The routine of repression
Kirby, Peadar
PINOCHET'S CHILE SETTLES IN FOR THE LONG RUN The routine of repression PEADAR KIRBY THE VISIT of Mrs. Jeane Kirkpatrick to Santiago at the beginning of August and her words of praise for the...
...Indeed, the agents involved haven't yet been brought to justice...
...Neither has this policy encouraged investment in productive industry within the country and most growth has taken place in the service sector, including commerce and financial houses, while growth in the productive sector has been slow...
...His political opposition has no power and is deeply divided both among the Christian Democrats and even more among the left...
...Today we are again faced with marxist aggression which has grown," General Pinochet said...
...The so-called democratic system includes the struggle for power and that therefore opens the flanks to marxist aggression...
...The only response was the arrest of the entire CNS leadership accused of being "an entity of the Communist Party...
...The basis of Pinochet's political model is to stamp out not only all political groupings autonomous of the government but even to stamp out political thought itself...
...This was most clearly expressed within days of her leaving Chile when four leading former politicians, three of them former government ministers, were detained in their homes in the early hours of the morning, driven by police to the Argentinian border and sent into indefinite exile...
...The money supply, one of the sacred dogmas of monetarism, has been cut back and fell by five percent in the first six months of 1981...
...It was because they attempted to support what could have become an alternative political organization that the four former politicians were exiled...
...But the cost of all this falls on the less well-off...
...Meanwhile exports have only grown from $2,300,000 worth to $4,700,000 worth in the same period...
...However, the discovery that the robbery of forty-five million pesos (just over one million dollars) from a bank in Calama in the north of Chile in March was the work of the chief of the CNI in the town and another agent has cast doubts on the real authors of many of last year's crimes...
...drawn up by an American living in Santiago showed the Chilean prices to be between one-third and one-half more expensive than U.S...
...This is clearest in the case of trade unions...
...The press, too, is severely restricted...
...However, to this must be added those on the government's only unemployment assistance, the Program of Minimal Employment (PEM...
...No occasion is missed to stress the threat of "extremism" or "Communism...
...Neither can we accept political activity because that would be vulnerable to marxist aggression...
...A list of prices of basic foodstuffs compared with equivalent prices in the U.S...
...The reasons for this lie in the fixed rate of exchange of the peso which since January last year has been fixed at 39 pesos to the dollar...
...Neighbors have the right to "denounce'' such events to the police who then investigate...
...Ruling since last March as a constitutional president with virtually unlimited powers, General Pinochet is more powerful than he has ever been...
...The average figure of 5.9 percent of the workforce unemployed per year from 1960 to 1973 rose to 13.5 percent in 1979 and 11.9 percent in 1980...
...And after the visit of Jeane Kirkpatrick so too it seems has the U.S...
...With those on PEM added, 17.3 percent was the real figure for unemployment last year...
...The most notable of these is the fall in the inflation rate from almost forty percent in 1979 to an expected ten percent this year...
...prices...
...A church group, the Academy of Christian Humanism, has a price index based on the prices of thirty-eight basic products which form sixty-six percent of the purchases of the poorest twenty percent of Santiago's population...
...The Calama incident takes on a particularly sinister aspect since two employees of the bank were abducted and then murdered by these agents who blew up their bodies with explosives to prevent recognition...
...Detentions continue with the police now having power to hold people for up to twenty days in secret detention centers...
...At times these are tortured and in the first months of this year thirty-eight cases of torture were reported to the Catholic church's Vicariate of Solidarity which is the most active body in monitoring the regime's abuses of human rights and defending the victims...
...The treatment of the four exiled politicians is only one small example of the summary treatment given to any Chilean who expresses views opposed to the regime's paranoid anti-Communism or opposes in any way its absolute powers...
...The military ceremonies to mark General Pinochet's eighth anniversary as commander-in-chief of the army on August 24 last was just such an occasion...
...This has meant a growth of imports from $2,700,000 worth in 1970 to $6,000,000 worth last year...
...Surveillance of the population by the feared CNI, the successor to the well-known DINA set up by General Pinochet after the September 1973 coup, has been so thorough as to make most Chileans afraid to voice any political views except to those they can absolutely trust...
...All the daily papers mirror the government's ideology which is shown up and criticized only by a weekly newsmagazine, Hoy, and a Jesuit monthly, Mensaje, read by an educated elite, and the fortnightly magazine of the Vicariate of Solidarity, called Solidaridad...
...While prices of luxury goods are cheap, those of basics are very expensive...
...As yet almost seven hundred cases of people who disappeared while in police custody have never been investigated by the government despite recent finds of mass graves with the mutilated bodies of some of those listed as disappeared...
...Even the open support for the CNS by the Catholic church in the person of Cardinal Silva of Santiago who visited the leaders in jail or a committee of solidarity which included such well-known names as the former Christian Democratic President, Eduardo Frei, and the party's candidate who was defeated by Salvador Allende in the 1970 presidential election, Radomiro Tomic (who could hardly be accused of being supporters of Communism) did not change the government's mind...
...The full reason for continuing this network of surveillance even after the military have institutionalized themselves in power is not understood without an appreciation of the regime's ideology...
...Unemployment too has been growing...
...While professionals' salaries have grown by some ninety percent over the past three years, those of workers have only grown by twenty percent...
...The shops are full of luxury goods at prices well below those in their country of origin...
...government...
...All political parties are now in what is called "recess" and every effort is made to ensure that former party members do not use other groups through which to work...
...These prices rose by an average nine percent higher than the overall average price increases in the year May 1980 to May last year...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick to Santiago at the beginning of August and her words of praise for the "successes" of the Chilean economy as she saw them mark a new stage of self-confidence for the Pinochet regime...
...The whole episode was the occasion for numerous calls on the government for an investigation into the CNI which have gone unheeded...
...A wave of attacks on police, of explosions, and of bank robberies which began a year ago and was blamed on left-wing groups became an excuse for increased repression...
...Under this impact many native Chilean industries have not been able to compete and have had to close down...
...Even small groups which might meet to discuss political issues are prevented through the regulation that even a meeting in a private house needs police permission...
...This is done by simple administrative decree and so the relocated person cannot appeal against it...
...With trade unions only able to negotiate with their immediate boss and not join with other unions to negotiate on a sector level, the workers are in a weak position to achieve any gains...
...Their crime had been to sign a letter of support for the imprisoned leadership of a trade union confederation, the CNS...
...While government works receive cheap labor in this way, the true unemployment figure is deflated...
...Therefore imports get progressively cheaper while exports and local products are hit...
...Reinforcing the political model being implemented is the monetarist economic model of the Pinochet regime...
...Even the Catholic church, which has been the only voice speaking out against the regime that could not be driven underground, has begun to settle down to live with General Pinochet...
...While the full costs of the economic model on the many poor of Chile may not be known for years to come, what does seem certain at the moment is that General Pinochet is here to stay...
...In this way the crime was being implicitly blamed on the disappeared employees...
...Objectively, therefore, a shift of wealth from the poorer sectors to the richer sectors can be seen as a result of the government's economic policies...
...The illegal CNS had, with the support of almost four hundred individual unions, submitted a list of trade union demands to the government...
...It is just one more case in the bloody saga of crimes by the security forces since the 1973 coup...
...Furthermore the CNI chief in the city of Arica on the Peruvian border was also implicated and his body later found in a car with a bullet through the head...
...This is presented in true technocratic fashion as being the only answer to Chile's economic problems, and its successes are often pointed to by the government...
...In this way most of the gains of the Chilean working class this century have been wiped out virtually overnight...
...PEADAR KIRBY is an Irish journalist who recently returned from an extended stay in Latin America...
...Through this workers get 1,300 pesos (33 dollars) a month but they have to accept whatever work they are given which is usually hard laboring work...
...Because of its strong anti-government line and its popular appeal it is constantly under harassment by the police and can only exist with the protection of the Catholic church...
...Candidates for leadership positions must have no political record and national federations of trade unions which might become an alternative political vehicle to the official government-controlled organizations are not allowed...
...To stamp out this marxist aggression in the first place we must dismiss the possibility of political parties until the country is tranquil...
...That can not be allowed...
...Strikes are legal for only sixty days after which workers have to accept the management's offer or resign their jobs...
...Last year 106 people were relocated under a new scheme by which the government sends opponents to live in the isolated and sparsely populated extreme north or south of the country for periods ranging from three to eighteen months...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 1
