here are some well citied facts on the economic situation under dictator pinochet. This doesnt event talk about the fascist freedom hating state that crushed chiles democracy,where 200,000 people were tortured and thousands were murdered and imprisoned by the government and military police for thought crimes.
The most phenomenal success story of all is Chile, with its "prospering free-market economy generated by Gen. August Pinochet" (Nash). That is an established truth, repeated everywhere. True, Pinochet was tough, but the "economic miracle" carried out by his Chicago Boys from 1974 to 1989 is there for all to see. To see, if they do not look too closely.
Pinochet's "miracle" turned into the "Chilean catastrophe" in under a decade, David Felix writes; virtually the entire banking system was taken over by the government in an attempt to salvage the economy, leading some to describe the transition from Allende to Pinochet as "a transition from utopian to scientific socialism, since the means of production are ending up in the hands of the state" (Felix), or "the Chicago Road to socialism." The militantly anti-socialist London Economist Intelligence Unit wrote that "the believer in free markets, President Pinochet, had a more comprehensive grip on the `controlling heights of the economy' than President Allende had dared dream of." The government-controlled portion of the economy in 1983 was comparable to the Allende years after the state took over failing enterprises, which it sold off at bargain rates to the private sector when they were resuscitated, along with efficient and profitable public enterprises that were generating 25 percent of the government's revenues, Joseph Collins and John Lear note. Multinational corporations did very nicely in the process, gaining control over large parts of the Chilean economy. Citing Chilean economists, James Petras and Steve Vieux report that "an estimated $600 million in subsidies were provided to purchasers in the 1986-1987 wave of privatizations," including "efficiently run, surplus-producing operations"; the operation is expected to reduce government surplus by $100 to $165 million during 1990-1995.
Until 1980, Chile's GDP per capita did not approach the 1972 (Allende) level, and investment was still below the late 1960s while unemployment was far higher. Per capita health care was more than halved from 1973 to 1985, setting off explosive growth in poverty-related diseases such as typhoid and viral hepatitis. Since 1973, consumption dropped 30 percent for the poorest 20 percent in Santiago and increased 15 percent for the top 20 percent. Private hospitals proudly display their high-tech equipment for the rich, while public ones offer mothers an appointment months away and medicines they cannot afford. College education, free for everyone under Allende, is now for the more privileged; and they will not be exposed to the "subversives" who have been purged, but offered "sociology, political science, and economics courses...more like religious instruction in the revealed truth of free markets and the red peril" (Tina Rosenberg), as in Brazil under the generals, or other places that come to mind. Macroeconomic statistics in the Pinochet years are generally below those for the preceding two decades; the average GNP growth from 1974-1979 was just over half that of 1961-1971, while per capita GNP fell 6.4 percent and per capita consumption 23 percent from 1972-1987. The capital city of Santiago is now "among the most polluted cities in the world," Nathaniel Nash observes, thanks to the free market Friedmanite model with its slogan "Produce, produce, produce," come what may -- what we denounce as the "Stalinist model" when there are points to be scored thereby. What "came" was "the daunting cost of cleaning up, ...and the daunting cost of not cleaning up" in a country with "some of the world's dirtiest factories," no regulations, severe pollution of water supplies, and general environmental ruin with much-feared consequences for the health of the population.
And thanks to the miracle, along with a little US help in "making the economy scream" under the Allende government, the proportion of the population that fell below the poverty line (minimum income required for basic food and housing) increased from 20 percent to 44.4 percent from 1970 to 1987.
"Not much of a miracle," Edward Herman comments.43
41 David Clark Scott, CSM, July 30, 1992; Salvador Corro, Proceso (Mexico), Nov. 18, 1991 (LANU, Jan. 1992); UN Report on the Environment, AP, May 7, 1992; La Botz, Mask, 165, 158; Andrew Reding and Christopher Whalen, Fragile Stability, Mexico Project, World Policy Institute, 1991. Barkin, Report on the Americas (NACLA), May 1991; "Salinastroika," ms., Aug. 1992. Baker, WP, Sept. 10, 1991, cited by Reding and Whalen.
42 Nash, NYT, Nov. 13, 1991; Aug. 1, 1992. Kamm, WSJ, April 16, 1992.
43 Felix, "Financial Blowups"; "Reflections on Privatizing"; "Latin American Monetarism in Crisis," in 'Monetarism' and the Third World, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, 1981. Data compiled by Chilean economist Patricio Meller; UN ECLA Poverty Study (Santiago, 1990) (Felix, p.c.). Petras and Vieux, "Myths and Realities." Economist Intelligence Unit cited by Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer, no. 50, July 7, 1992. Collins and Lear, "Pinochet's Giveaway," Multinational Monitor, May 1991. Rosenberg, Dissent, Summer 1989. Herman, letter, Washington Report on the Hemisphere, June 3, 1992. Nash, NYT, July 6, 1992.
