The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile

EIGHT: The Politics of Organizing Coercion

133 E I G H T The Politics of Organizing Coercion A common justification for authoritarian rule is the promise to “get rid of politics” by replacing corrupt, ineffective, or quarrelsome politicians with a more disciplined military, party, or bureaucratic cadre. This book throws such a notion into doubt by showing that even in authoritarian regimes, organizing coercion is a distinctly and unavoidably political problem of governance. Rulers have to build coercive institutions by selecting from among a discrete set of organizational alternatives and by grappling with the different trade-offs they impose. Weber’s fundamental insight about coercion in politics can thus be turned in on itself: not only is coercion at the center of politics, but the choices and conflicts involved in organizing coercion show that politics is also at the center of coercion. Rather than getting rid of politics, authoritarian rulers simply exchange one set of political choices and conflicts for another. The typology in this book maps a heretofore understudied political and policy space and provides a new language to analyze the conflicts that take place within it. In the case of Chile, this analysis sheds new light on the rise and fall of repression during the military regime, especially during the period of greatest institutional flux, between 1973 and 1978. While we still lack a complete picture of the events during this time, this book makes clear the need to move beyond the debate over whether this period signaled the triumph of the soft-liners or the consolidation of Pinochet ’s personal power. Each of these accounts contains elements of truth, but each also ignores fundamental aspects of the problems faced by decision makers at the time and fails to ask crucial questions. In 1973–74, the two crucial questions were: Why would the junta agree to the creation of a repressive agency—the DINA—that would 134 The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile undermine its own power, and how did the DINA manage to convince the military leadership to allow it to take over the task of repression? Understanding the problems of near-blind coercion and the benefits of increasing internal monitoring is not a sufficient explanation for the creation of the DINA, but it is a necessary one. In much the same way, the crucial questions in 1977–78 were these: Why would Pinochet agree to dismantle the DINA, an agency that had allowed him to centralize power, and how did the soft-liners manage to convince him to drop his allegiance to it? The DINA’s organizational fiascos (its failure to significantly increase internal monitoring and its resulting tendency to run amok, as well as its failure to decrease external monitoring and its resulting failure to deliver on the promise of plausible deniability) are also not a sufficient explanation for its fall, but it is necessary to consider them. This analysis brings contingency into the history of this period, an element that receives insufficient attention in the standard accounts. It makes clear that neither the rise nor the fall of the DINA was preordained . In 1973−74 the regime could have continued to muddle through with near-blind coercion, or it could have chosen to increase internal monitoring by reorganizing each of the armed forces and improving interforce communication and coordination. Undoubtedly there would have been problems with each of these alternatives, but these would not have been significantly higher than the problems imposed on the regime by creating the DINA. And while reorganizing coercion to address the failures of the DINA was crucial to institutionalizing the regime, the regime would have taken a radically different path had Pinochet chosen to strengthen his bond with the hard-liners and Contreras instead of breaking it. The real costs for Pinochet of backing the soft-liners—such as his more narrowly circumscribed powers—were not overwhelmingly outweighed by the potential benefits of a more clearly institutionalized regime, such as putting an end to the intra-junta rivalries. At the same time, the significance of the information on the regime’s crimes compiled by human rights watchdogs is presented here in a new light. This information played a role in curbing the dictatorship’s repression , but it did so in a more contingent manner—with more contradictory results—than is often assumed. As suggested above, replacing the The Politics of Organizing Coercion 135 DINA with the CNI was not a foregone...