Democracy in Chile: The Legacy of September 11, 1973 (review)

The thirtieth anniversary of that other 9/11—the violent September 11, 1973 military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende and put an end to his democratic road to socialism—was an occasion for reflection by scholars in many parts of the world. There were conferences and symposia on three continents, some of which focused on the coup itself and the Chile it brought to so sudden an end, while others concentrated on the Pinochet era that followed the coup. This conference volume is unusual—and valuable—for its primary focus on Chile after the end of the dictatorship and the restoration of democracy in 1990. The authors in this anthology generally share the Left's critical gaze and offer a critique of Chile's much-lauded transition to democracy and neo-liberal economic miracle, lending the book an ideological cohesion.

In the first part, on U.S.-Chilean relations, Peter Kornbluh recounts the interesting back-story to his acclaimed book, The Pinochet File (2003), telling how 24,000 secret U.S. documents on Chile came to be declassified. He summarizes his argument that the U.S. government knew what was going on in Chile during 1973-76, but chose not to do anything to stop the massive and systematic human rights abuses. In a strong contribution, Steve Volk examines the United States and Chile thirty years after the coup, seeing striking parallels between the two, beginning with their "twin 9-11's" (p. 27) and continuing through their replacement of citizens with consumers, the problematic quality of their democracy (including the suppression of civil liberties in the name of national security), and a commitment to neo-liberal economic and social policies.

Part II looks at those policies and their impact in some detail. Volker Frank synthesizes his excellent work on labor since 1990 into a concise summary chapter whose argument is told by its title: "Integration without Real Participation." That is also the theme of Fernando Leiva's chapter on the "politics of participation" under the post-1990 governments of the center-left Concertación, which concludes that its real purpose was to legitimate neo-liberal policies and the state that sustained them. Diane Haughney then looks at the indigenous victims of Chile's neo-liberal miracle, the Mapuches of the forested south of Chile, and their ongoing struggle with the big logging corporations over land and trees—although her most interesting pages discuss the Mapuches as a social movement and their often conflictive relations with the Chilean state. Patricia Tomic and Ricardo Trumper close this part of the book with a trenchant critique of Pinochet's educational reforms and neo-liberal educational policies, including the growing privatization of higher education, arguing that they reflected the Washington Consensus rather than Chilean needs and traditions, and that the new private universities were more interested in profits than pedagogy. The third part of this volume turns our attentions to questions of human rights. Mark Ensalco offers a brief overview of Pinochet's prosecution and eroding impunity, while Ornella Lepri Mazzuca reflects on historical memory in Chile, finding hope in the triumph of the truth in the fiction of Isabel Allende and in websites such as Memoria viva, concluding that memory takes advantage of different genres and new technologies to construct histories that differ from the official story.

The rest of the book focuses on the arts, although often using them as a window onto other issues. In Camilo Trumper's insightful chapter on the political murals, posters and graffiti of the Allende era, the walls on which they were painted become spaces for political struggles and "evanescent historical documents" (p. 144), where both a nation and a community were articulated. Julia Carroll's interesting analysis of the figure of the maid in Chilean fiction in the second half of the twentieth century points to the persistence of a hierarchical society, but also...