Charles, 254 Degollados (those with their throats cut), 382–384 Demichelli, Alberto, 181 Democracy: bringing economic reforms, 272; as consequence of Pinochet’s economic reform, 12; Declaration of Principles’s failure to mention, 143; economic reforms in democratic and authoritarian regimes, 11–13; Guzmán’s rejection of, 237, 262(n33); limited pluralism, 19; opinions by vote intention from 2004-–2006, 486(table); Pinochet’s ouster of Leigh, 187; through economic reform, 274–275. See also Concertación governments; “Protected and authoritarian democracy”

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Democratic Alliance, 373, 380–381, 418 Democratic regimes, privatization in, 310–311 Democratic transition: authoritarian roots of, 483–485; characteristics of, 477; consolidation of democratic institutions, 463–466; continuing power of the authoritarian elite, 485; difficulties of, 450–452; economic policy, 272; Fresno’s seminal work towards, 379; human rights policies, 452–456; 1980 constitution and the Concertación government, 449; public support for a peaceful solution, 417 Deputy ministers, 92–93, 118–119, 212 Detainees, 4 Developmentalism, 2(fn), 8–9, 14–16 Development Corporation (CORFO): AFPs purchasing privatized public companies, 308; Chicago Boys’ neutralization of military officers, 286–298; Chilectra privatization, 339–341, 353(n187); civilian-military integration in government ministries, 118; composition of CORFOcontrolled companies’ boards of directors, 287(table), 303(n83); DINA support, 51; electric company privatization, 335–336; improvising privatization policy, 313–314; introducing privatization, 312; Léniz’s criticism of, 278–279; ODEPLAN and, 304(101); popular capitalism thesis, 314–315; post-coup reprivatization, 309; post-plebiscite privatizations, 440–442, 441(table); privatization’s lack of transparency, 311–312; reprivatization, 164; Valenzuela’s control of, 119 Díaz, Juan Jaime, 236(table) Díaz Estrada, Nicanor, 246, 327 Dictablanda, 38 Dictatorships, 2(fn), 479–480 Diez, Sergio, 375–376; ambassadorial appointment, 29(n111); constitution commission, 151; perception of North Americans as Marxist, 279; political background of, 171(n69); political support of Pinochet, 13 DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), 3, 8; as anti-Marxist organization, 46; Bonilla’s opposition and mysterious death, 100(n51); caravan of death, 46, 48–50, 100(n55), 215(n37), 387(n20); Covarrubias’s criticism ending his military career, 82; dismantling under US pressure, 191; Guzmán’s relations with, 240–243; kidnapping Qué Pasa’s editor, 218(n84); legal incorporation of, 66(n99); Leigh’s support of, 185–186; Letelier-Moffit assassination, 197; media criticism of, 58, 104(n120), 192–193; personalization of terror, 50–53; Pinochet’s continuing

539

support of, 14; Pinochet’s misjudgment of, 73, 76; political assassinations, 25–26(n24), 79; as source of Pinochet’s power and control, 96–97. See also Letelier-Moffit assassination Di Palma, Giuseppe, 143 Disappeared ones: Argentina, 42; Communist Party leaders, 383; DINA involvement with, 52; justifying the use of political coercion against, 38–39; priests, 378; Qué Pasa’s coverage of, 192 Discrimination: economic modernization neglecting lower-income populations, 9–11 Dissent: against Argentina’s military regime, 40; Chicago Boys’ neutralization of academic centers, 283–285; DINA as control against, 96–97; eliminating through synchronization of mediating institutions, 21; Guzmán’s anti-Catholic stance on human rights violations, 242–243; Leigh’s radical stance against dissidents, 185; military action during protests, 384–385; new political orders’ violence leading to popular discontent, 31–32; Pinochet’s protest of human rights policy, 453–456; protests leading to apertura, 372–376; Qué Pasa as the voice of, 192–194; stifling protest against economic reform, 274–275; US-European opposition to authoritarian regimes, 278–279. See also Opposition Distributive pension system, 319, 321, 326 Dittborn, Julio, 269(n159), 290–291 Doctrinal consensus, 145 Donoso, Álvaro, 255, 290–291 Donoso, Fermín, 267(n89) Dual state, xxi, 13–14. See also Coercion, political; Economic policy Dupuis, Gustavo, 132 Durán, Julio, 263(n42) Economic crisis: apertura politics, 372–376; army’s role in, 135(n58); banks’ insolvency, 177(n176); Chicago Boys’ program for addressing, 276, 282–283; discontent with Popular Unity, 271; ending political recess, 358–359; government characteristics, 200(table); growing protests leading to apertura, 372–376; landowners’ tension with the Chicago Boys, 206; neoliberal reforms leading to, 167; political clientelism and economic reform, 364–366; popular capitalism, 314–315; Popular Unity government, 298(n2); radicalization of the middle class, 33–34; renegotiation of the debt, 366–371; stopgap loans, 388(n39);

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triggering opposition growth, 255–256; weakening regime legitimacy, 362–364 Economic equilibrium, 276 Economic identity of the regime, 8–13, 16 Economic indicators, 272, 273(table), 462(table) Economic modernization, 9–13 Economic performance: under the democratic regime, 460–463; developmentalism in Spain and Chile, 14–16; legitimation through economic success, 140, 162–168, 271–275 Economic policy: benefits of Concertación policy to the military, 437; the Brick, 282–283; exclusionary authoritarianism, 243–244; lack of economic justification for privatization, 313; military budget cuts damaging civilian-military relations, 112–113; post-regime success of, 480–481, 485. See also Privatization Economic reforms: under Concertación, 439–442; determining regime identity, 3, 8–13; economic transformation through structural reforms, 271–272; electric system privatization, 334; leading to postregime economic growth, 477; legitimation through economic success, 140, 162–163; political clientelism, 364–366; political context of, 9–11; political goals of, 357–359; post-transition continuation of Pinochet’s, xxii–xxiii. See also Chicago Boys; Privatization “The Economic Report,” 284 Economics school of Catholic University, 276–277, 280 Economics student association, 263(n43), 276 Education and training: Chicago Boys, 277–278; civil servants training programs, 295–296; Franco’s Spain shaping Guzmán’s political views, 230; Gremialistas’ power in municipal government, 257; Guzmán’s teaching career, 230–231; National Associations Secretariat, 246; navy control of, 183; opposition to Allende’s education reforms, 114; persecution of teachers and priests, 37, 62(n34); “president of the republic” initiative, 296–298, 306(nn137,138,139, 144, 145); public social spending from 1970–1998, 274(table); student involvement in Gremialista movement, 261(n11); training youth through the National Youth Secretariat, 249. See also Schools and universities Election Clarification Tribunal, 399–401, 422(n20) Election irregularities, 88–89, 104(n105), 186, 417–418

Elections: Catholic University’s FEUC elections, 231–232, 233(table); Congressional elections from 1989 to 2005, 468(table); constitutional debates over universal suffrage, 157; council elections, 424(n51); election fraud allegations, 62(n21); Gremialistas’ success in the FEUC elections, 232; Guzmán’s election to the Senate, 265(n68); Guzmán’s opinion of, 423(n32); 1989 campaign, 442–445; noncompetitive, 478; noncompetitive elections, 86–89, 87(table), 397–398; opposition success in professional association elections, 374, 390(n72); opposition success in university elections, 390(n75); prerevolutionary fraud allegations, 35; youth voter registration figures, 62(n24). See also Consulta; Plebiscite (1980); Plebiscite (1988) Elections (1999), 489(n15) Elections (2005), 470–471 Electric companies, privatization of, 307–308, 334–344 “11 August” movement, 232 Elmo Catalán Brigade, 186 Emergency, state of: government staffing during, 199; Pinochet as head of, 99(n38); Pinochet’s seven governments, 200(table); state of siege and, 149–150; state of the judiciary under, 54–55 Employment for Household Heads Program (POJH), 272, 365–366 Employment programs, 257–258 Enami company, 311 Endesa company, 311, 334–337, 340–343, 352(nn175, 176), 353(n195), 354(n200) Endesa Spain, 343, 354(n208) Energy industry, privatization of, 307–308 Enersis group, 269(n158), 334–343, 354(nn207, 208) Environmental issues, 275 Ercilla magazine, 58, 254 Errázuriz, Hernán Felipe, 93 Escauriaza, René, 84 Escobar Cerda, Luis: cabinet shuffles, 364; civilian power groups, 24; Fernández’s criticism of economic policy, 388(n41); as finance minister, 90; ministerial instability under the military regime, 1973–1990, 209(table); radical economic strategy, 278; structuralist bent, 388(n40) Espinoza, Miguel, 122(table), 125(table) Espinoza Bravo, Pedro, 49 Estanquero magazine, 144–145, 169(n27) Evans de la Cuadra, Enrique, 151, 153, 171(n72) Exception, states of, 161–162

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Exceptional powers: state control of the judiciary, 55 Exclusionary authoritarianism, 243–244, 250 Excommunion, 242–243, 267(n93) Executive branch: army control of, 107–108; constitutional debates over presidential powers, 157–158; constitutional provision for power of, 155–156; military institutionalization in Argentina and Uruguay, 180–181; personalization of presidential power, 187–189; Pinochet’s provision for executive powers, 216(n56); transitory articles, 358 Exile of political opposition: controlling opposition abroad, 45, 413–414; Pinochet’s arrest for, 456–457; Pinochet’s post-plebiscite use of, 360; Rivadeneira’s call for an end to, 423(n44); transitory articles allowing, 65(nn83,84), 358 Eyzaguirre, José María, 57, 399–401 Falange, 15, 27(n71), 260(n5), 262(n35), 263(n41) Falkland Islands, 17, 450 Family allowance, salaries, and public social spending, 274(table) Fantuzzi, Ángel, 369 Fatherland and Freedom (Patria y Libertad): DINA formation, 51; Guzmán’s involvement with, 230, 262(n31); limited synchronization, 22, 24; political support of Pinochet, 13; prerevolutionary civil conflict, 34–35 Fear of plebiscite, 398–399, 421(n12) Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 52–53 Federation of Students of Catholic University (FEUC): Chicago Boys’ origins in, 277; election results, 233(table), 263(nn45,46); Gremialista presidents of the FEUC, 235–236(table); Gremialistas’ growth in, 232–234; National Youth Secretariat leadership, 247–250; opposition success in 1985 elections, 374; political involvement of leaders, 264(n57); Unity Youth Front members, 251 Federici, José Luis, 202 Fernández, Gonzalo de la Mora, 181–182, 228 Fernández, Sergio: approving the consultation, 86; attempt to save the transition, 362–364; cabinet portfolio, 93, 94(table), 204, 207–208, 228; Chicago Boys, 281–282; civilian-military involvement in government, 119; civilian power groups, 23(table); criticism of Escobar’s fiscal policies, 388(n41); decline in power after 1980 plebiscite, 359–360; Gremialista-Chicago Boy

541

coalition, 196–199, 200(table); as Gremialista leader, 375; implementing the new political order, 195–196; influence with Pinochet, 90; ministerial instability under the military regime, 1973–1990, 209(table); National Renewal’s internal conflict, 404–405; 1988 plebiscite, 417; pension system reform, 348(n82); Pinochet-Leigh power struggle, 202; Presidential Secretariat, 102(n84); professional qualifications, 219(n101); referendum, 219(n100); UDI formation, 238 Fernández Larios, Armando, 50 Ferrer, Jaime, 132 Ffrench-Davis, Ricardo, 452 Fiducia movement, 229–230 Figueroa, Luis Simón, 290 Fillol, Jaime, 252(fig.) Finance Ministry, 284–285, 363–364 Fonasa health fund, 351(n154) Fontaine, Ernesto, 277, 295 Fontaine Talavera, Arturo, 235(table), 237, 265(n60) Foreign Affairs Ministry, 183, 206, 278 Foreigners: forming the “people’s army,” 37; Leigh’s obsession with, 186–187; referendum support, 87 Foreign policy, 191 Foxley, Alejandro, 284–285, 302(nn63,66), 452, 460 Fraga Iribarne, Manuel, 485 Franco, Francisco: funeral of, 191, 218(n77); moderation in personal style, 91; popular support for, 78, 99(n29) Franco regime, xvii; administrative supporters and opposition, 93; cabinet shuffles, 199; changing the governing elite, 29(n107); cruelty characterizing, 28(n97); developmentalism, 8, 14–16; end of, 432; Franco’s death raising concerns over Pinochet’s successor, 191–193; growing opposition to the regime, 411; influence on Guzmán, 228–231, 239, 261(n18); influencing draft constitution, 152–153; military institutionalization, 181–182; ministries, 206; modernization model, 275; movement organization, 77; party decline, 225; post-regime power of authoritarian elite, 485; question of succession, 395; successive regimes, 262(n32) Freedom of speech, 171(n61) Freight transporters, 370–371(table) Frei government: Chilectra privatization, 341–342; comparison of key macroeconomic indicators from 1959 to 1998, 273(table); economic performance,

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460–461; military budgets damaging civilian-military relations, 112–113; ODEPLAN, 289; Portada’s criticism of, 146; tacnazo, 45; use of Carabineros, 213(n17) Frei Montalva, Eduardo, 413(fig.); antagonism towards the junta, 217(n62); Council of State, 189; death of, 456–457, 459–460; pre-coup civil conflict, 33–36 Frei Ruiz-Tagle administration, 465–466, 485; comparison of key macroeconomic indicators from 1959 to 1998, 273(table); dismantling authoritarianism, 449; Pinochet’s opposition to human rights policy, 455 Fresno, Juan Francisco, 238, 373, 376, 378–379 Frez, Gastón, 102(n72), 119, 302(n75), 388(n37) Friedman, Milton, 162, 175(n145) “Friend or enemy” logic, 411, 479 Froemmel, Juan Enrique, 132 Frontel company, 336 Fuentealba, Renán, 45 Fuenzalida, Renato, 126(table) Gaete, Sergio, 103(n102), 132 Galtieri, Leopoldo, 432 Gálvez, Hugo, 203, 372 Gárate, Manuel, 118 García, Germán, 119, 136(n61) Garcia, Washington, 126(table) García Garzena, Víctor, 404 García Rodriguez, Ricardo, 203, 209(table), 382 Garín, Guillermo, 102(n72), 124, 127(table) Gazmuri, Jaime, 263(n45) General Secretariat: army role in, 119; creation of, 267(nn102, 103); Cuadra as head of, 208; destruction of the CNS, 360; Gremialista movement, 227; legitimation of exclusionary authoritarian regime, 244; Pinochet strengthening, 189; public information, 58–59 German government, 453–454 Giaconi, Juan, 206 “Goals not deadlines,” 357 González, Alejandro, 121–122, 122(table), 125(table) González, Guillermo, 132 González, Jaime, 126(table) González, Rolando, 100(n49) González Videla, Gabriel: antagonism towards the junta, 217(n62); anticommunist activities, 111; Council of State, 189, 217(n71); criticism of universal suffrage proposals, 158; Radical Party membership, 217(n61)

Gordon, Humberto, 361 Government systems, 16–18. See also Authoritarian regimes; Democracy; Institutional order Governors: provincial, 136(n68); regional, 120–123, 122(table), 123–124, 123(table) Gradualist economic strategy, 278 Gremialista movement: access to Pinochet, 84; the Brick, 282; cabinet portfolios, 202–203, 207; Catholic University’s FEUC election results, 233(table); Chicago Boys, 198, 276–277; civilianmilitary integration in government ministries, 118; civilian power groups, 23(table), 24; composition of the seven governments, 201(table); construction of, 231–237; demand for a new institutional order, 194; DINA criticism of, 191–192; dissatisfaction with the Fernández cabinet, 389(n63); four stages of, 237–238; government service by student leaders, 265(n62); limited synchronization at Catholic University, 59–60; limiting Pinochet’s power, 480; municipal government management, 256–260; National Unity Youth Front and, 250–256; National Youth Secretariat, 247–250; 1988 plebiscite, 402–406; ODEPLAN staff, 290–291; opposition success in 1985 FEUC elections, 374; origins and goals of, 226–228; pension reform support, 326; Pinochet’s relations with, 89–91; “president of the republic” initiative, 296–298; promoting new political order, 357; protesting election results, 35; referendum support, 87; as regime opposition, 412; regime role, 483; youth involvement, 263(n43), 264(n53) Gremios (associations): apertura politics, 373–374; composition of the seven governments, 201(table); limited pluralism favoring, 206; National Associations Secretariat, 245–246; opposition success in elections, 390(n72) Group of 24, 410, 414 Group of Ten, 326 Gualda, Patricio, 121, 125(table), 136(n67) Guerrillas: Argentina, 38–42; civil war thesis justifying political violence, 37; CNI destruction of MIR camp, 362; military justification of political coercion, 7–8; post-coup presence, 63(n35); Uruguay’s Tupamaros, 63(n46); US military training to combat, 110–111; weapons control law, 115 Guillard, Roberto, 122(table), 126(table), 373 Guzmán, Alamiro, 360 Guzmán, Juan, 66(n98), 97

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Guzmán Errázuriz, Jaime, 252(fig.), 401(fig.); administration position at Catholic University, 276–277; as adviser to Leigh, 214(n25); assassination of, 469; attempt to cancel 1988 plebiscite, 405–406; cabinet portfolios, 207, 212; campaign against the hard-liners, 387(n13); Catholic University as breeding ground for the Gremialista movement, 231–232; Chicago Boys, 282–283; civilian power groups, 23(table), 24; conflict with the hard-liners, 360; constituent commission, 151; control and use of media, 263(n39); converting the military government to constitutional government, 357; Covarrubias’s collaboration with, 84; creating the National Youth Secretariat, 247–249; creating UDI out of the Gremialistas, 375; demand for a new institutional order, 194; expulsion from National Renewal, 406; Franco’s death raising concerns over Pinochet’s successor, 191–193; Franco’s influence on, 228–231, 261(n18); historical legitimation, 148; implementing the Chacarillas Plan, 195–196; justifying continued use of force, 38; military decision to retain power, 141–142, 168(nn10,11); National Renewal, 404; National Unity Youth Front, 250–256; nature of the regime opposition, 387(n14); 1989 candidacy, 443–444; 1988 plebiscite rejection, 433; opinion of elections, 423(n32); Piñera’s connection, 197–198; Pinochet continuing as president, 396; Pinochet distancing himself from, 238; Pinochet’s relations with, 90–91, 391(n76); relations with DINA and the Catholic Church, 240–243; sanctioning human rights violations, 238–240, 266(n85); Senate transfer of power from Pinochet to Aylwin, 464; universal suffrage, 175(n132), 262(n33). See also Gremialista movement Hábitat AFP, 329 Hardenssen, Alberto, 251 Hard-liners: Bordaberry’s views, 172(n78); exclusion from the cabinet, 204; Guzmán’s opposition to, 237–238, 387(n13); Pinochet’s increasing interaction with, 360; right-wing support of Pinochet’s leadership, 89–97 Healthcare spending, 272, 274(table), 310 Health fund, 351(n154) Health Ministry, 206 Health Pension Institutions, 280 Henríquez, Luis, 126(table) Hertz, Carmen, 49

543

Hiriart, Lucía, 245 Historical legitimacy, 140, 143–149 Hitler, Adolf: on statesmanship, 101(n69); synchronization of mediating institutions, 20 Hitlerism, 27(n66) Hitler regime: analytic reductionism, 27(n66); economic policy, 12; Hitler’s power structure, 77 Holding companies, 339–340 Holger, Inmanuel, 111 Homeowners, 369–371(table) Hormazábal, Fernando, 124, 125(table), 353(n195) Hostels for youth training, 268(n129) Housing Ministry, 207 Huerta, Ismael, 34, 114, 173(n113), 214(n22) Huidobro, Sergio, 43–44 Human rights violations: as arena for opposition political action, 414; caravan of death, 46, 48–50, 100(n55), 215(n37), 387(n20); conservatives’ declining support for Pinochet, 479; democratic transition and, 452–456; fatality statistics, 4–6, 5(table); first government management, 199, 202; foreign criticism of Pinochet’s regime, 278–279; Gremialistas’ justification of, 253; Guzmán sanctioning, 238–243, 266(n85); judicial passivity in the face of, 54–57, 479; Pinochet’s arrest, 456–460; prompting first referendum, 86; Qué Pasa’s concerns over policy, 192–193; sociodemographic and political characteristics of victims, 6–7(table); US foreign policy shift, 191 Humeres, Héctor, 86, 103(n89), 217(n71) Hydroelectric power, 341 Hyperinflation, 165 Iansa company, 311 Ibáñez, Carlos, 73 Ibáñez, Pedro, 157–158, 217(n71), 351(n140), 376 Ibáñez Tilleria, Eduardo, 122, 122(table), 125(table), 213(n17) Identity, regime: coercion, 4–8; economic identity, 8–13; Pinochet’s personal identity as factor in, 13–14; structural elements of, 3–4 Ideology: de Castro’s economic view, 280; of the economic model, 481–482; guiding coercion, 20; role in authoritarian and democratic regimes, 19 Illanes, Ernesto, 232, 235(table), 264(n57) Immobility, governmental, 193–194 Independent Democratic Union (UDI): attempted destruction of the PDM, 399–400, 422(n19); decline in popular

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support of Pinochet, 479; establishment of, 226; Gremialista roots, 483; Guzmán’s creation of, 238, 260, 375–376; 1988 plebiscite, 402–406; Piñera’s membership, 301(n50); Pinochet’s arrest, 457; postregime political continuity, 484, 489(n15); reemergence under Concertación, 467; regime participation from 1989 to 2001, 443–445; rejecting democratic transition, 379–380, 433; Senate transfer of power to Aylwin, 464–465; Yuraszeck’s political career, 343 Individual capitalization, 317, 319–321, 324–325, 347(n74) Industrialization: modernization in an authoritarian regime, 10 Industrial social statute (1975), 246 Inflation, 165, 298(n2) Initiatives for legitimacy, 149–151 Inmobiliaria Luz y Fuerza, 339, 342 Inmobiliaria Manso de Velasco, 341 Insider trading, 311, 343 Institutionalization: characterizing regime type, 22, 24, 29(n112); consolidation of democratic institutions, 463–466; Gremialistas’ establishment of, 480; limits on the new democracy, 432; low level of Pinochet regime’s, 478–479, 483 Institutional neutrality, 34 Institutional order: change through constitutional reform, 151–152; consequences of succession, 397–402; constitutional provision for continuity of, 161; Council of State, 189–190; establishing the neoliberal economy, 163–164; Guzmán limiting Pinochet’s power, 237–238; influence of the Franco regime, 181–182; junta control of, 17; limited synchronization, 44–46; military institutionalization in Argentina and Uruguay, 180–181; military objectives for, 478; partial economic modernization and, 11; personalization of presidential power, 187–189; personalization of terror, 50–53; Pinochet’s presidential development, 83–89; Qué Pasa as the voice of dissent, 192–194; question of succession, 395–396; seven governments of Pinochet regime, 199–204; synchronization of mediating institutions, 20–21; weakening of the military, 190–192 Intelligence facilitating coup execution, 44 Inter-American Development Bank, 295 Interior Ministry, 417; Fernández cabinet, 196–199; Fernández’s tenure in, 196; fifth government, 203; special employment programs, 258 Internal Revenue Service (SII), 368, 457–459

International Criminal Court, 456 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 364 Interparliamentary Union event, 384 Inverlink company, 323 Inversiones los Almendros, 339, 342 Inversiones Luz, 342 Investigaciones, 51 Investment: Chilectra’s privatization, 339–340, 354(n201) Invierta AFP, 329 Irarrázabal, Tomás, 232, 235(table), 264(n57) Isolation from international community, 190–191, 193, 218(n77) Iturriaga, Raúl, 124, 125(table) Izurieta, Óscar, 158, 173(n113), 217(n71) Jarlan, André, 379 Jarpa, Sergio Onofre: accepting the “no” vote, 433; ambassadorial appointment, 29(n111); apertura as response to economic crisis, 372–375; cabinet portfolio, 208; civilian-military government, 203; civilian power groups, 23(table), 24; crisis government, 200(table); decline of Gremialistas’ power through, 238; electric company privatization, 339; Gremialistas’ control of ODEPLAN, 290; growing opposition to apertura, 380–382; implementing the apertura, 90; ministerial instability under the military regime, 1973–1990, 209(table); National Renewal elites, 405–406, 487; 1988 plebiscite, 403, 424(n48); Pinochet’s aggressive treatment of, 92; resignation of, 353(n182); tax evasion crackdown against Cumsille, 368 Jiménez, Tucapel, 246, 360–361, 387(n18) Jocelyn-Holt, Tomás, 374 John Paul II, 390(n67) Joint command, Leigh’s, 185–186 Juan Carlos I, 218(n77) Judiciary: caravan of death, 46; constitutional draft process, 151–152; democratic consolidation, 465–466; Guzmán’s defense of political coercion, 240; junta control of, 186; legal-constitutional legitimacy, 140, 149–151; limited synchronization neutralizing power of, 54; 1988 plebiscite, 399; as opposition arena for political action, 413–414; passivity over human rights violations, 479; prerevolutionary civil conflict, 34; prosecuting radical Carabineros members, 383–384; response to new human rights policy, 453; Supreme Court appointments under Concertación, 438–439; upholding weapons control law, 114–116

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Junta: analyzing the military aspect of the Pinochet regime, 16–17; anti-Marxist rhetoric and action, 46–48; composition and function of, 107; Council of State, 189–190; implementing limited synchronization, 44–46; lack of political organization leading to formation of, 179–180; military participation in government, 108–112, 216(n52); organization of legislative power, 182–184; Pinochet’s personalization of power, 187–189; powers allotted to, 213(n16); rejecting democratic transition accord, 379–380 Junta (Argentina), 180 Justice Ministry, 116 Kast, Miguel: cabinet portfolios, 207, 212; Chicago Boys, 277, 281–282; civilian power groups, 23(table); death of, 304(n102); Gremialista movement, 227; municipal social programs, 257–258; on the neoliberal model, 163; ODEPLAN Boys, 289, 291; pension reform, 320–321; “president of the republic” initiative, 296–298, 306(n137); recruiting students for the Gremialista movement, 232; response to CNS leaders’ exile, 360; sectarianism, 301(n47); Unity Youth Front, 251 Kelly, Roberto, 95(table), 289–290, 303(n93) Kidnappings: by Argentina’s guerrillas and leftist organizations, 41–42; Brazilian involvement, 63(n39); DICOMCAR involvement in, 382–384; DINA kidnapping Qué Pasa’s editor, 218(n84); prerevolutionary civil conflict leading to, 34–35; student movements’ involvement with, 263(n43) Kohl, Helmut, 453–454 Konrad Adenauer Foundation, 306(n145) Krauschaar, Helmut, 122(table), 125(table) Labor: agrarian reforms intensifying civil conflict, 36; business-labor conflicts, 283, 301(n59); Chilectra privatization, 339–342, 352(n171); Gremialista support of, 234; labor policy under authoritarian modernization, 275; miners’ strike, 264(n55); opposition to coalition government, 33–34; PEM and POJH workers, 366(table); pension system as casualty of modernization, 10–11; popular capitalism and pension reform, 323; resistance to privatization, 314; workgenerating projects, 365–366. See also Pension system; Unions Labor capitalism, 315, 339

545

Labor Economy Program (PET), 367 Labor Ministry, 202, 246 Labor Plan, 203, 246, 322–323 El Ladrillo. See Brick (El Ladrillo) Lagos, Joaquín, 100(n55) Lagos, Ricardo, 265(n68), 467, 487, 489(n15) Lagos administration: dismantling authoritarianism, 449; economic performance, 460–461 Lamarca, Felipe, 232, 237, 277, 368 Lanusse, Alejandro, 40–41, 72 Larraín, Hernán: FEUC elections, 232, 237; Gremialista presidents of the FEUC, 235(table); Gremialistas’ control of ODEPLAN, 290; post-regime political continuity, 265(n63), 484 Larroulet, Cristián: Chicago Boys, 277; Gremialista presidents of the FEUC, 235(table); National Unity Youth Front, 255, 268(n140); ODEPLAN Boys, 291, 345(n29); post-regime political continuity, 265(n61) Latin America: 1970’s military regimes, 17 Latin American bishops’ conference, 229–230 Lavín, Joaquín, 263(n44), 469–470, 489(n15) Law for Permanent Defense of the Democracy (la ley maldita), 111 Law student association, 232, 263(n43) Lazo, Juan Jorge, 70(n159) Leay, Cristián, 259(table) Lecaros, Raúl, 60 Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR): bank robberies committed by, 361, 387(n23), 388(n29); Catholic Church protecting members of, 267(nn89,90); DINA’s violent campaign against, 51–52; increasing visibility under Allende, 37–38; intelligence facilitating coup execution, 44; Leigh’s information gathering on, 186; priests protecting members of, 218(n83), 242; resurgence through Operation Return, 361–362; terrorist activities, 39, 411; UDI’s attempted destruction of, 399–400; victims of political violence, 6, 382 Left-wing groups: Catholic Church’s relations with, 376–380; Portada’s criticism of, 147; rhetoric of political violence, 37–38; supporting 1968 coup, 134(n25); victims of political violence, 382 Legal-constitutional legitimacy, 139–140, 149–151, 480 Legal-political advisory teams, 183 Legislative branch: the junta’s legislative power, 16–17; military organization of power, 182–184; transition period, 154–155 Legislative commissions, 183–184

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Legitimacy: authoritarianism and totalitarianism, 266(n73); constitutional acts, 152–157; constitutional draft process, 151–152; exclusionary authoritarianism, 243–244; Guzmán’s defense of Franco, 229; historical legitimacy, 143–149; justifying human rights violations, 239; legal-constitutional legitimacy, 149–151; legitimizing authoritarianism, 20–21; military legitimation strategy, 478; 1988 plebiscite providing, 398; Pinochet’s noncompetitive elections, 86–89; Pinochet’s strategy for, 78; political orientation of the Chicago Boys, 276; of privatization, 307; sources and purpose of, 139–140; through economic success, 162–168, 271–272; weakening through efficacy, 362–364 Leigh, Gustavo, 47(fig.); advocating party dissolution, 195; air force participation in government ministries, 129; antagonizing PDC members, 214(n33); Council of Generals, 85; eagerness to use force, 46–48; expulsion of, 253; investigation of Allende ministers, 215(n41); investigation of foreign elements, 215(n42); invoking siege state, 4; junta composition, 182; Leigh-Pinochet power struggle, 184–187; military role in government, 108–109; National Associations Secretariat, 246; obsession with Marxist threat, 215(n43); opposition to Pinochet as president, 101(n68); organization of the junta’s political power, 183; pension system reform following the expulsion of, 321; personalization of presidential power, 187–188; Pinochet-Leigh power struggle, 202; refusal to acknowledge Pinochet’s supremacy, 188–189; removal from office, 88; supporting democracy, 103(n100) Leighton, Bernardo: assassination attempt, 25–26(n24); Catholic University’s FEUC elections, 263(n46); expulsion of, 45, 216(n44); Leigh’s harsh criticism of, 186–187 Léniz, Fernando: cabinet portfolios, 214(n23); Chicago Boys, 278; national accord on transition to democracy, 379; Pinochet’s mistrust of, 91 Letelier, Orlando. See Letelier-Moffit assassination Letelier-Moffit assassination, 25–26(n24), 53(fig.); causing US foreign policy shift, 191; Contreras’s sentence, 106(n142); DINA personnel involved in, 49–50; Letelier’s exile preceding, 65(n83); Pinochet’s support of Contreras and

DINA, 14; political repercussions of, 52, 96–97, 196–197 Leturia, Javier: anti-Marxist rhetoric, 269(n147); FEUC and, 234; Gremialista presidents of the FEUC, 235(table); National Unity Youth Front, 251–253; political careers of National Youth Secretariat leaders, 259(table) La ley maldita (Law for Permanent Defense of the Democracy), 111 Liaison Exercise, 454 Liberalization: Argentina, 40–41. See also Apertura Liberal revolution, 12–13 Libro Blanco (White Book): authorship of, 62(n23); justifying use of violence, 37, 39; voter list tampering study, 35 Lima, Marcos, 313 Limited pluralism, 19–22, 24, 204–207, 436, 483 Limited synchronization, 21–24, 44–46, 59–60 Linz, Juan: authoritarian model, 18–20; military participation in government, 109–110; sources of legitimacy, 140 Lira, Osvaldo, 231, 261(n16) Lira, Samuel, 93, 95(table) Livingston, Roberto, 41 Llidó, Antonio, 378 Local government, Gremialista movement and, 227 Longueira, Pablo, 484 Lonquén case, 57 López, Enrique, 127(table) López Rodó, Laureano, 15–16, 27(n69), 27(n74) Lorca, Gustavo, 151, 171(n73) Low-income workers, 324 Lúcar, Jorge, 126(table), 135(n57) Lüders, Rolf, 177(n176), 207, 209(table), 277, 364 Luis Cruz Martínez Award, 252, 269(n143) Lutz, Augusto, 52–53, 81, 100(n54) Luxemburg, Rosa, 31 Macroeconomic indicators, 272, 273(table), 462(table) Madariaga, Mónica: advocating party dissolution, 195; ambassadorial appointment, 105(n133); cabinet portfolios, 93, 94(table), 212; on the Ortúzar Commission, 172(n83); presidential referendum, 219(n100); on the transition period, 161 Madrid, Alejandro, 459 Magister AFP, 323 Mahn, Alfredo, 79 Maldonado, Luis, 400–401

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Malvinas Islands, 17 La Mañana newspaper, 171(n61) Mandakovic, Tomislav, 313 Manuel Montt Award, 250 Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), 39, 381–382, 385, 411 Manufacturing sector, developmentalism and, 8 Marcel, Mario, 317, 461 Marcos, Ferdinand, 198 Maritain, Jacques, 147 Márquez de la Plata, Alfonso, 92–93, 94(table), 102(n84), 104(n127) Martín, Manuel, 93, 212, 364 Martínez, Francisco, 126(table) Martínez, Héctor, 130, 136(n76) Martínez, Jorge, 130 Marxism: Chacarilla speech condemning, 253–254, 269(n147); coercion as byproduct of national security doctrine, 110–112; DINA’s anti-Marxist activities, 96–97; Gremialistas’ condemnation of, 253; junta’s anti-Marxist rhetoric and action, 46–48; Leigh’s obsession with the Marxist threat, 185, 215(n43); Marxist threat as justification for political violence, 38–40; military justification of political coercion, 7–8; personalization of terror, 50–53; Pinochet’s stance, 98(n17), 99–100(n42); political persecution of priests and teachers, 62(n34); regime’s anti-Marxist discourse, 65(n74); right wing view of church as Marxist, 377–378; student involvement, 263(n45). See also Anticommunist attitudes and activities; Socialism Massa, José, 118 Massera, Emilio, 42 Matas, Manuel, 126(table) Matte, Joaquín, 124 Matte, Patricia, 102(n80) Matte group, 341 Matthei, Evelyn, 484 Matthei, Fernando, xxiv(n7), 129, 136(n75), 325, May Day events, 384 Mayors, 45, 258, 409 McCarthyism, 239 Media: attack on pro-peace priests, 266(n88); Catholic Church radio, 377; censorship suspension during apertura, 373, 389(n64), 390(n66); Chicago Boys’ use of, 277, 283; control of television, 68(n138); coverage of Carabineros’ terrorist acts, 384; Diez’s perception of Marxist media control, 279; Gremialistas’ control and use of, 226–227, 232, 234, 261(n14); Gremialistas’ savings and credit

547

union, 264(n56); Guzmán’s use of, 231–232, 234, 242, 254, 263(n39), 267(n93); historical legitimacy of authoritarian regime, 144–149; ignoring privatization irregularities, 342; military control through government ministries, 119; 1988 plebiscite, 401, 406, 416, 422(n26); pipeline promotion, 354(n202); promoting economic policy, 274–275; referendum support, 87; regime change, 434–435; voluntary synchronization, 57–59 Medina, Guillermo, 217(n71) Medina, Jorge, 60 Medina Lois, Alejandro, 131–132, 286 Melero, Patricio, 255, 258, 259(table) Mena, Odlanier, 361, 387(n20), 388(n25) Méndez, Aparicio, 181 Méndez, Juan Carlos, 251 Mendoza, César, 47(fig.); junta composition, 182; radicalization of the Carabineros, 382; refusal to acknowledge Pinochet’s supremacy, 188–189; resignation from the Carabineros, 384; supporting Leigh’s removal, 88 El Mercurio newspaper, 58, 172(n83), 388(n33) Merino, José Toribio, xxiv(n7), 47(fig.); Council of Generals, 85; coup execution, 43; draft constitution, 159–161; junta composition, 182; junta presidency and, 107, 205; Leigh’s ouster, 88; limiting navy’s participation in government, 129–130; military role in government, 108–109; ODEPLAN Boys, 289; organization of junta’s political power, 184; pension reform support, 325; personalization of presidential power, 187–188; prosecution of Allende ministers, 215(n41); refusal to acknowledge Pinochet’s supremacy, 188–189; timely retirement allowing for a Pinochet-chosen successor, 438 Mesa de Diálogo report, 455–456 Metal manufacturers’ association, 369 Military: accepting democracy, 431–433; Argentina’s Montoneros group attacking, 42; caravan of death, 46, 48–50, 100(n55), 215(n37), 387(n20); Chicago Boys’ neutralization of military officers, 286–298; civilian-military movement, 225–226, 248–252; COAJ advisors, 84–85; coercive element of regime identity, 4–8; conflict with the church, 377–378; constitutional debates over presidential powers, 158; constitutional provision for, 160–161; CORFOcontrolled boards of directors, 287(table),

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303(n83); coup execution, 43–44; criticism of DINA activities, 53; decision to retain power, 168(nn8,9,11); decline in civilian-military relations, 112–113; DINA formation, 51, 96–97; dismantling the authoritarian regime, 435–438; ending the apertura, 384–385; failure to benefit from privatization, 311; government participation, 116–120, 128(table); government participation without politicization, 108–112; growing participation in Allende government, 114–116; high level of government participation, 107–108; impeding democratic transition, 450–452; importance of government participation, 123–130; institutional support of Pinochet regime, 11; justifying the use of violence, 38–40; La Moneda bombing, 185; laws passed after the 1988 plebiscite, 439(table); Leigh’s ouster, 88; military regimes, 39–42, 192; mistrust of pension reform, 324–326; national security doctrine, 110–111; new institutional order and a weakened military, 190–192; objectives of new political order, 478; pension deficit, 333, 349(n107); Pinochet regime as military dictatorship, 192; Pinochet’s career, 78–80, 99(nn34,36); Pinochet’s identity as head of, 13, 80–83; Pinochet’s supporters for 1988 plebiscite, 407(table); postcoup retention of power, 140–143; prerevolutionary institutional politicization, 34–35; regime analysis strategy, 16–18; regional and provincial governments, 120–123; response to Rettig Commission, 453–455; seizing control of St. George’s School, 62(n34); slowing constitutional draft process, 151–152; Supreme Court’s lack of judicial authority, 55; university system participation, 130–132; violence as response to protest against Jarpa’s economic policy, 373. See also Air force; Army; Carabineros; Junta; Navy Millas, Orlando, 114 Miners’ strike, 234, 264(n55) Minimalist democracy, 230 Minimum Employment Program (PEM), 257–258, 272, 365–366 Minimum wage: debt renegotiation and, 367; proposed elimination of, 177(n173); salaries, family allowances, and public social spending from 1970 to 1998, 274(table) Mining industry, 234, 264(n55), 282, 323 Ministries. See Cabinet function and personnel; specific ministries

Misappropriation of funds by Pinochet, 457–459 Modernization: partial economic modernization, 9–11, 275; political context of, 9–11; political objectives and implications of, 481–483; Prussian modernization in Spain and Chile, 14–16, 275; seven modernizations thesis, 282. See also Economic policy; Economic reforms; Privatization Moffit, Ronni. See Letelier-Moffit assassination Molina, Arsenio, 255 Molina, Sergio, 295, 379, 416 La Moneda, Pinochet’s relocation to, 359 La Moneda bombing, 4, 43, 46, 66(n89), 185 Monetarism, 15, 162, 283 Monopolies, electric companies, 335 Montagna, Aldo, 422(n20) Montero, Enrique, 363–364 Montoneros, 40–42 Morales Bermúdez, Manuel, 72 Moreira, Iván, 258, 259(table) Morel, Enrique, 100(n55) Moren Brito, Marcelo, 49–50 Movement organization, Franco’s, 77 Mujica, Federico, 326–327 Mujica, Rodrigo, 277 Municipal government, Gremialista involvement in, 256–260 Municipalization, 257 Muñoz, Sergio, 458 National Academy for Political and Strategic Studies (ANEPE), 110–111, 239 National Accord, 376–380 National Agricultural Society, 206, 326, 390(n73) National Association of Public Employees, 360 National Associations Secretariat, 245–246, 360 National builders’ association, 206, 350(n129) National Chamber of Commerce, 73, 206, 222(n147) National Commission for Administrative Reform (CONARA), 85–86 National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, 42 National Corporation for Reparation and Reconciliation, 5–6 National Directorate of Social Communication (DINACOS), 58–59, 119, 189, 254, 417 National Energy Commission, 336, 352(n176) National Intelligence Center (CNI): DICOMCAR’s conflict with, 383–384; DINA’s conversion into, 97; estimating

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the size and scope of DINA, 51; increasing violence and power of, 361–362, 388(nn27,28); kidnappings as retaliation for protests, 385; plebiscite validating use of coercion, 358; replacing the DINA, 5 National Intelligence Directorate (DINA). See DINA Nationalism, 86–87, 147 National Mining Society, 73 National Party (PN): the Brick, 282; civilian power groups, 23(table), 24; creation of, 29(n110); Gremialista involvement at the University of Chile, 261(n11); 1988 plebiscite, 402; Pinochet’s civilian support, 89–97; Pinochet’s relations with, 90; post-coup dissolution of, 44–45 National Planning Office. See ODEPLAN National Properties Ministry, 205 National Renewal (RN): constitutional reform, 435–436; deputies’ participation in the military regime, 443(table); impeding democratic transition, 451; moving away from Pinochet regime, 484–485; 1989 electoral campaign, 443–445; political continuity, 487; preempting Guzmán’s party formation, 260; reemergence under Concertación, 467–471; Rivadeneira’s resignation, 424(n50); senators participation in the military regime, 444(table); supporting Pinochet’s candidacy, 424(n46); UDI-NR coalition for 1988 plebiscite, 403–406 National Security Council (CSN), 143, 160, 399, 436 National security doctrine, 18, 110–111, 143, 191 National Union Coordinator (CNS), 360–361 National Union Movement (MUN), 228, 255–256, 261(n11), 375–376, 402–406 National Unity Youth Front (Frente Juvenil de Unidad Nacional), xvii–xviii, 87, 227, 250–256 National Women’s Secretariat, 244–245, 267(n106), 409 National Workers’ Front (FNT), 402–406 National Youth Secretariat. See Youth Secretariat Natural gas, 341 Natural resource exploitation, 275 Navarrete, Mario, 122(table), 125(table) Navarro Rubio, Mariano, 27(n69) Navy: acceptance of plebiscite defeat, 433; Argentina’s Montoneros group attacking, 42; the Brick, 283; coup execution, 43–44; criticism of DINA activities, 53; economic liberalization, 165; emergency government, 199, 202; enforcing the

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weapons control law, 114–115; justifying the use of political coercion, 39; legislative powers, 107; Merino’s retirement allowing for a Pinochet-chosen successor, 438; military officers appointed university presidents, 131(table); military participation in government ministries, 116–118, 128(table), 129–130, 205–206; organization of junta power, 183; pension reform, 325; regional and provincial governments, 120; seven governments composition, 201(table). See also Military Nazi regime: communist support of, 61(n4); social modernization, 12; synchronization of mediating institutions, 20 Neoliberalism, 272; Chicago Boys’ economic program, 8–9; legitimacy through economic efficacy, 162–168; pension reform, 321. See also Economic policy Nepotism, 93, 104(n133), 212 Neutrality, institutional, 34–35 New authoritarianisms, 477 New Democracy Group, 326 New institutional order. See Institutional order New militarism, 17 Newspapers. See Media Nicaragua, political parties in, 225 “No” campaign, 409–410, 418–420, 422(n26) Noncompetitive elections, 86–89 Nonpension benefits, 352(n160) Normal School, Angol, Chile, 115 Noticias de Última Hora newspaper, 57 Novoa, Jovino, 265(n62), 401(fig.), 484 Núñez, Hernán, 406 Núñez, Jaime, 126(table) Ñuño, Sergio, 100(n50) ODEPLAN (National Planning Office): applying Chicago Boys’ policies, 163; attracting Gremialistas to, 290–291; Büchi’s control of, 280; Catholic University’s cooperation with, 295–296; Chadwick’s involvement with, 265(n59); Chicago Boys neutralizing military officers, 288; civilian power groups, 24; CORFO and, 304(n101); executive staff, 292–293(table), 304(n114); Gremialistas’ loss of influence through, 238; introducing privatization, 312; joint academic project with Catholic University, 294(table); municipalization, 257; popular capitalism and, 315, 317; post-coup growth and importance, 289–298; SERPLACs and ORPLACs, 304(n97); Yuraszeck as deputy director of, 338–339 Ojeda, Carlos, 125(table) Old militarism, 17 Olivares, José Miguel, 236(table), 255

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Onganía, Juan Carlos, 40–41, 72, 169(n13) Operation Colombo, 52 Operation Return, 361 Opposition: to the apertura, 380–382; Council of State as semi-opposition, 189–190; debt renegotiation as answer to, 366–367; 1988 plebiscite participation, 398–399, 410–412, 416–420; “no” campaign for 1988 plebiscite, 409–410; noncompetitive elections, 397–398; political action arenas during the 1988 plebiscite, 412–416; transition preempting, 358. See also Dissent Opus Dei, 27(n69) Organic Constitutional Law of the Armed Forces, 450 Organic democracy, 179 Organization of American States (OAS), 193, 413 Orpis, Jaime, 234, 236(table), 255, 484 Orrego Vicuña, Claudio, 266(n85) Ortúzar Commission, 151–153, 157–160, 171(n71), 172(nn76,83), 173(n101), 190 Ortúzar Escobar, Enrique, 151, 217(n71) O’Ryan, Jorge, 132 Ossa Pretot, Sergio, 113 Otero, Miguel, 238 Ovalle, Jorge, 151, 172(n83), 214(n25) Pacific Steel Company (CAP), 313–314, 316(table) Palacios, Pedro, 100(n55), 132 Panal company, 288, 310 Paraguay: party support for authoritarian regimes, 225, 260(n4); regime leadership, 72 Parallel advisers, Pinochet’s, 91–92, 104(n115), 360, 375, 387(n12) Paramilitary organizations. See Guerrillas Paredes, Fernando, 100(n55) Parera, Carlos, 127(table), 454 Parliamentarian Republic, 148–149 Parliamentary regime, 171(n66) Partial economic modernization, 9–11, 275 Parties, political: constitutional debates over universal suffrage and, 157–158; demand for a new institutional order, 195; Gremialistas’ function as, 483; Guzmán’s UDI, 375; importance of student movements in constructing, 231; introduction of the two-party system, 29(n109); junta disbanding, 44–45, 65(nn76,82), 153; legalization through 1998 plebiscite, 398; 1988 plebiscite organization, 402–405, 412–415; Pinochet regime’s lack of, 225–226; Pinochet’s dissolution of, 410–412; political institutionalization, 179–180; Portada’s

criticism of, 146; prerevolutionary political violence, 35; reemergence under Concertación, 466–471; suspension of, 21–22; UDI’s attempted destruction of Popular Democratic Movement, 399–400; Unity Youth Front as beginning of Guzmán’s party, 250–251. See also Christian Democratic Party; Independent Democratic Union; other specific parties La Partitocracia (The Partyarchy) (Fernández), 181–182 Party for Democracy, 467, 469 Pascal, Andrés, 242, 267(n90) Passicot, Andrés, 286 Patronage: AFP investment in privatized companies, 329–332; neutralizing small business discontent, 366–371; for taxi drivers, 389(n53) “Pay as you go” scheme, 317, 322 Pehuenche hydroelectric plant, 341 Peña, Jorge, 49 Pension entities, 319 Pension fund administrators (AFP): Chilectra privatization, 341–342; concerns over stock market investment, 329, 350(n136), 351(n140); creation of, 198, 348(n102); Endesa shares, 354(n200); individual capitalization pension system, 317, 319; member organizations, 350(n129); pension fund concentration, 328(table), 329, 330(table); Piñera’s pension reform initiative, 323; political and economic results of pension reform, 332–334; popular capitalism and, 315; profile of board members elected by, 482(table); purchasing privatized public companies, 308; role in pension reform, 329–330; who bought public companies, 316(table) Pension fund concentration, 330(table) Pension system: AFP investment in privatized companies, 329–332; the Brick’s recommendations for, 283; as casualty of modernization, 10–11; changes in the fund system, 1981–2005, 318(table); military mistrust of reforms, 324–326; nonpension benefits, 352(n160); ODEPLAN role in pension reform, 289; partial modernization, 275; Piñera’s privatization of, 198; political and economic results of reforms, 332–334; political arguments behind reforms, 322–324; private pension system concentration, 328(table), 330(table); privatization scheme, 319–322; recovering funds for pensioners, 176(n165); transparency in AFP’s pension fund investment, 351(n148); union support for reforms, 326–329

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Penta Group, 323 “People’s army,” 37 People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), 40–41 Pérez, Victor, 255, 484 Pérez de Arce, Hermógenes, 422(n20) Pérez Yoma, Edmundo, 455 Pérez Zujovic, Edmundo, 35, 113 Peri, René, 94–95(table) Perón, Isabel, 41 Perón, Juan Domingo, 40–41 Peronism, 41 Peronist government, 39–42 Personal identity as regime pillar, 13–14 Personalization of power, Pinochet’s: army high command, 80–83; characterizing the regime, 478–479; charismatic legitimation and, 168(n5); Declaration of Principles’ rejection of, 182; Guzmán’s limiting, 237–238, 265(n65); leadership style, 76–78; political order’s failure to institutionalize, 180; popular support, 71–76; reducing junta’s authority, 187–189; reinforcing, 359–361 Personalization of terror, 50–53 Peru: avoiding violence during coup, 32; increasing tension with, 191; military regime, 28(n84); national security doctrine, 110; regime leadership, 72 Petrodow company, 115 Philippi, Bruno, 336, 341–342, 352(n176) Philippi, Cristóbal, 291 Philippi Izquierdo, Julio, 217(n71), 400–401 Philippines visit, 118, 135(n53), 198, 220(n117) Piñera, Sebastián, 484 Piñera Echeñique, José: cabinet portfolios and tenure, 93; Catholic University’s FEUC elections, 263(n46); Chicago Boys, 278, 282; Chilectra privatization, 353(n188); eliminating minimum wage, 177(n173); the Fernández cabinet, 197; pension reform initiative, 321–322, 350(n128); pension system inequalities, 320; political sense, 220(113); response to CNS leaders exile, 360; third government, 203; UDI membership, 301(n50) Pinochetists, 253–254 Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto, 47(fig.), 401(fig.); anticommunist activities, 111–112; approving pension system reform, 321–322; army high command, 80–83, 108; cabinet appointments, 207–212; Chacarillas speech, 253–254, 269(n151); confidence in economic model, 397; Council of State, 189–190; criminal responsibility for atrocities, 488–489; criticism of Guzmán and the Gremialistas, 391(n76); DINA as source of power and

551

control, 96–97; DINA creation, 46; downfall of, 456–460; draft constitution, 159–161; FPMR attack on, 385; hardliners’ relations with, 204–205; irregular land purchase, 390(n65); as junta president, 182–183; lack of authority over military branches, 109; leadership style, 76–78; Leigh-Pinochet power struggle, 184–187; on military retention of power, 141–142; military support for 1988 plebiscite, 407(table); misappropriation of funds, 386(n10), 457–459; National Youth Secretariat, 247–249; noncompetitive elections, 86–89; opinions by vote intention from 2004–2006, 486(table); pension reform support, 325–326, 349(n110); personal and political roles in the regime, 479–480; Philippines visit, 198, 220(n117); plebiscite defeat, 433–434; popular support for, 71–72, 74(table)–75(table); presidency as source of power and authority, 83–89; professional background, 78–80; reaction to new human rights policies, 452–456; regional tours before 1988 plebiscite, 407–409; rejecting Council of State report, 159; rejecting Fernández’s economic and political plan to save the transition, 362–363; seven governments under, 199–204; Youth Day, 253–255; youth training camps, 249. See also Personalization of power, Pinochet’s Pipeline construction, 341–342 Pisagua detention camp, 99–100(n42) Planning and coordination secretariat (SERPLAC), 290–291, 305(n116) Plan Z, 37, 169(n20), 186 Plaza Baquedano, 384 Plebiscite (1980): economic status during, 165–166; as election transformation, 478; Fernández’s role in, 198; Gremialistas’ waning power, 237–238; outcome of noncompetitive elections, 87(table); pension reform initiative, 321–322; Pinochet’s response to election victory, 358–359 Plebiscite (1988): as beginning of democratic transition, xxii–xxiii; Chilectra’s privatization preceding, 340; conflict among regime supporters, 402–407; generals in government positions during, 125(table); military acceptance of “no” vote, 431–433; “no” campaign, 409–410; opposition arena’s for political action, 412–416; opposition’s decision to participate, 416–420; outcome of noncompetitive elections, 87(table); Pinochet’s attempt to alter results,

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xxiv(n7); Pinochet’s campaign, 407–409; Pinochet’s expectation, 398; Pinochet’s response to the “no” vote, 433–435; Pinochet’s self-fulfilling prophecy, 410–412; political objectives of privatization, 308–309; predicting voter turnout, 418(table); regime change as reform strategy, 2; regulating succession, 395–396; transition government leading to, 358; voting irregularities, 401, xxiv(n7). See also Democracy, Chile as Pluralism, xxiii; constitutional limits on, 155; draft constitution, 160; opposition to Allende’s education reforms, 114; Pinochet’s ties with civilian groups, 89; proportional control of political conflict, 204–207; UDI’s attempted destruction of Popular Democratic Movement, 399–400 Poblaciones, 203, 382 Poblete, Orlando, 102(n84) Podlech, Carlos, 221(n146) Poduje, Miguel Angel, 23(table), 118, 203, 207, 405–406, 408 Police brutality, 4. See also Coercion, political Political Adviser (ASEP), 265(n69) Political clientelism, 364–366 Political consensus, 145 Political institutionalization, 196 Political order. See Institutional order Política y Espíritu magazine, 45, 284 Politics: AFP investment in privatized companies, 331–332; behind privatization, 312–313; decline in civilian-military relations, 112–113; developmentalism in Spain and Chile, 15–16; economic reform as politically driven idea, 3; growing military participation in Allende government, 114–116; historical legitimacy of authoritarian regime, 143–146; military participation in government ministries, 116–120, 123–130; military participation in regional and provincial governments, 120–123; pension reform arguments, 322–324; Pinochet’s political role, 78; political context of economic reform, 9–11; political institutionalization, 179–180; political objective of privatization, 307; political orientation of the Chicago Boys, 276–278; popular capitalism, 314–317; prerevolutionary loss of institutional neutrality, 34–35; promulgating the constitutional acts, 153; regime analysis strategy, 16 Ponce Lerou, Julio, 311 Popular capitalism, 311, 314–317, 316(table), 323, 327, 331, 335, 340 Popular Democratic Movement, 399–400, 418

Popular support, Pinochet’s, 74(table)–75(table); continuation through the 1980s, 14; post-transition support of Pinochet, 3; waning in the face of corruption charges, 479 Popular Unity government, xxi; anticommunism justifying military retention of power, 143–144; Catholic University’s FEUC elections, 263(n45); Chicago Boys’ struggle against, 277; coup execution, 4, 44–45; economic failure, 271, 298(n2); Gremialista movement as opposing force, 232, 234; Guzmán blaming PU for human rights violations, 241; opposition to Allende’s education reforms, 114; revolutionary change through force, 32. See also Allende government Portada magazine: Alessandri advocating a presidential system, 194; influence of editorialists on Guzmán, 230–231; Pinochet’s neutralizing the opposition, 91–92; publishing history, 169(n28), 170(n31); regime legitimation through, 144–149 Portales, Diego, 145, 147–148, 254 Portugal, 2 Poverty reduction programs, 177(n168), 257, 281, 295–296 Power: AFP investment power, 308, 331–332; consolidating power in municipal governments, 256–258; constitutional debates over presidential powers, 157–158; Declaration of Principles’ rejection of personalization of power, 182; DINA as source of Pinochet’s, 96; electric, 336; executive power, 157–158, 216(n56), 839; factors contributing to Pinochet’s longevity, 2–3; Guzmán limiting Pinochet’s, 237–238; Guzmán’s admiration for Franco, 229; the junta’s legislative power, 16–17, 213(n16); junta’s seizure of, 43–44; Leigh-Pinochet power struggle, 184–187; military institutionalization in Argentina and Uruguay, 180–181; military organization of legislative power, 182–184; power structures in totalitarian regimes, 77; presidency as source of Pinochet’s power and authority, 83–89; separation of powers, 150–151; totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, 22; use of power characterizing regimes, 21. See also Centralization of power; Gremialista movement; Personalization of power, Pinochet’s Prado, Hugo, 126(table) Prado, Jorge, 93, 94(table) Prat, Jorge, 29(n110), 145

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Prats, Carlos: coup preparation, 61(nn17,19); DINA assassination of, 25–26(n24), 52, 99(n41), 104(n141); forced resignation of, 35–36, 62(n26); military’s economic needs, 113; ministry appointment, 114; Pinochet’s connection to, 79; separation of powers, 171(n63); tacnazo, 134(n23) La Prensa newspaper, 57–58 Presidency as source of Pinochet’s power and authority, 83–89 Presidential Advisory Committee (COAP), 85 Presidential General Staff: apertura, 372; Contreras’s opposition, 53; formation of, 84–85; importance of stability, 92; military control of, 135(n54); ministerial rank, 205; proportional cabinet representation, 206–207 Presidentialism, 155–156 Presidential residence, 386(n10) Presidential Secretariat: organization and staffing of, 85–86; proportional cabinet representation, 206–207; staffing and function of, 102(n83) “President of the republic” initiative, 296–298, 306(nn137,138,139,144) Priests: political violence against, 37, 62(n34), 267(n97), 378; protecting victims of human rights violations, 242–243; sheltering MIR members, 218(n83). See also Catholic Church Prieto, Alfredo, 92, 104(n133), 197–198 Prieto Gándara, Gonzalo, 55, 151, 188, 214(n23) Primo de Rivera, José Antonio, 219(n91), 228 Private property, political importance of, 309, 314 Private research centers, 415 Private sector: distrust of businessmen, 481; goals of privatization, 307; partial modernization, 275; third state of privatization policy, 309–310. See also Civilians Privatization: AFP investment in privatized companies, 329–332; CORFO decisions after the 1988 plebiscite, 441(table); economic justification for, 345(n16); electric companies, 334–344, 354(n199); irregularities, 288; neoliberal economic model, 164–165; partial modernization, 275; pension system, 319–322; political objectives of, 307–309, 312–313; politicization of, 482; popular capitalism, 314–317; profile of board members elected by AFPs, 482(table); resumption during economic crisis, 369; three stages of privatization policy, 309–312; who bought public companies, 316(table) Proclamation of Youth, 252–253

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Professionalizing the military, 108–109 Propaganda: pushing neoliberal economic reforms, 275. See also Libro Blanco Pro-Peace Committee, 192–193, 218(n83), 240, 243, 266(n88), 378, 413 “Protected and authoritarian democracy,” 4; developmentalism as legitimization for, 8–9; dismantling the authoritarian regime, 435–438; Franco regime shaping Guzmán’s views on, 230; Guzmán’s influence on the institutional architecture of, 227, 261(n12); new constitution reflecting, 153–156; as opposition to socialism, 11; plebiscite defining, 396; third government, 203 Protests. See Dissent Provida AFP, 327, 329 Provincial government, military participation in, 120–124, 123(table), 136(n68) Prussian modernization, 10, 14–16, 111, 275 Public defense expenditure as percentage of GDP, 437(fig.) Public health, 351(n154) Public opinion on 1988 plebiscite, 417 Public service, effect of limited synchronization, 45–46 Public Works Ministry, 205 Puelma, Hugo León, 202 Puro Chile newspaper, 57 Quaas, Richard, 127(table) Qué Pasa magazine: Council of State formation, 153; coverage of Carabineros’ terrorist acts, 384; criticism of pro-peace groups, 218(n83); criticism of the DINA, 58, 104(n120); DINA kidnapping the editor of, 218(n84); Pinochet’s neutralizing the opposition, 91–92; Vial’s history with, 145; as voice of dissent, 192–194 Quintana, Carmen Gloria, 385 Quinteros, Adolfo, 367 Quota system for military involvement in government ministries, 118 Radical Party (PR), 217(n61), 263(n42), 466–470 Radical Social Democratic Party (PRSD), 466–470 Radio Balmaceda, 45, 58 Radio Chilena, 58 Radio Cooperativa, 58 Ramírez, Francisco, 126(table) Ramona Parra Brigade, 186 Rancagua, Chile, 116, 135(nn46,47) Rank, ministerial, 205 Realidad journal, 227–228, 238, 261(n14), 265(n66), 357

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Real wages, 273(table), 367, 389(n54) Recession, economic, 165, 272, 278, 329–332. See also Economic crisis Recurso de amparo (writ of protection), 56, 240 Referendum. See Consulta Reforms: agrarian reforms intensifying civil conflict, 36, 62(nn29,30); municipal reform, 256–258; Socialist Party blocking constitutional reform agenda, 35; university reform, 232, 276. See also Chicago Boys; Economic reforms Reform strategy of political thought, 2 Regime identity: coercion, 4–8; economic identity, 8–13; Pinochet’s personal identity as factor in, 13–14; structural elements of, 3–4 Regional government: military participation in, 120–123; 1988 plebiscite preparations, 406–407 Regional tours, Pinochet’s, 407–409 Regulation: Büchi’s banking regulation, 280–281; electric companies, 334; lack of economic regulation, 10 Religion: Franco’s incorporation into government, 29(n107). See also Catholic Church Research centers, 415 Research methodology: analyzing the military facet of the Pinochet regime, 16–18; authoritarian regimes, 18–21 Restitution and reparation, 5 Retailers, 366–371 Retreating government, characteristics of, 200(table) Rettig Commission: Aylwin’s creation of, 453; caravan of death, 49; criticism of judicial performance, 56–57; Guzmán’s justification of political coercion, 241; military justice, 55; military justification of the use of political coercion, 38–39; results of investigations, 4–5; UDI and military rejection of commission report, 130, 479; Vicariate of Solidarity and, 243 Reyes, Hernán, 136(n66) Riesco, Walter, 489(nn7,8) Right-wing groups: Argentina’s terrorist acts against, 41–42; civilian support for Pinochet, 89–96; constituent commission, 151–152; election fraud allegations, 62(n21); Guzmán’s identification with, 230–231; increasing mistrust of Pinochet, 479; military pressure against Allende election victory, 113; military retention of power, 141–142; 1988 plebiscite, 403; Portada’s criticism of, 146; prerevolutionary political violence, 35;

rejection of political parties, 226. See also Gremialista movement Rillón, Sergio, 102(n80), 207 Risk Classification Commission, 329, 339, 350(n136) Rivadeneira, Ricardo, 404–405, 423(nn44,45), 424(nn47,49,50) Rivera, Hernán, 205 Rochner, Heinrich, 132 Rodríguez, Ervaldo, 80, 100(n49) Rodríguez, Jorge, 303(n80) Rodríguez, Pablo, 13, 34, 204–205 Rojas, Gonzalo, 247 Rojas, Rodrigo, 385 Romo, Alicia, 151, 172(n74) Rosende, Hugo: cabinet portfolios and tenure, 93, 95(table), 208; Election Clarification Tribunal, 422(n20); opposition to apertura, 92, 203, 380 Rossiter, Clinton, 149–150 Rotary Club lunch, 453–454 Rucci, José Ignacio, 41 Ruiz Danyau, César, 59, 131, 261(n11) Ruiz Giménez, Joaquín, 93 Rupture strategy of political thought, 2 Sabat, Pedro, 259(table), 260 Sábato, Ernesto, 42 Sacred Hearts School, 228–229 Saenz, Orlando, 282–283 Saesa company, 336 Saez, Raúl, 188, 278–279, 288, 489(n2) Saieh, Álvaro, 286 St. George’s School, 62(n34) Salas, Fernando, 242 Salas, Hugo, 125(table) Sánchez, Claudio, 252(fig.) Sánchez, Miguel, 127(table) Sánchez, Rodrigo, 125(table) San Cristóbal AFP, 329 Sanfuentes, Andrés, 282, 285 Sanfuentes, Emilio, 282 Santa María AFP, 329 Santísima Trinidad, 42 Santoni, Darío, 118 Santos, José Manuel, 242–243 San Vicente Petroquímica, 115 Sapag, Reinaldo, 302(n64) Savings, individual, 320–321 Savings and credit union, Gremialista control of, 234, 264(n56) Schneider, René, 34, 61(n19), 113, 263(n43) Scholarship programs, 296–298, 306(nn138,140,142,143,144,145) Schools and universities: Chicago Boys’ neutralization of, 283–286; church involvement in, 377; criticism of Allende government, 69(n143); junta rejection of

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reform proposal, 137(n80); limited synchronization, 59–60; military enforcement of weapons law, 116; military participation in the university system, 130–132; Unity Youth Front and, 251. See also Catholic University; Education and training; Student movements; University of Chile Schweitzer Speisky, Miguel, 23(table), 188 Searches and seizures, 114–115 Second Vatican Council, 229–230 Secret war, Argentina’s, 40 Security services. See DINA; National Intelligence Center Seguel, Enrique, 118, 124, 125(table), 209(table) La Segunda newspaper, 58 Self-employed workers, 323–324 Self-fulfilling prophecy, Pinochet’s, 410–412 Selume, Jorge, 286 Senate: constitutional debate over, 160; Guzmán’s election to, 265(n68); impeding democratic transition, 451; institutional senators, 156, 173(nn100,111); Pinochet as senator-for-life, 456; transfer of power from Pinochet to Aylwin, 464 Separation of powers, 150–151, 155–156, 171(n63), 214(n19) September 11, 1973. See Coup of 1973 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 457 Sepúlveda, Claudio, 34, 114 Serré, Patricio, 81–82, 122(table), 124, 125(table), 406 Servicio de Seguro Social, 319 Seven modernizations thesis, 282 Siebel, Walter, 423(n41) Siebert, Bruno, 92–93, 94(table), 102(n72), 119, 124, 125(table), 409 Siege, state of, 54–55, 149–150, 381 El Siglo newspaper, 57 Silva, Ernesto, 423(n41) Silva, José, 236(table) Silva Bascuñán, Alejandro, 151, 153, 171(n72) Silva Henríquez, Raúl: agrarian reform, 146; Guzmán’s criticism of, 231; personality and views of, 378; private research centers, 415; protecting MIR members, 242, 267(n91); resignation, 302(n64), 390(n67); resistance to synchronization of the universities, 60; university reform, 170(n32) Sinclair, Santiago: eliminating minimum wage, 177(n173); military involvement in government, 93, 95(table), 124, 136(n74); MIR attack on, 362; succession of, 102(n81)

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Single-party system, 225–226, 260(n5), 489(n14) Small businesses, 366–371 Social and Economic Council, 102(n80) Social citizenship, 308 Social consensus, 145 Socialism, xxi; economic modernization as antidote to, 11; as excuse for police state, 4, 7–8; prerevolutionary sympathies for, 36; prevolutionary conditions, 33–34; tacnazo, 112–113. See also Anticommunist attitudes and activities; Marxism Socialist Party: DINA’s violent campaign against, 51–52; justifying continued use of force, 37–38; 1988 plebiscite participation, 418; prerevolutionary conditions, 33–34, 116; reemergence under Concertación, 466–470; rejecting Aylwin’s democratic proposal, 415; UDI’s attempted destruction of, 399–400; victims of political coercion, 6 Social modernization, 12 Social revolution as consequence of economic modernization, 12 Social security corporations, 321 Social Security Ministry, 202 Social security reform, 321 Social spending, 272, 274(table) Social welfare: pension system reform weakening, 308; privatization policy concerning, 309–310 Soft-liners, 192–194 Solidarity pillar, 317 Somoza, Anastasio, 225 Soto Mackeney, Roberto, 102(n72), 124, 126(table) South America: 1970’s military regimes, 17 Soza Cousiño, Francisco, 288 Spain: Enersis purchase, 343, 354(n205); Second Republic, 31–32. See also Franco regime Special employment programs, 257–258 Special Operations Group (GOPE), 382 Spiniak case, 470 Sports, National Unity Youth Front and, 250–256 Stability as anticipated outcome of economic modernization, 11 Stabilization programs, 15, 278 Stange, Rodolfo, 130, 136(n77), 384 Statute of guarantees (estatuto de garantías), 32 Steffani, Gonzalo, 255 Stepan, Alfred, 243–244 Stock market investment, 329, 350(n134) Strikes, labor: Gremialistas’ role in, 234; miners’ strike, 264(n55); 1986 student

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strike, 132; Rancagua raid, 135(n46); truck drivers and retailers opposing economic policy, 367 Stroessner, Alfredo, 72, 225, 260(n4) Strongman, Leigh as, 46–48 Structural reforms, 271–272, 388(n40) Student movements: building the Gremialista movement, 231–237; Chicago Boys’ origins in, 277; Falange, 263(n41); increasing strength under apertura, 374; military violence quelling protest, 381; National Unity Youth Front, 250–256; opposition success in university elections, 390(n75); opposition to coalition government, 33–34; political persecution of priests and teachers, 62(n34) Suárez, Adolfo, 485 Suárez, Ramón, 269(n159) Succession, Pinochet’s: forcing Pinochet out, 480; Franco’s death raising concerns over, 191–193, 485; institutional consequences of, 397–402; National Renewal policy, 404; as objective of transition phase, 161–162; Pinochet’s failure to understand the importance of, 73, 76, 97; Pinochet’s plan for, xxiii; transitory articles’ provision for, 395–397 Succession as weakness of authoritarian regimes, 395–396 Suffrage, 157, 160, 175(n132) Summa AFP, 350(n134) Superior War School (Brazil), 110 Supreme Court, Chilean: Chilectra privatization, 343; Concertación appointments, 438–439; establishing regime legitimacy through, 150–151, 171(n61); hard-liners appointing justices, 208; 1988 plebiscite, 399; opposing the Popular Unity government, 34; state control of, 54–57. See also Judiciary Swett, Jorge, 59, 227 Synchronization of mediating institutions: implementing limited synchronization, 21–24, 44–46; limited synchronization in the universities, 59–60; regime characterization through, 20; voluntary synchronization, 54–59 Tacnazo, 45, 112–113, 134(n23), 146 Tapia Falk, Julio, 214(n25), 303(n78) Tapia Valdés, Jorge, 114 Tariffs, 369 Taxi drivers, 369, 370(table), 389(n53) Tax revenues: Pinochet’s tax evasion, 457–459; privatization, 344(n10); tax breaks through property ownership, 314–315; tax evasion crackdown to increase revenue, 368

Teachers, political coercion against, 37, 62(n34), 382–383 Technocrats. See Chicago Boys Te Deum celebration, 377 Teitelboim, Volodia, 187 Tejos, Florencio, 127(table) Telecommunications sector, privatization of, 309 Television. See Media Tello, Aureliano, 126(table) La Tercera de la Hora newspaper, 58, 416, 434–435 Terror, personalization of, 50–53 Terrorist activities: Argentina’s Montoneros, 41–42; Carabineros’ radicalization as response to, 382–383; military involvement in terrorist activities, 384–385; MIR and CNI, 39, 362; Pinochet’s link to September 11, 2001, 457; as Pinochet’s policy priority, 362–364; Pinochet’s self-fulfilling prophecy of political opposition, 411 Thatcher, Margaret, 71, 267(n89), 314, 319 Thayer, William: Council of State, 190, 218(n71); PDC leadership, 217(n70); pension reform, 326 Third wave of democratization, 3 Todman, Terence, 196 Toro Dávila, Agustin, 132 Torres de la Cruz, Manuel, 100(n46) Torture, 479 Totalitarian regimes: authoritarian regimes and, 21–24, 266(n73); coercion component, 20; constitutional prohibition, 155; leadership style, 76–77; limited synchronization, 21 Trade reform, 369 Transition accord: Guzmán’s rejection of, 238; junta rejection of, 379–380 Transition government: characteristics of, 200(table); constitutional provision for, 89; duration of, 421(n6); legislative chamber, 154–155; political clientelism and economic reform, 364–366; political goals of, 357–359; provision for phasing out military rule, 158–160; succession as objective, 161–162, 395–396; weakening through efficacy, 362–364 Transitory articles, 357–359, 412, 431, 436 Transparency: AFP’s pension fund investment, 351(n148); Chilectra and Endesa privatization, 338; privatization’s lack of, 311–312, 335 Transportation and Telecommunications Ministry, 205–206 Tribuna newspaper, 57–58 Truck drivers, 366–367 Truck Owners Confederation, 370–371(table)

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Truth and Reconciliation Commission. See Rettig Commission Tupamaros, 63(n46) Ullastres, Alberto, 27(n69) Ultra-left-wing movements, 40–42 Ultra-right wing movements, 409 Undemocratic regimes, 19 Undurraga, Sergio, 282–283 Unemployment: comparison of unemployment rates by administration, 273(table); economic crisis, 167; minimum wage elimination proposal, 177(n173); under structural reform policy, 272; work-generation program, 257–258, 365–366 Unified National School initiative, 114, 183 Unions: anticommunist persecution, 111–112; Chilectra privatization, 353(n188); church assistance in developing, 377; debt renegotiation to quell opposition to economic policy, 366–367; justifying continued use of force, 37–38; Leigh’s relationship with union leaders, 187; limited synchronization of mediating institutions, 21; military enforcement of weapons law, 115; National Associations Secretariat opposing, 246; pension reform support, 326–329; political objectives of pension reform, 322–323; protesting economic crisis, 372; Rancagua raid, 116, 135(nn46,47); US strike facilitating Piñera’s cabinet entry, 197–198. See also Labor; Pension system Union School of Chile, 246 United Kingdom, Pinochet’s refuge under, 457 United Kingdom, privatization plans, 319–322, 346(n35), 354(nn201,205) United Nations, 253 United People’s Action Movement (MAPU), 263(nn43,45,46) United States: criticism of Pinochet’s human rights situation, 278–279; foreign policy shift isolating Chile, 191; Letelier-Moffit assassinations, 52–53, 196–197; limits on foreign in vestment, 342; national security doctrine affecting Chilean military, 110–111; origins of Chilectra, 352(n165); protesting military violence, 385; Senate investigation into Pinochet finances, 479 Universal suffrage, 157, 160, 175(n132), 262(n33) University of Chicago. See Chicago Boys University of Chile: caravan of death victims, 49; Chicago Boys, 284–285; economics faculty, 303(n77); Gremialista activities, 261(n11); limited synchronization, 59–60;

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military involvement in running, 131; neutralization of, 285–286; opposition success in university elections, 390(n75); Yuraszeck’s background, 338 University of Concepción, 232–233 University of Santiago, 131 University of Valdivia, 132 University reform, 130, 276 Urbina, Orlando, 80 Urenda, Beltrán, 102(n80) Urquiza, Mikel, 236(table) Urrutia, Raúl, 259(table), 260 Urrutia Manzano, Enrique, 47(fig.), 54–56, 217(n71) Uruguay: civilian president in a military regime, 28(n79); guerrilla movement, 63(n46); influencing draft constitution, 152; military institutionalization, 180–181; political and social citizenship, 344(n5) Urzúa, Carol, 362 US Agency for International Development, 299(n16) Valdés, Gabriel, 415 Valdés, Ramón, 118 Valdés Puga, Enrique, 91–92, 197–198 Valech report, 479 Valenzuela, Francisco de Borja, 132 Valenzuela Ramirez, Sergio: cabinet portfolios and tenure, 125(table); military participation in government ministries, 119, 124; Presidential Secretariat, 102(n84) Valenzuela Somarriva, Eugenio, 399 Valle, Jaime del, 62(n21), 207 Varas, Juan Ignacio, 277, 285 Varela, Mario, 126(table) Varela, Victor, 259(table) Vargas, Raúl, 202 Vega, Juan Enrique, 263(n45) Velasco Alvarado, Juan, 28(n84), 72 Velasco Ibarra, José María, 18 Velasco Letelier, Eugenio, 193 Vergara, Roger, 361 Versailles, Treaty of, 31 Vertical hierarchy, 120 Vial, Aníbal, 269(n159) Vial, Javier, 165, 177(n176) Vial Correa, Gonzalo: Fernández cabinet, 197; Libro Blanco authorship, 62(n23); Pinochet’s neutralization of, 91–92; Portada magazine, 145; removal from office, 198; Rettig Commission, 453; stance on Pinochet and authoritarian regime, 105(n135) Vial group, 315, 325, 327

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Viaux, Roberto, 34, 45, 112–113, 134(nn23,24), 146 Vicariate of Solidarity, 240, 243, 376, 378–379, 382–383, 399, 411, 413 Videla, Ernesto, 118, 124, 125(table) Videla, Jorge Rafael, 72, 180 Vilarín, León, 366–367, 389(n49) Villa Grimaldi, 49–50 Villarzúa, Juan, 282, 299(n14) Viola, Roberto, 180 Violence, political: apertura, 380–382, 384–385; Argentina’s Peronist government, 39–42; caravan of death, 46, 48–50, 100(n55), 215(n37), 387(n20); Catholic Church condemning, 377–379; civilians’ tolerance of, 36–38; fatality statistics, 4–6, 5(table); Leigh’s radical war against Marxism, 185; new political orders’ violence leading to popular discontent, 31–32; personalization of terror, 50–53; Pinochet’s early willingness to use, 46; post-Pinochet assassinations by the Caribineros, 25(n15); post-Pinochet continuation of, 25(n13); against priests, 378; radicalization of the Carabineros, 382–384; revolutionary change through force, 32; sociodemographic and political characteristics of victims, 6–7(table); state executions, 66(n95); synchronization characterizing authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, 21. See also Coercion, political Viveros, Félix, 259(table), 260 Voluntary synchronization, 54–59 Von Plessing, Carlos, 132 Voter registration, 62(n24), 419, 422(n28) Voting intentions, 1988 plebiscite, 418(table), 420(table) Voting rights, 342, 401–402 War academies, 79, 110–112

War of the Pacific, 251–252 War tribunals, 185, 215(n37) Weapons control law, 114–116 Weber, Max, legitimation of, 139–140 Weimar Republic, 31 Whelan, Gerardo, 267(n89) White Book. See Libro Blanco Women: Madariaga, Mónica, 93, 94(table), 104(n133), 161, 172(n83), 195, 212, 219(n100); National Women’s Secretariat, 244–245, 267(n106); protesting economic crisis, 372; as victims of pension deficit, 333–334 Woodward, Michael, 378 Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT), 40 Workers’ vicariate, 377 Work-generation program, 365 Writ of protection, 56, 240 Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, 341 Youth: authoritarian roots of democratization, 484–485; Cuban revolution influencing, 62(n32); military violence against, 384–385; National Unity Youth Front, 227, 250–256; National Youth Secretariat, 247–250; work-generating projects, 365–366. See also Student movements Youth Day, 252–255, 269(n143), 269(nn144,145) Youth Secretariat, 88, 203–204, 238, 243, 247–250, 259(table), 409 Yuraszeck, José, 290–291, 311, 338–343, 352(n179), 353(n188), 354(n209) Zabala, José, 379 Zaldívar, Andrés, 89, 98(n4), 265(n68), 360, 373, 387(n15), 464 Zegers, Fernando, 101(n62) Zincke, Jorge, 126(table) Zylberberg, Marcos, 339, 353(n183)

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About the Book

This seminal book was inspired by a series of questions: What explains the endurance of Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian regime in Chile, a country with a lengthy democratic tradition? What mechanisms secured the regime’s political stability and broad-based support? What role did neoliberal ideas play in authoritarian discourse and policy? How could two such opposite forces as political coercion and economic freedom coexist? And why the fascination with Pinochet’s personality and leadership among elites and lower-income sectors alike? Carlos Huneeus’s authoritative work explores and reveals the very nature of the Pinochet regime, examining its structures, its policies, and the complex of factors that made its lengthy duration possible. The Pinochet Regime helps us to understand not only Chile’s past, but also the nature of the democracy that began on March 11, 1990. Carlos Huneeus is associate professor at the University of Chile’s Institute of International Studies, and executive director of CERC. His many publications in Spanish include Chile, un país dividido, and La UCD y la transición a la democracia en España.

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