Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973-2002

Abstract

This collection examines how the violent imposition of neoliberal economic policies affected Chilean working people during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973 – 89) and how the restoration of democracy in 1990 legitimized many of the labor relations and economic policies imposed by Pinochet. The articles demonstrate how the Chilean labor force was twice victimized: first by Pinochet and the military and then by the series of center-left civilian governments that workers had supported. Political violence ushered in an extreme form of neoliberalism by destroying labor unions, murdering and disappearing labor leaders, and dismantling a large public sector that had been built up since the 1930s and strengthened during the administrations of Eduardo Frei (1967 – 70) and Salvador Allende (1970 – 73). The violence unleashed against working people fragmented the class solidarity of important sectors of the Chilean working class, facilitated the restructuring of the labor force around neoliberal principles, and gave rise to new patterns of individualism, consumerism, and debt.The book’s most important contribution, however, is to document how poorly working people fared under the center-left governments of the Concertación, which consolidated Chilean neoliberalism and provided a veneer of legitimacy to a process that Pinochet was unable to complete with violence alone. The Concertación operated under a dark shadow cast by Pinochet, whose “designated senators” and undemocratic electoral laws constrained the development of democracy long after elected civilians assumed power. Indeed, until his arrest in London for human-rights violations in 1998, Pinochet’s power over the Concertación was so great that the contributors refer to the Pinochet era as enduring until 1998, eight years after the inauguration of civilian rule.Civilian administrations never jettisoned the Pinochet-era labor code, although they modified elements of it, and even though Chile experienced a period of spectacular economic growth and rising productivity in the 1990s, real wages did not increase, nor did the extreme income inequality bequeathed by the dictatorship improve. Although working people no longer feared the police, they experienced the increasing loss of permanent, well-paid jobs, replaced by temporary, low-wage employment and a corresponding erosion of the right to collective bargaining. The degradation of working conditions forced them to suffer disproportionately from Chile’s increased vulnerability to external economic shocks, which ultimately ended the “miracle,” after crises in Asia, Brazil, and Argentina between 1997 and 2002 threw the Chilean economy into a deep recession.Chile was not the only Latin American country where neoliberalism was erected on the ashes of a dirty war and nurtured by civilian governments, but this collection is one of the best examples of how the process unfolded in a country long heralded as a model of the free-market fundamentalism preached by the Chicago Boys. Two synthetic pieces on the Pinochet era (Peter Winn) and on the failure of social concertación under civilian administrations (Volker Frank) provide a useful context for understanding the six case studies that follow. The case studies examine both the industries that have traditionally sustained the Chilean economy — copper, textiles, and metallurgy — as well as those that have grown up under neoliberalism — fruit, fisheries, and forestry — displaying scholarship of uniformly high quality.The case studies are noteworthy for their analytic complexity. Interwoven into the analysis of the shifting class dynamics of Chilean society are interesting discussions about how new relations of power under neoliberalism degraded the environment, reconfigured gender relations (with ambiguous results for women), and reshaped cultural practices that replaced long-standing ties of worker solidarity with individualism and consumerism. The contributors also make it clear that despite being victimized by both Pinochet and neoliberal democracy, workers have continued to devise creative forms of resistance in their workplaces and communities. The result is a set of articles that explores the impact of political violence, democratization, and neoliberalism in Chile in detailed and highly nuanced ways.The collection addresses ongoing debates about the nature and viability of neoliberal democracy in Latin America. By the end of the book, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that although the return of civilian rule freed working-class Chileans from the political repression of the dictatorship, contemporary Chilean “democracy” is a shadow of what it was prior to September 11, 1973, when the Chilean military and its U.S. allies destroyed Latin America’s first experiment with democratic socialism. Winn suggests that scholars challenge any assertion that Chile’s neoliberal boom was a “miracle” with the question: “a miracle for whom — and at what cost?” (p. 12). Given the poor results of neoliberal democracy for Chilean workers, readers of this volume might also ask what hope there is for working people in Iraq, where the U.S. is currently struggling to erect another neoliberal democracy at gunpoint.