The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

by Naomi Klein

  In Chile, Pinochet was determined to break his people’s habit of taking to the streets. The tiniest gatherings were dispersed with water cannons, Pinochet’s favorite crowd-control weapon. The junta had hundreds of them, small enough to drive onto sidewalks and douse cliques of schoolchildren handing out leaflets; even funeral processions, when the mourning got too rowdy, were brutally repressed. Nicknamed guanacos, after a llama known for its habit of spitting, the ubiquitous cannons cleared away people as if they were human garbage, leaving the streets glistening, clean and empty.

  Shortly after the coup, the Chilean junta issued an edict urging citizens to “contribute to cleansing your homeland” by reporting foreign “extremists” and “fanaticized Chileans.”31

  Who Was Killed—and Why

  The majority of the people swept up in the raids were not “terrorists,” as the rhetoric claimed, but rather the people whom the juntas had identified as posing the most serious barriers to their economic program. Some were actual opponents, but many were simply seen as representing values contrary to the revolution’s.

  The systematic nature of this cleansing campaign is clearly corroborated by matching the dates and times of the disappearances documented in human rights and truth commission reports. In Brazil, the junta did not begin mass repression until the late sixties, but there was one exception: as soon as the coup was launched, soldiers rounded up the leadership of trade unions active in the factories and on the large ranches. According to Brasil: Nunca Mais (Never Again), they were sent to jail, where many faced torture, “for the simple reason that they were inspired by a political philosophy opposed by the authorities.” This truth commission report, based on the military’s own court records, notes that the General Workers Command (CGT), the main coalition of trade unions, appears in the junta’s court proceedings “as an omnipresent demon to be exorcised.” The report bluntly concludes that the reason “the authorities who took over in 1964 were especially careful to ‘clean out’ this sector” is that they “feared the spread of…resistance from the labor unions to their economic programs, which were based on tightening salaries and denationalizing the economy.”32

  In both Chile and Argentina, the military governments used the initial chaos of the coup to launch vicious attacks on the trade union movement. These operations were clearly planned well in advance, as the systematic raids began on the day of the coup itself. In Chile, while all eyes were on the besieged presidential palace, other battalions were dispatched to “factories in what were known as the ‘industrial belts,’ where troops carried out raids and arrested people. During the next few days,” Chile’s truth and reconciliation report notes, several more factories were raided, “leading to massive arrests of people, some of whom were later killed or disappeared.”33 In 1976, 80 percent of Chile’s political prisoners were workers and peasants.34

  Argentina’s truth commission report, Nunca Más (Never Again), documents a parallel surgical strike against trade unions: “We notice that a large proportion of the operations [against workers] were carried out on the day of the coup itself, or immediately after.”35 Amid the list of attacks on factories, one testimony is particularly revealing about how “terrorism” was used as a smoke screen to go after non-violent worker activists. Graciela Geuna, a political prisoner in the torture camp known as La Perla, described how the soldiers guarding her became agitated by an impending strike at a power plant. The strike was to be “an important example in the resistance to the military dictatorship,” and the junta did not want it to happen. So, Geuna recalled, the “soldiers in the unit decided to make it illegal or, as they said, to ‘Montonerize’ it” (the Montoneros being the guerrilla group the army had already effectively broken). The strikers had nothing to do with the Montoneros, but that didn’t matter. The “soldiers at La Perla themselves printed leaflets they signed ‘Montoneros’—leaflets calling on the power workers to strike.” The leaflets then became the “proof” needed to kidnap and kill the union leadership.36

  Corporate-Sponsored Torture

  Attacks on union leaders were often carried out in close coordination with the owners of the workplaces, and court cases filed in recent years provide some of the best-documented examples of direct involvement by local subsidiaries of foreign multinationals.

  In the years prior to the coup in Argentina, the rise of left-wing militancy had affected foreign companies both economically and personally; between 1972 and 1976, five executives from the auto company Fiat were assassinated.37 The fortunes of such companies changed dramatically when the junta took power and implemented Chicago School policies; now they could flood the local market with imports, pay lower wages, lay workers off at will and send their profits home unhindered by regulations.

  Several multinationals effusively expressed their gratitude. On the first new year under military rule in Argentina, Ford Motor Company took out a celebratory newspaper advertisement openly aligning itself with the regime: “1976: Once again, Argentina finds its way. 1977: New Year of faith and hope for all Argentines of good will. Ford Motor of Argentina and its people commit themselves to the struggle to bring about the great destiny of the Fatherland.”38 Foreign corporations did more than thank the juntas for their fine work; some were active participants in the terror campaigns. In Brazil, several multinationals banded together and financed their own privatized torture squads. In mid-1969, just as the junta entered its most brutal phase, an extralegal police force was launched called Operation Bandeirantes, known as OBAN. Staffed with military officers, OBAN was funded, according to Brazil: Never Again, “by contributions from various multinational corporations, including Ford and General Motors.” Because it was outside official military and police structures, OBAN enjoyed “flexibility and impunity with regard to interrogation methods,” the report states, and quickly gained a reputation for unparalleled sadism.39

  It was in Argentina, however, that the involvement of Ford’s local subsidiary with the terror apparatus was most overt. The company supplied cars to the military, and the green Ford Falcon sedan was the vehicle used for thousands of kidnappings and disappearances. The Argentine psychologist and playwright Eduardo Pavlovsky described the car as “the symbolic expression of terror. A death-mobile.”40

  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. Before the coup, Ford had been forced to make significant concessions to its workers: one hour off for lunch instead of twenty minutes, and 1 percent of the sale of each car to go to social service programs. All that changed abruptly on the day of the coup, when the counterrevolution began. 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. Troiani was among those pulled off the assembly line. He recalled that “before detaining me, they walked me around the factory, they did it right out in the open so that the people would see: Ford used this to eliminate unionism in the factory.”43 Most startling was what happened next: rather than being rushed off to a nearby prison, Troiani and others say soldiers took them to a detention facility that had been set up inside the factory gates. In their place of work, where they had been negotiating contracts just days before, workers were beaten, kicked and, in two cases, electroshocked.44 They were then taken to outside prisons where the torture continued for weeks and, in some cases, months.45 According to the workers’ lawyers, at least twenty-five Ford union reps were kidnapped in this period, half of them detained on the company grounds in a facility that human rights groups in Ar
gentina are lobbying to have placed on an official list of former clandestine detention facilities.46

  In 2002, federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Ford Argentina on behalf of Troiani and fourteen other workers, alleging that the company is legally responsible for the repression that took place on its property. “Ford [Argentina] and its executives colluded in the kidnapping of its own workers, and I think they should be held responsible for that,” says Troiani.47 Mercedes-Benz (a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler) is facing a similar investigation stemming from allegations that the company collaborated with the military during the 1970s to purge one of its plants of union leaders, allegedly giving names and addresses of sixteen workers who were later disappeared, fourteen of them permanently.48

  According to the Latin American historian Karen Robert, by the end of the dictatorship, “virtually all the shop-floor delegates had been disappeared from the country’s biggest firms…such as Mercedes-Benz, Chrysler and Fiat Concord.”49 Both Ford and Mercedes-Benz deny that their executives played any role in the repression. The cases are ongoing.

  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. Particularly brutal throughout the region were the attacks on farmers who had been involved in the struggle for land reform. Leaders of the Argentine Agrarian Leagues—who had been spreading incendiary ideas about the right of peasants to own land—were hunted down and tortured, often out in the fields they worked, in full view of the community. Soldiers used truck batteries to power their picanas, turning the ubiquitous farm implement against the farmers themselves. Meanwhile, the junta’s economic policies were a windfall for the landowners and cattle ranchers. In Argentina, Martínez de Hoz had deregulated the price of meat, and the cost was up more than 700 percent, leading to record profits.50

  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. “The poor won’t have any goody-goodies to look after them anymore!” Norberto Liwsky, an Argentine doctor, was told as “they applied electric shocks to my gums, nipples, genitals, abdomen and ears.”51

  An Argentine priest who collaborated with the junta explained the guiding philosophy: “The enemy was Marxism. Marxism in the church, let us say, and in the mother country—the danger of a new nation.”52 That “danger of a new nation” helps explain why so many of the juntas’ victims were young. In Argentina, 81 percent of the thirty thousand people who were disappeared were between the ages of sixteen and thirty.53 “We are working now for the next twenty years,” a notorious Argentine torturer told one of his victims.54

  Among the youngest were a group of 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.55 Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, the police commissioner finally sentenced in 2006, was one of the key figures implicated in the attack.

  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.

  In unguarded moments, some of those on the front lines of the economic transformation have acknowledged that the achieving of their goals required mass repression. Victor Emmanuel, the Burson-Marsteller public relations executive who was in charge of selling the Argentine junta’s new business-friendly regime to the outside world, told a researcher that violence was necessary to open up Argentina’s “protective, statist” economy. “No one, but no one, invests in a country involved in a civil war,” he said, but he admitted that it wasn’t just guerrillas who died. “A lot of innocent people were probably killed,” he told the author Marguerite Feitlowitz, but, “given the situation, immense force was required.”56

  Sergio de Castro, Pinochet’s Chicago Boy economics minister who oversaw the implemention of shock treatment, said he could never have done it without Pinochet’s iron fist backing him up. “Public opinion was very much against [us], so we needed a strong personality to maintain the policy. It was our luck that President Pinochet understood and had the character to withstand criticism.” He has also observed that an “authoritarian government” is best suited to safeguarding economic freedom because of its “impersonal” use of power.57

  As is the case with most state terror, the targeted killings served a dual purpose. First, they removed real obstacles to the project—the people most likely to fight back. Second, the fact that everyone witnessed the “troublemakers” being disappeared sent an unmistakable warning to those who might be thinking of resisting, thereby eliminating future obstacles.

  And it worked. “We were confused and anguished, docile and waiting to take orders…people regressed; they became more dependent and fearful,” recalled the Chilean psychiatrist Marco Antonio de la Parra.58 They were, in other words, in shock. So when economic shocks sent prices soaring and wages dropping, the streets in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay remained clear and calm. There were no food riots, no general strikes. Families coped by quietly skipping meals, feeding their babies maté, a traditional tea that suppresses hunger, and waking up before dawn to walk for hours to work, saving on bus fare. Those who died from malnutrition or typhoid were quietly buried.

  Just a decade earlier, the countries of the Southern Cone—with their exploding industrial sectors, rapidly rising middle classes and strong health and education systems—had been the hope of the developing world. Now rich and poor were hurtling into different economic worlds, with the wealthy gaining honorary citizenship in the State of Florida and the rest being pushed back into underdevelopment, a process that would deepen throughout the neoliberal “restructurings” of the postdictatorship era. No longer inspirational examples, these countries were now terrifying warnings about what happens to poor nations that think they can pull themselves out of the Third World. It was a conversion that paralleled what prisoners were going through inside the junta’s torture centers: it wasn’t enough to talk—they were forced to renounce their most cherished beliefs, betray their lovers and children. The ones who gave in were called quebrados, the broken ones. So it was in the Southern Cone: the region wasn’t just beaten, it was broken, quebrado.

  Torture as “Curing”

  While the policies attempted to excise collectivism from the culture, inside the prisons torture tried to excise it from the mind and spirit. As an Argentine junta editorial noted in 1976, “minds too must be cleansed, for that is where the error was born.”59

  Many torturers adopted the posture of a doctor or surgeon. Like the Chicago economists with their painful but necessary shock treatments, these interrogators imagined that their electroshocks and other torments were therapeutic—that they were administering a kind of medicine to their prisoners, who were often referred to inside the camps as apestosos, the dirty or diseased ones. They would heal them of the sickness that was socialism, of the impulse toward collective action.* Their “treatments” were agonizing, certainly; they might even be lethal—but it was for the patient’s own good. “If you have gangrene in an arm, you have to cut it off, right?” Pinochet demanded, in impatient response to criticisms of his human rights record.60

  In testimony from truth commission reports across the region, prisoners tell of a system designed to force them to betray the principle most integral to their sense of self. For most Latin American leftists, that most cherished principle was what Argentina’s radical historian Osvaldo Bayer called “the only transcendental theology: solidarity.”61 The torturers understood the importance of solidarity well, and they set out to sh
ock that impulse of social interconnectedness out of their prisoners. Of course all interrogation is purportedly about gaining valuable information and therefore forcing betrayal, but many prisoners report that their torturers were far less interested in the information, which they usually already possessed, than in achieving the act of betrayal itself. The point of the exercise was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else, that part of themselves that made them activists, replacing it with shame and humiliation.

  Sometimes the betrayals were completely beyond a prisoner’s control. For instance, the Argentine prisoner Mario Villani had his agenda book with him when he was kidnapped. It contained the coordinates for a meeting he had scheduled with a friend; the soldiers showed up in his place, and another activist was disappeared into the terror machinery. On the table, Villani’s interrogators tortured him with the knowledge that “they got Jorge because he’d kept his date with me. They knew that my knowing this would be a far worse torment than 220 volts. The remorse is almost more than you can take.”62

  The ultimate acts of rebellion in this context were small gestures of kindness between prisoners, such as tending to each other’s wounds or sharing scarce food. When such loving acts were discovered, they were met with harsh punishment. Prisoners were goaded into being as individualistic as possible, constantly offered Faustian bargains, like choosing between more unbearable torture for themselves or more torture for a fellow prisoner. In some cases, prisoners were so successfully broken that they agreed to hold the picana on their fellow inmates or go on television and renounce their former beliefs. These prisoners represented the ultimate triumph for their torturers: not only had the prisoners abandoned solidarity but in order to survive they had succumbed to the cutthroat ethos at the heart of laissez-faire capitalism—“looking out for No. 1,” in the words of the ITT executive.*63