BOOK REVIEW/Roger Bybee
‘Pinochet and Me: An Anti-Memoir’
Sept. 11, 1973: a day that the empire struck back, with a vengeance. If there is a single image representing the end of the post-WWII rebellions for sweeping social justice, perhaps it is the photo of a helmeted Chilean President Salvador Allende staring upward at his own Air Force jets bombing the presidential palace.
The election of democratic socialist Allende seemed to pose a serious menace to a world order dominated by major corporations which owned much of Chile’s resources. Allende rapidly began to provide rising wages, free milk to nutrition-deprived poor children, quality health care and education for all, land reform, and to promote an expansive conception of democracy which encompassed economic and social institutions as well as the traditional political arena.
The US response: a coup, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, that was the product of the extensive preparations of President Nixon and adviser Henry Kissinger who oversaw, as one CIA official put it, a gradual "accumulation of arsenic" for Chilean democracy.
Pinochet predictably followed through with mass slaughters and torture combined with the introduction of government policies nakedly serving Chile’s elites and transnational corporations.
Marc Cooper, who as a 21-year-old served as Allende’s translator and narrowly escaped capture by Pinochet’s forces, provides in Pinochet and Me a concise, riveting account of the past quarter century. Rarely does one find a book that is simultaneously so gripping, politically insightful, and thoroughly humane in spirit.
As Cooper notes, what eventually emerged from Chile was the first and most advanced model of what some have called "savage capitalism," pre-dating and to some extent inspiring the achievements of Thatcher and Reagan. Pinochet, guided by Milton Friedman and other "Chicago School" economists, atomized social organization and pulverized a well-organized and highly conscious working class opposition. He rammed through a radical program of export-driven production, privatization, deregulation, and of course the massive upward re-distribution of wealth.
"A century-worth of Chile’s accumulated democratic and social advances would be bloodily dismantled overnight, and a new radical capitalist order was built in its stead," grimly states Cooper. The post-coup Chilean economic "star" hailed by the New York Times and other corporate media shines much more brightly for some than for others. Cooper cites damning evidence of a new Chile re-configured to heap more wealth upon the wealthy while spreading more misery through the growing shanty-towns:
* "The richest 100 people in Chile earn more than the state spends on all social services," as one opposition senator points out.
* Of 65 nations studies by the World Bank, Chile ranks 7th worst in unequal income distribution.
* Real wages for Chilean workers are still 18% below where they were when Allende was overthrown.
In sum, the Chilean economic blueprint conforms closely to the formula laid out in 1892 by banker Eduardo Matte Perez, whose descendants still rank among Chile’s permanent rulers: "We, the owners of land and capital, own Chile. The rest, the masses, do not matter."
Ultimately, those "who do not matter" finally have managed to find some measure of justice, with Pinochet being charged in Chile with the disappearance of some 76 people (a small fraction of those butchered at his direction) during his reign of terror. Significantly, though, the impetus for these charges came from outside Chile, beginning with Pinochet’s arrest in Britain on human-rights charges due to the dedication of Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon.
Pinochet and Me is an unforgettable, lucidly-written work that tells a tragic tale of the destruction of a remarkable experiment in social justice at the hands of Pinochet and his US tutors. Although Pinochet and his most fervent backers have now been marginalized due to Judge Garzon’s tenacity and courage, the voices of Chile’s poor and working class remain unheard and their dreams of justice unrealized due to the legacy of Pinochet and an ever-harsher corporate-run global order.
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based writer and activist. He reviewed Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir, by Mark Cooper, Verso Books, London and New York, 143 pages, $22 hardcover
I'm teaching in Labor Studies at Penn State and the University of Illinois in on-line classes. I've been continuing with my work as freelance writer, with my immediate aim to complete a book on corporate media coverage of globalization (tentatively titled The Giant Sucking Sound: How Corporate Media Swallowed the Myth of Free Trade.) I write frequently for Z, The Progressive Magazine's on-line site, The Progressive Populist, Madison's Isthmus alternative weekly, and a variety of publications including Yes!, The Progressive, Foreign Policy in Focus, and several websites. I've been writing a blog on labor issues for workinginthesetimes.com, turning out over 300 pieces in the past four years.My work specializes in corporate globalization, labor, and healthcare reform... I've been a progressive activist since the age of about 17, when I became deeply affected by the anti-war and civil rights movements. I entered college at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee just days after watching the Chicago police brutalize anti-war demonstrators at the Democratic Convention of 1968. I was active in a variety of "student power" and anti-war activities, highlighted by the May, 1970 strike after the Nixon's invastion of Cambodia and the massacres at Kent State and Jackson State. My senior year was capped by Nixon's bombing of Haiphong Harbor and the occupation of a university building, all in the same week I needed to finish 5-6 term papers to graduate, which I managed somehow. My wife Carolyn Winter, whom I met in the Wisconsin Alliance, and I have been together since 1975, getting officially married 10/11/81. Carolyn, a native New Yorker, has also been active for social justice since her youth (she attended the famous 1963 Civil Rights march where Dr. King gave his "I have a dream speech"). We have two grown children, Lane (with wife Elaine and 11-year-old grandson Zachary, who introduced poker to his classmates during recess) living in Chicago and Rachel (who with her husband Michael have the amazing Talia Ruth,5, who can define "surreptitious" for you) living in Asbury Park, NJ. My sister Francie lives down the block from me. I'm a native of the once-heavily unionized industrial city of Racine, Wis. (which right-wingers sneeringly labeled "Little Moscow" during the upheavals of the 1930's), and both my grandfathers were industrial workers and Socialists. On my father's side, my grandfather was fired three times for Socialist or union activity. His family lost their home at one point during the Depression. My mom's father was a long-time member of UAW Local 72 at American Motors, where he worked for more than 30 years. Coming from impoverished families, my parents met through a very low-cost form of recreation: Racine's Hiking Club.
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