More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Naomi Klein
Read between
February 13 - March 1, 2024
The CIA had been quietly compiling a list of the country’s leading leftists, a document that fell into Suharto’s hands, while the Pentagon helped out by supplying extra weapons and field radios so Indonesian forces could communicate in the remotest parts of the archipelago. Suharto then sent out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his “shooting lists,” as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. embassy received regular reports on their progress.
Ford-funded students became leaders of the campus groups that participated in overthrowing Sukarno, and the Berkeley Mafia worked closely with the military in the lead-up to the coup, developing “contingency plans” should the government suddenly fall.
However, the Berkeley Mafia could not have been more hospitable to foreign investors wanting to mine Indonesia’s immense mineral and oil wealth, described by Richard Nixon as “the greatest prize in the Southeast Asian area.”
They passed laws allowing foreign companies to own 100 percent of these resources, handed out “tax holidays,” and within two years, Indonesia’s natural wealth—copper, nickel, hardwood, rubber and oil—was being divided up among the largest mining and energy companies in the world.
Suharto, on the other hand, had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place.
a senior CIA operations manager during the years of the coup, said Indonesia was a “model operation … . You can trace back all major, bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power. The success of that meant that it would be repeated, again and again.”
the coup did more than just get rid of a nationalist threat; it transformed Indonesia into one of the most welcoming environments for foreign multinationals in the world.
For a time, the coup planning proceeded on two distinct tracks: the military plotted the extermination of Allende and his supporters while the economists plotted the extermination of their ideas.
Chile’s coup, when it finally came, would feature three distinct forms of shock, a recipe that would be duplicated in neighboring countries and would reemerge, three decades later, in Iraq. The shock of the coup itself was immediately followed by two additional forms of shock. One was Milton Friedman’s capitalist “shock treatment,” a technique in which hundreds of Latin American economists had by now been trained at the University of Chicago and its various franchise institutions. The other was Ewen Cameron’s shock, drug and sensory deprivation research, now codified as torture techniques in
...more
Pinochet, the operation’s vain and volatile commander (built like one of the tanks he rode in on), clearly wanted the event to be as dramatic and traumatic as possible. Even if the coup was not a war, it was designed to feel like one—a Chilean precursor to Shock and Awe.
In the years leading up to the coup, U.S. trainers, many from the CIA, had whipped the Chilean military into an anti-Communist frenzy, persuading them that socialists were de facto Russian spies, a force alien to Chilean society—a homegrown “enemy within.” In fact, it was the military that had become the true domestic enemy, ready to turn its weapons on the population it was sworn to protect.
The trail of blood left behind over those four days came to be known as the Caravan of Death.6 In short order, the entire country had gotten the message: resistance is deadly. Even though Pinochet’s battle was one-sided, its effects were as real as any civil war or foreign invasion: in all, more than 3,200 people were disappeared or executed, at least 80,000 were imprisoned, and 200,000 fled the country for political reasons.
privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending—the free-market trinity.
In that year and a half, many of the country’s business elite had had their fill of the Chicago Boys’ adventures in extreme capitalism. The only people benefiting were foreign companies and a small clique of financiers known as the “piranhas,” who were making a killing on speculation.
Orlando Sáenz—the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, who had brought the Chicago Boys into the coup plot in the first place—declared the results of the experiment “one of the greatest failures of our economic history.”
Freed of the naysayers, Pinochet and de Castro got to work stripping away the welfare state to arrive at their pure capitalist utopia. In 1975, they cut public spending by 27 percent in one blow—and they kept cutting until, by 1980, it was half of what it had been under Allende.27 Health and education took the heaviest hits. Even The Economist, a free-market cheerleader, called it “an orgy of self-mutilation.”
Shock treatment was an apt description for what Friedman had prescribed. Pinochet had deliberately sent his country into a deep recession, based on the untested theory that the sudden contraction would jolt the economy into health. In its logic, it was strikingly similar to that of the psychiatrists who started mass-prescribing ECT in the 1940s and 1950s, convinced that deliberately induced grand mal seizures would magically reboot their patients’ brains.
He calculated what it meant for a Chilean family to try to survive on what Pinochet claimed was a “living wage.” Roughly 74 percent of its income went simply to buying bread, forcing the family to cut out such “luxury items” as milk and bus fare to get to work. By comparison, under Allende, bread, milk and bus fare took up 17 percent of a public employee’s salary.
The situation was so unstable that Pinochet was forced to do exactly what Allende had done: he nationalized many of these companies.
The only thing that protected Chile from complete economic collapse in the early eighties was that Pinochet had never privatized Codelco, the state copper mine company nationalized by Allende. That one company generated 85 percent of Chile’s export revenues, which meant that when the financial bubble burst, the state still had a steady source of funds.
When the hype and salesmanship behind the miracle are stripped away, Chile under Pinochet and the Chicago Boys was not a capitalist state featuring a liberated market but a corporatist one. Corporatism, or “corporativism,” originally referred to Mussolini’s model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society—government, businesses and trade unions—all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism.
That war—what many Chileans understandably see as a war of the rich against the poor and middle class—is the real story of Chile’s economic “miracle.”
If that track record qualifies Chile as a miracle for Chicago school economists, perhaps shock treatment was never really about jolting the economy into health. Perhaps it was meant to do exactly what it did—hoover wealth up to the top and shock much of the middle class out of existence.
Letelier wrote in 1976 that “during the last three years several billions of dollars were taken from the pockets of wage earners and placed in those of capitalists and landowners … concentration of wealth is no accident, but a rule; it is not the marginal outcome of a difficult situation—as the junta would like the world to believe— but the base for a social project; it is not an economic liability but a temporary political success.”
a huge transfer of wealth from public to private hands, followed by a huge transfer of private debts into public hands.
Since those wanted by the various juntas often took refuge in neighboring countries, the regional governments collaborated with each other in the notorious Operation Condor.
According to court testimony quoted in the country’s truth commission report, Brazil: Never Again, published in 1985, military officers attended formal “torture classes” at army police units where they watched slides depicting various excruciating methods.
The results of this training are unmistakable in all the human rights reports from the Southern Cone in this sinister period. Again and again they testify to the trademark methods codified in the Kubark manual: early morning arrests, hooding, intense isolation, drugging, forced nudity, electroshock. And everywhere, the terrible legacy of the McGill experiments in deliberately induced regression.
High-value prisoners were kept in absolute isolation for more than a decade. “We were beginning to think we were dead, that our cells weren’t cells but rather graves, that the outside world didn’t exist, that the sun was a myth,” one of these prisoners, Mauricio Rosencof, recalled. He saw the sun for a total of eight hours over eleven and a half years. So deprived were his senses during this time that he “forgot colors—there were no colors.”
One of the people living that life in Argentina was the country’s legendary investigative journalist Rodolfo Walsh. A gregarious Renaissance man, a writer of crime fiction and award-winning short stories, Walsh was also a super sleuth able to crack military codes and spy on the spies.
“I want to let those fuckers know that I’m still here, still alive and still writing,” he told Lilia as he sat down at his Olympia typewriter. 80 The letter begins with an account of the generals’ terror campaign, its use of “maximum torture, unending and metaphysical,” as well as the involvement of the CIA in training the Argentine police. After listing the methods and grave sites in excruciating detail, Walsh abruptly switches gears: “These events, which stir the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, the greatest suffering inflicted on the Argentinean people, nor the worst
...more
To the extent that killings by the state were acknowledged, they were justified by the juntas on the grounds that they were fighting a war against dangerous Marxist terrorists, funded and controlled by the KGB. If the juntas used “dirty” tactics, it was because their enemy was monstrous. Using language that sounds eerily familiar today, Admiral Massera called it “a war for freedom and against tyranny
In every case, the threat was either wildly exaggerated or completely manufactured by the juntas. Among its many other revelations, the 1975 Senate investigation disclosed that the U.S. government’s own intelligence reports showed that Allende posed no threat to democracy.
In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the “War on Terror” was a war against all obstacles to the new order.
Letelier rejected a frequently articulated notion that the junta had two separate, easily compartmentalized projects—one a bold experiment in economic transformation, the other an evil system of grisly torture and terror. There was only one project, the former ambassador insisted, in which terror was the central tool of the free-market transformation.
There was, he wrote, “an inner harmony” between the “free market” and unlimited terror.
When he handed down his verdict, he took an extraordinary step. He said that the conviction did not do justice to the true nature of the crime and that, in the interest of “the construction of collective memory,” he needed to add that these were “all crimes against humanity committed in the context of the genocide that took place in the Republic of Argentina between 1976 and 1983.”
With that sentence, the judge played his part in the rewriting of Argentine history: the killings of leftists in the seventies were not part of a “dirty war” in which two sides clashed and various crimes were committed, as had been the official story for decades.
the UN General Assembly passed a resolution by unanimous vote barring acts of genocide “when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part.”13 The reason the word “political” had been excised from the Convention two years later was that Stalin demanded it. He knew that if destroying a “political group” was genocidal, his bloody purges and mass imprisonment of political opponents would fit the bill. Stalin had enough support from other leaders who also wanted to reserve the right to wipe out their political opponents that the word was dropped.
The junta’s goal, he wrote, was “to establish a new order, like Hitler hoped to achieve in Germany, in which there was no room for certain types of people.”
In these countries, the people who “got in the way of the ideal” were leftists of all stripes: economists, soup kitchen workers, trade unionists, musicians, farm organizers, politicians. Members of all these groups were subjected to a clear and deliberate region-wide strategy, coordinated across borders by Operation Condor, to uproot and erase the left.
The Chicago Boys and their professors, who provided advice and took up top posts in the military regimes of the Southern Cone, believed in a form of capitalism that is purist by its very nature. Theirs is a system based entirely on a belief in “balance” and “order” and the need to be free of interferences and “distortions” in order to succeed. Because of these traits, a regime committed to the faithful application of this ideal cannot accept the presence of competing or tempering worldviews. In order for the ideal to be achieved, it requires a monopoly on ideology; otherwise, according to the
...more
The seed that Allende referred to wasn’t a single idea or even a group of political parties and trade unions. By the sixties and early seventies in Latin America, the left was the dominant mass culture—it was the poetry of Pablo Neruda, the folk music of Victor Jara and Mercedes Sosa, the liberation theology of the Third World Priests, the emancipatory theater of Augusto Boal, the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, the revolutionary journalism of Eduardo Galeano and Walsh himself. It was legendary heroes and martyrs of past and recent history from José Gervasio Artigas to Simón Bolívar to Che
...more
OBAN was funded, according to Brazil: Never Again, “by contributions from various multinational corporations, including Ford and General Motors.”
While Ford supplied the junta with cars, the junta provided Ford with a service of its own—ridding the assembly lines of troublesome trade unionists.
The Ford factory in suburban Buenos Aires was turned into an armed camp; in the weeks that followed, it was swarming with military vehicles, including tanks and helicopters buzzing overhead. Workers have testified to the presence of a battalion of one hundred soldiers permanently stationed at the factory.41 “It looked like we were at war in Ford. And it was all directed at us, the workers,” recalled Pedro Troiani, one of the union delegates.42 Soldiers prowled the facility, grabbing and hooding the most active union members, helpfully pointed out by the factory foreman.
It wasn’t only unionists who faced preemptive attack—it was anyone who represented a vision of society built on values other than pure profit.
In the slums, the targets of the preemptive strikes were community workers, many church-based, who organized the poorest sectors of society to demand health care, public housing and education—in other words, the “welfare state” being dismantled by the Chicago Boys.
high-school students who, in September 1976, banded together to ask for lower bus fare. For the junta, the collective action showed that the teenagers had been infected with the virus of Marxism, and it responded with genocidal fury, torturing and killing six of the high-schoolers who had dared to make this subversive request.
The pattern of these disappearances was clear: while the shock therapists were trying to remove all relics of collectivism from the economy, the shock troops were removing the representatives of that ethos from the streets, the universities and the factory floors.
