The Pinochet Regime (review)

For nearly 40 years, the figure of General Augusto Pinochet has divided the Chilean people. Many Chileans still consider him a patriotic military man who prevented the consolidation of Communism on Chilean soil and who laid the foundations for a prosperous, modern country. For many other Chileans, however, Pinochet is the man who destroyed a long-standing democracy and set up one of the cruelest authoritarian regimes Latin America has ever experienced. When the general was arrested in London in October 1998, some Chileans euphorically celebrated the event whereas others angrily repudiated the British action. His death in December 2006 again exposed the sharp division among Chileans. News of his death was greeted with spontaneous street celebrations, but just a few days later, impressively long queues of people in Santiago waited patiently for hours to pay their last respects to the former dictator.

This division has also been visible within Chilean academic circles. Until now well-balanced studies of Pinochet and his regime have been extremely rare. Even moderate scholars have tended to lose their objectivity when discussing the general. For many years historians have assumed that the first authoritative work on the Pinochet regime would have to come from a North American or European scholar who could maintain his or her emotional and personal distance from this most controversial period of recent Chilean history.

Chilean political scientist Carlos Huneeus’s The Pinochet Regime is thus a very welcome surprise; it provides a profound and extremely well-documented analysis of the structures of power, the policies, and the reasons for the longevity of the Pinochet regime. Huneeus starts his analysis by identifying the many distinctive features of the Pinochet regime and by comparing them to other authoritarian experiences in the South American region. Chile remained a police state throughout Pinochet’s seventeen years in power. Whereas in other South American countries repression was concentrated in the first years of military rule, the Pinochet regime used systematic violence against its opponents for the duration of its rule. Another important difference in the Chilean case was the enormous personalization of power in the figure of General Pinochet, unlike military regimes elsewhere in South America that were more collective in structure, with the armed forces governing as an institution. But the most distinctive feature of the Pinochet regime was the profound reforms he introduced in the Chilean economy following the adoption of an orthodox neoliberal model of free market economics.

As Huneeus correctly points out, the relative success Pinochet achieved in reactivating the Chilean economy and in modernizing the country helps to explain how his government was able to obtain the support of the country’s entrepreneurs and its large middle class. Instead of democracy and citizenship Pinochet offered Chilean citizens the benefits of the market and unrestricted consumerism of foreign goods. As the consumption of foreign goods expanded, it became an effective instrument in legitimizing Pinochet’s rule.

Pinochet’s legitimation strategy was also based on the adoption of a series of constitutional measures (including the formation of a council of state and the promulgation of the 1980 constitution) in an attempt to provide the regime with a legal basis and to ensure its long-term existence. In a detailed analysis, Huneeus demonstrates that the political and economic course the new authorities followed was unclear in the early years after the military coup. At the beginning, the military regime was influenced by the ideas and projects of the so-called gremialista movement, an ultraconservative Catholic movement led by Jaime Guzmán. The gremialistas provided the main ideological arguments used in justifying the coup, as well as the new order the military sought to follow. They also offered the legal and technical assistance needed to reform the legal system and to manage a series of specialized state agencies. However, the gremialistas had no specific economic plan to tackle the profound economic and financial crisis that had severely affected the country since the days of Salvador Allende’s government.

In a fascinating chapter, Huneeus describes the ascendancy of the...