tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/augusto-pinochet-38219/articlesAugusto Pinochet – The Conversation2024-01-11T21:37:33Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2197902024-01-11T21:37:33Z2024-01-11T21:37:33ZHalf a century later, the military junta still haunts Chile<iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/half-a-century-later-the-military-junta-still-haunts-chile" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>Chileans recently voted to reject a proposed new constitution which critics said was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/16/why-chiles-draft-constitution-reads-like-us-conservative-wish-list/">even more authoritarian and conservative</a> than the 1980 dictatorship-era constitution it sought to replace. </p>
<p>Most notably, the rejected changes sought to strengthen property rights and uphold free-market principles. Roughly 56 per cent of voters rejected the new constitution while around 44 per cent were in favour. Debates about the constitution highlight the political challenges that have plagued Chile since the violent days of the military junta. </p>
<p>Hosted in Santiago, <a href="https://www.panamsports.org/en/news-sport/the-santiago-2023-pan-american-games-left-the-name-of-chile-at-the-highest-level/">the 2023 Pan and Parapan American Games</a>, were seen as an opportunity to signal a new Chile. For Toronto-born Olympian <a href="https://olympic.ca/team-canada/melissa-humana-paredes/">Melissa Humaña-Paredes</a>, daughter of Chilean political refugees, entering the Estadio Nacional (National Stadium) as a <a href="https://olympic.ca/2023/10/20/humana-paredes-wilkerson-to-be-team-canadas-opening-ceremony-flag-bearers-at-santiago-2023/">flag-bearer</a> for the Canadian team, conjured up simultaneous feelings of pride, and the images of the atrocities from 50 years ago. </p>
<p>Under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet which ruled Chile from 1970 to 1990, many sport stadiums, especially the Estadio Nacional, were used as open-air prisons, where many Chileans were tortured and killed.</p>
<h2>Athlete activism in 1970s Chile</h2>
<p>On Sept. 11, 1973, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/09/10/1193755188/chile-coup-50-years-pinochet-kissinger-human-rights-allende">a coup backed by the United States overthrew the democratically-elected government of Chilean President Salvador Allende</a>. Allende was the first Marxist president in Latin America and leader of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) coalition. He earned a <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20130911-1973-chile-1973-coup-defining-moment-france-left-communist-socialist-party">“mythical status”</a> among leftist political groups globally as a renowned socialist elected in the midst of the Cold War.</p>
<p>The defeat of Chilean democracy had devastating effects on the Chilean people. The violence of Pinochet’s reign was documented by the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture. In 2011, the Commission presented a <a href="https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/collections/truth_commissions/Chile90-Report/Chile90-Report.pdf">final report</a> recognizing a total of <a href="https://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2023/09/12/exvicepresidenta-de-comision-valech-acusa-a-diputado-bobadilla-udi-de-ofender-a-las-victimas/">40,018 victims, 3,065 of them dead or missing</a>.</p>
<p>Melissa’s father, sport sociologist and professor, Hernán Humaña, a co-author of this article, recounts his own experiences as a Chilean national volleyball player during that time in his book <em>Playing Under the Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile.</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Standing in line on the [volleyball] court, looking at the flag, and singing the anthem had turned into a painful routine for me. I felt the pain viscerally — not just in my heart. Observing spectators in the stands, also struggling during the anthem, made for an interesting study of people’s political alliances. Those supporting the military sang their lungs out, whereas those opposed either didn’t sing at all or selected only one part of the anthem, the one about “granting asylum to those persecuted.” What irony! Standing there singing, in full view of everyone, I was always aware that any departure from the norm could be dangerous for me, as the military and their supporters were humourless and would punish and persecute for such unpatriotic conduct.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.londres38.cl/1937/w3-article-97937.html">Sergio Tormen Méndez</a> and <a href="https://www.londres38.cl/1937/w3-article-97894.html">Luis Guajardo Zamorano</a> were two athletes, less fortunate in the military junta, forcibly disappeared 10-months after the coup d'etat.</p>
<p>Méndez and Zamorano were two elite cyclists and friends committed to fighting the military dictatorship. On the morning of July 20, 1974, DINA, the feared secret police, kidnapped the two men along with national cycling coach, Andres Moraga, and 14-year-old Peter, Méndez’s younger brother. In subsequent days, Moraga and Peter were released with a message: Sergio and Luis are in big trouble. Numerous survivors recount seeing the two in various torture centres, yet, the details of their disappearance remains a dark secret, and their bodies have yet to be found.</p>
<p>The tireless efforts of many groups, principally the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (<em>Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos</em>), have attempted to break pacts of silence amongst those responsible for human rights violations, and authorities, especially members of the armed forces, have consistently impeded efforts to pursue justice. </p>
<p>Efforts are further complicated by a <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/09/chile-amnesty-law-keeps-pinochet-s-legacy-alive/">1978 amnesty law</a> that pardoned perpetrators and accomplices of all offenses committed between Sept. 11, 1973 and March 10, 1978.</p>
<p>Since the return to democracy in 1990, only 307 previously missing victims have been identified, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/30/chile-announces-much-anticipated-plan-to-search-for-pinochet-victims">Chilean courts have since processed 584 kidnapping cases, 169 murders, and 85 illegal burials under the dictatorship</a>.</p>
<p>Finally, in August 2023, president Gabriel Boric’s government <a href="https://elpais.com/chile/2023-08-30/chile-buscara-a-mas-de-mil-desparecidos-de-la-dictadura-la-mayor-apuesta-de-boric-a-50-anos-del-golpe-militar.html">initiated a plan</a> to determine the circumstances of forced disappearances and offer reparations and assurances to the families of victims.</p>
<h2>Mythical miracles</h2>
<p>The history of brutal violence <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/myths-about-pinochets-chile-persist-brazil-today/">counters the sanitized myths</a> about a Chilean miracle popularized by people like economist Milton Friedman, who called it Latin America’s “<a href="https://www.druglibrary.org/special/friedman/socialist.htm">best economic success story</a>.”</p>
<p>In 2019, the attempted framing of the “miracle of Chile” could no longer be maintained. Two years after Chile was announced as host of the 2023 Pan/Parapan American Games, civic unrest erupted after the government announced an increase in transit fares. <a href="https://ciudadaniai.org/en/chile.html">Mass demonstrations were led by students</a> who jumped turnstiles and held open gates for people to avoid fares.</p>
<p>With some of the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50123494">highest levels of inequality</a> among 30 of the wealthiest nations in the world, and <a href="https://corruption-tracker.org/case/chiles-milicogate-scandal#:%7E:text=Summary%20of%20Corruption%20Allegations&text=Three%20Chilean%20Armed%20Forces%20(CAF,were%20indicted%20or%20tax%20fraud">public officials marred by corruption scandals</a>, Chileans were reacting to 30 years of free-market neoliberal failure. </p>
<p>More than a million people, from the poorest to those from upper middle-class neighbourhoods, took to the streets. Militarized police and armed forces brutally repressed demonstrations, as protesters chanted <a href="https://jacobin.com/2019/10/chile-protests-pinera-repression">“It’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years.”</a></p>
<p>In a matter of weeks, at least <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/13/chile-un-prosecution-police-army-protests">26 people were killed, 113 people were tortured, and 24 cases of sexual violence were committed</a> by the police and army.</p>
<p>In response to protests, the political establishment agreed to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/how-chile-is-rewriting-its-pinochet-era-constitution-2021-05-14/">redraft the 1980 constitution</a>, ratified amid the bloodshed of Pinochet, and Boric <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-59694056">was elected in December 2021</a> with a progressive agenda. </p>
<p>His minority government has <a href="https://apnews.com/article/chile-constitution-kast-boric-2c0c228d4608a55faf75ad6a318865a0">struggled to implement significant changes</a>. The first attempt to pass a progressive constitution — which included a host of rights and guarantees — was rejected in 2022.</p>
<p>Roughly 80 per cent of <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294731/distribution-wealth-by-percentile-chile/">Chile’s wealth</a> remains concentrated within the top 10 per cent, and almost 50 per cent of the total national wealth belongs to the top one per cent.</p>
<p>The entrance of the Estadio Nacional reads “<a href="https://apnews.com/article/national-stadium-santiago-pan-american-games-788a048385aa169950ffd0b5915d3edd">A people without memory is a people without future</a>” and serves as a stark reminder that memories, especially those bearing the weight of state repression in stadiums celebrated now, remain living.</p>
<p>The Pan and Parapan American Games and constitutional debates, while ostensibly thought to represent a new Chile, temporarily obscured histories, still repeating.</p>
<p><em>This article was also co-authored by Chilean filmmaker Hernán Morris, and Melissa Humaña-Paredes, a 2020 Tokyo Olympian.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219790/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Despite hosting the 2023 Pan American Games and electing a president with a progressive agenda, Chile continues to grapple with entrenched economic inequality.Hernan Humana, Associate Lecturer, School of Kinesiology and Health Science, York University, CanadaAmanda De Lisio, Assistant Professor, School of Kinesiology and Health Science, York University, CanadaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2189822023-12-06T13:28:36Z2023-12-06T13:28:36ZKissinger’s obsession with Chile enabled a murderous dictatorship that still haunts the country<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563455/original/file-20231204-25-6iv62u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C75%2C5064%2C3684&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet greets U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1976.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/chilean-president-augusto-pinochet-greets-secretary-of-news-photo/515114332?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Noticing my nonappearance at the start of a black-tie dinner at the Johannesburg home of <a href="https://theconversation.com/harry-oppenheimer-biography-shows-the-south-african-mining-magnates-hand-in-economic-policies-205494">Harry Oppenheimer</a>, a mining magnate and Africa’s richest man, the host assumed I was boycotting the event on principle. It was a reasonable assumption: I was the Chilean ambassador to South Africa, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tortured-and-deadly-legacy-kissinger-and-realpolitik-in-us-foreign-policy-192977">Henry Kissinger</a> was the chief guest.</p>
<p>By then, a quarter century had passed since the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/09/10/1193755188/chile-coup-50-years-pinochet-kissinger-human-rights-allende">military coup that toppled</a> the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende – an event that gave rise to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal 17-year-long military dictatorship – but the issue still lingered. Many Chileans bitterly remembered the role of the U.S. government, and of Kissinger in particular, in the breakdown of Chilean democracy.</p>
<p>It was something Kissinger himself acknowledged during that dinner – which I did attend, just late due to encountering a hailstorm. Kissinger explained that he always declined invitations to visit my home country out of fear over what “Allende Chileans” would do to him.</p>
<p>Plenty of Chileans still despise Kissinger. On news of his death at the age of 100 on Nov. 29, 2023, <a href="https://twitter.com/jg_valdes/status/1730066974116323584">Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile’s ambassador to the U.S.</a>, summed up that sentiment when he posted in Spanish on X, the platform previously known as Twitter: “A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his profound moral misery.” </p>
<p>It’s hard to overestimate the role Kissinger played in Chile. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/us/henry-kissinger-dead.html">national security adviser and secretary of state</a> during the Nixon and Ford administrations, he oversaw policies that helped install and then prop up a dictator.</p>
<h2>Chile’s 1973 coup</h2>
<p>Upon <a href="https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/6399554/allende-wins-50-years-later-declassified-documents-show-reactions">Allende’s election on Sept. 4, 1970</a>, Kissinger became obsessed with blocking his inauguration. The measures approved by Kissinger included a botched kidnapping attempt of <a href="https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-10-22/cia-chile-anatomy-assassination">Chilean Army Chief René Schneider</a>, engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency, that ended with the general’s assassination.</p>
<p>Kissinger insisted on a hard line with the Allende administration. He did everything possible to make the “Chilean road to socialism” fail, among other things, by “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-latin-american-studies/article/abs/make-the-economy-scream-economic-ideological-and-social-determinants-of-support-for-salvador-allende-in-chile-19703/47F57E51ED3046DD69EFB93F221A4497">making the economy scream</a>,” as President Richard Nixon put it.</p>
<p>After a meeting with Kissinger in November 1970, a <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm">CIA cable to its station in Santiago stated</a> that “it is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown in a coup.”</p>
<p>The <a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve16/ch5">CIA’s covert financing of Chilean opposition parties</a>, funding of the country’s <a href="https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2017-04-25/agustin-edwards-declassified-obituary">right-wing media</a> and <a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v21/d311">support for the 1972 truckers strike</a> that snarled the nation’s freight and commerce for months were <a href="https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94chile.pdf">amply documented by a U.S. Senate committee</a> a few years after the coup.</p>
<p>Not content with having helped to topple Allende, Kissinger then wholeheartedly supported Pinochet’s regime.</p>
<p>When the U.S. ambassador to Chile relayed his efforts to persuade the military to act less brutally against political prisoners, Kissinger wrote on the margins of the cable, “<a href="https://web.mit.edu/hemisphere/events/kissinger-chile.shtml">… cut out the political science lectures</a>.” At a 1976 Organization of American States meeting in Santiago, far from urging Pinochet to tone down his regime’s repression, as some of Kissinger’s staff had recommended he do, he told the general, “<a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB437/">we want to help, not undermine you</a>.”</p>
<h2>Operation Condor</h2>
<p>Kissinger’s support for repressive military dictatorships extended beyond Chile’s borders.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563515/original/file-20231205-22-whmx65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two men in military uniforms chat in a black and white photo." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563515/original/file-20231205-22-whmx65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563515/original/file-20231205-22-whmx65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563515/original/file-20231205-22-whmx65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563515/original/file-20231205-22-whmx65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563515/original/file-20231205-22-whmx65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563515/original/file-20231205-22-whmx65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563515/original/file-20231205-22-whmx65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Argentina’s dictator Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, right, confers with Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet, in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1978.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ObitArgentinaVidela/5da45b83d8f74a63bee16d422fc13b9f/photo?boardId=37be9465fcce45d283d5431cccb20a6a&st=boards&mediaType=audio,photo,video,graphic&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=484&currentItemNo=3">AP Photo/Eduardo Di Baia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He supported <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/03/operation-condor-the-illegal-state-network-that-terrorised-south-america">Operation Condor</a>, an international undertaking that coordinated intelligence and operations among many of South America’s right-wing military regimes – Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay – from 1975 to 1983. The operations contributed to the widespread <a href="https://www.ox.ac.uk/research/research-impact/operation-condor">detention, torture and murder</a> of many left-wing opposition activists across three continents.</p>
<p>By September 1976, the excesses of Operation Condor were clear, and the U.S. State Department prepared an important diplomatic message, <a href="https://fam.state.gov/fam/07fam/07fam0030.html">known as a demarche</a>, strongly objecting to the repressive policies. Amazingly, <a href="https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21757-document-04">Kissinger stopped it</a> in its tracks. It was never delivered to those foreign ministries – and the timing was ominous.</p>
<p>Five days later, on Sept. 21, 1976, <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/car-bomb">Orlando Letelier, an exiled Chilean diplomat</a> who had served as Allende’s ambassador to the U.S. and in his cabinet in three different roles, was assassinated in Washington, D.C. He died after a bomb blew up the car he was driving – fatally injuring him and a colleague, <a href="https://ips-dc.org/remembering_ronni/">Ronni Karpen Moffitt</a>. Letelier was giving her and her husband, <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1981/05/13/Michael-Moffitt-who-survived-a-car-bomb-that-killed/4177358574400/">Michael Moffitt</a>, a ride to work. Michael was thrown from the vehicle but survived.</p>
<p>Preceding 9/11 by 25 years, the Letelier assassination was the first foreign-sponsored terrorist act on U.S. soil. Years of investigations revealed that Chile’s secret police planned and executed the plot to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/09/20/this-was-not-an-accident-this-was-a-bomb/">get rid of a prominent political figure</a> with influential contacts in Washington, D.C.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563516/original/file-20231205-27-jt2woa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in a brown suit crouches down to touch a plaque strewn with flowers." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563516/original/file-20231205-27-jt2woa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563516/original/file-20231205-27-jt2woa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563516/original/file-20231205-27-jt2woa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563516/original/file-20231205-27-jt2woa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563516/original/file-20231205-27-jt2woa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563516/original/file-20231205-27-jt2woa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563516/original/file-20231205-27-jt2woa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chilean President Gabriel Boric touches a memorial to Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt at Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., in 2023.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ChileCoupAnniversary/cc733873aac14518b4e88a0196bf6d4f/photo?boardId=37be9465fcce45d283d5431cccb20a6a&st=boards&mediaType=audio,photo,video,graphic&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=484&currentItemNo=12">AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Breaking the mold</h2>
<p>Mocking Chile’s supposed lack of strategic significance, <a href="https://eltecolote.org/content/en/kissinger-the-last-condor-an-obituary-by-one-of-his-victims/">Kissinger once dismissed</a> the long and narrow country as “a dagger pointing straight at the heart of Antarctica.” Yet, he devoted full chapters to Chile in each of the <a href="https://www.librarything.com/nseries/25589/Kissingers-Memoirs">first two volumes of his memoirs</a>.</p>
<p>What made <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB437/">Kissinger take such deadly aim at Allende</a> was his new political model, a “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0329">peaceful road to socialism</a>.”</p>
<p>It represented something else entirely from the revolutionary movements that were coming to the fore in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In Chile, an established and stable democracy had elected a Socialist president with an ambitious program of <a href="https://portside.org/2023-09-03/defending-allende">social and economic reforms</a>.</p>
<p>Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, which brought together an array of leftist and left-of-center political parties, could easily be replicated in Europe, in countries like France and Italy, leading to anti-U.S. governments – Washington’s worst nightmare. In this, Kissinger was not wrong. <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312129088/francoismitterrand">French Socialist leader Francois Mitterrand</a> visited Chile in 1971, met with Allende, recreated such a coalition in France and repeatedly won presidential elections.</p>
<p>Successful democratic socialist countries did not fit Kissinger’s long-held design for the world, inspired by his realist perspective, to create a balance of power between the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, China and Japan.</p>
<p>This view <a href="https://classicsofstrategy.com/2016/02/05/henry-kissinger-a-world-restored-1957/">sprang from his studies</a> of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400844746-004">Europe’s long peace</a> in the 19th century, which was anchored in a balance of power between Great Britain, France, Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary.</p>
<p>To Kissinger, what in the 1970s was called the Third World, and today is known as the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-global-south-is-on-the-rise-but-what-exactly-is-the-global-south-207959">Global South</a>, played no role in this grand design – to him, nothing important could come from the South. History was shaped by the great powers, such as the U.S., China and the Soviet Union. </p>
<h2>Big body count</h2>
<p>It is estimated that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/17/chile-families-search-disappeared-pinochet">more than 3,000 people were killed</a> by Chile’s military dictatorship, at least 1,000 of whom are still “disappeared” – meaning their bodies were never found.</p>
<p>These numbers pale in comparison to the estimated <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/argentina-death-flight-plane-dictatorship-returned-home-florida/">30,000 deaths in Argentina</a> under its junta; the <a href="https://theconversation.com/henry-kissingers-bombing-campaign-likely-killed-hundreds-othousands-of-cambodians-and-set-path-for-the-ravages-of-the-khmer-rouge-209353">hundreds of thousands of deaths in Cambodia</a> caused by the U.S. bombings directed by Kissinger; the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/01/bangladesh-kissinger-henry-genocide-pakistan-east-legacy/">millions who died in Bangladesh</a> in their 1971 war of independence against a U.S.-backed Pakistan; and the estimated 200,000 killed by the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/12/06/indonesia.timor.us/">Indonesian armed forces in East Timor in 1975</a> with Kissinger’s explicit approval.</p>
<p>They were casualties of the misguided geopolitical obsessions of a man blinded by a 19th century European view of world affairs. That perspective casts all developing nations as mere pawns in the games played by the great powers.</p>
<p>To this day, Chile lives under the shadow of Pinochet’s 1980 constitution, which <a href="https://online.ucpress.edu/currenthistory/article/120/823/43/115914/Chile-s-Constitutional-Moment">greatly expanded presidential powers</a> and enshrined the <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691208626/the-chile-project">neoliberal economic model</a> he imposed on the country. On Dec. 17, 2023, Chileans will vote for a second time in two years on a referendum that could <a href="https://apnews.com/article/chile-constitution-boric-pinochet-hevia-e752d1656e7f3c648fb771ab786a3b48">replace Pinochet’s constitution</a> with a new one.</p>
<p>That referendum may or may not turn a page in Chilean history. Regardless of the outcome, the scars will remain.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218982/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span> I am a member of Diplomats Without Borders (DWB), of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and of the International Studies Association (ISA). I am also affiliated with the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), and I am a member of the Party for Democracy, a Chilean political party.</span></em></p>It’s hard to overestimate the role Henry Kissinger played in Chile. A former Chilean diplomat describes the mark that the powerful statesman made in his country and elsewhere in the Global South.Jorge Heine, Interim Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2130142023-09-10T19:21:13Z2023-09-10T19:21:13ZHow disappearance became a global weapon of psychological control, 50 years on from Chile’s US-backed coup<p>For the few remaining <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/long-search-remains-pinochet-victims-chile-coup">women of Calama</a> in Chile’s Atacama desert, September 11 holds a terrifying meaning. They understand the pain of watching forensic investigators meticulously scour through particles of dust, seeking to retrieve the tiniest fragments of lives brutally taken from the world. They know what it means to face devastating absence, knowing the bodies of loved ones will never be returned.</p>
<p>But their loss has nothing to do with the attack on New York’s twin towers.</p>
<p>Fifty years ago, in the early morning of September 11 1973, a US-backed coup led by General Augusto Pinochet began with Chile’s military taking control of strategic locations in the capital city Santiago, including the main radio and television networks. At 8.30am, a declaration was broadcast that the military was now in control of the country.</p>
<p>While the elected president, Salvador Allende, refused to concede power in what turned out to be his farewell address, Pinochet’s undemocratic forces surrounded the presidential palace. A few hours later, the centre of Chilean democracy was bombed by a fighter jet and set ablaze. Allende <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Salvador_Allende">died from gunshot wounds</a> the same day.</p>
<p>Chile under Pinochet would become the experimenting ground for an economic project that inspired both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and went by the name of <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/neoliberalism-was-born-in-chile-now-it-will-die-there/">neoliberalism</a>. But it was also an experimenting laboratory for the torture and enforced disappearance of human beings.</p>
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<p>During the 16 years of Pinochet’s reign, 1,100 people were officially registered as “forcibly disappeared”. Only 104 bodies were ever found, although local communities put this figure much higher. Some were abducted due to their political associations and beliefs, others for sexual abuse. And some were just randomly selected to send the message that nobody was immune to the threat of vanishment.</p>
<p>Since 2017, I have co-directed the <a href="https://www.historiesofviolence.com/stateofdisappearance">State of Disappearance project</a>, which researches and promotes better understanding of this form of violence that haunts many societies when they seek a transition to peace. The 50th anniversary of Chile’s day of terror is a key date in the annals of human suffering, in part because Pinochet’s rise to power marked the start of the modern era of disappearance as a political and organised crime technique.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Brad Evans discusses the State of Disappearance project with co-director Chantal Meza.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Techniques honed in the US</h2>
<p>The strategy of disappearance is so shocking and difficult to comprehend because the violence is rationalised, professionalised and calculated. It is never random, even if its targets appear to have been arbitrarily selected. Its currency is emotional fear that infects the population like a virus, creating a climate of suspicion and betrayal.</p>
<p>While the modern era of state-led policies of disappearance developed through the countries of South and Central America, the techniques were honed at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation">School of the Americas</a> (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), a US Defense Department training facility at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia.</p>
<p>For 21 years, South American countries were subject to a covert campaign of political repression and state terrorism coordinated by the CIA and characterised by frequent coups and assassinations. During the darker chapters of this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor">Operation Condor</a>, policies of violence against the US’s ideological leftwing enemies spread throughout the continent’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cone">southern cone</a> like wildfire. Military generals and officers from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and later Brazil all trained at the infamous US facility, learning the most effective strategies to destroy opposition and govern their people by instilling a culture of everyday fear.</p>
<p>Some <a href="https://bennorton.com/victims-of-operation-condor-by-country/">estimates</a> put the number of enforced disappearances directly linked to this operation at around 80,000, including a staggering 30,000 bodies <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story-america/2013/3/6/tracing-the-shadows-of-operation-condor">taken from the streets of Argentina</a>. While these included known activists and prominent spokespersons demanding social justice and reform, others who only had a very tentative opposition to the military junta and its neoliberal aspirations were among the victims.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The story of Operation Condor (Al Jazeera English)</span></figcaption>
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<p>Indeed, the terms “disappeared” and “disappearance” first entered the political lexicon during Argentina’s dictatorship of the mid-1970s, when the state – backed by the US in its so-called “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Dirty-War">dirty war</a>” – kidnapped and killed those it perceived to be a threat to its operations and ideological foundations, literally disappearing their bodies.</p>
<p>Beyond the official remit of Condor, the same ideologically driven violence extended throughout the Americas, leaving no country untouched. In Colombia, the government’s <a href="https://www.unidadvictimas.gov.co/en/unit/units-review/28230">victims’ unit</a> has registered more than 45,000 victims dating back to the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2665910722000330">1970s</a>, although another <a href="https://www.abcolombia.org.uk/enforced-disappearances-in-colombia-still-an-ongoing-issue/">government database</a> puts the number of missing above 110,000. While, as in Argentina, many victims were disappeared by the Colombian state and associated right-wing paramilitary organisations, this was compounded by use of similar tactics by leftist guerrilla organisations and narcotrafficking cartels.</p>
<p>Operation Condor was thus at the heart of a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/18/us-military-usa">wider security project</a> through which the violence of disappearance became a normalised practice. While not part of the official programme, more Colombian military officials trained at the School of the Americas than any other nation.</p>
<p>In many cases, the disappeared would vanish without any witnesses to their abduction. People were swiftly taken from the streets and thrown into cars – in Argentina, Ford Falcons became a <a href="https://medium.com/history-on-wheels/the-curse-of-the-ford-falcon-36cda9a8f97f#:%7E:text=The%20Ford%20factory%20in%20General,tortured%20there%20by%20the%20military.">symbol of terror</a> – or stolen from their beds in the solitude of the night.</p>
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<p><strong><em>This article is part of Conversation Insights</em></strong>
<br><em>The Insights team generates <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218">long-form journalism</a> derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.</em></p>
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<p>Often, this would be followed by blanket denials, even that a person had actually disappeared, by those in power. But as events in Colombia and (more recently) Mexico have shown, there is sometimes a need to return a mutilated body to “remind” people of the likely horror. In the infamous case of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/world/americas/Ayotzinapa-mexico-students-anniversary.html">43 student teachers</a> who went missing in the Mexican state of Guerrero in 2017, the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/12/americas/julio-cesar-mondragon-fontes-missing-students-mexico/index.html">brutally tortured body</a> of another student teacher, Julio César Mondragón Fontes, was discovered the next day. The whereabouts of his fellow students are still unknown.</p>
<p>As I have <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/remembering-43/">written elsewhere</a>, what especially marks out this violence is the way the fight for truth and memorialisation for the missing has become a key battleground. Yet even leftist leaders such as <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/14/mexico-president-continues-attacks-on-opposition-despite-order">Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador</a>, Mexico’s president since 2018, show limits to what the state is willing to concede, as noted by his recent <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/27/amlo-defends-mexicos-military-after-report-on-missing-students-case">exoneration of the military</a> which, according to the victims’ families, had played an integral role in this forced abduction.</p>
<p>Beyond the spectacle of violence, there is a deeper reason why disappearance is so effective as a political and psychological strategy. Psychologically, it plays into the most primal of human fears: to vanish without a trace. It induces what the academic <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/obituaries/jean-franco-dead.html">Jean Franco</a> <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/cruel-modernity">called</a> a “triple deprivation – of body, of mourning, of burial”.</p>
<p>In the act of disappearing life, not only is there a denial of justice that requires the reappearance of victims’ bodies for a crime to be proven. There is also a denial of the political process that demands negotiation with past tragedies so the future can be steered in a better direction. </p>
<p>This is what makes disappearance a true crime against humanity: it is a form of violence that makes it hard to restore something of the human condition. Not only does it deny a person the most basic right to belong to the world, it creates an economy of terror that lives on in the minds of relatives and friends – a form of “future violence”.</p>
<h2>Trained in psychological warfare</h2>
<p>Since the early 1990s in zones of conflict and crisis, the lines between state and non-state actors, along with regulated versus illicit economies, have become almost impossible to separate.</p>
<p>Organisations such as <a href="https://theconversation.com/inside-a-reintegration-camp-for-colombias-ex-guerrilla-fighters-words-of-reconciliation-are-our-only-weapons-now-184074">the Farc in Colombia</a> illustrate the difficulties of distinguishing between ideological groups and mere criminal organisations. In Mexico, <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/worse-than-any-horror-film-inside-a-los-zetas-cartel-kitchen-1.4225436">Los Zetas</a> – acknowledged to be the most violent of all the world’s drug cartels – reveal an even more fraught, state-sponsored past. This group’s origins can be dated to the early 1990s, when a group of commandos from the <a href="https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuerpo_de_Fuerzas_Especiales_de_M%C3%A9xico">Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales</a> (Mexican special forces) broke away from the state and used their knowledge and training to devastating effect.</p>
<p>Originally set up to provide a rapid security response during the 1986 World Cup held in the country, this special forces unit would soon be attacking the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/feb/17/mexico-zapatistas-rebels-24-years-mountain-strongholds">Zapatistas</a>, an Indigenous movement in the southern state of Chiapas that itself became committed to non-violence. Los Zetas’ deployment into the remote jungle regions quickly resulted in a horrifying slaughter of 30 captured Indigenous “rebels”, who were found by the side of a river with their ears and noses cut off.</p>
<p>Later, the same unit – a number of whom were trained in the US School of the Americas – became a key element of Mexico’s <a href="https://www.elmundo.es/america/2013/07/16/mexico/1373982845.html">war on drugs</a>, triggering a notable acceleration in disappearances. What made Los Zetas especially notorious was the brutality and scale of the violence, including attempted mass killings such as the grenade attacks on <a href="https://www.jornada.com.mx/2008/09/27/index.php?section=politica&article=003n1pol">Independence Day in Morena</a> in 2008, which injured more than 100. Another favoured tactic was to hang bodies from bridges and leave beheaded and dismembered bodies in discoverable locations.</p>
<p>That members of Los Zetas, like previous graduates from the School of the Americas, were trained in psychological warfare is not incidental. It is not enough to simply eliminate opposition. Fear works by having persons change their behaviour before they have even considered acting in a particular way. The threat of more violence stops agency and freedom dead in their tracks.</p>
<p>Today, this strategy appears largely immune to political change. While the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/18/silence-us-backed-coup-evo-morales-bolivia-american-states">US-supported ousting</a> of the democratically elected Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019 showed it was still business as usual in the geopolitical displacement of Latin American populist leaders, in Mexico, despite a much-vaunted <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/democratizing-mexican-politics-1982-2012">process of democratisation</a>, cases of disappearance have increased exponentially.</p>
<p>Since 2006, the number of enforced disappearances in Mexico reported by Human Rights Watch <a href="https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/mexico.">exceeds 100,000</a>. Over the same period, more than <a href="https://adondevanlosdesaparecidos.org/2021/10/08/mexico-rebasa-las-4-mil-fosas-clandestinas-40-se-encontraron-en-este-sexenio/#:%7E:text=Compartir%3A,una%20tercera%20parte%20de%20esta">4,000 unmarked graves</a> have been discovered around the country. A significant number of these victims are young women and people from other vulnerable groups including children and migrants. But the disappearance of nearly 150 journalists highlights the policy of silencing that goes with it. Today, Mexico is <a href="https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/mexico#:%7E:text=Mexico%20is%20one%20of%20the%20most%20dangerous%20countries%20in%20the,Many%20journalists%20self%2Dcensor.">one of the most dangerous places in the world</a> to try to report the truth.</p>
<p>Journalists such as <a href="https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/lydia-cacho-ribeiro-international-visibility-shield-threatened-journalists">Lydia Cacho</a> and <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/anabel-h%C3%A9rnandez-condemns-murder-of-journalist-mar%C3%ADa-elena-ferral-in-veracruz/a-52972126">Anabel Hernandez</a> continue to risk their lives to expose the role that corruption plays in the organisation of disappearances. In <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/nyregion/garcia-luna-trial-mexico-court.html">February 2023</a>, Mexico’s secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna – once the highest-ranking law officer in the fight against the country’s drug gangs – was convicted for being on the payroll of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaloa_Cartel">Sinaloa cartel</a>. More recently, this cartel has brought its violence to the state of Zacatecas, making it the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/13/mexico-city-fresnillo-cartel-kidnappings-violence">global epicentre for disappearance</a>, with one person vanishing every day there in 2023.</p>
<h2>The impact of disappearance on loved ones</h2>
<p>Throughout history, state-sponsored disappearance has proved extremely effective in quietening resistance and governing through fear. But the organisation of disappearance takes a great deal of political and financial investment – requiring considerable organisation, planning and the provision of alibis. It also takes significant effort to prevent bodies from being found, especially in a digital age when details of such crimes can be more easily shared.</p>
<p>However, digital technology also presents a significant challenge for the families searching for their loved ones, and those trying to deal with the legacies of disappearance.</p>
<p>While groups working on behalf of the disappeared use the internet and social media to disseminate information and maintain visibility, our interviews reveal strong suspicion of communication devices and the growing “surveillance state”. The digital revolution has given more power to those who master the technology. Disappearance has taken new forms, enabled by <a href="https://english.elpais.com/usa/2022-02-01/drones-the-latest-weapon-of-mexicos-cartels.html">tracking systems</a> such as drones that can be subsequently erased. </p>
<p>Despite these dangers, we monitor many courageous attempts by communities who continue to demand answers to what happened to their disappeared. In Mexico alone, there are some 130 “<a href="https://www.reforma.com/fallan-busquedas-arman-colectivos/ar2084682">search collectives</a>” tasked with trying to recover the remains of the missing. As one family member told us: “The whole country is a clandestine grave.”</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-06-04/the-seeking-mothers-of-latin-america-without-fear-and-with-memory.html">Ceci Flores</a>, leader of the <a href="https://www.laprensalatina.com/human-remains-found-by-searching-mother-in-mexico-do-not-belong-to-missing-son/#:%7E:text=Currently%2C%20the%20searching%20mothers%20of,found%20dead%20in%20clandestine%20graves.">searching mothers of Sonora</a> in northern Mexico:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have the idea that we know where they pick up [kidnap] our children, but we do not know where they are going to leave them. So, if we have to tour the entire Mexican republic, we are going to do it. And if I don’t find my son, maybe I will find another mother’s son.</p>
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<p>Theirs is a labour of care which, in the act of searching, refuses to accept the absence. But this work is laborious and financially burdening, not to mention emotionally exhausting. The collectives depend on tip-offs, though often they simply search abandoned places, disused wells, jungled forests and open fields.</p>
<p>There are certain clues they look for, including traces of the lime that is frequently used to cover bodies and accelerate their decomposition. Their tools are rudimentary – they often rely on the harrowing insertion of a thin metal pole, a <em>varilla</em>, into the ground to release the potential stench of death. Many testimonies from these searching collectives speak of how the decomposing remains of a person gives off its own unique odour.</p>
<p>Aside from the fact that those searching for the disappeared often end up being violently threatened and even disappearing themselves, the psychological impact demands a more expansive appreciation of the suffering they endure. <a href="https://www.mqup.ca/state-of-disappearance-products-9780228018964.php?page_id=46&*">Our research</a> has repeatedly found that living with disappearance can be truly unbearable, for the violence it passes on to others offers no kind of resolution and no prospect of recovery. The memory of loss places a perverse kind of guilt on the shoulders of family members.</p>
<p>Psychological studies of <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7408511/">families dealing with missing persons</a> have spoken of a “vortex of grief”. Dealing with what the International Red Cross identifies as “<a href="https://international-review.icrc.org/sites/default/files/irrc_99_905_4.pdf">ambiguous loss</a>” demands new therapeutic responses that appreciate the lasting effects of this absence. Close relatives are often deeply traumatised and <a href="https://www.interventionjournal.org/article.asp?issn=1571-8883;year=2020;volume=18;issue=2;spage=139;epage=149;aulast=Smid">haunted by “intrusive memories”</a>. Studies of those living in the aftermath of the Holocaust have shown how trauma can also be <a href="https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(15)00652-6/fulltext">transmitted across generations</a>.</p>
<p>Yet despite all this evidence, not enough attention is paid to the lasting psychological and social impacts on communities living with disappearance. Part of the problem is that many of these communities are desperately poor and already disenfranchised. In life they are often forgotten, so is it any wonder that in death they are denied?</p>
<h2>The struggle for justice</h2>
<p>Arguably, the most challenging obstacle to overcome when dealing with the crime of disappearance is the pervading culture of impunity that exists in many countries. As the <a href="https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/SessionDetails1.aspx?SessionID=2531&Lang=en">UN Committee on Enforced Disappearance noted</a> in Mexico in 2022, where as few as 2% of all criminal cases result in a prosecution:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Impunity in Mexico is a structural feature that favours the reproduction and cover-up of enforced disappearances. It creates threats and anxiety to the victims, those defending and promoting their rights, public servants searching for the disappeared and investigating their cases, and society as a whole.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are, however, notable exceptions. In Argentina, as a result of a campaign by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_the_Plaza_de_Mayo">Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo</a> (the first major group to organise against the 1970s military regime’s human rights violations), the <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-convention-protection-all-persons-enforced">International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance</a> was established in 2010. Since then, some of those involved in the organisation and enactment of the country’s notorious “<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/argentina-death-flight-plane-dictatorship-returned-home-florida/#:%7E:text=Human%20rights%20groups%20estimate%2030%2C000,took%20place%20at%20least%20weekly.">death flights</a>” have been brought to justice. So has <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-oct-10-fg-priest10-story.html">Christian von Wernich</a>, a former chaplain in Buenos Aires who supplied details of the confessions he took to the authorities, who then used the information to target new victims.</p>
<p>But perhaps the most high-profile example of justice achieved was the (initial) conviction of Guatemala’s former dictator, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/02/gen-efrain-rios-montt-obituary">Efraín Ríos Montt</a>, for genocide and crimes against humanity in 2013. Montt was yet another graduate of the School of the Americas, alongside the likes of Salvadorian death squad leader <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_D%27Aubuisson">Roberto D’Aubuisson</a> and Argentine junta leader <a href="https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldo_Galtieri">Leopoldo Galtieri</a>.</p>
<p>Montt came to power following another US-backed coup in 1982, and would oversee the disappearance of an estimated 40,000 Guatemalans, largely from the nation’s Indigenous Maya population. Roddy Brett from the University of Bristol was a director of the team that prepared the legal investigation against Guatemala’s former dictator. Commenting on his conviction, Brett explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Montt’s imprisonment in 2013 was the first time a domestic court of law in Latin America had convicted a former head of state for genocide. Through their successful search for justice, Indigenous survivors of Guatemala’s genocide obliterated the military’s wall of denial and wrote themselves into history. However, opposition to the verdict and its subsequent reversal ten days later was a major, if not unexpected, set-back for those seeking legal recourse for the disappeared.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The power of art to represent loss</h2>
<p>In June 2023, Argentina <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/5/the-proof-we-were-missing-death-flight-returns-toargentina">repatriated a plane from the US</a> that had been used in the campaign of death flights, in which victims were thrown from the air while still conscious. The extent of this strategy was only properly understood when <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/06/05/argentinian-death-flight-plane-to-be-displayed-at-buenos-aires-museum_6029141_4.html#:%7E:text=On%20December%2014%2C%201977%2C%20at,bodies%20of%2012%20political%20opponents.">bodies started washing up</a> on the shores of the Rio de la Plata in December 1977 as a result of a freak weather pattern. </p>
<p>The repatriated plane will soon go on display at the former navy and mechanics school in Buenos Aires (now the <a href="https://www.argentina.gob.ar/derechoshumanos/museo-sitio-de-memoria-esma/en">ESMA Museum and Site of Memory</a>), a clandestine detention facility in which many of the disappeared were held before their disposal.</p>
<p>The re-emergence of such items, which also includes a fleet of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/argentina-dictatorship-falcon-idUSL2E8QR0OQ20120327">Ford Falcons</a> used by the death squads, highlights the importance of material objects that give at least some visible form to the violence of absence. In the same way, it is understandable why we see so many families and campaigners harnessing the power of art to represent their loss.</p>
<p>There can be no peace at a macro level if individuals and communities remain traumatised by wounds that cannot heal because of a gaping absence. Josefina Echavarria Alvarez, director of the <a href="https://peaceaccords.nd.edu/">Peace Accords Matrix</a> at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, offered this perspective in relation to the work of the <a href="https://www.abcolombia.org.uk/truth-commission-of-colombia-executive-summary/">Colombia Truth Commission</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What I have seen in my work as peace educator over decades in various post-war contexts has been the importance of art-based responses … Arts-based practices are central – not peripheral – to peace building, to rebuilding relationships after war and changing the dynamics of human interaction, especially with those who have been historically separated from us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Art reveals better than anything the spirit of freedom. It is no coincidence that the Nazis put the so-called “<a href="https://heni.com/talks/degenerate-art">degenerate artists</a>” on trial, nor that the Pinochet regime disappeared the musician <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200812-vctor-jara-the-folk-singer-murdered-for-his-music">Víctor Jara</a>, whose tortured and bullet-ridden body was <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/ABC_Univision/murdered-chilean-singers-family-seeks-justice-us/story?id=20202252">discovered</a> days after his abduction.</p>
<p>Jara’s creative sensibility marked him as a prime enemy of the Chilean state. There is nothing an authoritarian personality despises more than free expression and creation, for it is the essence of resistance. Moreover, through art, difficult conversations become possible. A door is opened that may allow something of the human to be recovered.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Notable here is Chilean film director Patricio Guzmán’s documentary <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jul/12/nostalgia-for-the-light-review">Nostalgia for the Light</a> (2010), which brings us back to the barren emptiness of the Atacama plains and the <a href="https://returnatacama.hemi.press/chapter/labours-made-visible-the-women-of-calama-and-everyone-has-fallen-except-us-fallen/">women of Calama</a>. What begins as an astronomical mediation on the telescoping search of distant galaxies and stars, slowly turns the lens on to the uninhabitable desert and the appearance of distant figures: the women still searching amongst the dust for the remains for their husbands.</p>
<p>Decades of searching mean they can easily tell the difference between white stones and human fragments. Theirs is a story of defiance in a place where rains have refused to fall for more than a millennia. But it is also a story revealing the chasm of power that reaches across time. “I wish telescopes didn’t just look at the sky, but could go through the earth to be able to locate [the bodies],” one of the women laments as she goes through the impossible motions of another day.</p>
<p>The first stage of our <a href="https://www.historiesofviolence.com/artistaswitness">State of Disappearance project</a> culminates with an exhibition by the Mexican abstract artist <a href="https://www.chantal-meza.com/biography">Chantal Meza</a>. Our project, which she co-directs, began as a result of the artistic demand to respond to the horrors of enforced disappearance in Meza’s country, and has since instigated a series of international collaborations.</p>
<p>Bringing together many respected academics, dancers, musicians and advocacy groups, the challenge we all confronted was largely the same: what can art, politics and society do when the body of the human is denied? The project doesn’t claim to resolve this, nor has it sought to impose any political doctrine, but tries to open up new conversations on what disappearance means, the forms it takes, and how to better imagine our response.</p>
<p>Meza confronts these questions in 75 works that explore themes of obscurity, mental anguish, ghosting, the fragmentation of life, and the voiding of existence. The heart of this work, she explains, is making visible what has been forgotten so that we might rethink what humanity means:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Disappearance constitutes a form of violence that rips open a wound in time. It weaponises the visual, as the terror it induces becomes prey to what is no longer seen. Part of the demand for justice, then, has to concern memory. This means to humbly consider the role of visual testimony, which the arts can help with.</p>
<p>As artists, we can only venture to wonder the meaning of disappearance – whether in brushstrokes, dancing movements, musical compositions or the written word. But our lost worlds and the limits of our straight answers can be fiercely poured into those creations. Maybe through our encounters with artists and other collaborations, we find it easier to appear and disappear – to be never found, but just to leave a trace.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em><a href="https://www.historiesofviolence.com/stateofdisappearance">The State of Disappearance exhibition</a>, featuring the works of Chantal Meza, is at Bristol’s Centrespace art gallery from October 28 to November 8 2023</em></p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>For you: more from our <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">Insights series</a>:</em></p>
<ul>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/my-home-city-was-destroyed-by-war-but-i-will-not-lose-hope-how-modern-warfare-turns-neighbourhoods-into-battlefields-211627?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">‘My home city was destroyed by war but I will not lose hope’ – how modern warfare turns neighbourhoods into battlefields</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/womens-secret-war-the-inside-story-of-how-the-us-military-sent-female-soldiers-on-covert-combat-missions-to-afghanistan-205669?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">Women’s secret war: the inside story of how the US military sent female soldiers on covert combat missions to Afghanistan
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<li><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/inside-a-reintegration-camp-for-colombias-ex-guerrilla-fighters-words-of-reconciliation-are-our-only-weapons-now-184074?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">Inside a reintegration camp for Colombia’s ex-guerrilla fighters: ‘Words of reconciliation are our only weapons now’
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<p><em>To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/the-daily-newsletter-2?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK"><strong>Subscribe to our newsletter</strong></a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213014/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brad Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>State-sponsored disappearance plays into the most primal of human fears – to vanish without a trace. The modern era started with Chile’s US-backed coup on September 11 1973Brad Evans, Professor in Political Violence, University of BathLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2111802023-08-09T19:50:09Z2023-08-09T19:50:09ZFrom Oppenheimer to Milton Friedman: how the Cold War battle of economic ideas shaped our world<p>Is Oppenheimer a movie for our time, reminding us of the tensions, dangers and conflicts of the old Cold War while a <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/27/new-cold-war-nato-summit-united-states-russia-ukraine-china/">new one</a> threatens to break out? </p>
<p>The film certainly chimes with today’s big power conflicts (the US and China), renewed concern about nuclear weapons (Russia’s threats over Ukraine), and current ideological tensions between democratic and autocratic systems.</p>
<p>But the Cold War did not just rest on the threat of the bomb. Behind the scientists and generals were many other players, among them the economists, who clashed just as vigorously in their views about how to run postwar economies. </p>
<p>Without their allocation systems, funding mechanisms, technological advances, economic mapping and fiscal policies, neither the big powers nor the minor players could have afforded their defence expenditures or operated their economies. </p>
<p>One of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s colleagues, genius Hungarian mathematician <a href="https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/biographies/vonNeumann.html">John von Neumann</a>, not only worked on the Nagasaki bomb at Los Alamos, but also turned his mind to economics. He developed game theory for economists – which the <a href="https://www.rand.org/about.html">RAND Corporation</a> used to test first-strike nuclear attacks against second-phase reprisals. </p>
<p>Von Neumann also developed the computer architecture on the <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/edvac">EDVAC machine</a> that allowed simulations of these nuclear and economic “games”. He went on to build the famous expanding economy model that showed the possibilities of dynamic growth through investment.</p>
<h2>Spies and ideologies</h2>
<p>The US had a huge financial advantage in this game, but it did not have everything its own way. Von Neumann’s nemesis was a Russian prodigy named <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1975/kantorovich/facts/">Leonid Kantorovich</a>. He survived the siege of Leningrad and invented linear programming to help Soviet factories build wartime planes more efficiently. </p>
<p>When he proposed extending these techniques to the whole planned Soviet economy, he was knocked back by the Marxist ideologues because he used prices to indicate scarcity. Kantorovich escaped incarceration and execution, unlike some of his colleagues. But he found himself assigned to the <a href="https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/DeptII_Gordin_AtomicMonopoly">ENORMOZ</a> project, the desperate Soviet race to build their own atomic bomb. </p>
<p>Kantorovich was helped in this contest by information leaked by Soviet spy <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/klaus-fuchs/">Klaus Fuchs</a> from von Neumann’s laboratory at Los Alamos. Such <a href="https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1942-1945/espionage.htm">espionage was endemic</a> in the period. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-soviets-stole-nuclear-secrets-and-targeted-oppenheimer-the-father-of-the-atomic-bomb-204885">How the Soviets stole nuclear secrets and targeted Oppenheimer, the 'father of the atomic bomb'</a>
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<p>US Treasury Assistant Secretary Harry Dexter White, a principal architect of the 1944 <a href="https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/bretton-woods-created">Bretton Woods</a> agreements (which established the IMF and the World Bank), was feeding US secrets to the Soviets. More than 20 of his New Deal colleagues in the US administration belonged to Soviet spy rings. </p>
<p>In economics as well as the military, there were defining ideological differences: those like Austrian economist <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-hayek/">Friedrich Hayek</a> who saw market allocation and price signals as the only way to allocate resources efficiently in a modern economy; and those like Polish Marxist economist <a href="https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/lange.htm">Oskar Lange</a>, who argued that planned socialist economies could also be efficient – at least theoretically – by using frequent data on shortages and gluts. </p>
<p>The Soviet Union used this latter system tolerably well to meet the military needs of the second world war. But it failed when faced with the more sophisticated civilian demands later in the Cold War.</p>
<h2>Academic warfare</h2>
<p>Such arguments were fought out on the Washington beltway and in the Kremlin. But some of the most brutal arguments took place in the hallowed halls of academia.</p>
<p>For example, <a href="http://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/robinson.htm">Joan Robinson</a>, the brilliant yet erratic upper-class Cambridge economist, tried to rewrite Marxian economics but ended up with something closer to dynamic Keynesianism – an interpretation of how John Maynard Keynes’ 1935 <a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-general-theory-of-employment-money-and-interest/">General Theory of Employment, Money and Interest</a> might be extended to lead to growth.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/john-maynard-keynes-unusually-for-an-economist-he-did-not-think-people-were-very-rational-159357">John Maynard Keynes: unusually for an economist, he did not think people were very rational</a>
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<p>And for the next 30 years she argued this with <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1970/samuelson/biographical/">Paul Samuelson</a> of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, himself from a tough steel town, about whether the reinvestment of profits or the surplus value of labour was the key to dynamic growth.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541612/original/file-20230808-25-fh75un.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541612/original/file-20230808-25-fh75un.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541612/original/file-20230808-25-fh75un.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541612/original/file-20230808-25-fh75un.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541612/original/file-20230808-25-fh75un.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541612/original/file-20230808-25-fh75un.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1188&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541612/original/file-20230808-25-fh75un.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1188&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541612/original/file-20230808-25-fh75un.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1188&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Robinson, Samuelson and other economists are profiled in my <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/economists-in-the-cold-war-9780192887399?cc=nz&lang=en&">new book</a>: Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas. Through their eyes we see the war of economic ideologies, the competing social objectives, the fight over allocation mechanisms and the different views on what drives an economy. </p>
<p>This was binary economics, though there were some attempts at a middle way, such as the “social market economy” promoted in the late 1940s by the German economic minister and cigar-smoking technocrat <a href="https://www.ludwig-erhard-zentrum.de/en/ludwig-erhard">Ludwig Erhar</a>.</p>
<p>After several decades of disagreement, the economic battlegrounds seemed set. Centrally planned economies were lagging, but by 1970 new computing power (partly the work of von Neumann and Kantorovich) seemed to offer them new opportunities.</p>
<p>Fascinated by the possibility of computers helping direct an economy, Oscar Lange wrote just before his death: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>So what’s the trouble? Let us put the simultaneous equations on an electronic computer and we shall obtain the solution in less than a second.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Computers and coups</h2>
<p>The next round of this battle would play out not in Europe, but in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende employed British management consultant <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/22/stafford-beer-chile-allende-technology-cybernetics">Stafford Beer</a> to design a new tool for central planning. </p>
<p>In Santiago he built a futuristic control centre: a ring of armchairs with controls, monitors and a software system named <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-chilean-wide-web/">Cybersyn</a>. Allende had nationalised 500 businesses and he linked them up to the control centre by fax machine (ironically, using the wired network of the CIA-influenced ITT company). </p>
<p>Each day, the controllers would fax orders to the factories and receive information on shortages and gluts. Could a computer-based allocation system provide a workable alternative to markets?</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-50-years-ago-milton-friedman-told-us-greed-was-good-he-was-half-right-146294">Vital Signs: 50 years ago Milton Friedman told us greed was good. He was half right</a>
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<p>We will never know, because on September 11 1973 General <a href="https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-pinochets-chile-100659">Augusto Pinochet</a> mounted a military coup, bombed the presidential palace, assassinated Allende and sent a contingent of soldiers with fixed bayonets to ritualistically stab the monitors in the control room. </p>
<p>Pinochet established his own cabinet, heavily populated with “Los Chicago Boys”, the economics students trained at the University of Chicago on Ford and Rockefeller Foundation schemes. </p>
<p>One of them, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1976/friedman/biographical/">Milton Friedman</a>, later visited Chile to advise the dictator Pinochet on the economy. When criticised, he replied: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I do not consider it as evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean government, any more than I would regard it as evil for a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean government to help in a medical plague.</p>
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<p>But it was not all so divisive. In 1954, the left-wing Oppenheimer was pulled before the Atomic Energy Commission in a secret hearing to testify on charges of having communist sympathies. The right-wing von Neumann was the first to organise a group of witnesses for the defence, despite completely disagreeing with Oppenheimer’s politics.</p>
<p>Despite all the geopolitical tensions, economists today can at least argue in a far less hostile environment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211180/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alan Bollard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Cold War was an economic standoff as well as an atomic one. The author of a new book describes the minds behind the great ideological battles on that 20th-century front line.Alan Bollard, Professor of Economics, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of WellingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1903712022-09-13T09:46:47Z2022-09-13T09:46:47ZChile’s progressive new constitution rejected by voters after campaign marred by misinformation<p>Despite recently electing Chile’s most progressive president in the shape of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-59694056">former student protest leader Gabriel Boric</a>, voters in the country have now rejected his most important reform. A plebiscite held on September 4 to replace the constitution imposed during the dictatorship of <a href="https://constitutionnet.org/country/constitutional-history-chile">Augusto Pinochet</a> with a progressive new one led to a solid no vote. This has effectively halted Boric’s agenda for reform.</p>
<p>The final ballot stood at 62% rejecting (<em>Rechazo</em>) the proposed document and just 38% approving (<em>Apruebo</em>). It was a result that directly contradicted the initial <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/world/americas/chile-constitution-plebiscite.html">plebiscite held in 2020</a> when 78% of voters backed the idea of a new constitution, after which Eliza Loncon, an indigenous left-wing academic <a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-election-of-progressive-indigenous-academic-to-oversee-constitutional-reform-is-a-blow-to-right-wing-establishment-164088">was elected</a> to oversee a constitutional convention to write the document.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-election-of-progressive-indigenous-academic-to-oversee-constitutional-reform-is-a-blow-to-right-wing-establishment-164088">Chile: election of progressive indigenous academic to oversee constitutional reform is a blow to right-wing establishment</a>
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<p>The decision to rewrite the constitution came after months of political upheaval in 2019-20 caused by a crisis of inequality. Protests over metro fares in the capital, Santiago, developed into a mass social movement encompassing feminists, environmentalists, indigenous groups and anti-neoliberal activists calling for progressive socioeconomic change.</p>
<p>The new document was <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/whats-chiles-proposed-new-constitution-2022-07-29/">certainly radical</a>, with a range of political and social reforms guaranteeing a range of social rights including housing, social security, health, work and access to food. There was also a range of proposed environmental reforms making fighting climate change a state duty and requiring the state to protect biodiversity, native species and natural spaces.</p>
<p>Political reforms included an element of direct democracy, gender parity, indigenous rights and a restructuring of the bicameral parliamentary system to give the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house) more power at the expense of the Senate.</p>
<p>Conceding defeat, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/23784a2e-7ed7-4f37-8921-eb5112683c33">Boric said</a>: “I’m sure all this effort won’t have been in vain, because this is how countries advance best, learning from experience and, when necessary, turning back on their tracks to find a new route forward.”</p>
<p>The “no” vote has not only halted the implementation of a new constitution, it has also forced a cabinet reshuffle. Boric has removed some of his more progressive ministers, including former interior minister <a href="https://www.weforum.org/people/izkia-siches">Izkia Siches</a>, a doctor of indigenous descent who helped shape Chile’s pandemic response. </p>
<p>In place he has brought in figures from Chile’s traditional political class such as <a href="https://chiletoday.cl/post-referendum-cabinet-changes-izkia-siches-and-others-out/">Carolina Toha</a>, a minister in former president Michelle Bachelet’s first administration. This hints at a shift toward centrist politics. </p>
<p>As such, the newly elected president seems increasingly fragile and politically isolated, with a much-reduced mandate.</p>
<p>Many commentators have been baffled by the referendum result, wondering how citizens that had galvanised across the nation for political change, have settled for a constitution enacted by one of Latin America’s most brutal dictators.</p>
<h2>Fearmongering and misinformation</h2>
<p>Fake news became a defining feature of the “<em>rechazo</em>” campaign which, in turn, the mainstream Chilean media was more than happy to amplify for clicks and views. One such story, propagated by far-right politician Felipe Kast who Boric defeated in the 2021 election, claimed that abortions would be legalised for up to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/31/chile-new-constitution-vote-misinformation">nine months into pregnancy</a>.</p>
<p>Kast also claimed, before retracting the story, that Venezuelan president Nicola Maduro had supported the draft constitution. Kast circulated on his Twitter feed a video <a href="https://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2022/05/17/senador-felipe-kast-se-retracta-tras-difundir-falso-video-de-maduro-apoyando-el-borrador-de-la-nueva-constitucion-el-registro-es-de-2020/">purporting to back this claim</a>. He subsequently withdrew the claim and apologised. </p>
<p>Other “half-truths” circulating on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter were that private property would be expropriated, insurance funds could not be inherited, and that uniformed police would be abolished. An early 2022 survey found that <a href="https://www.adnradio.cl/los-21-plenos/2022/04/10/58-de-los-chilenos-afirman-conocer-informacion-falsa-sobre-convencion-constitucional.html">58% of Chileans</a> had been exposed to some form of misinformation.</p>
<p>Another line of attack focused on the people involved in writing the new constitution, who some critics argued were not representative of the whole of Chilean society but had a majority from the left. One critic, <a href="https://time.com/6193719/chile-constitution-reform-boric/">Kenneth Bunker</a>, said the quota system to ensure that indigenous groups were properly represented on the drafting body, also didn’t represent the conservative side of Chilean politics.</p>
<p>Ciper, an investigative media outlet, <a href="https://www.ciperchile.cl/2022/09/07/120-residentes-de-12-comunas-populares-de-la-region-metropolitana-explican-por-que-votaron-rechazo/">found</a> that most of those who voted against the new constitution did so because of false information. </p>
<p>Ciper surveyed 120 people across 12 districts of Santiago and found that the main reasons for rejecting the new constitution were people’s fear of having their property expropriated, scare campaigns about unrestricted abortions and the spectre of indigenous people having more rights than the rest of the nation. None of these are accurate reflections of the proposed reforms.</p>
<p>It’s a devastating blow for progressive politics in Chile. As the 50th anniversary of the military coup that ended the last progressive government in 1973 draws closer, it seems the country is no closer to shaking off Pinochet’s social and economic legacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190371/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carole Concha Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Voters have rejected radical proposals to overhaul the constitution established under the Pinochet dictatorship.Carole Concha Bell, PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1847112022-08-05T12:18:17Z2022-08-05T12:18:17ZWhat is neoliberalism? A political scientist explains the use and evolution of the term<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/477260/original/file-20220802-11521-fi7yh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=101%2C39%2C2787%2C1809&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">President Ronald Reagan, shown here speaking in Moscow in 1980, was an early adopter of neoliberalism in the U.S. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/president-ronald-reagan-speaks-at-the-spaso-house-may-30-news-photo/849177?adppopup=true">Dirck Halstead/Liaison</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Neoliberalism is a complex concept that many people use – and overuse – in different and often conflicting ways. </p>
<p>So, what is it, really? </p>
<p><a href="https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1008310">When discussing neoliberalism with my students</a> at the University of Southern California, I explain the phenomenon’s origins in political thought, its ambitious claims of promoting liberty and its problematic global track record. </p>
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<h2>‘Markets work; governments don’t’</h2>
<p><a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/">Neoliberalism contends</a> that markets allocate scarce resources, promote efficient growth and secure individual liberty better than governments. </p>
<p>According to the progressive journalist <a href="https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/">Robert Kuttner</a>, the “basic argument of neoliberalism can fit on a bumper sticker. Markets work; governments don’t.” </p>
<p>From such a perspective, government represents bureaucratic bloat and political imposition. Government is wasteful. The verve of capitalism, along with a limited democratic politics, is neoliberalism’s balm for all that ails humankind.</p>
<p>Completing his bumper-sticker mantra, Kuttner continues, “there are two corollaries: Markets embody human freedom. And with markets, people basically get what they deserve; to alter market outcomes is to spoil the poor and punish the productive.”</p>
<h2>Evolution of neoliberalism</h2>
<p>The moniker “neoliberalism” was coined by Austrian economists Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises in 1938. Each elaborated his own version of the notion in 1944 books: “<a href="https://mises.org/library/road-serfdom-0">The Road to Serfdom</a>” and “<a href="https://mises.org/library/bureaucracy">Bureaucracy</a>,” respectively. </p>
<p>Neoliberalism ran contrary to the prevailing economic strategies promoted by <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/collected-writings-of-john-maynard-keynes/oclc/971381838">John Maynard Keynes</a>, <a href="https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2014/09/basics.htm">which encourage governments to stimulate economic demand</a>. It was the opposite of big-government socialism, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism/">whether in its Soviet manifestation or its European Social Democratic version</a>. Neoliberalism’s proponents embraced <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/">classical liberal principles such as laissez-faire</a> – the policy of not intervening in markets.</p>
<p>By the 1970s, Keynesian policies were faltering. Hayek’s organization, the <a href="https://www.montpelerin.org/event/429dba23-fc64-4838-aea3-b847011022a4/summary">Mont Pelerin Society</a>, had drawn wealthy European and American benefactors to its ranks and funded <a href="https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/">powerful think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute</a>. These groups refined neoliberalism’s message, making it a viable and attractive ideology. </p>
<p>By the 1980s, neoliberalism had gained ascendancy with <a href="https://history.jhu.edu/faculty-books/the-great-persuasion-reinventing-free-markets-since-the-depression/">Republicans such as president Ronald Reagan</a>. High-ranking officials in the Democratic presidential administrations of <a href="https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/">Jimmy Carter</a> and, later, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/books/review/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-neoliberal-order-gary-gerstle.html">Bill Clinton</a> also embraced neoliberalism. </p>
<p>Neoliberalism was also championed by conservatives like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot">international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund</a>. </p>
<p>But deregulating free markets had some unfortunate political consequences. It promoted <a href="https://doi.org/10.4000/regulation.7729">financial and labor crises in the U.S. and U.K. </a> and exacerbated <a href="https://doi.org/10.4000/regulation.7729">poverty and political instability</a>. The crisis was felt from the Global South to the U.S. Northwest, manifesting in the anti-World Trade Organization protests often referred to as the <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/battle-seattle-20-years-later-its-time-revival/">“The Battle of Seattle.”</a> To critics like <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/whats-neoliberal-do/">Frantz Fanon</a> and <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/40603">David Harvey</a>, neoliberalism is more akin to neoimperialism or neocolonialism. Basically, they contend, it achieves old ends – exploiting the global working class – through new means.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476959/original/file-20220801-33954-bmrgfx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Mural with 'neoliberalismo' written in light-gray text and 'solidaridad' written below it in bigger, red text." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476959/original/file-20220801-33954-bmrgfx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/476959/original/file-20220801-33954-bmrgfx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=280&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476959/original/file-20220801-33954-bmrgfx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=280&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476959/original/file-20220801-33954-bmrgfx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=280&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476959/original/file-20220801-33954-bmrgfx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476959/original/file-20220801-33954-bmrgfx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/476959/original/file-20220801-33954-bmrgfx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A mural in Havana, Cuba, promoting ‘solidarity’ over ‘neoliberalism.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">A. Kammas</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This critique fuels <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberalism-against-democracy-wendy-browns-in-the-ruins-of-neoliberalism-and-the-specter-of-fascism/">another argument</a>: that neoliberalism harbors <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/in-the-ruins-of-neoliberalism/9780231193856">anti-democratic sentiments</a>. What if citizens prefer government regulation and oversight? History demonstrates that neoliberal stalwarts would still <a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/06/neoliberalism-democracy-populist-right">push market orthodoxy over popular opinion</a>.</p>
<p>An extreme example of this was Hayek’s support of the repressive Pinochet regime in Chile. Augusto Pinochet toppled the popular socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973. Pinochet was <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB110/index.htm">cautiously welcomed by the Nixon administration</a> and looked upon <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-01-02-me-1475-story.html">favorably by both Reagan</a> and <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-07-mn-19796-story.html">Thatcher</a>. In their view, Pinochet’s commitment to neoliberalism trumped his anti-democratic character.</p>
<p>This history helps explain the election last year of Gabriel Boric, Chile’s 36-year-old president. Boric <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/can-chiles-young-president-reimagine-the-latin-american-left">ran on an agenda for profound change</a> following a period of turmoil over Pinochet-era policies. His campaign slogan was “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.”</p>
<h2>A flawed, contradictory ideology</h2>
<p>Beginning in the 1980s and for a long time after, neoliberalism for many Americans conjured individual liberty, consumer sovereignty and corporate efficiency. Many Democrats and Republicans alike championed it to justify their policies and attract voters. </p>
<p>But, in my opinion, that was only the popular façade of a deeply flawed ideology.</p>
<p>One need only consider the consequences of U.S. bank deregulation after <a href="https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/05/04/how-the-2007-08-crisis-unfolded">the global financial crisis of 2008</a> to see what happens <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/a-guide-to-the-financial-crisis--10-years-later/2018/09/10/114b76ba-af10-11e8-a20b-5f4f84429666_story.html">when government allows markets to run themselves</a>. Key American <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/12/13/two-recessions-two-recoveries-2/">economic indicators</a> like class inequality also tell the grim story of unchecked markets.</p>
<p>For many Americans, however, the <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/evolution-and-the-american-myth-of-the-individual/">mythology</a> of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/misconception-of-individual-liberty-letters-to-the-editor-1419984888">individual liberty</a> remains strong. U.S. politicians who hint of curtailing it – by, say, proposing more regulations or increased social expenditures – are often branded “<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/01/22/is-president-obama-truly-a-socialist/">socialist</a>.”</p>
<p>Ultimately, neoliberalism was a child of its time. It’s a grand narrative born of the Cold War era, claiming to have the solution to society’s ills through the power of capitalist markets and government deregulation. </p>
<p>There is no shortage of articles showing that it has not delivered on its promise. Arguably, it has <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/is-capitalism-a-threat-to-democracy">made matters worse</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184711/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anthony Kammas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The word ‘neoliberal’ gets thrown around a lot, often with differing and even contradictory meanings. Here, a political economist explains the origins and evolution of this complex concept.Anthony Kammas, Associate Professor (Teaching) of Political Science, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1799792022-04-04T12:31:06Z2022-04-04T12:31:06ZLessons in realpolitik from Nixon and Kissinger: Ideals go only so far in ending conflict in places like Ukraine<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455555/original/file-20220331-19-22c29.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=25%2C25%2C3319%2C2201&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Supporters of Ukraine, like these demonstrators in Boston on Feb. 27, 2022, are likely to be disappointed by any peace deal. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/protesters-hold-signs-during-a-peaceful-stand-for-ukraine-news-photo/1238820038?adppopup=true">Vincent Ricci/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The U.S. has limited options in confronting Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. </p>
<p>The Biden administration’s strategy is moderated by what’s known as “realpolitik.” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/us/politics/us-ukraine-russia-escalation.html">The U.S. is not willing to risk a larger war with Russia</a> by any level of involvement that might bring Washington and its allies into direct military conflict with Moscow, risking an escalation into nuclear war. </p>
<p>In a recent column for The Washington Post, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/13/biden-us-ukraine-lessons-cold-war/">journalist Matt Bai lamented</a> that President Joe Biden “will be forced to take a realpolitik view that most of us will find hard to stomach.”</p>
<p>“No matter how unjust Ukraine’s fate, he must continue to reject any measure that threatens to put U.S. troops in direct conflict with the Russians,” Bai wrote.</p>
<p>This means that, even as <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/un-general-assembly-set-censure-russia-over-ukraine-invasion-2022-03-02/">much of the world decries the savagery of the Russian invasion</a> and the intense suffering of Ukrainians, President Volodymyr <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-wants-a-no-fly-zone-what-does-this-mean-and-would-one-make-any-sense-in-this-war-179282">Zelenskyy’s call for efforts like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone</a> will go unanswered by both Washington and NATO allies. </p>
<p>And, as a <a href="https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1006509">scholar and practitioner of U.S. foreign policy</a>, I believe any agreement produced by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/29/world/ukraine-russia-war">peace talks between Ukraine and Russia</a> will reflect the U.S. realpolitik approach and likely disappoint Ukraine’s supporters.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455558/original/file-20220331-24-2ku1im.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two smiling older men toast each other as they stand in the front of a banquet table and are watched by a crowd of people." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455558/original/file-20220331-24-2ku1im.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455558/original/file-20220331-24-2ku1im.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455558/original/file-20220331-24-2ku1im.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455558/original/file-20220331-24-2ku1im.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455558/original/file-20220331-24-2ku1im.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455558/original/file-20220331-24-2ku1im.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455558/original/file-20220331-24-2ku1im.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Richard Nixon, left, and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai toast each other at the end of Nixon’s first day of his visit to the People’s Republic of China on Feb. 21, 1972.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/NixonInChina/f3231bc8c0294725b49c435dc7ca68cd/photo?Query=Nixon%20China&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=342&currentItemNo=33">AP Photo/Bob Daugherty</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The costs of realpolitik</h2>
<p>What exactly does realpolitik mean? </p>
<p><a href="https://nationalinterest.org/feature/realpolitik-its-many-distortions-14678?utm_source=pocket_mylist">Realpolitik</a> refers to the philosophy of states’ pursuing foreign policies that further their national interest, even at the expense of human rights, or compromising intrinsic liberal values in pursuit of their interests abroad. </p>
<p>In the U.S., you can’t discuss realpolitik without referring to the <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/nixon/foreign-affairs">foreign policy of U.S. President Richard Nixon</a>, guided by his national security adviser and later secretary of state, <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/kissingers-realpolitik-and-american-exceptionalism">Henry Kissinger</a>. The two men, in the most audacious example of their practice of realpolitik, set in motion events that led to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/02/23/1082250128/nixons-trip-to-china-laid-the-groundwork-for-normalizing-u-s-china-relations">normalized relations with China</a>. President Nixon put aside his virulent anti-communist leanings in favor of an approach he hoped would ultimately strengthen the U.S. </p>
<p>Yet Kissinger <a href="https://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/henry-kissinger-interview-with-der-spiegel/">dismisses the notion</a> that he is or was a proponent of realpolitik. </p>
<p>“Let me say a word about realpolitik, just for clarification. I regularly get accused of conducting realpolitik. I don’t think I have ever used that term. It is a way by which critics want to label me,” <a href="https://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/henry-kissinger-interview-with-der-spiegel/">Kissinger told German news magazine Der Spiegel in 2009</a>.</p>
<p>Yet later in the interview, Kissinger sounds like the realpolitik practitioner he is <a href="https://warontherocks.com/2015/12/the-kissinger-effect-on-realpolitik/">frequently characterized as</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world’s trouble. But I believe more suffering has been caused by prophets than by statesmen. For me, a sensible definition of realpolitik is to say there are objective circumstances without which foreign policy cannot be conducted. To try to deal with the fate of nations without looking at the circumstances with which they have to deal is escapism. The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In essence, Kissinger is not arguing for a foreign policy devoid of morality. Instead, he believes in recognizing the limits of furthering the national interest if policy is circumscribed by idealism. </p>
<p>To contain communism meant engaging in <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27552537">foreign policies that contradicted “traditional” American values</a> of respect for human rights and self-determination. To Nixon and Kissinger, winning the Vietnam War, or at least ending it in a way the American public would find acceptable, meant taking unsavory actions, including <a href="https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf">carpet-bombing Cambodia</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455574/original/file-20220331-21-zqkijv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two men in suits talking to each other in a large, elegant room with high ceilings, standing next to a window." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455574/original/file-20220331-21-zqkijv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455574/original/file-20220331-21-zqkijv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455574/original/file-20220331-21-zqkijv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455574/original/file-20220331-21-zqkijv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=780&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455574/original/file-20220331-21-zqkijv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=981&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455574/original/file-20220331-21-zqkijv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=981&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455574/original/file-20220331-21-zqkijv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=981&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Richard Nixon, left, with U.S. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger in 1972.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/american-president-richard-nixon-with-united-states-news-photo/74932537?adppopup=true">Frederic Lewis/Hulton Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Containing communism also translated into support for the dictator and human rights violator <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=82588&page=1">Augusto Pinochet in Chile</a> during Kissinger’s tenure. Post-Kissinger, <a href="https://www.salon.com/2015/02/10/7_fascist_regimes_america_enthusiastically_supported_partner/">realpolitik meant support for right-wing anti-communist dictators in Central America</a> during <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/reagan/foreign-affairs">the Reagan administration</a>.</p>
<h2>Realpolitik without guns</h2>
<p>Realpolitik isn’t only about the justification and conduct of wars. Nixon and Kissinger also sought to exploit the emerging rift between the Soviet Union and China. They made the decision <a href="https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v17/d3">to try to improve relations</a> with China, which had been almost nonexistent since the <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/chinese-rev">Chinese Communists defeated the U.S.-backed nationalists in 1949</a>. Their efforts culminated in <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/nixons-1972-visit-china-50">Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972</a>. </p>
<p>The staunch anti-communist in Richard Nixon <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/02/20/nixon-china-mao-visit-1972/">believed improved relations with China</a> served the national interest, further driving a wedge between Beijing and Moscow and setting the course for a safer world, in perhaps a generation. </p>
<p>To set this in motion meant backtracking from <a href="https://watergate.info/1960/08/21/nixon-the-meaning-of-communism-to-americans.html">his – and many Americans’ – anti-communist leanings</a>. Ideology took a back seat to pursuit of the national interest.</p>
<p>The U.S. <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02/04/remarks-by-president-biden-on-americas-place-in-the-world/">views itself</a> as a proponent of universal human rights, democracy and the rule of law, self-determination and sovereignty of nations. But not at the expense of its own global position. At times, domestic politics can influence adventurism abroad and how strongly American values are incorporated into foreign policy. There are times when Americans are angry and want to see an adversary punished even if it means <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/171653/americans-continue-oppose-closing-guantanamo-bay.aspx">violating the nation’s ideals</a>.</p>
<p>Public sentiment after the 9/11 attacks, for example, gave President George W. Bush wide latitude in foreign policy. But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stretched on, the <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/us-war-afghanistan-twenty-years-public-opinion-then-and-now">American public’s appetite</a> for the wars and overseas policing diminished greatly, forcing Presidents <a href="https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-pol-obama-at-war/">Obama</a>, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/08/18/1028607717/strange-bedfellows-indeed-the-trump-biden-consensus-on-afghanistan">Trump</a> and <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/04/14/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-way-forward-in-afghanistan/">Biden</a> to bring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an end without a clear victory, <a href="https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/political-instability-iraq">leaving behind</a> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/not-our-tragedy-the-taliban-are-coming-back-and-america-is-still-leaving">unstable nations</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455581/original/file-20220331-15-yrmxd4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two men shake hands as they meet." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455581/original/file-20220331-15-yrmxd4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455581/original/file-20220331-15-yrmxd4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455581/original/file-20220331-15-yrmxd4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455581/original/file-20220331-15-yrmxd4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=456&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455581/original/file-20220331-15-yrmxd4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455581/original/file-20220331-15-yrmxd4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/455581/original/file-20220331-15-yrmxd4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chilean dictator President Augusto Pinochet, left, greets Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the president’s office on June 8, 1976.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/chilean-president-augusto-pinochet-greets-secretary-of-news-photo/515114332?adppopup=true">Bettmann/Getty</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>How the Ukraine war ends</h2>
<p>What will <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/opinion/ukraine-war-end-putin.html">the end</a> of the Ukraine war look like?</p>
<p>Realpolitik in American foreign policy means restraint in Ukraine. A direct confrontation with Russia is not in the U.S. interest, and <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/a-tale-of-two-crises-why-us-strategy-in-ukraine-has-few-implications-for-taiwan/">Ukraine’s strategic value is limited</a>. An <a href="https://theconversation.com/international-law-says-putins-war-against-ukraine-is-illegal-does-that-matter-177438">illegitimate war</a> in which hundreds if not thousands of <a href="https://theconversation.com/civilians-are-being-killed-in-ukraine-so-why-is-investigating-war-crimes-so-difficult-178155">Ukrainian civilians have already been killed</a> won’t move the U.S. away from this position, because the risks of escalation are too high. And nuclear escalation would be likely, because <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2020.1818070">the U.S. is far superior to Russia in terms of nonnuclear forces</a>. </p>
<p>Without the U.S. and NATO engaging militarily in the war, Ukraine will likely be forced to <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/30/ukraine-is-ready-for-painful-concessions/">make concessions</a> and accept at least some terms that Russia wants in any peace agreement. That may include a Ukraine with different territorial borders and a security relationship with Russia that it does not entirely like.</p>
<p>This may be hard for some – both inside and outside Ukraine – to stomach. But however much realpolitik is attributed to a Kissinger-dominated era of history, it <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807847732/thank-god-theyre-on-our-side/">has been</a> and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2011/06/14/137171315/for-u-s-dealing-with-dictators-is-not-unusual">still is present</a> in contemporary U.S. foreign policy. </p>
<p>From tacit <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/">support of the murderous dictator Saddam Hussein</a> in the Iran-Iraq War – in which <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/">the U.S. knew</a> of Saddam’s use of chemical weapons – to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2010/12/07/131884473/Afghanistan-After-The-Soviet-Withdrawal">letting Afghanistan fall into a political vacuum</a> after the Soviet pullout in 1989 – leading to the rise of the Taliban – to Washington’s close relationship with <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-repressive-saudi-arabia-remains-a-us-ally-156281">brutal human rights abuser Saudi Arabia</a>, the U.S. frequently chooses to put its own interest ahead of its professed values. </p>
<p>[<em>There’s plenty of opinion out there. We supply facts and analysis, based in research.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?nl=politics&source=inline-politics-no-opinion">Get The Conversation’s Politics Weekly</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179979/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeffrey Fields receives funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation. </span></em></p>The US frequently chooses to put its own interest ahead of its professed values. That approach to foreign policy is called ‘realpolitik’ and it may lead to an unsatisfying peace deal in Ukraine.Jeffrey Fields, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and SciencesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1788362022-03-15T12:16:05Z2022-03-15T12:16:05ZPutin puts international justice on trial – betting that the age of impunity will continue<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451997/original/file-20220314-101106-1r6jxz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C67%2C4985%2C3255&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A pregnant woman is carried away from a shelled maternity hospital. She later died.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/RussiaUkraineWarMaternityHospital/0c824c429f0f4bfbb1c5cea372219a22/photo?Query=maternity%20ukraine&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=136&currentItemNo=5">AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Images of pregnant women <a href="https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-kyiv-europe-2bed71c00916d44ea951c5809b446db3">fleeing a bombed maternity ward</a> in Mariupol, Ukraine, raised again the question of how far the Russian military will be willing to go to conquer the country – and <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/10/is-russia-committing-war-crimes-by-bombing-hospitals-in-ukraine">whether war crimes are being committed</a>.</p>
<p>In just over two weeks of the invasion, <a href="https://extranet.who.int/ssa/LeftMenu/Index.aspx?utm_source=Stopping%20attacks%20on%20health%20care%20QandA&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=Link_who">the World Health Organization has verified</a> 39 attacks by Russians on health care facilities. Ukraine <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/11/first-thing-russian-forces-have-killed-more-civilians-than-soldiers?utm_term=622b4edc7d657dbab80fe20b1e5cd689&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email">claims more civilians</a> than Ukrainian soldiers have already been killed. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/what_is_ihl.pdf">International humanitarian law</a>, constituting agreements between countries on the laws of conduct in war, requires militaries to avoid the deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of weapons like cluster munitions that are indiscriminate – in other words, have a high chance of affecting civilians. </p>
<p>It also calls on warring nations to prevent extensive damage to civilian infrastructure, such as schools, residential buildings and hospitals. Simply stated, under these criteria, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-icc-is-investigating-war-crimes-in-ukraine-could-putin-be-indicted-178005">war crimes</a> take place when there is excessive destruction, suffering and civilian casualties. Rape, torture, forced displacement and other actions may also constitute war crimes.</p>
<p>There are other international crimes, including genocide and crimes against humanity. The latter consists of similar acts like rape and murder <a href="https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/crimes-against-humanity.shtml">undertaken as part of widespread or systematic attack</a> directed against a civilian population.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://udayton.edu/directory/artssciences/hrc/inglis-shelley.php">scholar of human rights and the law</a>, I believe there is clear evidence that Russia has already engaged in violations of international law, including war crimes. Although the potential for holding Russian commanders, and even President Vladimir Putin, accountable and punishing them for international crimes is more likely than in the past, the path is likely long and difficult. Moreover, it is unknown what effect, if any, the specter of prosecution will have on the course of the war.</p>
<p>That’s because international justice has been unable to either prevent or prosecute many perpetrators of war crimes in the past decade.</p>
<h2>History repeating</h2>
<p>International law experts point to <a href="https://theweek.com/russo-ukrainian-war/1010764/putins-brutal-record-in-chechnya-and-syria-is-ominous-for-ukraine">the earlier ravages of Russian military actions in both Chechnya and Syria</a> as an indicator of the tactics Putin is willing to use in the invasion of Ukraine. </p>
<p>Russia fought two wars against the breakaway republic of Chechnya in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union. The second – in which Putin cut his teeth as a wartime leader – was seen as particularly brutal.</p>
<p>During that 1999-2000 conflict, advocacy group <a href="https://www.hrw.org/legacy/press/2000/04/chech0421.htm">Human Rights Watch collected evidence</a> that Russia <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2000/02/29/war-crimes-chechnya-and-response-west#">carpet-bombed the capital Grozny and other towns</a>, causing heavy civilian casualties – estimates run into <a href="https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/5415049">the tens of thousands killed</a> – and leaving much of the capital destroyed. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A woman dragging a cart walks away from the edifice of buildings destroyed by missiles." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452002/original/file-20220314-26-kj93iu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/452002/original/file-20220314-26-kj93iu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452002/original/file-20220314-26-kj93iu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452002/original/file-20220314-26-kj93iu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452002/original/file-20220314-26-kj93iu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452002/original/file-20220314-26-kj93iu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/452002/original/file-20220314-26-kj93iu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The city of Grozny was destroyed by Russian shells.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/this-combination-of-photos-created-on-july-29-shows-a-news-photo/1158372463?adppopup=true">Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is also compelling evidence that war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed during Russia’s occupation of <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=20220310-prosecutor-statement-georgia">South Ossetia in Georgia in 2008</a> and in relation to its annexation of <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=201211-otp-statement-ukraine">Crimea and engagement in eastern Donbas region</a> in Ukraine in 2014.</p>
<p>In 2015, Russia participated in Syria’s civil war on the side of President Bashar al-Assad by providing Russian air support to Syria’s army. According to <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/12/01/russia/syria-war-crimes-month-bombing-aleppo">Human Rights Watch</a>, the aerial bombardment of Aleppo supported by the Russians in 2016 was “recklessly indiscriminate, deliberately targeted at least one medical facility, and included the use of indiscriminate weapons such as cluster munitions and incendiary weapons.” </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/02/russia-committed-war-crimes-in-syria-finds-un-report">United Nations concluded</a> that the Russian air force was <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=25638&LangID=E">responsible for war crimes in the Syrian province of Idlib in 2019</a>, having bombed indiscriminately a major marketplace and a displaced persons camp, killing and injuring scores of men, women and children. Russian denied any culpability. And no charges against Putin or Russian military commanders have ever been formally pursued internationally for alleged crimes in Chechnya or Syria. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/11/politics/joe-biden-warning-chemical-weapons/index.html">United States recently raised</a> the prospect of <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Timeline-of-Syrian-Chemical-Weapons-Activity">Russia’s deploying prohibited chemical weapons</a> in Ukraine. If it does so, it will be following the lead of Putin ally Assad, whose government <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Timeline-of-Syrian-Chemical-Weapons-Activity">is known for its use of prohibited chemical weapons</a> against civilians in Syria.</p>
<p>Either way, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/09/russian-ukraine-war-will-get-worse-before-it-gets-better-army-secretary-christine-wormuth-says.html">military experts</a> expect Russia’s tactics in Ukraine to only intensify in its brutality and disregard for the laws of war.</p>
<h2>In search of accountability</h2>
<p><a href="https://opiniojuris.org/2022/02/25/more-than-rhetoric-international-criminal-justice-crime-semantics-and-the-role-of-the-icc-in-the-ukraine-conflict/">Many scholars</a> pin their hopes for accountability on <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/">the International Criminal Court</a>, which was established under the Rome Statute in 1998 with 123 states parties. <a href="https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/role-international-criminal-court">The aim of the court</a> is to prosecute those responsible for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and aggression. </p>
<p>Although neither Russia nor Ukraine is a party to the Rome Statute, the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/7/is-putin-likely-to-face-the-icc-over-russias-actions-in-ukraine">ICC has initiated an investigation</a> into alleged crimes based on <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=pr1146">a special declaration by Ukraine</a>. This gives the ICC legal authority to investigate and prosecute alleged crimes committed in Ukraine since 2014. </p>
<p>But while this early action means that evidence might be collected in real time and speed up the usually slow process of international justice, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/icc-faces-myriad-challenges-prosecute-war-crimes-ukraine-2022-03-04/">there are still substantial problems in prosecuting these alleged crimes</a>. </p>
<p>The standards set for proving massive and complex international crimes are more daunting than for domestic crimes. It is even harder to <a href="https://theconversation.com/civilians-are-being-killed-in-ukraine-so-why-is-investigating-war-crimes-so-difficult-178155">prove command responsibility by a head of state</a>, such as Putin, particularly when there is no cooperation between the ICC and the country of the accused. <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/prosecuting-heads-of-state/F6143E3825D0C7EACA922A0E9BF1C9A5">Successful cases are few</a> and have taken place only after a leader’s fall from power and only if the court has cooperation with the country. That’s how Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia was prosecuted by the <a href="https://www.icty.org/">International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia</a>. Similarly, former President Charles Taylor of Liberia was prosecuted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. </p>
<p>Other options for criminal trials <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/03/russia-war-crimes-putin-prosecute.html">exist outside the ICC but also face major obstacles</a>. Advocates have harnessed <a href="https://lieber.westpoint.edu/water-finds-way-universal-jurisdiction-justice-syria/">the concept of universal jurisdiction</a> – inspired by <a href="https://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/chile98/index.htm">the efforts of Spain to bring former dictator Augusto Pinochet of Chile</a> to justice – to bring perpetrators of war crimes in Syria to trial in European courts. </p>
<p><a href="http://opiniojuris.org/2022/03/08/de-bunking-the-role-of-international-law-in-the-ukrainian-conflict/">Legal experts are also</a> looking at the prosecution of Putin and Russian leadership directly for <a href="https://crimeofaggression.info/role-of-the-icc/definition-of-the-crime-of-aggression/">the crime of aggression</a> in regards to Ukraine. </p>
<p>For this crime, the ICC does not have legal authority to prosecute Putin without a U.N. Security Council referral. Given that Russia has a seat on the Security Council, where it wields a veto, that won’t happen. Options include establishing a special tribunal by Ukraine <a href="https://www.justsecurity.org/80395/united-nations-response-options-to-russias-aggression-opportunities-and-rabbit-holes/">with U.N. General Assembly endorsement</a> or other international support. </p>
<p>But the ICC and special courts are “made from scratch” institutions, with limited capacity and without a police force. Practically, getting Putin or other Russian leaders into any court is an issue. For example, the ICC still struggles <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/darfur/albashir">to capture former Sudan President Omar al-Bashir, accused of genocide and other crimes in Darfur</a>, despite issuing arrest warrants for him in 2009 and 2010. </p>
<h2>Age of impunity</h2>
<p>Advocates point out <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-05-13/age-impunity">that impunity</a> – the ability to escape responsibility for violations of international law – has been on the rise for many years, along with authoritarianism.</p>
<p>That means the initiation of criminal investigations might have little impact on the calculations of Putin, senior Russian leadership or commanders and soldiers on the ground in Ukraine. Some <a href="https://www.ipinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Simmons_Paper.pdf">international law experts argue</a> that even where actual prosecution and punishment might not be immediate, actors who care about their legitimacy domestically or internationally are more likely to be deterred from committing more crimes by potential prosecutions. However, there are no <a href="https://internationallaw.blog/2017/04/06/the-approach-to-deterrence-in-the-practice-of-the-international-criminal-court/">firm conclusions</a> about the preventive or deterrent effect of international justice. </p>
<p>[<em>Over 150,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://memberservices.theconversation.com/newsletters/?source=inline-150ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p>
<p>The actions of Russia in Ukraine <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/14/vladimir-putin-war-crimes-icc-sajid-javid-hague">might spur investigations at an unprecedented</a> pace. And the ICC can issue <a href="https://iccforum.com/rome-statute#Article58">arrest warrants in order to prevent the further commission of crimes</a>. Such warrants would affect the accused’s ability to travel and officially represent the country.</p>
<p>When, or if, the formal label of accused “war criminal” gets attached to specific Russian names, it is possible that the prospect of accountability will become a more significant factor in the decision-making of those responsible for the ruthless war in Ukraine. But it will still be too late for the many victims already being identified.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/178836/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shelley Inglis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Vladimir Putin has a history of flattening cities in time of conflict. But alleged war crimes in Chechnya and Syria never resulted in charges, let alone prosecutions. Will Ukraine be any different?Shelley Inglis, Executive Director, University of Dayton Human Rights Center, University of DaytonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1724622021-11-25T16:26:52Z2021-11-25T16:26:52ZChile: voter apathy could hand the presidency to far-right inheritor of the Pinochet legacy<p>Far-right politician, José Antonio Kast, has come away from the first round of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/22/jose-antonio-kast-chile-right-wing-presidential-election">Chilean presidential elections</a> as the candidate with the highest percentage of votes. He will face former student protest leader Gabriel Boric in a fiercely contested run-off vote on December 19.</p>
<p>Kast obtained 27.9% of the votes cast on November 21 compared with Boric’s 25.8%. But the turnout was only 46%, reflecting a degree of voter apathy that surprised many observers. The election came only a few months after progressive intellectual, Elisa Loncón, was elected to oversee the <a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-election-of-progressive-indigenous-academic-to-oversee-constitutional-reform-is-a-blow-to-right-wing-establishment-164088">writing of a new constitution</a> for Chile. This in turn had followed massive street protests in 2019 – dubbed <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/burning-metro-chile-election-divides-voters-between-protest-order-2021-11-20/"><em>estallido social</em></a> (the social explosion) – which led to a referendum over sweeping reforms.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-election-of-progressive-indigenous-academic-to-oversee-constitutional-reform-is-a-blow-to-right-wing-establishment-164088">Chile: election of progressive indigenous academic to oversee constitutional reform is a blow to right-wing establishment</a>
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<p>But the strength of public feeling appears not to have translated into votes for Boric, who ran as the reform candidate. Speaking to the Chilean press once the votes were counted, Boric was <a href="https://www.elciudadano.com/chile/gabriel-boric-sobre-segunda-vuelta-nuestra-cruzada-es-que-la-esperanza-le-gane-al-miedo/11/21/">defiant</a>:</p>
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<p>It’s in these difficult moments that true leadership is tested … The challenge that begins today is a challenge against something. I didn’t occupy this space to speak ill of other candidates. We come here to be the voice of hope, of dialogue and unity. Our crusade is that hope overcomes fear.</p>
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<h2>Pinochet 2.0?</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://chiletoday.cl/who-is-kast-the-far-right-frontrunner-in-chiles-presidential-race/">Kast family</a> has played a part in right-wing Chilean politics for decades. José Antonio – or JAK, as he is often known – is the son of former Nazi, Michael Kast, who escaped to Chile after the second world war. </p>
<p>His brother, Miguel Kast-Rist, was one of the “<a href="https://www.tni.org/my/node/12111">Chicago Boys</a>” – the Harvard-trained economic thinktank assembled by Milton Friedman to design a strict monetarist economic model for Augusto Pinochet in the years following the 1973 US-backed coup in which the then-president, Salvador Allende, was deposed and murdered. Miguel’s son Felipe is a senator and a member of the governing coalition party, Evópoli (political evolution).</p>
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<img alt="Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet shakes the hand of US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger in 1976." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433935/original/file-20211125-1695-cfsk03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433935/original/file-20211125-1695-cfsk03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433935/original/file-20211125-1695-cfsk03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433935/original/file-20211125-1695-cfsk03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433935/original/file-20211125-1695-cfsk03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433935/original/file-20211125-1695-cfsk03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/433935/original/file-20211125-1695-cfsk03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=519&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Augusto Pinochet with US secretary of state Henry Kissinger in 1976, Pinochet’s Chile was a testing ground for neoliberal economic policies.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>The Kast family were both benefactors and supporters of the Pinochet regime and have been dogged by allegations of involvement in human-rights abuses during Pinochet’s decades in power. José Antonio Kast stood on a platform of social and moral order and is expected, if he secures victory in next months run-off election, to represent the interests of the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/pinochets-ghost-haunts-divisive-chilean-election-2021-11-21/"><em>Pinochetista</em> elite</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/general-pinochet-arrest-20-years-on-heres-how-it-changed-global-justice-104806">General Pinochet arrest: 20 years on, here's how it changed global justice</a>
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<p>His campaign managed to capitalise on <a href="https://globalvoices.org/2021/10/19/chile-rejects-the-migrants-it-once-welcomed/">anti-immigrant sentiment</a> stirred up by a recent surge of migration from Venezuela, Haiti and Colombia. He has also successfully exploited a widespread fear of communism – helped by Chile’s notoriously <a href="https://lab.org.uk/chile-lies-censorship-el-mercurio/">concentrated</a> media that has been sympathetic to the Pinochet regime and its fiercely neoliberal model. </p>
<p>Another message hammered home by the Kast campaign was a fear of the “enemy within”. This is a dog-whistle reference to tensions in the southern Araucania region, where indigenous <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-55042838">Mapuche communities</a> are struggling to exert ancestral land rights, placing them in direct conflict with multinational interests.</p>
<p>His socially regressive proposals include the deportation of migrants, scrapping the women’s ministry and the continuation of the unpopular pension system. He also supports the further militarisation of Chilean society, exemplified by draconian <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/10/why-chile-protesters-say-state-security-law-criminalises-protests">laws</a> that already heavily penalise protest and the constant presence of armed security forces on the <a href="https://www.tni.org/en/article/expression-meets-repression">streets</a> of Santiago since the 2019 social unrest, <a href="https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/11/22/more-polarized-than-ever-presidential-election-in-chile-marks-new-political-era-pub-85839">promising</a> a “firm hand” against activists. </p>
<h2>Boric’s challenge</h2>
<p>The low turnout reflects the Boric campaign’s failure to engage Chile’s working-class vote. This is nothing new in Chilean politics – from the start of the country’s transition to democracy, votes have been steadily <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228641113_Voter_Turnout_Evidence_from_Chile">declining</a>.</p>
<p>Gabriel Boric <a href="https://time.com/6121561/gabriel-boric-chile-election/">rose</a> to political prominence as a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/18/a-fairer-chile-ex-student-leader-bids-to-reshape-country-in-divisive-election">student</a> leader at the University of Chile, Santiago during the 2011-13 student protests. He was elected to the Chilean congress in 2013 and again in 2017 as an independent. In the 2021 presidential election, he stood as a candidate representing the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/two-political-upstarts-notch-upset-wins-chiles-presidential-primaries-2021-07-19/">Apruebo Dignidad</a>, a coalition of left-wing parties. </p>
<p>Valentina Rosas, a political scientist at Chile’s Pontifical Catholic University, alluded to the disconnect between the political elite and the wider electorate, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/22/jose-antonio-kast-chile-right-wing-presidential-election">telling The Guardian</a>: “It looks like some of the things Boric stands for don’t respond to people’s urgent needs. They have no bearing on the price of bread or stopping people breaking into your home.”</p>
<p>Despite huge numbers of protesters calling for social change during 2019-20’s mass mobilisations – with many risking extreme violence and imprisonment from Chile’s notoriously repressive security forces – voting figures indicate that grassroots movements do not necessarily translate to formal political engagement. Boric will need to counter this if he is to attract the numbers necessary to win the presidency. </p>
<p>But trends in Chile’s voter participation indicate a growing disenchantment with parliamentary politics as numbers continue to fall. In 1989, the turnout in the first democratic election after the Pinochet regime was toppled, was 94.7%. But by 2017, after two decades of weak transition to democracy, and successive governments failing to address growing structural inequalities, just 46.5% of the electorate voted. </p>
<p>Whatever the reasons behind the disengagement of Chilean voters, Boric must find a way to lure back people alienated from parliamentary politics. If he is unable to do this, the country risks slipping back into the clutches of the far-right, whose legacy was once thought so toxic in Chile.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172462/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carole Concha Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Three decades after the Chilean people toppled the notorious Pinochet regime, a new standard bearer for the far right is leading the polls.Carole Concha Bell, PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1640882021-07-08T17:32:49Z2021-07-08T17:32:49ZChile: election of progressive indigenous academic to oversee constitutional reform is a blow to right-wing establishment<p>An indigenous academic will head up Chile’s newly formed constitutional convention, sending shock waves through Chile’s conservative right-wing establishment. </p>
<p>Elisa Loncon was voted in by delegates on July 4 after <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-57142087">an election</a> on May 17 returned a large majority of independent and opposition members. For many, her leadership heralds the start of a radical progressive shift in the country’s politics. </p>
<p>The 155-member constitutional convention will now meet to rewrite Chile’s constitution, with proposals needing a two-thirds majority to be adopted. </p>
<p>The decision to rewrite the constitution comes after a referendum was held in October 2020 following <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/18/chile-students-mass-fare-dodging-expands-into-city-wide-protest">mass protests</a> that began a year previously after a hike in metro fares. The transit protests developed into a mass social movement encompassing feminists, environmentalists, indigenous groups and anti-neoliberal activists calling for progressive socioeconomic change. </p>
<p>Protesters were <a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-abolishes-its-dictatorship-era-constitution-in-groundbreaking-vote-for-a-more-inclusive-democracy-148844">unanimous about the need</a> to overturn the repressive constitution that had been imposed in 1980 by the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-abolishes-its-dictatorship-era-constitution-in-groundbreaking-vote-for-a-more-inclusive-democracy-148844">Chile abolishes its dictatorship-era constitution in groundbreaking vote for a more inclusive democracy</a>
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<p><a href="https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/indigenous-academic-elisa-loncon-elected-to-re-write-chiles-constitution/">Loncon</a> is an academic of indigenous Mapuche descent, born into poverty, whose family has a long tradition of struggling for Mapuche autonomy and rights. Despite her humble origins, the 58-year-old academic has an educational CV that encompasses a degree in English at University of La Frontera in Chile, followed by postgraduate studies at the International Institute of Social Studies in the Hague, University of Regina (Canada) and the UAM Iztapalapa in Mexico City. She has a PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a doctorate in literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.</p>
<p>Her election, along with the inclusion of 17 indigenous constituents into the constitutional assembly, comes at a time when <a href="https://theglobalamericans.org/2021/04/mapuche-organizations-call-on-international-agencies-to-intervene-on-behalf-of-chiles-indigenous-population/">tensions are high</a> in Araucania, the ancestral territories of the Mapuche in southern Chile. Despite making up more than 12% of Chile’s population of 18.95 million, Chile’s indigenous peoples have historically been socially and politically marginalised.</p>
<p>The Mapuche is the only indigenous Chilean group to have never been fully subjugated – they have resisted tyranny and dispossession since the arrival of Spanish colonisers in 1536. </p>
<p>During the ill-fated administration of Chile’s left-wing president, Salvador Allende (1970-73), the Mapuche won some land rights and were recognised as an ethnic group. But the Pinochet regime (1973-90) reversed these rights after militarily overthrowing the Allende government, sold off ancestral lands to national and multinational companies and imposed <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/chile-autoridades-deben-dejar-de-criminalizar-personas-mapuches-a-traves-de-ley-antiterrorista/">terror laws</a> in 1984 to suppress indigenous land recovery efforts.</p>
<p>The transition to democracy after the ousting of Pinochet in 1990 did little to alter conditions for the Mapuche. Despite a gradual shift towards democracy, the neoliberal socioeconomic model imposed by Pinochet largely remained unchallenged by successive governments, including those deemed “socialist” such as the two administrations of Michelle Bachelet (2006-10 and 2014-18).</p>
<h2>Oppressing Chilean minorities</h2>
<p>The expansion of the forestry industry in Chile’s southern regions, thanks to Pinochet era <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/chile-wildfires-forestry-industry-plantations">deregulation</a>, has led to the rapid <a href="https://www.patagonjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4189%3Achiles-threatened-forests-&catid=190%3Aconservation&Itemid=279&lang=en">destruction of forests</a> that provide plants vital for Mapuche medicine and are a vital source of food. Meanwhile industrial waste and hydroelectric dams <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/10/chile-patagonia-dams-hydroelectricity">have contaminated</a> many rivers and lakes in the region. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Portrait of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet wearing ceremonial uniform." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/410389/original/file-20210708-27-kq945g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/410389/original/file-20210708-27-kq945g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/410389/original/file-20210708-27-kq945g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/410389/original/file-20210708-27-kq945g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/410389/original/file-20210708-27-kq945g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/410389/original/file-20210708-27-kq945g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/410389/original/file-20210708-27-kq945g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Repressive: Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Archivo General Histórico del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores</span></span>
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<p>Mapuche people trying to fight against the degradation of their lands have found themselves pitted against police acting in the interests of big business. It’s not uncommon for indigenous activists to be <a href="https://www.redpepper.org.uk/killing-of-indigenous-activist-in-chile-provokes-widespread-protests/">murdered</a>, including environmental campaigner Macarena Valdés Muñoz, 32, who was found hanged in her home in Newen-Tranguil, 500 miles south of Santiago in 2018.</p>
<p>Chile is <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-57070812">the only</a> country in Latin America whose constitution does not even recognise the existence of its indigenous peoples. So Loncon’s appointment will be pivotal for Mapuche voices to finally be included in the delicate task of reshaping the identity of a country blighted by the years of repression under Pinochet.</p>
<h2>Road to reform</h2>
<p>In a powerful speech delivered in Chile’s capital, Santiago, after her appointment, Loncon signalled her intention to prioritise the rights of indigenous people and women: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This convention I will be presiding over will transform Chile into an intercultural Chile that does not violate the rights of women, the rights of caregivers … into a Chile that takes care of mother earth, that keeps its waters clean against all domination. A very special greeting for the Mapuche lamgnen [sisters] in Wallmapu [Araucania]. This dream is our ancestor’s dream.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That a left-wing outsider is presiding over the writing of a new constitution has stunned an ailing political elite that may finally be losing its grip on power. Marcela Cubillos, a prominent <a href="https://twitter.com/jwbartlett92/status/1233448326982520833?lang=en">pro-Pinochet activist</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/mcubillossigall/status/1411849469650481154">tweeted</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This convention has been installed with clear dominance of the Communist party and the Frente Amplio (Broad Front). We hope that the rule of law is respected, and the brakes are put on this attempt to overpower (it), that will be the focus. This will not be easy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With only 38 of the 155 seats in the Constitutional Convention, Cubillos and her hard-line conservative allies will find themselves relatively powerless in the face of an overwhelming majority on the constitutional convention of progressives: grassroots activists, feminists, LGBTQ+ representatives and indigenous peoples. </p>
<p>Delegates have <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/protests-delay-inauguration-chiles-new-constitutional-assembly-2021-07-04/">signalled their intention</a> to address topics such as water and property rights, central bank independence and labour practices. After nearly five decades progressive change may finally be achievable in Chile.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164088/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carole Concha Bell is affiliated with Mapuche International Link, NGO based in Bristol that promotes the culture and rights of the Mapuche people. I am a volunteer press officer and receive no income from MIL. </span></em></p>Elisa Loncon has pledged to prioritise indigenous and women’s rights as part of the constitutional reform.Carole Concha Bell, PhD candidate, Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1631472021-06-28T12:14:21Z2021-06-28T12:14:21ZControversy over Communion in the Catholic Church goes back some 2,000 years<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408448/original/file-20210625-28-1uvawe2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=10%2C0%2C1011%2C676&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">When Pope John Paul II was beatified, Zimbabwe's ruler, Robert Mugabe, was in attendance and given Communion.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/zimbabwes-president-robert-mugabe-flanked-by-his-wife-grace-news-photo/457486158?adppopup=true.">Franco Origlia/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently approved drafting a <a href="https://www.usccb.org/news/2021/united-states-conference-catholic-bishops-vote-write-document-meaning-eucharist-life">document on receiving Communion in the Catholic Church</a>. It will include a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/catholic-bishops-debate-communion-for-biden-11623937299">section regarding standards</a> for politicians and public figures who support laws <a href="https://www.archstl.org/bishops-vote-to-draft-teaching-document-on-the-eucharist-6591">allowing abortion, euthanasia and other “moral evils</a>.” </p>
<p>The proposed document has already caused controversy. <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/995796836/vatican-warns-u-s-bishops-about-denying-communion-to-supporters-of-abortion-righ">The Vatican</a> has warned against exclusively focusing on abortion and euthanasia and cautioned that the document could further <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/us/targeting-biden-catholic-bishops-advance-controversial-communion-plan.html">divide U.S. Catholics</a>.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.holycross.edu/academics/programs/religious-studies/faculty/mathew-schmalz">Catholic scholar of religion</a>, I would argue that battles over Communion are nothing new in the Catholic Church.</p>
<h2>The importance of Communion</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408417/original/file-20210625-23-9t0k7u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=47%2C0%2C2587%2C1690&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Archbishop Jose H. Gomez holds a Communion wafer during Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles in 2020." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408417/original/file-20210625-23-9t0k7u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=47%2C0%2C2587%2C1690&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408417/original/file-20210625-23-9t0k7u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408417/original/file-20210625-23-9t0k7u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408417/original/file-20210625-23-9t0k7u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408417/original/file-20210625-23-9t0k7u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408417/original/file-20210625-23-9t0k7u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408417/original/file-20210625-23-9t0k7u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is debating which Catholics are worthy of receiving Communion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CatholicBishopsCommunionandPolitics/e0a310966abf4656bc4efd469229f175/photo?Query=United%20States%20Conference%20of%20Catholic%20Bishops%202021&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=4&currentItemNo=0">AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File</a></span>
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<p>In the Catholic Church, the Communion service is one of seven rituals called <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P3E.HTM">sacraments</a> that have a primary significance. During this service, called <a href="https://www.usccb.org/offices/public-affairs/structure-and-meaning-mass">a Mass</a>, Catholics believe that the bread and wine, when specially blessed by a priest, become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Ritually consuming this bread and wine is a special way to “commune,” or be united, with Jesus Christ. </p>
<p>Catholics call both the celebration of Mass and the blessed bread and wine <a href="https://denvercatholic.org/the-eucharist-throughout-history-a-timeline/">the Eucharist</a>, from the Greek word meaning “thanksgiving.” Receiving Communion can also be called receiving the Eucharist.</p>
<p>The Catholic Church teaches that <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/10/30/explainer-when-can-someone-be-denied-eucharist">in order to receive Communion</a>, a person must not be <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P4D.HTM">conscious of a serious sin</a> – such as murder or adultery – that has not already been absolved through confession to a priest. </p>
<p>In early Christianity, rules about receiving Communion could be strict. Christians who were known to be guilty of serious sins were not supposed to receive Communion until they went through a process of reconciliation with a local bishop. In the <a href="http://cdn.theologicalstudies.net/16/16.4/16.4.1.pdf">Middle Ages</a>, very few Catholics actually received Communion at all, as many believed that they were unworthy to do so. </p>
<h2>The possibility of scandal</h2>
<p>In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Catholic Church <a href="https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/decree-on-frequent--daily-reception-of-holy-communion-2174">encouraged a more frequent – even daily – reception of Communion</a>. </p>
<p>Still, one of the main concerns surrounding Communion is that someone publicly known to be committing serious sins would receive Communion. Such cases create “scandal.”</p>
<p>In the Catholic Church’s terminology, scandal is “<a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P80.HTM">an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil</a>.” So, someone who accepts Communion while at the same time publicly continuing in sinful behavior encourages others to continue to do the same as well. </p>
<p>When it comes to public policy, the compendium of Catholic doctrine, the Catholic Cathechism, <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P80.HTM">specifically states</a>, “they are guilty of scandal who establish laws or social structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice.”</p>
<h2>Denying Communion</h2>
<p>There is a history of the Catholic Church denying Communion to those participating in what is considered publicly sinful behavior.</p>
<p>One of the most famous examples is of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Ambrose">Ambrose</a>, bishop of Milan, who baptized the theologian Augustine of Hippo, who later became <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/">one of the most influential figures in Christian history</a>. Ambrose denied Communion to the Roman Emperor Theodosius in the fourth century. Enraged by the lynching of a leader of a Roman army garrison, Theodosius gave orders that led to a massacre in the port city of Thessalonica, which killed 7,000 citizens. <a href="https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/340951.htm">In a letter calling for Theodosius to take responsibility for his actions</a>, Ambrose wrote, “Are you ashamed, O Emperor?”</p>
<p>From 1208 to 1214, Pope Innocent III asked his bishops to place England and Wales under “<a href="http://magnacartaresearch.blogspot.com/2014/03/23-march-1208-interdict-is-laid-on.html#:%7E:text=On%2023%20March%201208%2C%20English,consecrated%20ground%20with%20religious%20ceremony.">interdict</a>,” or “prohibition,” which banned the performance of all sacraments – including the Eucharist – except for baptism and confession of the dying. The reason for this extreme act was said to be that King John had rejected Innocent III’s candidate for the important position of <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Archbishops-of-Canterbury/">archbishop of Canterbury</a>.</p>
<p>In the early 20th century, Irish bishops spoke against continuing acts of violence by Irish nationalists who opposed the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/aftermath/af06.shtml">Anglo-Irish treaty</a> of 1921, which established the Irish Free State and ended the Irish War of Independence. In <a href="http://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000514373#page/1/mode/1up">a letter</a> published on 22 October 1922, the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/29742759?seq=36#metadata_info_tab_contents">Irish bishops</a> denied absolution and Communion to “irregulars” using violence against the “legitimate authority” of the government.</p>
<p>More recently, it was reported in 2011 that priests in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/may/28/malta-divorce-referendum">Malta were denying Communion to Catholics</a> who supported legalizing divorce. In the United States, presidential candidate John Kerry <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kerrys-communion-controversy/">was denied Communion in 2004</a>, reportedly for his support for abortion rights. The same issue saw Joseph Biden denied Communion in <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-joe-biden-was-denied-communion-at-a-church-126171">2019</a> by a church in South Carolina.</p>
<h2>Communion controversies</h2>
<p>At the same time, the Catholic Church has also been questioned for not denying Communion to Catholic public figures who have behaved sinfully.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408421/original/file-20210625-28-ivnooy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Pope John Paul II, left, with Chilean President Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Santiago, Chile on April 1, 1987." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408421/original/file-20210625-28-ivnooy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408421/original/file-20210625-28-ivnooy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408421/original/file-20210625-28-ivnooy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408421/original/file-20210625-28-ivnooy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408421/original/file-20210625-28-ivnooy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408421/original/file-20210625-28-ivnooy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408421/original/file-20210625-28-ivnooy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pope John Paul II gave Communion to military dictator Augusto Pinochet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/CHILEPINOCHETOBIT/bdb7c8cb600b4fd8a4ba3b79d8ef61c1/photo?Query=pinochet%20john%20paul&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=2&currentItemNo=0">AP Photo/Pete Leabo</a></span>
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<p>In <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/04/11/Pope-avoids-confrontation-with-Pinochet/8894545112000/">his trip to Chile in 1987</a>, Pope John Paul II <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/01/world/pope-on-latin-trip-attacks-pinochet-regime.html">criticized the military dictatorship</a> under the Army General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet led a revolt that toppled the elected government. <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/1990/05/truth-commission-chile-90">Thousands were tortured and executed</a> under his rule. But <a href="http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2000b/060200/060200a.htm">the pope still gave Pinochet Communion</a>.</p>
<p>When Pope John Paul II was <a href="https://www.archbalt.org/holy-confusion-beatification-canonization-are-different/">beatified</a> – a crucial step in becoming named a saint – Zimbabwe’s ruler, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-27519044">Robert Mugabe</a>, was in attendance. Among <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/09/robert-mugabe-1924-2019-a-liberator-turned-oppressor/">many human rights abuses</a>, Mugabe <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-zimbabwe-mugabe-violence/mugabes-legacy-thousands-killed-in-rain-that-washes-away-the-chaff-idUSKCN1VR18H">sanctioned the killing of 20,000 people belonging to the Ndebele ethnic minority</a> who were loyal to his rival, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1999/07/02/zimbabwe-nationalist-joshua-nkomo-dies-at-82/da22452e-4238-4f0d-9dbf-96a21eb7ee1c/">Joshua Nkomo</a>. Nonetheless, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/88416/robert-mugabe-vatican-catholic-pope-zimbabwe">Mugabe was allowed</a> to take Communion at the Vatican, in St. Peter’s Square. Some in the African Catholic media called this a “<a href="https://www.scross.co.za/2011/05/mugabe-the-scandal-factor/">scandal</a>.”</p>
<p>[<em>Explore the intersection of faith, politics, arts and culture in a weekly email newsletter.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/this-week-in-religion-76/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=religion-explore">Sign up for This Week in Religion.</a>]</p>
<h2>The path forward</h2>
<p>Pope Francis <a href="https://www.vatican.va/evangelii-gaudium/en/files/assets/basic-html/page40.html">has stated</a>: “The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” And so one of the key issues that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ proposed document will surely need to address is when human weakness becomes serious sin and scandal.</p>
<p>While the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops will issue guidelines for reception of Communion, it will be the task of individual bishops to decide how to put them into practice. And some Catholic bishops, notably Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington D.C., <a href="https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/06/21/washingtons-cardinal-wont-deny-biden-communion/">have said</a> they will not deny communion to President Biden in their jurisdictions.</p>
<p>At the present time, the Catholic Church in America is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/us/biden-abortion-catholic-church.html">highly polarized</a>. For his part, <a href="https://time.com/6074753/joe-biden-catholic-communion-abortion/">President Biden, who goes to Mass every week, has said</a> that he has no plan to change how he worships. In such a context, U.S. Catholic bishops will have to move forward very carefully. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408420/original/file-20210625-21-wy6b49.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="In a Jan. 20, 2021 photo, President-elect Joe Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, attend Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle during Inauguration Day ceremonies in Washington." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408420/original/file-20210625-21-wy6b49.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408420/original/file-20210625-21-wy6b49.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408420/original/file-20210625-21-wy6b49.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408420/original/file-20210625-21-wy6b49.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408420/original/file-20210625-21-wy6b49.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408420/original/file-20210625-21-wy6b49.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408420/original/file-20210625-21-wy6b49.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">President Biden is an observant Catholic who regularly attends Mass.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/BidenCatholicBishops/0f62214fa4ac438aa9fc13f6398b661c/photo?Query=biden%20AND%20communion&mediaType=photo&sortBy=&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=8&currentItemNo=1">AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File</a></span>
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</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163147/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mathew Schmalz is a political independent.</span></em></p>Biden is not the first public figure to whom the Catholic Church wants to deny Communion. Over the centuries, the Church has often come under criticism for either denying or giving Communion.Mathew Schmalz, Professor of Religious Studies, College of the Holy CrossLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1279482019-12-04T14:13:14Z2019-12-04T14:13:14ZCollage art and activism in Chile: Instagram posts building on the legacy of Latin American ‘mail art’<p>Since widespread protests started in October 2019 in Chile, social media has become a key way for artists and activists to circulate and exchange information and ideas. Independently curated Instagram feed <a href="https://www.instagram.com/collagechile/">@CollageChile</a> has taken a particularly prominent role. The work, in form and dissemination, echoes 20th-century mail art and collage practice from Latin America, a practice that involved postcard-sized art sent through the postal system that challenged the region’s authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 80s.</p>
<p>On October 18 2019, protesters took to the streets of the Chilean capital Santiago, angered by a proposed increase in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/18/chile-students-mass-fare-dodging-expands-into-city-wide-protest">Metro fares</a>. What started as a local protest about a specific issue, led to rioting and exposed mass discontent. The protests are the largest the country has seen since the end of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in 1990. </p>
<p>Chile’s president Sebastian Piñera, who is politically centre-right, responded by putting the military on the streets and declaring a state of emergency. He <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/dead-santiago-supermarket-set-fire-191020052021604.html">declared</a>: “We are at war against a powerful enemy, who is willing to use violence without any limits”.</p>
<p>Piñera’s actions produced further protests and he was forced to <a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-protests-escalate-as-widespread-dissatisfaction-shakes-foundations-of-countrys-economic-success-story-125628">table constitutional change</a>. The president’s comments – and the ease with which he imposed severe measures – prompted widespread disapproval by Chileans who took to social media with the hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23noestamosenguerra&src=typed_query">#noestamosenguerra</a> (#wearenotatwar). </p>
<h2>Instagram activism</h2>
<p>Activists have used social media to report and denounce human rights abuses by police and military. Videos posted show police beating and firing live rounds at unarmed protesters. Particularly gruesome images show the results of police firing pellets directly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/world/americas/chile-protests-eye-injuries.html">into protestors’ faces to blind them</a>.</p>
<p>Artists on @collagechile have also used its large and instantaneous networks for political effect. A feed of images from the past connect viewers with what is at stake in the present. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B5IlNkgFKOj/"><em>Perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco</em></a> (Perfectly I Distinguish Black from White) by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/mattialmg/">@mattialmg</a> takes its title from Chile’s foremost poet and songwriter, Violeta Parra. Parra’s folk protest songs still resonate in Chile after her death in 1967. Parra is depicted wearing an eye patch, a symbol for protesters blinded by police. The collage implies that while the state blinds its citizens to reality, both literally and metaphorically, people cannot be prevented from seeing realities of inequality and state violence in Chile today.</p>
<p>Pinochet’s face menaces some of the collages, highlighting that the current government’s reaction is a dark reminder of his dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. In fact, Piñera relied on powers rooted in the constitution drafted and implemented by Pinochet’s regime (Articles 39-45) and commentators question whether they have been used <a href="https://www.uchile.cl/noticias/158804/ha-sido-ilegal-la-implementacion-del-estado-de-emergencia">legitimately in this case</a>. Many have fought for greater changes to Pinochet’s constitutional legacy, which they believe <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/chiles-constitutional-moment/">favours the country’s political and economic elite</a>. </p>
<p>In <em>La misma mierda, distinto olor</em> (Same shit, different smell) by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ordeph/">@ordeph</a>, images of Pinochet’s military junta are mixed with images of contemporary politicians. Piñera’s face is positioned next to Pinochet’s, their faces connected by a bold red intestinal shape. Chile’s past is digested and blended with the present to link the past’s authoritarian leaders with today’s politicians. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304456/original/file-20191129-95250-pwpz6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/304456/original/file-20191129-95250-pwpz6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304456/original/file-20191129-95250-pwpz6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304456/original/file-20191129-95250-pwpz6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304456/original/file-20191129-95250-pwpz6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304456/original/file-20191129-95250-pwpz6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/304456/original/file-20191129-95250-pwpz6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">La misma mierda, distinto olor!!</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://66.media.tumblr.com/1e0d233029a810f475c9804f83b68d17/088364f90c89ace5-e8/s1280x1920/f45d53ffd332cf9fd4a8e5acba3c8ce63a9ded3e.jpg">@Ordep/Instagram</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>Sharing these image via social media builds on a legacy of artists using collage and disrupting media messages seen in Latin American <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/m/mail-art">mail art</a>, which began to be practised in the 1960s and was a global movement. Mail artists created small postcard-sized art works which included visual poems, collage or drawings that were shared through the postal system.</p>
<p>Social media, however, takes these exchanges further by connecting more people via hashtags and Instagram feeds. Each time Piñera restates that the country is in a <a href="https://www.biobiochile.cl/noticias/nacional/chile/2019/11/28/pinera-en-ceremonia-de-nuevos-pdi-estamos-enfrentando-a-un-enemigo-poderoso-e-implacable.shtml">war with a powerful enemy</a>, artists respond quickly with collages that challenge the president’s own narrative. </p>
<h2>Pre-digital circuits of exchange</h2>
<p>Artists in South America engaged with <a href="http://sfaq.us/2014/12/fifty-years-of-latin-american-mail-art/">the practice</a> to subvert censorship and create circuits of exchange to challenge dictatorships. The Chilean artist and poet Guillermo Deisler highlighted abuses committed by Pinochet’s regime in his mail art. First imprisoned following the coup, Deisler sent postcard-sized artworks such as <a href="http://www.lomholtmailartarchive.dk/networkers/guillermo-deisler/1985-01-10-deisler"><em>Aktion por Chile y America Latina</em></a> in 1985 from his exile in East Germany. </p>
<p>Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’s Insertions into Ideological Circuits in the 1970s involved stamping <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/meireles-insertions-into-ideological-circuits-2-banknote-project-t12512">banknotes</a> with demands for answers regarding political killings by the state. He also used recycled <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/performance-at-tate/perspectives/cildo-meireles">Coca Cola bottles</a> to insert subversive messages into public circulation.</p>
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<p>Forced to flee to Brazil in 1976 after political persecution, Argentine artist León Ferrari collected newspaper clippings related to disappearances, detentions and the discovery of mutilated bodies during the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983). Ferrari received more in the mail and compiled these into <a href="https://www.macba.cat/en/nosotros-no-sabiamos-3265"><em>Nosotros no sabíamos</em></a> (We Didn’t Know, 1976) – a folio challenging Argentine society’s silence on the dictatorship’s brutality. </p>
<p>It was dangerous to make and receive mail art in Latin America. Like many others, <a href="https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/1273-the-unhappy-ambiguity-of-clemente-padin-politics-and-polysemy-in-latin-american-mail-art">Clemente Padín in Uruguay was imprisoned</a>in 1977 and Argentinian mail artist Edgardo A. Vigo’s son was <a href="https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/vigo/#:%7E:targetText=Vigo%20was%20active%20during%20the,%E2%80%9Cdisappeared%E2%80%9D%20his%20son%20Palomo.">“disappeared” during the dictatorship</a>. </p>
<p>Deisler, Meireles, Ferrari, Padín, Vigo and others faced down these risks to use existing communication systems to denounce injustice, subvert censorship and traditional circuits of exchange. This legacy of art which challenged dominant political slogans is used by collage artists in Chile today.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-protests-escalate-as-widespread-dissatisfaction-shakes-foundations-of-countrys-economic-success-story-125628">Chile protests escalate as widespread dissatisfaction shakes foundations of country's economic success story</a>
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<p>In the digital era, the internet has become the primary means to challenge mainstream media. While undeniably it is used to share information of dubious origin, social media is a powerful information exchange circuit. Online media reach audiences unthinkable in the age of broadcast and postal circulation. </p>
<p>By reminding viewers of the recent past and documenting current injustices, the images shared through platforms such as Collage Chile become the new digital insertions into ideological circuits. And, in this they are continuing a legacy of socially engaged art practices in Latin America. </p>
<p>Current collage art, as shown on Collage Chile’s platform, builds on a tradition of practice in Latin America that challenges abuses of power and social inequality. From the generation of artists who were killed and had to leave their countries due to dictatorships, a new generation has emerged who insist that the past’s abuses should never be repeated. This generation have the ability to share their work globally through social media and form new online communities of resistance.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127948/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sebastian Bustamante-Brauning does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Chilean art activists are using social media to expose abuses and, in doing so, they’re engaging in the legacy of Latin American mail artSebastian Bustamante-Brauning, Doctor of Philosophy Student, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1263052019-11-18T14:00:25Z2019-11-18T14:00:25ZChile’s political crisis is another brutal legacy of long-dead dictator Pinochet<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301853/original/file-20191114-26237-ba3gyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=22%2C0%2C5056%2C3448&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protest music in Santiago, Chile, Nov. 12, 2019. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Chile-Protests/d30ae73761684bdf8337a1a045c14ff8/14/0">AP Photo/Esteban Felix</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>After weeks of <a href="https://larepublica.pe/mundo/2019/11/14/chile-la-zona-centro-de-santiago-se-convierte-en-tierra-de-nadie-protestas-sebastian-pinera/">intense, sometimes violent nationwide protests</a>, Chilean President Sebastian Piñera has relented to demands to rewrite the Chilean Constitution. The protesters say they want a new constitution to address Chile’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/chile-to-hold-referendum-on-new-constitution/2019/11/15/ef973a9c-07b8-11ea-ae28-7d1898012861_story.html">severe social and economic inequities</a>.</p>
<p>Chile’s current constitution, which dates back to 1980, was written under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled the country from 1973 to 1990. Pinochet is reviled for overseeing several thousand <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/1990/05/truth-commission-chile-90">extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances</a>. He was <a href="https://theconversation.com/general-pinochet-arrest-20-years-on-heres-how-it-changed-global-justice-104806">arrested in 1998 on charges of crimes against humanity</a> but died before being tried.</p>
<p>But he also implemented the <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/chile-protests-global-uprising-income-inequality-sanders-warren-billionaires-20191027.html">free-market reforms</a> that are often credited for Chile’s celebrated economic dynamism. After growing at <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=CL">an average of 4.7% a year</a>, Chile’s economy today is <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=CL">nine times larger than it was in 1990</a>. </p>
<p>Since Pinochet’s exit, Chile has been widely seen as a stable and vibrant <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/097492840305900108?journalCode=iqqa">Latin American success story</a>. So <a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-heads-into-presidential-runoff-with-a-transformed-political-landscape-86453">even left-leaning governments</a> have mostly left the dictatorship-era economic system in place. </p>
<p>Under the surface, however, Pinochet’s free-market reforms were actually <a href="https://theconversation.com/chile-protests-escalate-as-widespread-dissatisfaction-shakes-foundations-of-countrys-economic-success-story-125628">ripping Chile’s social fabric apart</a>.</p>
<h2>Growth without equity</h2>
<p>Chile is one of the world’s most unequal countries, with less equitable income distribution than <a href="http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/gini-coefficient-by-country/">neighboring Peru, Bolivia and Argentina</a>.</p>
<p>And it’s getting worse. In 2006, the top 10% of Chilean earners earned 30 times more income than the bottom ten percent. In 2017 <a href="http://observatorio.ministeriodesarrollosocial.gob.cl/casen-multidimensional/casen/docs/Resultados_ingresos_Casen_2017.pdf">they earned 40 times more</a>.</p>
<p>Such statistics reflect a reality that most Chileans know firsthand. Chile’s enormous economic growth benefited the rich, but working and middle-class people still struggle with <a href="https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---protrav/---travail/documents/publication/wcms_248029.pdf">low wages and job insecurity</a>. As protesters consistently point out, simply earning enough for health insurance and retirement is a constant struggle.</p>
<p>High rates of tax evasion among Chile’s wealthiest citizens mean that the country’s income inequality problem is likely <a href="http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/56016/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Fairfield,%20T_Top%20income%20shares_Fairfield_Top%20income%20shares_2014.pdf">even more severe than official figures suggest</a>.</p>
<p>These problems began with Pinochet’s free-market reforms. After assuming power in the 1973 coup against President Salvador Allende, the right-wing dictator set about dismantling the welfare state the socialist Allende had begun to build. The policy changes he made were <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/chile-agrees-hold-referendum-constitution-5-191115221832042.html">codified in the 1980 constitution</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301854/original/file-20191114-26273-8w0i50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301854/original/file-20191114-26273-8w0i50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301854/original/file-20191114-26273-8w0i50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=350&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301854/original/file-20191114-26273-8w0i50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=350&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301854/original/file-20191114-26273-8w0i50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=350&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301854/original/file-20191114-26273-8w0i50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301854/original/file-20191114-26273-8w0i50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301854/original/file-20191114-26273-8w0i50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Soldiers supporting the coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet take cover as bombs are dropped on the presidential palace, Sept. 11, 1973.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-International-News-Chile-CHILE-/9c28961944e5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/34/0">AP Photo/Enrique Aracena, File)</a></span>
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<p>Pinochet targeted three areas – labor rights, retirement and health care. These neoliberal reforms, which came with strong support from <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=OW12mnUqGQwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA208&dq=United+States+support+for+neoliberalism+in+Chile&ots=pQhMkN1RgC&sig=K5tYQIuDn5073CE1o0CjQxaK_Sc#v=onepage&q=United%20States%20support%20for%20neoliberalism%20in%20Chile&f=false">the U.S. government</a>, shifted primary responsibility for managing the economy and providing social services from the state to the private sector.</p>
<p>The most important determinant of inequality, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2016.1216534">my research finds</a>, was the dictator’s evisceration the rights of Chilean workers to organize and negotiate with employers. </p>
<p>Pinochet did this by creating new ways for companies to hire workers, including allowing different types of temporary contracts. In Chile, temporary workers do not have the right to worker protections such as severance payments when terminated, <a href="https://www.leychile.cl/Navegar?idNorma=207436&idVersion=2017-06-09">employer-paid protections against workplace injury and the right to unionize</a>.</p>
<p>These rules make temporary workers cheap labor, giving employers strong incentives to maintain or expand their reliance on them. As a result, less than <a href="http://redatam.dirtrab.cl/redchl/COMPENDIO/Neg_Colectiva.pdf">3% of Chilean workers</a> are covered by contracts that allow workers to <a href="http://redatam.dirtrab.cl/redchl/COMPENDIO/OOSS.pdf">collectively organize to negotiate with management</a>.</p>
<p>Even permanent workers saw their unionization rights decrease markedly under Pinochet’s labor code. Many Chilean workers ended up in weakened so-called <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=x7KHDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=bargaining+groups+chile&source=bl&ots=LAf-bxJ5Fg&sig=ACfU3U2Qf5a2fNJxG2v4k47bryUK04X6Rg&hl=en&ppis=_e&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiEx6HYn-jlAhVNwlkKHRjYBEQQ6AEwDXoECAoQAg#v=onepage&q=bargaining%20groups%20chile&f=false">bargaining groups</a> that do not grant workers the right to strike. Overall union membership in Chile today is <a href="http://redatam.dirtrab.cl/redchl/COMPENDIO/OOSS.pdf">less than half what it was under Allende</a>. </p>
<h2>Poor safety net</h2>
<p>Supporters of Pinochet’s free market labor reforms argued that these reforms would <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w10129">reduce inequality and increase employment</a>, particularly for Chile’s least skilled workers. </p>
<p>The opposite happened. Despite enormous economic growth over the past three decades, employment rates for workers at the lower end of the economic ladder remain exceptionally low. </p>
<p>The unemployment rate for workers at the bottom 10th of Chile’s socioeconomic ladder has <a href="http://observatorio.ministeriodesarrollosocial.gob.cl/casen-multidimensional/casen/docs/Resultados_trabajo_Casen_2017.pdf">averaged nearly 30% since 1990</a>, government data shows. Meanwhile, unemployment for the top 10th of earners has stayed around 2%. </p>
<p>Pinochet-era changes to Chile’s pension system have compounded inequities in the labor market.</p>
<p>In keeping with its extreme free market ideology, Pinochet’s military regime replaced the original retirement system – which was based on combined contributions from workers, employers and the state – with a privately managed pension system. </p>
<p>Under this system, all workers except the military and national police were made solely responsible for their individual retirement accounts. The state and business contributed nothing. </p>
<p>Under the <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1866802X19861491">leftist President Michelle Bachelet</a>, Chile in 2008 began to provide minimum pensions for the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21699763.2016.1148623">poorest retirees</a>, too. </p>
<p>Because employers don’t help employees save for retirement, the cost of labor in Chile is <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12116-011-9091-2">comparatively low</a>, increasing Chile’s competitiveness in the global economy.</p>
<p>But Chilean retirees have fared poorly. Most can’t save enough to sustain themselves in old age. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301855/original/file-20191114-26229-1l52qtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301855/original/file-20191114-26229-1l52qtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301855/original/file-20191114-26229-1l52qtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301855/original/file-20191114-26229-1l52qtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301855/original/file-20191114-26229-1l52qtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301855/original/file-20191114-26229-1l52qtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301855/original/file-20191114-26229-1l52qtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301855/original/file-20191114-26229-1l52qtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President Sebastian Piñera, who previously governed the country from 2010 to 2014, has agreed to Chilean protester demands for a new constitution.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Chile-Protests/80c2d73d312e4dc2b3ba27fd46f18164/7/0">AP Photo/Esteban Felix</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Pinochet’s privatization of Chile’s health care system has similarly increased the distance between rich people and everyone else. </p>
<p>Under Allende, Chile was <a href="http://kaisnet.or.kr/resource/down/11_1_08.pdf">headed toward free, universal health care</a>. The Pinochet regime created a for-profit private health care system to compete with the government-run system, but it’s so prohibitively expensive that 90% of the poorest third of Chileans still <a href="http://observatorio.ministeriodesarrollosocial.gob.cl/casen-multidimensional/casen/docs/Resultados_Salud_casen_2017.pdf">rely exclusively on the public system</a>. It is critically underfunded and <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168851017300660">offers lower-quality care than the private system</a>. </p>
<h2>Pinochet’s real legacy</h2>
<p>The fractures in the veneer of Chile’s “model economy” have been showing since at least 2006, when <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/08/student-protests-in-chile/100125/">massive, nationwide student protests</a> erupted over <a href="https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/chiles-student-protests">increased education costs</a>. </p>
<p>Like those earlier protests, students have been at the <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/chile-protests-hundreds-of-thousands-take-part-as-peso-hits-record-low/a-51218587">forefront of today’s protests</a>. Many are too young to remember the human rights abuses, political repression and economic deprivation of Pinochet’s regime. But they have personal experience with the social inequality it gave rise to.</p>
<p>Mass protests are the result of those two realities. Raised in democracy, Chile’s young protesters expect a fairer share of the country’s wealth. And they’re not old enough to fear an authoritarian crackdown for proclaiming their rights.</p>
<p><em>Correction: This story has been corrected to more accurately interpret data on the wealth gap in Chile.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/126305/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul W. Posner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>To quell weeks of protest over extreme inequality, Chile’s president has agreed to rewrite the country’s constitution, passed in 1980 under the deadly military regime of Augusto Pinochet.Paul W. Posner, Associate Professor, Clark UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1256282019-10-25T11:17:16Z2019-10-25T11:17:16ZChile protests escalate as widespread dissatisfaction shakes foundations of country’s economic success story<p>Chile’s capital city Santiago appears dynamic and bustling, complete with gleaming skyscrapers and a modern metro network. Against the backdrop of the snow-topped Andes mountains, the Costanera Tower – South America’s tallest building – symbolises the country’s open neoliberal economy and mass consumption society. </p>
<p>But protests have rocked the country, challenging this image of stability and prosperity.</p>
<p>Following a government proposal to increase the price of metro tickets, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/18/chile-students-mass-fare-dodging-expands-into-city-wide-protest">students began to dodge metro fares</a> in protest on October 14, jumping the turnstiles <em>en masse</em> and setting metro stations on fire. The protests soon spread within Santiago and to other Chilean cities, leading President Sebastian Piñera to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/19/chile-protests-state-of-emergency-declared-in-santiago-as-violence-escalates">declare a state of emergency</a> and daily curfews on October 18. This legislation, which dates from the dictatorship era of the 1970s and 80s, allows the military to patrol the streets. </p>
<p>But the move has led to an escalation of the protests, as <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-50137360">thousands of Chileans disobeyed the curfews</a> by marching peacefully against government policy and violent repression on a daily basis, calling for Piñera to resign.</p>
<p>The images of soldiers and tanks on the streets, dispersing protesters with water cannon, tear gas, and physical violence, recall the images of military repression during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990. The economic and ideological legacies of the Pinochet era as well as the nature of Chile’s transition to democracy are key to understanding the reasons for the protests. The anger of those on the streets is as much a reflection of the country’s high inequality as it is of these unresolved legacies.</p>
<p>Much of the media coverage of the protests has focused on the spectacle of looting, vandalism, and soldiers beating the protesters. Since the protests started, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chile-news-santiago-at-least-18-dead-and-thousands-arrested-in-chile-protests-2019-10-24/">18 people have died and there have been 3,000 arrests</a>. But there are wider causes behind these events. The protests emerged in the middle of growing dissatisfaction with high levels of inequality and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-50086133">a high cost of living</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/298569/original/file-20191024-170458-18lmv41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/298569/original/file-20191024-170458-18lmv41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/298569/original/file-20191024-170458-18lmv41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/298569/original/file-20191024-170458-18lmv41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/298569/original/file-20191024-170458-18lmv41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/298569/original/file-20191024-170458-18lmv41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/298569/original/file-20191024-170458-18lmv41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Income inequality has not improved in Chile since the days of the military dictatorship.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wid.world/share/#0/countrytimeseries/sptinc_p99p100_z;sptinc_p90p100_z/CL/2015/eu/k/p/yearly/s/false/16.671499999999998/60/curve/false/1990/2015">World Inequality Database</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the surface, Chile looks like an economic and political success story, as the country’s GDP growth has <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=CL-ZJ">outpaced that of Latin America as a whole</a> in recent years, but many Chileans are struggling. The metro fares have come to symbolise what they feel is the unjust distribution of income and social spending. </p>
<h2>Legacy of Pinochet era</h2>
<p>Like the state of emergency, Chile’s social and economic policies also date from the dictatorship. Neoliberal reforms were introduced in the mid-1970s by Pinochet and his team of American-trained economists, known as the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll/">“Chicago Boys”</a>. The reforms took place in the context of violent repression. <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/09/chile-years-pinochet-s-coup-impunity-must-end/">Official investigations</a> showed that 3,065 people were murdered by state agents during the dictatorship, 40,000 tortured, and hundreds of thousands forced into exile.</p>
<p>The 1970s reforms included the elimination of subsidies, welfare reform, and the privatisation of state-owned companies, the health sector, education and pensions. Pinochet’s reforms led to high levels of unemployment, declining real wages, and expensive social services, such as education. The impact is clear today in education, characterised by low levels of public spending and highly unequal access to good-quality schools and universities. Between 2011 and 2013 students <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-22118682">organised mass demonstrations</a> against Chile’s education policies, and dissatisfaction remains.</p>
<p>Chile turned from a military to a civilian government in 1990, following the 1988 referendum in which Pinochet was defeated. But due to the nature of the transition, social and economic policies changed very little. Pinochet negotiated his departure in such a way that the armed forces kept control of the political process, including his own appointment as a lifelong senator. The 1980 military constitution – which is still in place today – has allowed Piñera to declare the controversial state of emergency to deal with the protests. Although some of the military control structures have been dismantled since Pinochet’s death in 2006, the civilian governments on the right and the left have had a limited appetite to address the country’s inequalities.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-50148714">response to the protests</a>, on October 22 Piñera suspended the planned fare increases and announced a spending package of reforms to address the protestors’ concerns. The fact that Chileans <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/23/chile-protests-sebastian-pinera-apology-reform">continue to protest</a> around the country shows that many people feel these measures are too little, too late. </p>
<p>Given the long historical roots of the inequalities, it’s unlikely that one-off extra spending can address the country’s structural problems. Even if the government’s intention has been to de-escalate the situation, its hardline response to the protests signals growing polarisation rather than a quick resolution to the issues.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125628/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marieke Riethof does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Unresolved legacies of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet are driving anger at the cost of living in Chile.Marieke Riethof, Senior Lecturer in Latin American Politics, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/761432017-04-28T06:22:13Z2017-04-28T06:22:13ZThe end: Chilean legend exits presidential race, ushering in a new political era<p>In a dramatic change of heart, former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos, who played a central role in the country’s return to democracy in the 1980s, has <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-chile-politics-lagos-idUKKBN17C1K4?il=0">withdrawn</a> from the upcoming presidential race. It seems Lagos’ lengthy career in public service has finally reached its end. </p>
<p>The decision came after the Socialist Party, historically an ally of his Party for Democracy, publicly <a href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Chiles-Lagos-Drops-out-of-Race-as-Socialists-Back-Guillier-20170411-0012.html">backed a different</a> candidate – the <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-a-chilean-outsider-revive-latin-americas-ailing-left-71213">independent senator Alejandro Guillier</a> – for this year’s election. </p>
<p>It is the end of an era in Chile. As the 79-year-old Lagos withdraws, an entire generation of ageing leaders is also being symbolically retired. The mood in the nation’s political establishment is funereal. </p>
<p>Most of Chilean people, however, have already moved on.</p>
<h2>A fruitful trajectory</h2>
<p>Ricardo Lagos Escobar has been a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ricardo-Lagos">towering figure in Chilean politics</a> for over three decades. </p>
<p>He became a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/18/world/man-ricardo-lagos-escobar-chilean-socialist-clinton-blair-mold.html">political celebrity</a> in the 1980s after pointing his finger at the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on live national television, an act of bravery that catapulted him into the front lines of the opposition against the authoritarian regime.</p>
<p>When democracy was restored in 1990, he served Chile’s first democratically elected president, Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994), as secretary of education and then his successor, Eduardo Frei (1994-2000), as secretary of public works. </p>
<p>In 2000 Lagos, long thought to be a presidential frontrunner, finally became the third president of modern Chile. During his six-year term, he enacted <a href="http://www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-92977.html">numerous progressive reforms</a>, including having crucial authoritarian clauses removed from the constitution, ending military influence over key institutions, establishing universal health care, launching anti-poverty programs, overhauling Chile’s infrastructure, legalising divorce, abolishing the death penalty and instituting a modern civil service. </p>
<p>Lagos even <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-protest/chile_3292.jsp">refused US president George W. Bush’s plea</a> in 2003 to join the Iraq War. </p>
<p>When he left office in 2006, Lagos had an approval rating of over 60%. This was symbolically important: he was the first Socialist to take office since Salvador Allende, and his generally well-regarded administration dispelled the widespread but unfounded notion that a leftist president would only lead the country to economic mismanagement and political chaos. </p>
<h2>A different country</h2>
<p>But things have changed since then, and Lagos’ 2017 campaign was dogged by crucial policies of the time that have now come under severe scrutiny. </p>
<p>A full-scale transformation of public transit in Santiago he orchestrated, for example, turned out to be <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21720651-commuters-do-not-want-pay-bad-service-santiagos-transport-system-sputtering">disastrous</a>. Train lines were inaugurated but never run, and public service concessions granted to private companies have since been questioned. </p>
<p>Lagos’s legacy among young Chilean leftists was also damaged by his decision as president to invite Chile’s big banks to fund tuition fees as a way of increasing access to higher education. While this policy did indeed extend the system’s coverage, thousands of families became indebted.</p>
<p>The discomfort of the middle class exploded in the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/08/student-protests-in-chile/100125/">massive 2011 student protests</a>, which irrevocably changed Chile’s political landscape. </p>
<p>The generation that followed Lagos never questioned him, but the generation after them – citizens his grandchildrens’ age – weren’t so easily won over. Born into democracy, they were not enticed by Lagos’s finger-to-Pinochet tale. For them, Lagos was the status quo.</p>
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<span class="caption">Lagos is revered for challenging General Augusto Pinochet, centre, who toppled the Socialist Salvador Allende in 1973.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>In this year’s presidential race, young leftists have argued that some of Lagos’ fundamental achievements as president may have looked good at the time but sorely need upgrading today. </p>
<p>Case in point: Chile’s debate over <a href="https://constitution-unit.com/2016/05/17/the-chilean-constituent-process-a-long-and-winding-road/">writing a new constitution</a>. While Lagos was proud of amendments he orchestrated to make the nation’s constitution more democratic, protestors on the street said that these amendments did too little and were too few. They wanted a brand new constitution for Chile. </p>
<p>Lagos, unmoved, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-politics-election-idUSKCN1181WA">announced in September 2016</a> that he would run for president again as a candidate of the ruling Concertación coalition. </p>
<p>The energetic near-octogenarian organised town hall meetings across Chile and convened policy groups to furnish a robust centre-left government programme. He insisted on the need to discuss substantive ideas. </p>
<p>The public was less enthusiastic. Polls consistently showed Lagos with <a href="http://www.t13.cl/noticia/politica/encuesta-cep-guillier-sube-13-puntos-y-queda-6-pinera-lagos-estancado-5">5% support</a>. </p>
<p>He was trying to hold a national conversation, but Chile had already checked out.</p>
<h2>Treason or renewal?</h2>
<p>In March, President Michelle Bachelet’s Socialist Party, currently the strongest wing of the ruling coalition, declined to back Lagos, putting its money instead on Alejandro Guillier, an independent Senator and former TV news anchorman whose <a href="http://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2017/02/27/cadem-pinera-y-guillier-ganarian-con-facilidad-sus-respectivas-primarias-y-lagos-se-desploma/">polling</a> was in the 20% range.</p>
<p>Pundits said it was an act of radical pragmatism. Elected Socialist officials are, after all, naturally interested in retaining their posts. And Guillier likely represents the best chance to beat the front-runner, the right-wing former president Sebastián Piñera. </p>
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<span class="caption">The two main contenders in Chile: Alejandro Guillier (left) and Sebastián Piñera.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>But for others, this pragmatism reeked of betrayal: Lagos was being humiliated by his own people, who opted for a character of unknown doctrinal inclinations and little political experience. Some <a href="http://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/opinion/2017/04/11/la-delirante-reaccion-de-la-elite-laguista/">likened Lagos’s defeat</a> to the assassination of Julius Caesar by his disciples. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.emol.com/noticias/Nacional/2017/04/16/854384/El-analisis-de-Longueira-La-Traicion-a-Lagos-Guillier-es-el-DJ-Mendez-y-Beatriz-Sanchez-podria-pasar-a-segunda-vuelta.html">Editorials and opinion pieces</a>, particularly from right-wing sources, have bid farewell to Lagos in an obituary mood, singing his virtues and remembering his good deeds. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"851193671429107713"}"></div></p>
<p>The establishment was eager for an electoral battle between Piñera and Lagos, two former presidents with proven credentials. With Guillier, they fear a populist in the making. </p>
<p>But other interpretations hold that what the Socialist Party did was to put an end to an era that needed to be over. </p>
<p>Lagos’ generation has been one of the most politically fertile in Chilean history. They suffered under (or encouraged) the military coup in 1973, and then fought (or supported) Pinochet’s dictatorship for 17 years. </p>
<p>And for two decades after his defeat, they lead a never-ending transition to democracy. They changed the face of Chile in many substantial ways, most of them positive. But they refused to retire. </p>
<p>According to this thesis, the Socialists probably did the right thing in bringing in some new blood. </p>
<p>The two best-rated politicians in Chile are former student leaders Gabriel Boric, 31, and Giorgio Jackson, 30. And the Socialist Party’s new leader, Alvaro Elizalde, is 47 years old. </p>
<p>The right is seeing a similarly long-awaited generational renewal: congressman Felipe Kast, 39, <a href="http://www.latercera.com/noticia/la-nueva-estrategia-felipe-kast-tras-lanzamiento-pinera/">has challenged Piñera</a> in the primaries. </p>
<p>Lagos’ fall cannot be isolated from these events. </p>
<p>“My friends”, said Lagos in <a href="http://www.efe.com/efe/america/portada/exmandatario-ricardo-lagos-se-retira-de-la-carrera-a-presidencia-chile/20000064-3234545">announcing his withdrawal from the race</a>, “life goes on…” It would only be fair to add that in his case, “…but, for us, political life does not.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76143/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cristóbal Bellolio receives funding from Conicyt, a Chilean state body that funds scholarships for graduate studies. </span></em></p>Former president Ricardo Lagos, who is revered for standing up to the dictator Augusto Pinochet, says goodbye to public life.Cristóbal Bellolio, Adjunct professor, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.