The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments I did not know it at the time, but this book began with the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973. I was eight years old, and the coup marked me, as it did every Chilean. My parents had supported the Allende government , my father spent eighteen months as a political prisoner after the coup, and in 1975 he and my mother fled to Canada as refugees with my two sisters and me. This book goes to press almost a year after Augusto Pinochet’s death, when many of his henchmen are in jail for crimes committed during the dictatorship. Although he avoided prison himself, Pinochet was dogged by the courts in his final years, especially after being arrested in London in 1998, thanks to the efforts of a dedicated Spanish prosecutor making full use of an increasingly restrictive international human rights legal regime. During his final years Pinochet also lost a great deal of support as a result of financial scandals, which demonstrated that contrary to widespread popular belief his regime was not free from corruption and he and his family took advantage of their power to enrich themselves personally. Many of the dictatorship’s crimes remain unpunished, and many Chileans still support, if not Pinochet, then many of the dictatorship ’s overall goals. Yet compared to a generation ago, Pinochet and the dictatorship are much more thoroughly discredited than in the past, the regime’s misdeeds are well known, and the legal noose around its principals continues to tighten. The intellectual origins of this book can be traced in part to the work of Max Weber, which I read as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia and came to especially appreciate in graduate school at MIT. Weber (like Hobbes before him) understood that coercion is at the center of politics—one of the fundamental insights of the social sciences. If coercion is central to politics, it is especially central to authoritarian xv regimes, which use coercion more freely than democracies. In graduate school in the 1990s the world appeared to be on an inexorable path toward democracy, but from the perspective of the early twenty-first century this path seems less certain and the resilience of authoritarian regimes more striking. Unfortunately, by comparison to democracy we still know very little about authoritarianism. One reason is that the operations of authoritarian regimes, especially regarding the use of force and coercion, are more secretive. Does this mean that a fundamental part of politics is destined to remain in the shadows? In this sense, studying the Chilean dictatorship presented a number of challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, it was a coercionintensive and secretive regime well known for its abuses, especially during its first few years. On the other hand, the regime at one point restrained its repressive apparatus as part of an institutional reform that had not, I felt, been adequately studied or understood. Of course, the regime did not stop abusing its citizens then, and scores would continue to be tortured; but it killed fewer people, and this new restraint opened some political spaces that had previously been closed. This book is written in the hope that a better understanding of the rise and fall of repression in Chile will shine a light on a critical yet little understood part of the politics of still too many regimes in the world. Various parts of the research for this book were carried out with support from the Canada Research Chairs Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Aspen Institute, the American Historical Association, the Inter-American Foundation, the I. W. Killam Trusts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of British Columbia , and the University of Calgary. In addition, this book owes its existence to the advice, critique, help, and support of many people, none of whom are responsible for the resulting analysis but all of whose input has been invaluable. I am especially grateful to my advisors at MIT, Josh Cohen, Jonny Fox, and the late Myron Weiner, who exemplify the highest standards of analytical rigor and moral purpose in scholarship. Phineas Baxandall, Max Cameron , Ram Manikkalingam, Chap Lawson, and Tony Pereira gave the project crucial boosts at critical moments, and without them this book xvi Preface and Acknowledgments would not have come into being. I am also grateful to...