by Naomi Klein
CHAPTER 4
CLEANING THE SLATE
TERROR DOES ITS WORK
Extermination in Argentina is not spontaneous, it is not by chance, it is not irrational: it is the systematic destruction of a “substantial part” of the Argentine national group, intended to transform the group as such, to redefine its way of being, its social relations, its fate, its future.
—Daniel Feierstein, an Argentine sociologist, 20041
I had just one goal—to stay alive until the next day…. But it wasn’t just to survive, but to survive as me.
—Mario Villani, survivor of four years in Argentina’s torture camps2
In 1976, Orlando Letelier was back in Washington, D.C., no longer as an ambassador but as an activist with a progressive think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. Haunted by thoughts of the colleagues and friends still facing torture in junta camps, Letelier used his newly recovered freedom to expose Pinochet’s crimes and to defend Allende’s record against the CIA propaganda machine.
The activism was having an effect, and Pinochet faced universal condemnation for his human rights record. What frustrated Letelier, a trained economist, was that even as the world gasped in horror at reports of summary executions and electroshock in the jails, most were silent in the face of the economic shock therapy; or, in the case of the international banks showering the junta with loans, downright giddy about Pinochet’s embrace of “free-market fundamentals.” 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.
“The violation of human rights, the system of institutionalized brutality, the drastic control and suppression of every form of meaningful dissent is discussed (and often condemned) as a phenomenon only indirectly linked, or indeed entirely unrelated, to the classical unrestrained ‘free market’ policies that have been enforced by the military junta,” Letelier wrote in a searing essay for The Nation. He pointed out that “this particularly convenient concept of a social system, in which ‘economic freedom’ and political terror coexist without touching each other, allows these financial spokesmen to support their concept of ‘freedom’ while exercising their verbal muscles in defense of human rights.”3
Letelier went so far as to write that Milton Friedman, as “the intellectual architect and unofficial adviser for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy,” shared responsibility for Pinochet’s crimes. He dismissed Friedman’s defense that lobbying for shock treatment was merely offering “technical” advice. The “establishment of a free ‘private economy’ and the control of inflation a la Friedman,” Letelier argued, could not be done peacefully. “The economic plan has had to be enforced, and in the Chilean context that could be done only by the killing of thousands, the establishment of concentration camps all over the country, the jailing of more than 100,000 persons in three years…. Regression for the majorities and ‘economic freedom’ for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin.” There was, he wrote, “an inner harmony” between the “free market” and unlimited terror.4
Letelier’s controversial article was published at the end of August 1976. Less than a month later, on September 21, the forty-four-year-old economist was driving to work in downtown Washington, D.C. As he passed through the heart of the embassy district, a remote-controlled bomb planted under the driver’s seat exploded, sending the car flying and blowing off both his legs. With his severed foot abandoned on the pavement, Letelier was rushed to George Washington Hospital; he was dead on arrival. The former ambassador had been driving with a twenty-five-year-old American colleague, Ronni Moffit, and she also lost her life in the attack.5 It was Pinochet’s most outrageous and defiant crime since the coup itself.
An FBI investigation revealed that the bomb had been the work of Michael Townley, a senior member of Pinochet’s secret police, later convicted in a U.S federal court for the crime. The assassins had been admitted to the country on false passports with the knowledge of the CIA.6
When Pinochet died in December 2006 at age ninety-one, he faced multiple attempts to put him on trial for crimes committed during his rule—from murder, kidnapping and torture to corruption and tax evasion. The family of Orlando Letelier had been trying for decades to bring Pinochet to trial for the bombing in Washington and to open the U.S. files on the incident. But the dictator got the last word in death, evading all the trials and issuing a posthumous letter in which he defended the coup and the use of “maximum rigor” in staving off a “dictatorship of the proletariat…. How I wish the Sep. 11, 1973, military action had not been necessary!” Pinochet wrote. “How I wish the Marxist-Leninist ideology had not entered our fatherland!”7
Not all the criminals of Latin America’s terror years have been so fortunate. In September 2006, twenty-three years after the end of Argentina’s military dictatorship, one of the main enforcers of the terror was finally sentenced to life in prison. The convicted man was Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, who had been police commissioner of the province of Buenos Aires during the junta years.
During the historic trial, Jorge Julio López, a key witness, went missing—disappeared. López had been disappeared in the seventies, brutally tortured, then released—now it was happening all over again. In Argentina, López became known as the first person to be “double disappeared.”8 As of mid-2007, he was still missing, and the police were virtually certain that he had been kidnapped as a warning to other would-be witnesses—the same old tactics of the terror years.
The judge on the case, fifty-five-year-old Carlos Rozanski of Argentina’s federal court, found Etchecolatz guilty of six counts of homicide, six counts of unlawful imprisonment and seven cases of torture. 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.”9
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. Nor were the disappeared merely victims of mad dictators who were drunk on sadism and their own personal power. What had happened was something more scientific, more terrifyingly rational. As the judge put it, there had been a “plan of extermination carried out by those who ruled the country.”10
He explained that the killings were part of a system, planned far in advance, duplicated in identical fashion across the country, and committed with clear intent not of attacking individual persons but of destroying the parts of society that those people represented. Genocide is an attempt to murder a group, not a collection of individual persons; therefore, argued the judge, it was genocide.11
Rozanski recognized that his use of the word “genocide” was controversial, and he wrote a lengthy decision backing up the choice. He acknowledged that the UN Convention on Genocide defines the crime as an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, religious or racial group”; the Convention does not include eliminating a group based on its political beliefs—as had been the case in Argentina—but Rozanski said he did not consider that exclusion to be legally legitimate.12 Pointing to a little-known chapter in UN history, he explained that on December 11, 1946, in direct response to the Nazi Holocaust, 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 wa
s 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.14
Rozanski wrote that he considered the original UN definition to be the more legitimate, since it had not been subject to this self-interested compromise.* He also made reference to a ruling by a Spanish national court that had put one of Argentina’s notorious torturers on trial in 1998. That court had also ruled that Argentina’s junta had committed “the crime of genocide.” It defined the group the junta was trying to wipe out as “those citizens that did not fit the model determined by the repressors to be suitable for the new order being established in the country.”15 The following year, in 1999, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, famous for issuing an arrest warrant for Augusto Pinochet, also argued that Argentina had suffered genocide. He too made an attempt to define which group had been targeted for extermination. 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.” The people who did not fit the new order were ones “located in those sectors that got in the way of the ideal configuration of the new Argentinean Nation.”16
There is, of course, no comparison in scale between what happened under the Nazis, or in Rwanda in 1994, and the crimes of the corporatist dictatorships of Latin America in the seventies. If genocide means a holocaust, these crimes do not belong in that category. However, if genocide is understood as these courts define it, as an attempt to deliberately obliterate the groups who were barriers to a political project, then this process can be seen not just in Argentina but, to varying degrees of intensity, throughout the region that was turned into the Chicago School laboratory. 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.
Since the fall of Communism, free markets and free people have been packaged as a single ideology that claims to be humanity’s best and only defense against repeating a history filled with mass graves, killing fields and torture chambers. Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.
There was, as Letelier wrote, an “inner harmony” between the drive to cleanse sectors of society and the ideology at the heart of the project. 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 central theory, the economic signals become distorted and the entire system is thrown out of balance.
The Chicago Boys could scarcely have selected a part of the world less hospitable to this absolutist experiment than the Southern Cone of Latin America in the 1970s. The extraordinary rise of developmentalism meant that the area was a cacophony of precisely the policies that the Chicago School considered distortions or “uneconomic ideas.” More important, it was teeming with popular and intellectual movements that had emerged in direct opposition to laissez-faire capitalism. Such views were not marginal but typical of the majority of citizens, as reflected in election after election in country after country. A Chicago School transformation was about as likely to be warmly received in the Southern Cone as a proletarian revolution in Beverly Hills.
Before the terror campaign descended on Argentina, Rodolfo Walsh had written, “Nothing can stop us, neither jail nor death. Because you can’t jail or kill a whole people and because the vast majority of Argentinians…know that only the people will save the people.”17 Salvador Allende, as he watched the tanks roll in to lay siege to the presidential palace, had made one final radio address suffused with this same defiance: “I am certain that the seed we planted in the worthy consciousness of thousands and thousands of Chileans cannot be definitively uprooted,” he said, his last public words. “They have the strength; they can subjugate us, but they cannot halt social processes by either crime or force. History is ours, and the people make it.”18
The junta commanders of the region and their economic accomplices were well acquainted with those truths. A veteran of several Argentine military coups explained the thinking inside the military: “In 1955 we believed that the problem was [Juan] Perón, so we took him out, but by 1976 we already knew that the problem was the working class.”19 It was the same across the region: the problem was large and deep. That realization meant that if the neoliberal revolution was going to succeed, the juntas needed to do what Allende had claimed was impossible—definitively uproot the seed that was sown during Latin America’s leftward surge. In its Declaration of Principles, issued after the coup, the Pinochet dictatorship described its mission as a “prolonged and profound operation to change Chilean mentality,” an echo of the statement twenty years earlier by USAID’s Albion Patterson, godfather of the Chile Project: “What we need to do is change the formation of the men.”20
But how to do that? 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 Guevara. When the juntas set out to defy Allende’s prophecy and pull up socialism by its roots, it was a declaration of war against this entire culture.
The imperative was reflected in the dominant metaphors used by the military regimes in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina: those fascist standbys of cleaning, scrubbing, uprooting and curing. In Brazil, the junta’s roundups of leftists were code-named Operação Limpeza, Operation Cleanup. On the day of the coup, Pinochet referred to Allende and his cabinet as “that filth that was going to ruin the country.”21 One month later he pledged to “extirpate the root of evil from Chile,” to bring about a “moral cleansing” of the nation, “purified of vices”—an echo of the Third Reich author Alfred Rosenberg’s call for “a merciless cleansing with an iron broom.”22
Cleansing Cultures
In Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, the juntas staged massive ideological cleanup operations, burning books by Freud, Marx and Neruda, closing hundreds of newspapers and magazines, occupying universities, banning strikes and political meetings.
Some of the most vicious attacks were reserved for the “pink” economists whom the Chicago Boys could not defeat before the coups. At the University of Chile, rival to the Chicago Boys’ home base, the Catholic University, hundreds of professors were fired for “inobservance of moral duties” (including André Gunder Frank, the dissident Chicagoan who wrote angry letters home to his former professors).23 During the coup, Gunder Frank reported that “six students were shot on sight in the main entrance to the School of Econo
mics to offer an object lesson to the remainder.”24 When the junta seized power in Argentina, soldiers marched into the University of the South in Bahía Blanca and imprisoned seventeen academics on charges of “subversive instruction”; once again, most were from the economics department.25 “It is necessary to destroy the sources which feed, form and indoctrinate the subversive delinquent,” one of the generals announced at a press conference.26 A total of eight thousand “ideologically suspect” leftist educators were purged as part of Operation Clarity.27 In high schools, they banned group presentations—a sign of a latent collective spirit, dangerous to “individual freedom.”28
In Santiago, the legendary left-wing folk singer Victor Jara was among those taken to the Chile Stadium. His treatment was the embodiment of the furious determination to silence a culture. First the soldiers broke both his hands so he could not play the guitar, then they shot him forty-four times, according to Chile’s truth and reconciliation commission.29 To make sure he could not inspire from beyond the grave, the regime ordered his master recordings destroyed. Mercedes Sosa, a fellow musician, was forced into exile from Argentina, the revolutionary dramatist Augusto Boal was tortured and exiled from Brazil, Eduardo Galeano was driven from Uruguay and Walsh was murdered in the streets of Buenos Aires. A culture was being deliberately exterminated.
Meanwhile, another sanitized, purified culture was replacing it. At the start of the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, the only public gatherings permitted were shows of military strength and football matches. In Chile, wearing slacks was enough to get you arrested if you were a woman, long hair if you were a man. “All over the Republic a thorough cleansing is under way,” declared an editorial in a junta-controlled Argentine newspaper. It called for a mass scrubbing of leftist graffiti: “Soon enough the surfaces will shine through, released from that nightmare by the action of soap and water.”30