by Naomi Klein
Both groups of shock “doctors” working in the Southern Cone—the generals and the economists—resorted to nearly identical metaphors for their work. Friedman likened his role in Chile to that of a physician who offered “technical medical advice to the Chilean Government to help end a medical plague”—the “plague of inflation.”64 Arnold Harberger, head of the Latin American program at the University of Chicago, went even further. In a lecture delivered to young economists in Argentina, long after the dictatorship had ended, he said that good economists are themselves the treatment—they serve “as antibodies to combat anti-economic ideas and policies.”65 The Argentine junta’s foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti, said that “when the social body of the country has been contaminated by a disease that corrodes its entrails, it forms antibodies. These antibodies cannot be considered in the same way as the microbes. As the government controls and destroys the guerrilla, the action of the antibody will disappear, as is already happening. It is only a natural reaction to a sick body.”66
This language is, of course, the same intellectual construct that allowed the Nazis to argue that by killing “diseased” members of society they were healing the “national body.” As the Nazi doctor Fritz Klein claimed, “I want to preserve life. And out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.” The Khmer Rouge used the same language to justify their slaughter in Cambodia: “What is infected must be cut out.”67
“Normal” Children
Nowhere were the parallels more chilling than in the Argentine junta’s treatment of children inside its network of torture centers. The UN Convention on Genocide states that among the signature genocidal practices is “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”68
An estimated five hundred babies were born inside Argentina’s torture centers, and these infants were immediately enlisted in the plan to reengineer society and create a new breed of model citizens. After a brief nursing period, hundreds of babies were sold or given to couples, most of them directly linked to the dictatorship. The children were raised according to the values of capitalism and Christianity deemed “normal” and healthy by the junta and never told of their heritage, according to the human rights group the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo that has painstakingly tracked down dozens of these children.69 The babies’ parents, considered too diseased to be salvageable, were almost always killed in the camps. The baby thefts were not individual excesses but part of an organized state operation. In one court case, an official 1977 Department of the Interior document was submitted as evidence; it was titled “Instructions on procedures to follow with underage children of political or union leaders when their parents are detained or disappeared.”70
This chapter in Argentina’s history has some striking parallels with the mass theft of indigenous children from their families in the U.S., Canada and Australia, where they were sent to residential schools, forbidden to speak their native languages, and beaten into “whiteness.” In Argentina in the seventies, a similar supremacist logic was clearly at work, based not on race but on political belief, culture and class.
One of the most graphic connections between the political killings and the free-market revolution was not discovered until four years after the Argentine dictatorship had ended. In 1987, a film crew was shooting in the basement of the Galerías Pacífico, one of Buenos Aires’ plushest downtown malls, and to their horror they stumbled on an abandoned torture center. It turned out that during the dictatorship, the First Army Corps hid some of its disappeared in the bowels of the mall; the dungeon walls still bore the desperate markings made by its long-dead prisoners: names, dates, pleas for help.71
Today, Galerías Pacífico is the crown jewel of Buenos Aires’ shopping district, evidence of its arrival as a globalized consumer capital. Vaulted ceilings and lushly painted frescoes frame the vast array of brand-name stores, from Christian Dior to Ralph Lauren to Nike, unaffordable to the vast majority of the country’s inhabitants but a bargain for the foreigners who flock to the city to take advantage of its depressed currency.
For Argentines who know their history, the mall stands as a chilling reminder that just as an older form of capitalist conquest was built on the mass graves of the country’s indigenous peoples, the Chicago School Project in Latin America was quite literally built on the secret torture camps where thousands of people who believed in a different country disappeared.
CHAPTER 5
“ENTIRELY UNRELATED”
HOW AN IDEOLOGY WAS CLEANSED OF ITS CRIMES
Milton [Friedman] is the embodiment of the truth that “ideas have consequences.”
—Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. defense secretary, May 20021
People were in prison so that prices could be free.
—Eduardo Galeano, 19902
For a brief period, it did seem that the crimes of the Southern Cone might actually stick to the neoliberal movement, discrediting it before it expanded beyond its first laboratory. After Milton Friedman’s fateful trip to Chile in 1975, the New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis asked a simple but inflammatory question: “If the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?”3
After the murder of Orlando Letelier, grassroots activists picked up on his call for “the intellectual architect” of Chile’s economic revolution to be held responsible for the human costs of his policies. In those years, Milton Friedman couldn’t give a lecture without being interrupted by someone quoting Letelier, and he was forced to enter through the kitchen at several events where he was being honored.
Students at the University of Chicago were so disturbed to learn of their professors’ collaboration with the junta that they called for an academic investigation. Some academics backed them up, including the Austrian economist Gerhard Tintner, who fled European fascism and came to the U.S. in the 1930s. Tintner compared Chile under Pinochet to Germany under the Nazis and drew parallels between Friedman’s support for Pinochet and the technocrats who collaborated with the Third Reich. (Friedman, in turn, accused his critics of “Nazism.”)4
Both Friedman and Arnold Harberger gladly took credit for the economic miracles performed by their Latin American Chicago Boys. Sounding like a proud father, Friedman crowed in Newsweek in 1982 that the “Chicago Boys…combined outstanding intellectual and executive ability with the courage of their convictions and a sense of dedication to implementing them.” Harberger has said, “I feel prouder about my students than of anything I have written, in fact, the latino group is much more mine than the contribution to the literature.”5 When it came to considering the human costs of the “miracles” their students performed, however, both men suddenly saw no relationship.
“Despite my sharp disagreement with the authoritarian political system of Chile,” Friedman wrote in his Newsweek column, “I do not regard it as evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean Government.”6
In his memoir, Friedman claimed that Pinochet spent the first two years trying to run the economy on his own, and that it wasn’t until “1975, when inflation still raged and a world recession triggered a depression in Chile, [that] General Pinochet turned to the ‘Chicago Boys.’”7 This was blatant revisionism—the Chicago Boys had been working with the military before the coup even took place, and the economic transformation began on the day the junta took power. At other points, Friedman even claimed that Pinochet’s entire reign—seventeen years of dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured—was not a violent unmaking of democracy but its opposite. “The really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society,” Friedman said.8
Three weeks after Letelier was assassinated, news came that cut short the debates over how Pinochet’s crimes reflect
ed on the Chicago School movement. Milton Friedman had been awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics for his “original and weighty” work on the relationship between inflation and unemployment.9 Friedman used his Nobel address to argue that economics was as rigorous and objective a scientific discipline as physics, chemistry and medicine, reliant on an impartial examination of the facts available. He conveniently ignored the fact that the central hypothesis for which he was receiving the prize was being graphically proven false by the breadlines, typhoid outbreaks and shuttered factories in Chile, the one regime ruthless enough to put his ideas into practice.10
One year later, something else happened to define the parameters of the debate about the Southern Cone: Amnesty International won the Nobel Peace Prize, largely for its courageous and crusading work exposing the human rights abuses in Chile and Argentina. The economics prize is actually independent from the peace prize, awarded by a different committee and handed out in a different city. From afar, however, it seemed as if, with the two Nobel prizes, the most prestigious jury in the world had issued its verdict: the shock of the torture chamber was to be forcefully condemned, but economic shock treatments were to be applauded—and the two forms of shock were, as Letelier had written with dripping irony, “entirely unrelated.”11
The Blinders of “Human Rights”
This intellectual firewall went up not only because Chicago School economists refused to acknowledge any connection between their policies and the use of terror. Contributing to the problem was the particular way that these acts of terror were framed as narrow “human rights abuses” rather than as tools that served clear political and economic ends. That is partly because the Southern Cone in the seventies was not just a laboratory for a new economic model. It was also a laboratory for a relatively new activist model: the grassroots international human rights movement. That movement unquestionably played a decisive role in forcing an end to the junta’s worst abuses. But by focusing purely on the crimes and not on the reasons behind them, the human rights movement also helped the Chicago School ideology to escape from its first bloody laboratory virtually unscathed.
The dilemma back to the inception of the modern-day human rights movement, with the 1948 adoption of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No sooner had the document been written than it became a partisan battering ram, used by both sides in the Cold War to accuse the other of being the next Hitler. In 1967, press reports revealed that the International Commission of Jurists, the preeminent human rights group focused on Soviet abuses, was not the impartial arbiter it claimed to be but was receiving secret funding from the CIA.12
It was in this loaded context that Amnesty International developed its doctrine of strict impartiality: its financing would come exclusively from members, and it would remain rigorously “independent of any government, political faction, ideology, economic interest or religious creed.” To prove that it was not using human rights to advance a particular political agenda, each Amnesty chapter was instructed to simultaneously “adopt” three prisoners of conscience, one each “from communist, Western, and Third World countries.”13 Amnesty’s position, emblematic of the human rights movement as a whole at that time, was that since human rights violations were a universal evil, wrong in and of themselves, it was not necessary to determine why abuses were taking place but to document them as meticulously and credibly as possible.
This principle is reflected in the way the terror campaign was recorded in the Southern Cone. Under constant surveillance and harassment from secret police, human rights groups sent delegations to Argentina, Uruguay and Chile to interview hundreds of victims of torture and their families; they also gained what access they could to prisons. Since independent media were banned and the juntas denied their crimes, these testimonies form the primary documentation of a history that was never supposed to be written. Important as this work was, it was also limited: the reports are legalistic lists of the most stomach-turning methods of repression, cross-referenced with the UN charters they violated.
The narrow scope is most problematic in Amnesty International’s 1976 report on Argentina, a breakthrough account of the junta’s atrocities and worthy of its Nobel Prize. Yet for all its thoroughness, the report sheds no light on why the abuses were occurring. It asks the question “to what extent are the violations explicable or necessary” to establish “security”—which was the junta’s official rationale for the “dirty war.”14 After the evidence was examined, the report concludes that the threat posed by left-wing guerrillas was in no way commensurate with the level of repression used by the state.
But was there some other goal that made the violence “explicable or necessary”? Amnesty made no mention of it. In fact, in its ninety-two-page report, it made no mention that the junta was in the process of remaking the country along radically capitalist lines. It offered no comment on the deepening poverty or the dramatic reversal of programs to redistribute wealth, though these were the policy centerpieces of junta rule. It carefully lists all the junta laws and decrees that violated civil liberties but named none of the economic decrees that lowered wages and increased prices, thereby violating the right to food and shelter—also enshrined in the UN charter. If the junta’s revolutionary economic project had been even superficially examined, it would have been clear why such extraordinary repression was necessary, just as it would have explained why so many of Amnesty’s prisoners of conscience were peaceful trade unionists and social workers.
In another major omission, Amnesty presented the conflict as one restricted to the local military and the left-wing extremists. No other players are mentioned—not the U.S. government or the CIA; not local landowners; not multinational corporations. Without an examination of the larger plan to impose “pure” capitalism on Latin America, and the powerful interests behind that project, the acts of sadism documented in the report made no sense at all—they were just random, free-floating bad events, drifting in the political ether, to be condemned by all people of conscience but impossible to understand.
Every facet of the human rights movement was functioning under highly restricted circumstances, though for different reasons. Inside the affected countries, the first people to call attention to the terror were friends and relatives of the victims, but there were severe limits on what they could say. They didn’t talk about the political or economic agendas behind the disappearances because to do so was to risk being disappeared themselves. The most famous human rights activists to emerge under these dangerous circumstances were the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, known in Argentina as the Madres. At their weekly demonstrations outside the house of government in Buenos Aires, the Madres did not dare hold up protest signs—instead they clasped photographs of their missing children with the caption ¿Dónde están? Where are they? In the place of chants, they circled silently, wearing white headscarves embroidered with their children’s names. Many of the Madres had strong political beliefs, but they were careful to present themselves as nothing more threatening to the regime than grieving mothers, desperate to know where their innocent children had been taken.*
In Chile, the largest of the human rights groups was the Peace Committee, formed by opposition politicians, lawyers and Church leaders. These were lifelong political activists who knew that the attempt to stop torture and to free political prisoners was only one front in a much broader battle over who would have control of Chile’s wealth. But in order to avoid becoming the regime’s next victims, they dropped their usual old-left denunciations of the bourgeoisie and learned the new language of “universal human rights.” Scrubbed clean of references to the rich and the poor, the weak and strong, the North and the South, this way of explaining the world, so popular in North America and Europe, simply asserted that everyone has the right to a fair trial and to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. It didn’t ask why, it just asserted that. In the mixture of legalese and human interest that characterizes the human rights lexicon, they le
arned that their imprisoned compañeros were actually prisoners of conscience whose right to freedom of thought and speech, protected under articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, had been violated.
For those living under dictatorship, the new language was essentially a code; just as musicians hid the political messages in their lyrics in sly metaphors, they were disguising their leftism in legalese—a way of engaging in politics without mentioning politics.*
When Latin America’s terror campaign was picked up by the fast-expanding international human rights movement, those activists had their own, very different, reasons for avoiding talk of politics.
Ford on Ford
The refusal to connect the apparatus of state terror to the ideological project it served is characteristic of almost all the human rights literature from this period. Although Amnesty’s reticence can be understood as an attempt to remain impartial amid Cold War tensions, there was, for many other groups, another factor at play: money. By far the most significant source of funding for this work was the Ford Foundation, then the largest philanthropic organization in the world. In the sixties, the organization spent only a small portion of its budget on human rights, but in the seventies and eighties, the foundation spent a staggering $30 million on work devoted to human rights in Latin America. With these funds, the foundation backed Latin American groups like Chile’s Peace Committee as well as new U.S.-based groups, including Americas Watch.15
