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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach03092010.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach03092010.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">March 9,
2010<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Milton
Friedman's Cruel Legacy <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">The
Social Earthquake in Chile
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By ROGER
BURBACH <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">C</font><font size=3>
hile 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.” <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>Settling Accounts<br><br>
</b>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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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<br>
Chile, the US sent in the military to take control of Porte au Prince
before any significant relief assistance was distributed. <br><br>
<b>Milton Friedman’s Legacy<br><br>
</b>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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>Signs of Resistance<br><br>
</b>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.”*<br><br>
*See Asociacion Chilena de ONGs Accion, La Ciudadania, Protagonista de la
Reconstruccion del Pais. March 7, 2010, Published in
<a href="http://www.elclarin.cl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20384&Itemid=48">
Clarin</a>.<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2><b>Roger Burbach</b> 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
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1842774352/counterpunchmaga">
The Pinochet Affair</a>.<br><br>
<br><br>
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