The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

  The Argentine junta excelled at striking just the right balance between public and private horror, carrying out enough of its terror in the open that everyone knew what was going on, but simultaneously keeping enough secret that it could always be denied. In its first days in power, the junta made a single dramatic demonstration of its willingness to use lethal force: a man was pushed out of a Ford Falcon (a vehicle notorious for its use by the secret police), tied to Buenos Aires’s most prominent monument, the 67.5-meter-high white Obelisk, and machine-gunned in plain view.

  After that, the junta’s killings went underground, but they were always present. Disappearances, officially denied, were very public spectacles enlisting the silent complicity of entire neighborhoods. When someone was targeted to be eliminated, a fleet of military vehicles showed up at that person’s home or workplace and cordoned off the block, often with a helicopter buzzing overhead. In broad daylight and in full view of the neighbors, police or soldiers battered down the door and dragged out the victim, who often shouted his or her name before disappearing into a waiting Ford Falcon, in the hope that news of the event would reach the family. Some “covert” operations were even more brazen: police were known to board crowded city buses and drag passengers off by their hair; in the city of Santa Fe, a couple was kidnapped right at the altar on their wedding day in front of a church filled with people.66

  The public character of terror did not stop with the initial capture. Once in custody, prisoners in Argentina were taken to one of more than three hundred torture camps across the country.67 Many of them were located in densely populated residential areas; one of the most notorious was in a former athletic club on a busy street in Buenos Aires, another in a schoolhouse in central Bahía Blanca and yet another in a wing of a working hospital. At these torture centers, military vehicles sped in and out at odd hours, screams could be heard through the badly insulated walls and strange, body-shaped parcels were spotted being carried in and out, all silently registered by the nearby residents.

  The regime in Uruguay was similarly brazen: one of its main torture centers was a navy barracks abutting Montevideo’s boardwalk, an area once favored by families for ocean-side strolls and picnics. During the dictatorship, the beautiful spot was empty, as the city’s residents studiously avoided hearing the screams.68

  The Argentine junta was particularly sloppy about disposing of its victims. A country walk could end in horror because mass graves were barely concealed. Bodies would show up in public garbage bins, missing fingers and teeth (much as they do today in Iraq), or they would wash ashore on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, sometimes half a dozen at a time, after one of the junta’s “death flights.” On occasion, they even rained down from helicopters into farmers’ fields.69

  All Argentines were in some way enlisted as witnesses to the erasure of their fellow citizens, yet most people claimed not to know what was going on. There is a phrase Argentines use to describe the paradox of wide-eyed knowing and eyes-closed terror that was the dominant state of mind in those years: “We did not know what nobody could deny.”

  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. Under Condor, the intelligence agencies of the Southern Cone shared information about “subversives”—aided by a state-of-the-art computer system provided by Washington—and then gave each other’s agents safe passage to carry out cross-border kidnappings and torture, a system eerily resembling the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” network today.*70

  The juntas also swapped information about the most effective means each had found to extract information from their prisoners. Several Chileans who had been tortured at Chile Stadium in the days after the coup remarked on the unexpected detail that there were Brazilian soldiers in the room offering advice on the most scientific uses of pain.71

  There were countless opportunities for such exchanges in this period, many of them running through the United States and involving the CIA. A 1975 U.S. Senate investigation into U.S. intervention in Chile found that the CIA had provided training to Pinochet’s military in methods for “controlling subversion.”72 And U.S. training of Brazilian and Uruguayan police in interrogation techniques has been heavily documented. 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. During these sessions, prisoners were brought in for “practical demonstrations”—brutally tortured while as many as a hundred army sergeants looked on and learned. The report states that “one of the first people to introduce this practice into Brazil was Dan Mitrione, an American police officer. As a police instructor in Belo Horizonte during the early years of the Brazilian military regime, Mitrione took beggars off the streets and tortured them in classrooms so that the local police would learn the various ways of creating, in the prisoner, the supreme contradiction between the body and the mind.”73 Mitrione then moved on to conduct police training in Uruguay, where, in 1970, he was kidnapped and killed by the Tupamaro guerrillas—the group of leftist revolutionaries had planned the operation in order to to expose Mitrione’s involvement in torture training.* According to one of his former students, he insisted, like the authors of the CIA manual, that effective torture was not sadism but science. “The precise pain in the precise place, in the precise amount” was his motto.74

  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.

  Prisoners released from Chile’s National Stadium said that bright floodlights were kept on twenty-four hours a day, and the order of meals seemed deliberately out of sequence.75 Soldiers forced many prisoners to wear blankets over their heads so they could neither see nor hear properly, a baffling practice since all the prisoners knew they were in the stadium. The effect of the manipulations, prisoners reported, was that they lost their sense of night and day, and the shock and panic triggered by the coup and their subsequent arrests were greatly intensified. It was almost as if the stadium had been turned into a giant laboratory, and they were the test subjects in some strange experiment in sensory manipulation.

  A more faithful copy of the CIA experiments could be seen in Chile’s Villa Grimaldi prison, which “was known for its ‘Chile rooms’—wooden isolation compartments so small that prisoners could not kneel” or lie down.76 Prisoners in Uruguay’s Libertad prison were sent to la isla, the island: tiny windowless cells in which one bare bulb was illuminated at all times. 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.”*77

  In one of Argentina’s largest torture centers, the Navy School of Mechanics in Buenos Aires, the isolation chamber was called the capucha, the hood. Juan Miranda, who spent three months in the capucha, told me about that dark place. “They keep you in a blindfold and a hood with your hands and legs in chains, lying down on a foam mattress all day long, in the attic of the prison. I could not see the other prisoners—I was separated from them with plywood. When the guards would bring food, they made me face the wall, then they would pull up the hood so I could eat. It was the only time we were allowed to sit up; otherwise, we had to lie down all the time.” Other Argentine prisoners had their senses starved in cells the size of co
ffins, called tubos.

  The only reprieve from isolation was the worse fate of the interrogation room. The most ubiquitous technique, used in the torture chambers of all the region’s military regimes, was electroshock. There were dozens of variations on how electrical currents were sent coursing through prisoners’ bodies: with live wires, with army field telephones, with needles under fingernails, clamped with clothespins on gums, nipples, genitals, ears, mouths, in open wounds, attached to bodies doused in water to intensify the charge; on bodies strapped to tables or to Brazil’s iron “dragon chair.” Argentina’s cattle-owning junta was proud of its distinctive contribution—prisoners were shocked on a metal bed, called the parrilla (the barbecue), where they were subject to the picana (cattle prod).

  The exact number of people who went through the Southern Cone’s torture machinery is impossible to calculate, but it is probably somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000, tens of thousands of them killed.78

  A Witness in Difficult Times

  To be a leftist in those years was to be hunted. Those who did not escape to exile were in a minute-by-minute struggle to stay one step ahead of the secret police—an existence of safe houses, phone codes and false identities. 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. His greatest investigative triumph took place when he was working as a journalist in Cuba, where he managed to intercept and decode a CIA telex that blew the cover of the Bay of Pigs invasion. That information is what allowed Castro to prepare for and defend against the invasion.

  When Argentina’s previous military junta had banned Peronism and strangled democracy, Walsh decided to join the armed Montonero movement as their intelligence expert.* That put him at the very top of the generals’ Most Wanted list, with every new disappearance bringing fresh fears that information extracted by the picana would lead the police to the safe house he had secured with his partner, Lilia Ferreyra, in a small village outside Buenos Aires.

  From his vast network of sources, Walsh had been trying to track the junta’s many crimes. He compiled lists of the dead and disappeared, the locations of mass graves and of secret torture centers. He prided himself on his knowledge of the enemy, but in 1977 even he was stunned by the furious brutality that the Argentine junta had unleashed on its own people. In the first year of military rule, dozens of his close friends and colleagues had disappeared in the death camps, and his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Vicki, was also dead, driving Walsh mad with grief.

  But with Ford Falcons circling, a life of quiet mourning was not available to him. Knowing his time was limited, Walsh made a decision about how he would mark the upcoming one-year anniversary of junta rule: with the official papers lavishing praise on the generals for having saved the country, he would write his own, uncensored, version of the depravity into which his country had descended. It would be titled “An Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta,” and it was composed, Walsh wrote, “without hope of being listened to, with the certainty of being persecuted, true to the commitment I took up a long time ago, to bear witness in difficult times.”79

  The letter would be the decisive condemnation of both the methods of state terror and the economic system they served. Walsh planned to circulate his “Open Letter” the way he had distributed previous communiqués from the underground: by making ten copies, then posting them from different mailboxes to select contacts who would distribute them further. “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 violation for human rights which you have committed. It is in the economic policy of this government where one discovers not only the explanation for the crimes, but a greater atrocity which punishes millions of human beings through planned misery…. You only have to walk around greater Buenos Aires for a few hours to check the speed with which such a policy transforms the city into a ‘shantytown’ of ten million people.”81

  The system Walsh was describing was Chicago School neoliberalism, the economic model that would sweep the world. As it took deeper root in Argentina in the decades to come, it would eventually push more than half the population below the poverty line. Walsh saw it not as an accident but the careful execution of a plan—“planned misery.”

  He signed the letter on March 24, 1977, exactly one year after the coup. The next morning, Walsh and Lilia Ferreyra traveled to Buenos Aires. They split the bundle of letters between them and dropped them into mailboxes around the city. A few hours later, Walsh went to a meeting he had arranged with the family of a disappeared colleague. It was a trap: someone had talked under torture, and ten armed men were waiting outside the house in ambush, with orders to capture Walsh. “Bring that fucking bastard back alive, he’s mine,” Admiral Massera, one of the three junta leaders, had reportedly directed the soldiers. Walsh, whose motto was “It isn’t a crime to talk; getting arrested is the crime,” immediately pulled out his gun and began firing. He injured one of the soldiers and drew their fire; he was dead by the time the car arrived at the Navy School of Mechanics. Walsh’s body was burned and dumped in a river.82

  The “War on Terror” Cover Story

  The juntas of the Southern Cone made no secret of their revolutionary ambitions to remake their respective societies, but they were savvy enough to publicly deny what Walsh was accusing them of: using massive violence in order to achieve those economic goals, goals that, in the absence of a system of terrorizing the public and eliminating obstacles, would have certainly provoked popular revolt.

  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…a war against those who favor death and by those of us who favor life…. We are fighting against nihilists, against agents of destruction whose only objective is destruction itself, although they disguise this with social crusades.”83

  In the run-up to Chile’s coup, the CIA bankrolled a massive propaganda campaign to paint Salvador Allende as a dictator in disguise, a Machiavellian schemer who had used constitutional democracy to gain power but was on the verge of imposing a Soviet-style police state from which Chileans would never escape. In Argentina and Uruguay, the largest left-wing guerrilla groups—the Montoneros and the Tupamaros—were presented as such perilous threats to national security that the generals had no other choice but to suspend democracy, seize the state for themselves and use whatever means were necessary to crush them.

  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.84 As for Argentina’s Montoneros and Uruguay’s Tupamaros, they were armed groups with significant popular support, able to pull off daredevil attacks on military and corporate targets. But Uruguay’s Tupamaros were completely dismantled by the time the military seized absolute power, and Argentina’s Montoneros were finished within the first six months of a dictatorship that stretched on for seven years (which was why Walsh was in hiding). Declassified State Departme
nt documents have proven that César Augusto Guzzetti, the Argentine junta’s foreign minister, told Henry Kissinger on October 7, 1976, that “the terrorist organizations have been dismantled”—yet the junta would go on to disappear tens of thousands of citizens after that date.85

  For many years, the U.S. State Department also presented the “dirty wars” in the Southern Cone as pitched battles between the military and dangerous guerrillas, struggles that at times got out of hand but were still deserving of economic and military aid. There is mounting evidence that in Argentina as well as in Chile, Washington knew it was supporting a very different kind of military operation.

  In March 2006, the National Security Archive in Washington released the newly declassified minutes from a State Department meeting that took place just two days after the Argentine junta staged its 1976 coup. At the meeting, William Rogers, assistant secretary of state for Latin America, tells Kissinger that “we’ve got to expect a fair amount of repression, probably a good deal of blood, in Argentina before too long. I think they’re going to have to come down very hard not only on the terrorists but on the dissidents of trade unions and their parties.”86

  Indeed they did. The vast majority of the victims of the Southern Cone’s terror apparatus were not members of armed groups but non-violent activists working in factories, farms, shantytowns and universities. They were economists, artists, psychologists and left-wing party loyalists. They were killed not because of their weapons (which most did not have) but because of their beliefs. In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the “War on Terror” was a war against all obstacles to the new order.