[News] The Social Earthquake in Chile

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach03092010.html

March 9, 2010


Milton Friedman's Cruel Legacy


The Social Earthquake in Chile

By ROGER BURBACH

Chile is experiencing a social earthquake in the 
aftermath of the 8.8 magnitude quake that struck 
the country on February 27. “The fault lines of 
the Chilean Economic Miracle have been exposed,” 
says Elias Padilla, an anthropology professor at 
the Academic University of Christian Humanism in 
Santiago. “The free market, neo-liberal economic 
model that Chile has followed since the Pinochet 
dictatorship has feet of mud.”

Chile is one of the most inequitable societies in 
the world. Today, 14 percent of the population 
lives in abject poverty. The top 20 percent 
captures 50 percent of the national income, while 
the bottom 20 percent earns only 5 percent. In a 
2005 World Bank survey of 124 countries, Chile 
ranked twelfth in the list of countries with the worst distribution of income.

The rampant ideology of the free market has 
produced a deep sense of alienation among much of 
the population. Although a coalition of center 
left parties replaced the Pinochet regime twenty 
years ago, it opted to depoliticize the country, 
to rule from the top down, allowing controlled 
elections every few years, shunting aside the 
popular organizations and social movements that 
had brought down the dictatorship.

This explains the scenes of looting and social 
chaos in the southern part of the country that 
were transmitted round the world on the third day 
after the earthquake. In Concepcion, Chile’s 
second largest city, which was virtually leveled 
by the earthquake, the population received 
absolutely no assistance from the central 
government for two days. The chain supermarkets 
and malls that had come to replace the local 
stores and shops over the years remained firmly shuttered.

Settling Accounts

Popular frustration exploded as mobs descended on 
the commercial center, carting off everything, 
not just food from the supermarkets but also 
shoes, clothing, plasma TVs, and cell phones. 
This wasn’t simple looting, but the settling 
accounts with an economic system that dictates 
that only possessions and commodities matter. The 
“gente decente” the decent people and the big 
media began referring to them as lumpen, vandals 
and delinquents. “The greater the social 
inequities, the greater the delinquency,” 
explains Hugo Fruhling of the Center for the 
Study of Citizen Security at the University of Chile.

In the two days leading up to the riots, the 
government of Michele Bachelet revealed its 
incapacity to understand and deal with the human 
tragedy wrecked on the country. Many of the 
ministers were gone on summer vacation or licking 
their wounds as they prepared to turn over their 
offices to the incoming right wing government of 
billionaire Sebastian Piñera, who will be sworn 
in this Thursday. Bachelet declared that the 
country’s needs had to be studied and surveyed 
before any assistance could be sent. On Saturday 
morning the day of the quake, she ordered the 
military to place a helicopter at her disposal to 
fly over Concepcion to assess the damage. As of 
Sunday morning, no helicopter had appeared and the trip was abandoned.

As an anonymous Carlos L. wrote in an email 
widely circulated in Chile: “It would be very 
difficult in the history of the country to find a 
government with so many powerful 
resources­technological, economic, political, 
organizational­that has been unable to provide 
any response to the urgent social demands of 
entire regions gripped by fear, needs of shelter, water, food and hope.”

What arrived in Concepcion on Monday was not 
relief or assistance, but several thousand 
soldiers and police transported in trucks and 
planes, as people were ordered to stay in their 
homes. Pitched battles were fought in the streets 
of Concepcion as buildings were set afire. Other 
citizens took up arms to protect their homes and 
barrios as the city appeared to be on the brink 
of an urban war. On Tuesday relief assistance 
finally began to arrive in quantity, along with 
more troops and the militarization of the southern region.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on part of 
a Latin American tour that was scheduled before 
the quake, flew into Santiago on Tuesday to meet 
with Bachelet and Piñera. She brought 20 
satellite phones and a technician on her plane, 
saying one of the “biggest problems has been 
communications as we found in Haiti in those days 
after the quake.” It went unsaid that just as in
Chile, the US sent in the military to take 
control of Porte au Prince before any significant 
relief assistance was distributed.

Milton Friedman’s Legacy

The Wall Street Journal joined in the fray to 
uphold the neoliberal model, running an article 
by Bret Stephens, “How Milton Friedman Saved 
Chile.” He asserted that Friedman’s “spirit was 
surely hovering protectively over Chile in the 
early morning hours of Saturday. Thanks largely 
to him, the country has endured a tragedy that 
elsewhere would have been an apocalypse.”  He 
went on to declare, “it’s not by chance that 
Chilean’s were living in houses of brick­and 
Haitians in houses of straw­when the wolf arrived 
to try to blow them down.” Chile had adopted 
“some of the world strictest building codes,” as 
the economy boomed due to Pinochet’s appointment 
of Friedman-trained economists to cabinet 
ministries and the subsequent civilian 
government’s commitment to neoliberalism.

There are two problems with this view. First, as 
Naomi Klein points out in “Chile’s Socialist 
Rebar” on the Huffington Post, it was the 
socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1972 
that established the first earthquake building 
codes. They were later strengthened, not by 
Pinochet, but by the restored civilian government in the 1990s.

Secondly as CIPER, the Center of Journalistic 
Investigation and Information reported on March 
6, greater Santiago has twenty-three residential 
complexes and high rises built over the last 
fifteen years that suffered severe quake damage. 
Building codes had been skirted, and “the 
responsibility of the construction and real 
estate enterprises is now the subject of public 
debate.” In the country at large, two million 
people out of a population of seventeen million 
are homeless. Most of the houses destroyed by the 
earthquake were built of adobe or other 
improvised materials, many in the shanty towns 
that have sprung up to provide a cheap, informal 
work force for the country’s big businesses and industries.

There is little hope that the incoming government 
of Sebastian Piñera will rectify the social 
inequities that the quake exposed. The richest 
person in Chile, he and several of his advisers 
and ministers are implicated as major 
shareholders in construction projects that were 
severely damaged by the quake because building 
codes were ignored. Having campaigned on a 
platform of bringing security to the cities and 
moving against vandalism and crime, he criticized 
Bachelet’s for not deploying the military sooner 
in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Signs of Resistance

There are signs that the historic Chile of 
popular organizations and grass roots mobilizing 
may be reawakening. A coalition of over sixty 
social and nongovernmental organizations released 
a letter stating: “In these dramatic 
circumstances, organized citizens have proven 
capable of providing urgent, rapid and creative 
responses to the social crisis that millions of 
families are experiencing. The most diverse 
organizations--neighborhood associations, housing 
and homeless committees, trade unions, university 
federations and student centers, cultural 
organizations, environmental groups­are 
mobilizing, demonstrating the imaginative 
potential and solidarity of communities.” The 
declaration concluded by demanding of the Piñera 
government the right to “monitor the plans and 
models of reconstruction so that they include the 
full participation of the communities.”*

*See Asociacion Chilena de ONGs Accion, La 
Ciudadania, Protagonista de la Reconstruccion del 
Pais. March 7, 2010, Published in 
<http://www.elclarin.cl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20384&Itemid=48>Clarin.

Roger Burbach is the director of the Center for 
the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting 
Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley 
and author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1842774352/counterpunchmaga>The 
Pinochet Affair.




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