Chile, Thirty years since the Pinochet coup

[Zombie]

From the Marxist.com

September 11, 2003

"Today is the 30th anniversary of the coup staged by Pinochet against the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. This anniversary has been overshadowed in the last couple of years by the dramatic events that took place at the World Trade Center in New York in 2001. The same date falls on a tragic day for the Chilean proletariat, full of lessons to be learnt.

The two articles that we are bringing to the attention of our readers today give an accurate and in-depth analysis of the Unidad Popular government between 1970-73. We don’t need to add anything to that analysis in this brief introductory note.

As we commemorate this anniversary, several bourgeois publications have also remembered those events, but they analyse them from another class point of view and they draw completely different conclusions from ourselves.

The latest edition of The Economist (September 6, 2003) is of particular interest. It condemns the coup formally, but then it states that, "Thirty years on, Chile is a far happier country. It has become Latin America’s most successful economy – in part because of the free-market reforms imposed, by trial and error and with unnecessary cost, by General Pinochet’s dictatorship."

So for The Economist thousands of left-wing and trade union activists killed and tens of thousands imprisoned or exiled are merely "unnecessary costs". This way of thinking does not surprise us. It reveals the same ruthlessness that the bourgeoisie throughout world expressed in 1973, when they greeted the Pinochet coup which had thwarted the "danger of communism". It is common knowledge that the US government and the CIA directly financed and supported the coup organisers."

More here

[Marxist in Nebraska]

"Thirty years on, Chile is a far happier country. It has become Latin America’s most successful economy – in part because of the free-market reforms imposed, by trial and error and with unnecessary cost, by General Pinochet’s dictatorship."

First of all, the author of the leftist piece on Chile is right to be angry at the Economist article trivializing the deaths of thousands of people by calling them an "unnecessary cost."

According to Greg Palast's book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Pinochet's flirtations with Milton Friedman and the architects of what has become neo-liberalism devastated the country. Friedman's economic nonsense was opposed to any kind of regulation, of socializing any of the means of production. Even vital human needs, such as water, are to be sold to private companies. The idea was that, under pure capitalism, competition between water companies will lower prices and increase efficiency in the industry.

Once again, that idea proved idiotic. If I want to buy a paperback at the store, and the printer has decided to charge $800 for it, then I will not buy the book. I do not need that book to stay alive, so I will not bow to the shameless profiteering the printer is engaged in. That is capitalist economics--you have to keep the price affordable and attractive.

When human needs such as water or things like electricity which humans in the developed world have become dependant upon, we have to buy them. Of course, competition once these things are privatized is a joke. Whenever utilities have been privatized, one or two companies buy all of the resource and corner the market. If the profit-driven water monopoly decides to charge $800 a gallon, I have to give in. Without water, I will wither and die. The water monopoly can raise the cost of water 1000%, 10000%, and the people will have to pay it or they will die.

According to Palast (I am no expert in Chilean history), the neo-liberal economists under the influence of Friedman and protected by Pinochet proceeded to cripple the Chilean economy. Chile only rebounded when Pinochet send Friedman's disciples packing and started plagiarizing Allende's economic ideas.