CENDA de
Centro de Estudios Nacionales de Desarrollo Alternativo
On (de)Generations
The decline of the "Sons of Pinochet"
Manuel Riesco Larraín
Written for The New Left Review, London
Draft version
Index
The political debacle of the Chilean right is unexpected and impressive. Not seen since half a century ago. Like then, their electoral defeat is a sign of something more serious. Before, it marked the decline of the old landowners. Today something similar seems to happen with their children. The rearward generation. Those who regained power after the military coup.
By alien hand, fingered from abroad, they regained hegemony that their forefathers had lost. The elders had won and sustained it for centuries, with relative legitimacy and almost always by political means, most of the time.
The "Sons of Pinochet" exercised theirs during just four decades, through terror and its scars. This is often the final croak of what has to die and does not agree to do so with dignity.
They were the anti-generation of '68. That flock of young people from all social sectors, who were seduced in a cheerful and singularly responsible manner, by the illustrated wave of collective will that swept the world in those years. Rampaging ugly ideas, expired institutions, oppression, injustice and secular obscurantism.
Reunited again after a long quest, de ‘68 generation now provide their experience to progressive generations who followed them. To finish what they started half a century ago. For which they have struggled all their lives.
When a new spring dawns for the Chilean people.
Amid the widespread unrest in Chile and the world, the generation of '68 struggled to be realistic dreaming the impossible. Something sensible to try during these periods when societies rush stride. Great popular tides, which over two centuries have been providing the driving force that has allowed humanity to break out, in ever wider successive shovings, from the shackles of ignorance and submission to the old signorial and peasant regime, to build modern urban civilization that already covers half the planet.
From time to time sprouts the spring of nations. Happy are those who have been privileged to flourish in their fertility. The generation of '68 has lived a long quest. The march has not been easy. Progress and setbacks. Action and reaction. Lights and Shadows. Not too many adjectives to describe many peaks and troughs.
It was baptized in the university reform, which in six years, doubled, modernized and democratized, public higher education. Generous, they provided the infantry to the conquest, embodiments, and defense, of the Allende government. Disciplined, they complied convinced to the wise leadership of the older generation, in turn forged in the preceding popular springs.
Such are Chileans. Very patient and well aware, every decade they lose patience. They had been doing so throughout the century, massively in the years 1924, 1931, 1938, 1949 and 1957, not counting minor episodes.
The wave of popular mobilization that began shortly before 1968 was the most fruitful of all. For once, the peasantry awoke from his secular nap and joined by millions. This essential feature probably define this feat as representing in the history of Chile what the year 1789 for the global modern era.
Within a few vibrant years, the social, economic and cultural geography of Chile was turned upside down and forever. Their leader, Salvador Allende, who had been a witness and protagonist of the previous waves, became the only truly universal compatriot. Generation of '68 around the world, remembers exactly what he was doing at the time of his heroic sacrifice in La Moneda in flames.
Very young, this generation became adults in defeat. They faced undeterred the reactionary tsunami that broke over these shores. Sometimes, some people have suffered these vengeful backlashes, before lifting the appropriate defenses. They are destructive, but superficial. They hurt, but not an inch is rolled back in the progress achieved by the large earthquakes that precede them in the tectonic depths of society.
Unable to stop it, this generation without hesitation dived under the wave, to emerge across nearly intact, to organize resistance from the very first moment. They fought in the shadows, protected by an impenetrable network of solidarity and discretion they wove around them. They faced death that snatched their best. Survived torture, imprisonment, exile, persecution and second-class citizenship.
Innocence was lost. They learned to deploy all forms of struggle. They understood that politics is reason and force. Amplitude and edge. Prudence and courage. Human head and body of beast. They rode the Centaur of the Prince.
Thus prepared, they led a new wave of mass protests in the 1980’s, which finally succeeded in toppling the dictatorship. That spring of the people, the hardest of them all, forged the best of all generations. Which calls itself "G-80". They provided without hesitation troops to the struggles of those years. They paid the highest costs. They also lost their best. Others are prohibited from returning to the homeland to which they gave their lives. Not yet entirely recomposed, their turn comes to take over.
They will succeed, surrounded by the love of their people, who will behold them as their heroes, which they are. It will look up to them with pride. Representing in the imaginary of all, what each and everyone did in those dark years. Because everyone resisted. Every day. Every night. Everywhere. Each in their own way and according to their abilities. Even if it was a small gesture of solidarity, a silence of complicity, a good joke.
Everything was tried, to end of the dictatorship together with its reactionary legacy. The accumulated forces were considerable and all of them were thrown into battle. It was not enough. After years of relentless fighting, the popular wave began to show signs of fatigue. Like it or not, they had achieved the main thing: open a way to end the dictatorship.
In the excitement of their own power and their vision clouded by cracks in their head, it broke away from the body. Just for a few months, but enough to allow division of the opposition against the dictatorship. This would seal the "moderate" course of the ensuing transition.
For worse, socialism in which they had pinned their hopes collapsed. While the "Washington Consensus", was proclaimed, inspired by a cult of demented liberals, living dead since their failure in the crisis of the 1930s. Their coffin was reopened by large financial conglomerates and rentiers, that from the 1980s wrested control of the world economy and politics.
Years “as far as the possible”, the decades of 1990 and 2000 were quite unfortunate for '68 generation. Just as they did during the Allende government, again they tore apart from head to toe.
Some embraced the new era enthusiastically. Maybe there was some truth in the idea that history had come to its end. They gladly changed the big story for the small. They were seduced by the philosophy post-all-you-had-believed-before. That, fiscal balances and trade openness.
Someone made some coins in the trade of charlatan. Those who recovered their political jobs, the more often demoted it to petty agreements in the corridors of parliament. There were those who claimed that the mistake was not vote in 1970 by the Christian Democratic candidate Tomic, instead of Allende. Not to reach consensus on land reform with the landowners. Reconciliation was the question. The most lively surfaced like dirty foam as "lobbyists", ugly word hitherto unknown for this battered generation. No few mistook prudence with accommodation.
They proclaimed that this state of things was going to last forever. It lasted very little. In the worst part of the 1990s, a new progressive generation burst onto the University of Chile, rebuilding the Student Federation of Chile, FECH, which others had closed as obsolete. The "G-90" was a ray of sunlight through gray clouds. Pinochet was arrested in the London Clinic. He was tried in Chile in the long summer of 2001. Justice increasingly broadened its measure of the possible. A huge global crisis shaked the floor of Neoliberal ideas, which had penetrated in some segments of this generation, which was rather "groggy" after so many blows and avatars.
Spring returned. In full splendor. Early buds took the form of Penguins, tens of thousands of them. Soon and more grown up, they newly sprouted throughout Chile, in the hundreds of thousands. In a couple of passes, students broke down the speciously promoted idea that education could become a merchandise.
The people follows events with growing anticipation. In remote regions, they have shown signs of what can occur when those from below fall squarely into the fray. On a couple of occasions, they recalled what the demonstrations of millions look like. Convened at noon by a luminous girl, they went out one night to bang their pots and pans. Soon again, they retreated massively each evening, for several days, to honor silently in front of their televisions, their tragic and splendid memory.
All this was enough to radically change the political situation. The progressive parties again flaunted their unique flexibility. Over nearly a century, they have been forming successive coalitions that have managed to collect the main demands of each moment. In this period they failed only in two occasions, the latter of tragic consequences.
This time, they managed to form the broadest coalition in history, New Majority, which brought together again in one beam, almost all who toppled the dictatorship. There are signs that it will be expanded further, incorporating in formal or informal way, several of whom still feel disaffected from the left, and others who are moving in this direction, from the right. These broad political alliances are, of course, indispensable to channel citizens demands into government policies.
Likewise, they constitute one of the main defenses against reactionaries tsunamis, which are inevitable in times of change. To be effective in this regard, wide coalitions must be complemented by vigorous repression of likely fascist outbreaks. Hopefully by legal means, but if this is not possible, through direct citizen action. Like the Britons did in the Battle of Cable Street, where in 1936 they swept to death the powerful local fascist “black shirts.” Both are the lessons of peoples who have managed to stop these criminal waves. Also, in contrast, are part of the teachings of the Chilean defeat 40 years ago.
Throughout, the role played by President Elect Michelle Bachelet has now been decisive. Unlike her first term, to which she was compelled by forces which mostly exceeded her control. Including a maneuver of the "Sons of Pinochet", who at the time saw her as less dangerous than other potential candidates. That maneuver backfired badly. She won that election galloping against Sebastián Piñera, who replaced her after four years.
During her rule, she tried without much success to take advantage of the "penguin revolution" to boost educational changes that were not on her government’s agenda. However, she did promise a pension reform. She implemented it, granting the right to "solidarity" pensions to more than half of the population. More than one million families began to receive it mmediately, directly benefiting more the lower-income quarter of Chileans.
Both reforms increased available resources significantly. However, they did not even try to touch the bases of the respective privatized systems. Rather, these emerged strengthened as more public resources softened some of their most irritating edges. Then came the global crisis, which her government faced with remarkable decision, increasing public spending almost a fifth, mostly in direct benefit of the population.
All this was recognized, the good and the bad. After an initial quite pronounced decline, and once they started paying solidarity pensions, her leadership began receiving an increasing support of the citizenry.
However, they refused to grant a new mandate to her then policy coalition, the Concertación of Parties for Democracy. After two decades, the people got tired of waiting for a twist that departed from the model imposed by the dictatorship, which they had hitherto been managing with few substantive changes. In the election of 2009, former President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle scored less than 30 percent of the votes in the first round and was narrowly beaten by Sebastián Piñera in the second round.
This did not appear to affect the popularity of Michelle Bachelet, who ended his rule with almost unanimous approval. It remained intact during the four years of Piñera, time devoted by her to exercise properly as a senior UN head.
Upon her return, she was categorical regarding a central aspect: she was only prepared to lead a broader coalition, which included the Communist and other leftist forces who had been excluded since the end of the dictatorship. With a program pointing to three main objectives in which all agreed. Regain free, high quality, public education, a tax reform that would reduce inequality and most importantly, a new constitution.
These are certainly moderate goals. Although addressing the most pressing and ripe issues, they do not intend to tackle more substantive ones, such as the re-nationalization of natural resources.
Revolutionary, Bachelet’s program it is not. Far too moderate for the times, it is. The same applies to her newly appointed cabinet members, where the most avowed social liberal technocrats of the old Concertación and the senior lobbyist of the mining companies, head the Ministries of Education and Energy, respectively.
In no way is it a program like Allende's, which inspired fervent adherence of millions, collecting their deepest woes and dearest hopes, and at the same time tackled the large national transformations that were objectively required.
This is what classic political science suggests as the appropriate manner to lead a rising popular wave: move to its front without hesitation. On the contrary, when massive agitation reaches the point of its inevitable cyclical decline, consolidation of what has been achieved and reestablishing order are in the agenda. Lenin - whose main contribution to political science is the discovery of these long cycles in massive participation in political matters, underlines the renowned Latin American theorist and author, Marta Harnecker -, famously derided as “parliamentary cretinism” the idea of moderate graduality in times of widespread agitation. In the opposite, he called “revolutionary infantilism”, the idea that the only way to move is forward, all the time, regardless of the signs of fatigue in mass movement; “forward without compromise,” as the infamous motto of a frivolous leader of Popular Unity.
Inevitably, all this has created problems with the leaders of the rising mass movement, even before the government assumes. For the Communist Party, has already meant significant losses in the leadership of the mass movement, where it is certainly the main force overall. They have lost the presidency of important student federations, and some smaller but highly active labour unions, suchs as port workers, for example. In other important unions, such as teachers, the Communists have, on the contrary, achieved significant advances. In the recent parliamentary polls, they elected six members of the lower chamber, of a total of 147 Deputies, doubling their previous representation. Two of the new Communist deputies are brilliant female ex student leaders, which were elected with very high majorities in populous districts of Santiago.
However, if the program is met, it will open the way to address the major problems facing the nation. Especially if a new constitution is promulgated. It will necessarily generate broad public discussion about the underlying problems. “The new constitution will prepare Chile for the coming years in terms of our natural resources," said President-elect in the presentation of his first cabinet. She is absolutely right.
The contents of the reforms implemented by the new government, as well as the depth and extent of thereof, will be determined by the correlation of political forces that will be configured on the move. Parliamentary majorities achieved, in theory allow many changes. Provided that there is no disagreement on the New Majority and counted with the participation of some right-wing dissidents and independents, to which they have indicated their willingness in principle.
The key to all this is the evolution of popular mobilization. Clearly, this is an upward course, but its trajectory is not linear, far from it. It never was. It advances in constant comings and goings. If citizens manifest massively, loudly and clearly, progress in this government may be important. If not, it will be smaller and less defined.
Anyway, it's a matter of time that changes are made. The good times are coming for the generation of '68. They were born united at the university reform, were divided during the Allende government, reunited during struggle against dictatorship, to fracture again during the transition, in the last two decades. It has now been reunited again.
The new political situation will give them a fair chance to contribute their experience to the progressive generations that followed. So to conclude the task begun then, for which all of them have been fighting all their lives. For its adversaries, it means something quite different.
The political debacle of the right seems so deep as that experienced in the 1960s. Like then, a significant swath of children of "those on top", possibly the best, begin to break with what their parents represented. Fifty years ago the old landowners disappeared forever. In one way or another, always based on their monopoly on the riches of this land, they had directed the destinies of the country since long before Independence. The elders achieved and exercised their hegemony mainly by political means, most of the time.
Today, seems to come sundown for the generation of their children. Those who recovered the lost hegemony thanks to the military coup, and have been exercising it for four decades, primarily through terror and its scars. The rearward generation of the old elite. The anti-'68 generation. The "Sons of Pinochet", as they were named in the title of a book by a sharp journalist, recently named cabinet minister by Bachelet.
All precipitated during what they called "Black September". Forty years of the coup of 1973 were coming but no one had organized a special commemoration, beyond what had always been done on these dates. The country was in the midst of a major national election. The progressive parties and organizations were mostly dedicated to it.
The only one who had seriously prepared for the occasion, was a television channel owned by an U.S. tycoon. Months in advance and sparing no resources, it had produced a mini series titled "Echoes of the Desert," about the founding event of the extermination of political opponents, the "Caravan of Death". Also, a program with forbidden images, as titled, of the protests of the 1980s and earlier. Both were exhibited in successive weeks around September 11 2013, in primetime.
Impact was phenomenal. A large audience overshadowed other television channels, which quickly had to dust off and transmit programs of similar content. For two weeks the entire country, many millions of people, retired every night to the privacy of their homes to regain their memories of the years of dictatorship. The reactions were immediate. All spoke. Political and social leaders, universities, churches, court, and so on. The State itself, represented by the President of the Republic, a center-right politician, condemned unequivocally both the dictatorship and which he called its "passive accomplices."
Then and for another week, public attention was focused on the first practical consequence of this huge wave of collective memory overriding its dikes: the closure, decreed by the government, of a luxury prison where the main perpetrators of crimes against humanity were being held. They were transferred to another, more uncomfortable one, with their accomplices lower gradation.
"Black September" called it the candidate of the right, who saw her support evaporating by the hour. It was the ideal equivalent of a massive nationwide protest, which spread throughout the whole month. Hegemonies were radically changed, in the space of ideas and feelings.
A major concrete impact was produced in the national elections, one month later. The results were adverse to the right. The support of their deputies in 2013 accounted for a loss of 627 thousand votes compared to 2009. Since the parties that make up the New Majority and other forces of the left, center-left, regionalist and independent, increased their voting, the ratio of the right fell 7.3 percentage points to 36.2 percent of the total. They lost 9 deputies, which also represented a decline of 7.5 percentage points in the number of MPs. Thanks to the binomial electoral scheme, they remained over-represented with 40.8 percent of all deputies.
Nevertheless, the election of 2009 was exceptional for the right. If the results of the year 2013 are compared with 2005, which seem more representative of its electoral percentage, their total valid votes is reduced by 2.5 percentage points and the number of deputies lost, in five. That's bad, but there seems no catastrophe.
Nevertheless, the rightist top leaders and media talk openly of a deep crisis. Their internal divisions have sharpened. Fractures have given rise to two new political groupings, so far. The party most affected by the waivers has been National Renovation (RN), where President Sebastián Piñera was a member. In the election they had come off better than their partners from the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), since the latter had suffered the greatest drain of votes and elected parliamentarians.
Their most renowned leaders collapsed in scandal, while infighting for the dubious privilege of an assured defeat against Bachelet. They showed their feet of clay. One after another fell, an emerging successful entrepreneur, the most brazen of its political leaders of the last two decades, and the rude, arrogant and spoiled, daughter of a member of the Junta de Gobierno during the dictatorship. The first for cheating with taxes, the second by mental disorder, and the other simply because no one stands her, not even her own supporters. She got just a quarter of the vote in the first presidential round, the worst result of the right since 1990. Added to the misadventures of their most experienced political leader, which again exhibited the character issues that have led to successive blows throughout his career.
Except for the latter, who emerged as the leading secondary student leader opposing Allende, the other fallen idols of this generation of the right share the characteristic of having always grown up in the shadow of the most powerful groups in the country. They were always taken in hand. Since the end of the dictatorship, all of them had been being promoted shamelessly, ad nauseum, by the media and so-called, business and military “factual powers". They fabricated an aura of authority and invincibility around them. As often happens in these cases, they convinced themselves that their superior personal qualities had projected them to the heights they reached. Confronted for once in their lives with more or less complicated trances, they collapsed with a crash. Sooner or later the water seeks its own level.
A Carlos Larraín, president of RN, cares about what may occur when an "absolute proportional electoral system ... the worst thing for the right", is established. The man is old-fashioned and probably, the binomial electoral system reform that he now considered inevitable, brings to mind what happened after that in 1958, the unique electoral ballot was established. This voting mechanism, which remains in force to this day, ended with bribery landowners used to do with their peasants. Hauled thus, they constituted the electoral base of liberals and conservatives in particular, their two traditional parties.
These days, several recalled that in 1965, both old parties totaled less than 13 percent of the vote and elected nine deputies of a total of 147. In the vote of senators they fared even worse, since they got little more than 10 percent and elected none. They remained only with 7 that were not reelected in that round, of a total of 45 senators in the chamber.
Communists alone that year obtained the same vote as all the right combined, and elected 18 deputies and two senators. The united left in the Popular Action Front (FRAP) won almost 18 percent of the vote and elected 36 deputies and 6 senators. The Radical Party, which soon after would integrate Allende’s Popular Unity, also won around 13 percent of the vote and elected 20 deputies and three senators. The Christian Democrats of then President Eduardo Frei Montalva won hands: nearly 44 percent of the vote, choosing 82 deputies and 11 senators.
A couple of years later, that parliament enacted by very broad majorities, laws as advanced as those mandating labour unions for the peasantry, and agrarian reform. They put a definitive end to the old Latifundia regime, which even Pinochet did not dare try to restore.
Hernán Larraín, UDI Senator, coincides with the diagnosis made by Andrés Allamand, elected senator of RN: "Support on popular communes of the metropolitan area fell 49 percent between the elections of 2009 and 2013, in the middle sector decreased by 17 percent and the high stratus climbed 1 percent.
This diagnosis is correct, but does not reflect a perhaps more essential fact: in the recent presidential primary, the candidate Andrés Velasco, who came in second and then supported Michelle Bachelet, scored most of his vote in the communes precisely where the "upper strata" live. That vote is traditionally for the right, and in light of the results largely seems to have then aligned with their parliamentary candidates and their candidate in the presidential runoff, which matched those voting.
Most who supported Velasco in those communes are young. This shows that not a few children of the "Sons of Pinochet" manifest today reluctant to follow their parents. That looks bad. It is no longer their usual political wrangling. It is a deeper fracture that crosses their own families. As is well known, a rift of this type within the "those above" is one of the three classic conditions for major changes. The other two concern the unity of purpose and willingness to fight among "those below”.
There was never something like this since the 1960s. No young person wanted to be a "mummy" as right-wingers were then nicknamed. They were so unpresentable as Pinochet diehards today. Apparently, the "mummys" also vanished among the youth of the elite then. Aside from the occasional and rather harmless quaint, and other less sympathetic characters who longed for the middle ages, which students liked to scamper from time to time just for fun.
A not insignificant group of the elite straightforwardly embraced the progressive cause, which by then seduced the overwhelming majority of the country. Most of these were identified with the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva and no few moved on to support Salvador Allende.
Those who had supported Frei and later became opponents of Allende, mostly rejected the dictatorship, as it showed its bloodthirsty ultra right-wing character. Some of them were never supporters of the coup and right from the start assumed the defence of the persecuted by the new regime, showing extraordinary resilience in these tough times.
Actually, most of the young elite were still "mummys" in his heart, but as it was not cool they crouched. Sidelining what shook the world and Chile in those years, they were dedicated to having fun in their own way, at least for a while. When things took a darker colour, almost all were opposed to the government of Popular Unity and promoted the coup more or less actively. Most of them supported the Pinochet regime to the end and voted "Yes" in the referendum of 1988. Many are still longing for him in quiet.
Others turned right-wing revolutionaries. They did not disgust of insurrectional street fighting, terrorism and political assassination. They broke radically with the convictions of the "mummys", which usually were republican and democratic in politics and rather developmental in economics. They replaced these convictions by political authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism tinged with economic neoliberalism.
After their debacle of 1965, the right-wing political leadership was assumed by old cadres who had sympathized in their time with Nazism. They led the New National Party, which replaced the traditional Liberal and Conservative.
A part of the youngest, sought inspiration in the ideas of the founder of the Spanish Falange, the Marquis José Antonio Primo de Rivera. They founded the so called Guild Movement, which emerged from the Counter-Reformation of the Catholic University in 1967, led by Jaime Guzmán. Those who were active in the youth of the National Party, on the one hand and the Guild Movement, on the other, form the core of today's RN and UDI, respectively.
Moreover, with resources from the American CIA and following its direct guidance, in the days of their insurrection against the constitutional government of Salvador Allende they engendered a flamboyantly fascist movement, which they called "Homeland and Freedom". It debuted in 1970, strafing the then Commander in Chief of the Army, General Rene Schneider, a constitutionalist, in a desperate attempt to prevent Allende's inauguration.
The band that killed the General, inaugurated the criminal braid: military renegades, lumpen and misguided "pijes" children of the most rancid of the elite, the ilk that three years later would become the flower of the Pinochet dictatorship. They were blessed by a ultraconservative priest surnamed Karadima, in whose elegant parish they veiled their weapons on the eve of the crime.
Right-wing revolutionary trends are certainly not a Chilean originality. They were the main demon that stalked classical transitions to modernity. The original "Spring of Nations", the brilliant week in 1848 that demolished all the governments of continental Europe, which Flaubert describes masterfully in his Sentimental Education, not only gave birth to the Communist Manifesto a few days before. Such turbulence removed it all, and also brought afloat the most putrid ideas of the underworld of human society.
The same as authentic revolutionaries, right-wing revolutionaries also rebelled against the feudal regime that collapsed in the Old Continent and resented the deformations of positivist rationalism and all the contradictions of the new bourgeois regime. But instead of overcoming those forwardly, the right-wing opposed them exaltation of the primeval instincts, tribal values, race, ultra-nationalism and other niceties of the like. In addition to that, with a strong anti-Christian and virulently anti-Semitic component.
Notorious in this regard, for example, are grotesque writings of Nietzsche and Wagner, among others of that era. They ascribe to the Jews, whom they identify with the successful bourgeoisie, an attempt of domination by domestication, by way of their Christian derivation, of the "conquering vitality of the cheerful and healthy blond savage."
Delusions of this style inspired European right-wing populist political movements. They acquired a mass character during secular crisis of capitalism, which began in the 1870s and then in 1930. They channeled the frustration of layers of the population stricken by economic disasters of liberalism, compounded by the aftermath of World War I in the latter case.
Wherever such movements led countries where they came to power, is the most tragic chapter of human history. So far. Other circumstances have generated similar right-wing weeds in various latitudes, as shown by the case of Chile and other Latin American countries in the late 20 century and the former Yugoslavia in the early current. It seems incredible that, following the new secular crisis that began the year 2000 and for which resistance from large creditors has prevented States to react accordingly, new outbreaks of this type have achieved massive proportions, of all places in Europe! The greatest danger that threatens humanity of the 21 century, is that trends of this nature may come to power in one of the emerging giants. God forbid it!
In Chile as before in Spain, religion played an important role in the ideology of the local right-wing revolutionaries. Certainly, not the one preached then by the hierarchy of the Latin American Catholic Church. They had shifted decidedly in favor of social progress since the early 1960s. Chilean hierarchy maintained excellent relations with President Allende and did everything possible to prevent the military coup. From the start they defended the persecuted by the dictatorship. They held this position until the 1980s and then turned toward more conservative positions, partly influenced by the winds that blew during the pontificate of John Paul II.
Progressive rotation of the church hierarchy turned the elite toward Catholic fundamentalist currents. They became parishioners of some infamous priests as Karadima, and especially Opus Dei. This movement also born in Franco's Spain, played a key role in the ideological reshaping of the "Sons of Pinochet." Later they found competition in the Legionaries of Christ. Evangelical sects played a complementary role among the people, offering a way to heaven to the more conservative stripes.
In recent years, scandals of pedophilia and other aberrations have ousted these false prophets from their pulpits. The old "mummy" would have considered a bad joke to see the great men of their class, affiliated to such disreputable secret societies.
If the ideas of the Spanish Falange and the fundamentalist religious views played a role in the reshaping of the Chilean elite in the 1960s, Neoliberalism was from afar, the main ideology of the "Sons of Pinochet."
Under the Washington Consensus, the fanatical adherence of the Chilean elite to Neoliberalism, allowed them to reduce isolation that characterized right-wing revolutionaries. It granted a certain patent of modernity, at least with regard to the economy, to the reaction represented by the Pinochet dictatorship in all areas, certainly including this one. This gave them some ability to gain influence, especially on some intellectual and professional segments who were formed under the aegis of "one thought".
Neoliberalism was manna from heaven for the "Sons of Pinochet." It all started with the best intentions in the world. In the mid-1950s, Wade Gregory, then an employee of the Department of Agriculture in mission to Chile in the so called "Point Four" was the officer who prepared the details of the agreement that paved the way for a steady flow of students of agronomy and economics at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) to the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman would be their inspirational figure.
Retired for many years, Gregory stated that his purpose was to create a new kind of intellectual elite, who understood the need for changes in then prevailing relationships of agrarian dependency, which he described in detail in very interesting studies of Chile's largest Latifundia.
He remembered choosing Chicago, because in those years he appreciated it as one of the most liberal economic U.S. schools. He selected PUC precisely because most of the stems of the traditional agrarian ruling class were studying there. A progressive individual throughout his entire life, he never imagined that this offspring would acquire such a large influence under Pinochet, in an experiment that diverted quite a lot from his original intentions.
To these rapt students, Friedman was like the beam to Saul. They saw the face of God. Loved his bourgeois anarchist ideas, as British historian Eric Hobsbawm qualifies them. The problem was the state. Certainly! The same on which the influence of their parents had been dwindling since the disastrous military progressive movement that became known as the "Sables ratling", in 1924. The monster that threatened to definitively wipe them as a class, promoting agrarian reform. Trying to nationalize copper. The one who mobilized huge and costly armies of teachers to arouse the conscience of the peasants, establishing compulsory primary education. Besides wasting scarce resources of the country in industrial subsidies and costly health and pension programs.
They were appalled by the wisdom of anti-labour Neoliberal ideas, which attributed all the evils not caused by the State, to undue influence of unions. Their disdain for the classical theory of land rent, seemed downright great. Same rule for everyone is not hard. Discrimination between economic sectors was a serious mistake. Had not the developmentalist State discriminated against Latifundia owners? If non discrimination meant some would obtain valuable raw materials for free, it was just fortunate. Terminate with all regulations and let the free private enterprise flourish. Something like an economistic version of "Blonde savage vitality" of Nietzsche.
They were converted to the point. Fervently. The first apostles returned in the early 1960s. Among them, Sergio De Castro, Manuel Cruzat and the late Ernesto Fontaine, among others, were dug in the Faculty of Economics, PUC, which remains their headquarters. From there they would spread the good news to successive generations of the elite. Later to the whole of Chile and finally to Latin America through CIAPEP, a program of PUC and the Interamerican Development Bank, led by the last mentioned. Harberger, one of the Friedman’s assistants, married a Chilean and served as a close link with Chicago.
"The Chicago Boys" as the group called themselves, worked for the presidential campaign of Jorge Alessandri in 1970, writing a heavy program tome they called The Brick. It detailed the Neoliberal revolution against half a century of disastrous state developmentalism in the Chilean economy. After the coup and with the sponsorship of Admirals Carvajal and Gotuzzo, they soon assumed control of the economics of Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Immediately, they enforced the extremist Friedman recipes, which rapidly in 1975, and again in 1982, precipitated the Chilean economy into the two worst economic crises since the 1930s. The second was directly attributed to the Chicago Boys and temporarily cost them the Ministry of Finance, from which Pinochet sacked Sergio de Castro unnoticed.
A group calling itself "The Piranhas", headed by Manuel Cruzat, lost most of the empire of banks and companies he had risen like a house of cards during the preceding decade. HIs partner Vial ended up in jail, along with other known members of the group, including some former ministers. For a while they quivered..
The global "revival" of Neoliberalism initiated by then, came to their rescue. In the 1980s, the world economy was coming out of the secular crisis of the previous decade. It had been a hard blow to the Keynesian economic concepts that had been hegemonic during the "Golden Age" of post-war capitalism. It gave a boost to the critics from the far right, led by Friedman and the New Chicago School.
In the wake of the crisis, the economies of the developed countries began a long upswing, which lasted throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Two business factions grew disproportionately, whose influence was to prove decisive for Neoliberal’s rise: bankers and big oil. The anarchist-bourgeois ideology of Friedman settled them almost as much as the offspring of the Chilean landowners.
The unlimited support of these powerful patrons raised the neoliberal theorists out from the catacombs into which they had been relegated after the debacle in the 1930s, of what was then called "Manchester liberalism". These "sponsors" with large pouches elevated them again to the respectability of university chairs and corporate spokespeople. After the election of Reagan and Thatcher, who had the backing of the same interest groups, these extremist teachers came to power in international bodies and from there jumped to central banks and finance ministries around the world.
They did much damage. They caused great suffering to hundreds of millions of human beings. But never as many as they gave billions to win to their sponsors.
Long live Globalization! It was short. It ended with the crisis of the 2000s. Muffled by the back door, the arrogant bankers who considered themselves "Masters of the Universe", ran to implore the State bailout. The same State that the Neoliberal teachers they had patronized before, had sought to dismantle. As in the old Spanish saying: Once the dog is dead, the rabies is gone.
A counterrevolution is the worst thing that can happen to a society, except perhaps a military invasion. After the Pinochet coup, the retina of the world registered shelling, summary executions, raids, concentration camps, torture, beheadings, abductions and all sorts of atrocities. Under the sulking look of the dictator behind his black glasses.
More difficult to record, is the violent change of tide that sweeps everything. A reactionary tsunami, sweeping all spaces. Counterrevolutions are devastating butts, but superficial and transient. The reconstruction of the destroyed and repair of the damaged, may well take half a century. But still, they are unable to roll back the deep social transformations achieved by the revolutions that preceded them.
In the days following the coup, the center of Santiago experienced an unusual sighting: it was filled with dark three-piece suits, with a buttoned vest. The garment had fallen into complete disuse since the mid-1960s, displaced by male equivalent of joyful and uninhibited miniskirt. Similarly, the most rancid customs, obscurantist ideas and stale habits, returned with a vengeance. Overnight. Removing those other, fresh, bright, and illustrated, which had become hegemonic in Chilean society during the preceding decade. Suddenly, a long spring was turned into the winter. Dreams and hopes of those below, crushed by hatred and lust for revenge from those above, which for a moment feared losing everything. In a single day, Chileans became a defeated people.
The "Sons of Pinochet" became adults in this poisoned atmosphere. They settled just fine. Got drunk with champagne uncorked by their parents at noon on September 11, 1973. They ran as reservists to join the army and navy especially. Some tortured relatives who were detainees at the National Stadium. There was one who, as a young officer, was among those who stormed the residence of the President and appeared on TV denouncing the alleged luxury he enjoyed, while his body was still warm.
That night in their trucks, they led the cops and army guys of each town, spotting peasant supporters of land reform, and then helped to dump their riddled corpses into lime kilns. Their peasant victims of those raids account for more than half of the disappeared and executed by the dictatorship, whose names are carved in stone at the General Cemetery of Santiago.
Supposed defenders democracy and fighters against communist tyranny, they applauded the closing of Congress and the prohibition of all forms of political and worker associations. Their media, which incidentally were the only ones left standing, incited and fanned the regime wildly. They were complicit in the most sinister operations of "intelligence". They defended and justified the dictatorship from first to the last day. Whilst still ripping hair out by lack of freedom of expression in Cuba.
No wonder. The owner of the largest newspaper, the sad and untouchable Pater Familias of the Chilean elite , had conspired with the heads of the Empire to overthrow the democratic president of his own country. They described him as dangerous tyrant before he assumed office! Recently, on the same days of their "Black September", this character, turned a pathetic babbling old man, had been forced to make statements before a judge investigating the criminal responsibilities of those who organized the coup of 1973
Indeed, they did not neglect the main thing: They seized again the very rich natural resources of the country to live on its rent. As their ancestors had done for centuries. On behalf of the sacrosanct property, they looted the state. As "Piranha," the nickname they gave themselves, they began by industries, banks and businesses, nationalized by Allende and ended with large enterprises created over half a century of state developmentalism.
That is the main source of all current Chilean fortunes. Likewise, the root of the rentier nature of the "Sons of Pinochet". They are authentic sheikhs without a turban. They shared loot with others like them who came from outside. A handful of large rentiers corporations, "treasure hunters" as the Financial Times calls them, in large part foreign, have appropriated the whole of Chile.
Ten mining corporations own concessions on the subsoil of more than 40 percent of the national territory. Two hydroelectric generating companies hold 90 percent of the water rights. Seven families, 90 percent of the fishing rights. Two large companies own the bulk of forest plantations. A few large buyers capture the rent of agricultural producers, which are small and medium mostly. And so on.
According to the World Bank, Chile's GDP is composed by more than a fifth, of fickle natural resource rents. As is known, rents are surpluses in the price above the cost of production. Prices of scarce goods are determined by demand, and are largely unrelated to production costs. The latter in turn, determine the price of normal industrial goods, from the supply side.
Chilean resources are exported without processing none. They are extracted with inputs and machinery that are almost entirely imported, the same as almost all industrial consumer goods. Large rentier corporations have promoted Neoliberal policies, which have liquidated production of added value in all sectors that do not have natural protection.
As if this were not enough, two or three large companies control each of the major markets for goods and services, including those who do not depend on natural resources. They collude to also sell above cost, collecting monopolistic "quasi-rents". The largest appear in the financial sector, but collusion has been proved in criminal cases, in pharmacies and chickens!
Less than a tenth of the workforce is enough to exploit natural resources, including one and a half percent of salaried employees who work in mining. Meanwhile, over half of the workforce is employed in trade and services that add little or no value. For this reason, their jobs are insecure, degrading the production capacity and negotiating capability of the labour force. Paraphrasing a late U.S. Senator, most Chileans are busy selling each other imported goods, and haircutting one another.
As soon as the “Sons of Pinochet” took over the economic leadership, their first act was to free prices, which soared. At the same time, they falsified the consumer price index, which they systematically continued to do until several years after the coup, as was later proved.
Thus, in one stroke, they lowered in half the real wages of all workers. This reduced in the same proportion, the participation of the latter in the gross domestic product (GDP). Which regressed the income distribution to levels prior to the 1930 crisis. After the end of the dictatorship, real wages did not match their pre-coup levels until December 1999, at the end of the century.
Income distribution has continued to deteriorate until today. The richest one per percent, appropriates "operating surplus" amounting to 55 percent of GDP, according to statistics from the Central Bank for 2011. According to the same source, the "income of labour" that year totaled 35 percent of GDP. This figure is very similar to adding up the income of all the families, measured by the income survey of households, which in Chile is called Casen, which certainly the well-heeled do not deign to answer. State taxes less subsidies, accounts for the remaining 10 percent of GDP.
Given that personal consumption amounts to 70 percent of GDP, according to the same source, it follows that the richest one percent consume the same as the 99 percent! They invest the rest of their "operating surplus", to further grow their share of the cake.
The "Sons of Pinochet" with their families, are part of a group of no more than 160 thousand people, roughly one percent of the Chilean population. Nearly all of them live in only three "upper strata" districts of the capital, where the rightist parties obtain more than 70 percent of the vote. They have segregated cities in ghettos, taking refuge in the farthest, where they previously looked after performing ethnic cleansing. There they live, perched high in the mountains, like in a besieged fortress, frightened to the bone. The rich do shed a tear. To comfort and indulge a little, they consume as much as in their neighborhood as all the remaining population in the rest of the country.
The “Chicago Boys” extremist experiments in "savage capitalism", precipitated the Chilean economy in 1982 in its most devastating crisis since the 1930s. A sudden devaluation of the exchange rate, which Sergio de Castro had dogged in keeping fixed at 39 pesos per dollar, broke all banks, which were taken over by the government. The only one saved was the State Bank.
Humiliated by international creditors, the dictatorship took over all private debt at a huge cost to the country. GDP collapsed more than 15 percent and unemployment soared to a third of the workforce, including emergency jobs. Similar to the situation that Greece now lives. Crisis extended throughout much of the 1980s and was the breeding ground of popular protests that eventually ended the dictatorship.
They dismantled social public services, built along half a century of state developmentalism, by governments of all political colors. Beginning by that which was more hateful, the national system of public education. At the time of the coup, it had enrolled one out of three Chileans of all ages, in establishments that were free and of recognized quality, at all educational levels, reaching into the heart of the old Latifundia.
They occupied the schools, replaced rectors and directors with military, expelled many of the best teachers and students. Tuition contracted, especially at universities. The budget was cut in half and teacher’s salaries by two thirds, levels that remained until the end of the dictatorship. They closed departments and faculties, expelled the Pedagogical Institute from the university. forbade authors, burned books. They privatized education, through vouchers paid by the state budget, by the way. After four decades of dismantling and failed privatization experiments, enrollment in all levels of education, public and private, has shrinked to a quarter of the total population. A much smaller proportion than before the coup, with the difference that now families must pay more than half of the bill and the quality leaves much to be desired.
Coverage increases, exhibited as the great achievement of privatization, are due to a sharp decline in the proportion of youth in the population, allowing a greater proportion of these access to education, while tuition is reduced in proportion to the total population.
They privatized pensions and partially health, seizing contributions to social security, reducing pensions, even more for women and deteriorating healthcare.
They liquidated public urban and rail transport, the latter a monumental work completed by the early decades of the twentieth century covering every corner of the territory - the main legacy of the Latifundia period, by the way. Partly to pay for services provided by truck and bus owners, guilds that had mobilized against Allende, oiling wills with U.S. bills. During the last decade, the country has struggled to rebuild public transportation systems it once had and were destroyed.
Only two cases frustrated the greed of the “Sons of Pinochet”: former Latifundia and large mining, formerly U.S. companies, both legally expropriated by the governments of Eduardo Frei Montalva and foremost, Salvador Allende. These, along with education and health of the people, represent the most important social and economic changes of half a century of state developmentalism. They were irreversible.
More than 40 percent of the land expropriated, including more than four-sevenths of the cultivated area, were given in ownership to peasants considered "loyal." Certainly, those who most deserved it received not a square meter. Peasants who had supported agrarian reform who escaped the killings, were expelled without further proceedings from the land they had worked for centuries. Even their “pueblas”, as their small ranches were called, were snatched from them.
The former owners took inmediate possession of the "Reserves" to which they were entitled by the agrarian reform law. But, alas, these were very small. Not able to hold tenants, who paid in work the land old Latifundia assigned them to support themselves. Moreover, they could get the idea again that the land belongs to those who labour it. Thus, in the months and years that followed, “reserves” were completely depopulated. The same happened in large areas of mountains, which were sold to a couple of large forestry companies soon after.
Hundreds of thousands of peasants and their families were thrown out to the country roads in the first two years after the coup. A part to become salaried workers on the same land where they once lived. Most migrated to cities, in what was the second major pushing delivery that gave birth to modern Chilean urban workforce. The first had been the closure of the nitrate mines in the 1930 crisis. These peasants and their wives, who soon also joined the workforce, are the true basis of the Chilean "economic miracle" of the 1990s.
Meanwhile, the sons of former landowners who remained in the countryside had to learn to live with their former employees and foremen, now their neighboring landowners. They tried to buy their land and succeeded in some cases. Yet not a single Latifundia was reconstituted. "Reservists" and assignataries of land, both product of the agrarian reform, became the medium entrepreneurs that would give rise to the capitalist revolution of Chilean agriculture.
Former U.S. mining companies were merged into the state owned CODELCO, which remains the largest copper producer in the world and the largest company in the country, by far. It has been the main element of national development and provided a major share of the public budget - including the royalty of 10 percent of their sales that goes to the armed forces.
Until the end of the dictatorship, CODELCO was producing over 90 percent of copper exported by the country. Nevertheless, taking advantage of a law of mining claims inherited from the dictatorship, democratic governments privatized mining sites that today are operated by multinationals and account for 72 percent of copper exports in 2013. Production of CODELCO has increased more slowly and their proportion has fallen to the remaining 28 percent.
Until 2003 private companies did not pay a cent for the extracted minerals and also cheated with their income taxes, with the result that large mining with one important exception, reported losses year after year. At that time the government introduced a modest specific mining tax, which represents less than one percent of its sales.
The mining-claims law gives assignees "full concession" to subsoil, gratuitously. To keep them, they have to pay a patent of one dollar a year per hectare. It is indefinite, transferable and heritable. If the state wants it back, it must pay the full value of the minerals that eventually have been discovered. This law flagrantly contradicts even the Constitution enacted by Pinochet in 1980, which keeps the paragraph of Allende’s nationalization of 1971, which reserves to the State the “full, non-transferable and inalienable” ownership of the subsoil.
This infamous law is the best example of the distortion introduced in the Chilean economy by the "Chicago Boys." It was devised and promulgated in 1981 by the then Mining Minister José Piñera, brother of the current President, Harvard alumnus and the main Chilean neoliberal ideologue. A senior fellow of ultraconservative Cato Institute of the U.S., and a number of "libertarian" centers of the like.
Also, as Labour Minister, he authored the labour code of the dictatorship, which eliminated the effective right to strike. He also authored pension privatization and the creation of the AFP private pension administrators, which he has promoted worldwide with the zeal of a prophet.
These, along with the tariff reduction to zero, the privatization of education, health, water and mining concessions, are the major Neoliberal "modernizations" of the Chilean economy. Precisely the ones that Chile intends to correct now.
There are still those who believe that the dictatorship committed "excesses" in matters of human rights, but modernized its economy. Neither one nor the other. It directed a systematic policy of state terrorism to impose an extremist vision, which deformed the economic and social
structure.
The evident modernisation of the country has followed its course not thanks to the “Chicago Boys” and their more moderate continuators since the 1990s, but in spite of them. It was the inevitable result of the great social and economic changes promoted by half century of State developmentalism preceding the 1973 coup.
Developmental States have arisen, in one form or another, in all countries whose economies have been emerging since the early twentieth century. The same as in Chile in 1924. In all of them, it was the main actor of modernization. It was also a product of the most essential phenomenon of transition to modernity that the world has been pursuing over the past two centuries: the humble steps of the peasant leaving the land where he lived and worked for generations, only when he is not able to take any more of its hardships, and leading him to the cities where modern life and economy are born.
In early stages, developmental States were forced to follow a “statist” strategies for a rather simple cause: there was no one else around capable of importing the advances that capitalism had produced in the developed world, to countries still dominated by traditional agrarian social structures. At some point, every 20 century developmental States shifted strategies to promote market economies. This happened even in States which had been built following more or less radical anti-capitalist ideologies. However, this pro-market turn took place not before they had achieved the basic social transformation: turning masses of peasants into a modern, relatively educated and healthy, urban workforce. Only in these cases, this policy shift has been successful. “Market friendly” policies have also been been tried many times in pre urban societies, usually enforced by external advisors, notably the World Bank and the like. To consistently disastrous results.
When developmentalist States shifted from “statist” to “market” policies, most of them hardly damaged what they had built before. It would seem rather foolish to do so. East Asian cases inspired in Japan, as well as many other countries, including the largest in Latin America, proved that this change of strategies may be achieved rather seamlessly. In fact, there is overwhelming evidence that after it has taken place, the mature modern State increases its role, under different forms.
Only in a few countries, mostly by the end of the century and under the influence of the global Neoliberal wave, this shift coincided with a severe dismantling of public institutions and even the State itself. Pitifully, Chile was an early and extreme example of this case. The reactionary tsunami that broke over the long coast of the country, destroyed a significant part of what the State had built in previous decades. It also severely distorted the economic and social structure, in fact delaying the authentic development.
After four decades and driven by renewed citizens mobilization, Chile is poised to complete the work of reconstruction. In the twilight of the "Sons of Pinochet."
The South African Apartheid did not always exist. The Dutch settlers who landed on these shores in the sixteenth century, fleeing religious persecution in Europe, exercised absolute hegemony over South African society until the late twentieth century. Certainly, they always conformed a tiny elite from the numerical point of view and were completely segregated from the majority of the population. Both identifiable by the color of their skins.
Yet it was only during their decline that the Afrikaners had to resort to the infamous Apartheid laws, which were enacted in 1948. They became increasingly strict during the second half of the twentieth century, until in 1970 the non-white majority lost their civil rights and were relegated to the Bantustans. Hegemony that Afrikaners had exercised mainly by consensus during centuries, only in their demise depended primarily upon force and finally exclusively on it.
So it always is. As the classic authors describe, from Engels in his Anti-Dühring to the Prison Notebooks of Gramsci, elites always based their hegemony primarily on consensus, based in turn on their ability to lead the economy.
Their monopoly on violence always plays a role as well, of course. It may be larger or smaller depending on the circumstances. As Machiavelli’s Centaur, hegemony has human torso and head, but the body of a beast. However, it is only during their decline that elites are compelled to rely primarily on force. These periods are necessarily brief in historical scale, since there is no people that endure them for long.
It happened in the same way, with the poor peasants from the XVI century that fleeing famine and hardship of Castile and the Basque Country, arrived to this long strip at the far southern end of America. They did not come as "conquerors" in the style of their comrades from further north. According to the acute thesis of Russian-Chilean sage Alejandro Lipschutz, the latter were actually "condotieri", military adventurers who infiltrated and then supplanted the Incas and Aztecs lords, in the course of the wars they fought against each other constantly. Thus transplanted European feudalism on preexisting signioralisms in ancient American empires. For this reason, hypothesize Lipschutz, conquest was never successful where none American signioralisms existed.
Narrow, barren and rocky valleys, enclosed between hills and mountains, which now make up the territory of Chile, were poor. Never produced enough surplus to build pyramids and cities in the clouds. Nor great cathedrals and Latifundia mansions. They never provided enough surplus to sustain large estates or empires, least conquerors from overseas.
Those who arrived in these parts came from working the land with their own hands and settled to work the land. As colonists or small lords with a few dozen commended Indians, two hundred in the most numerous. In those days, Pizarro lorded over ten thousand.
At the time of independence, "the cabin of a Scottish fisherman offered more amenities than the house of a Chilean landowner," according to the caustic remark of Mary Graham, a keen British visitor in the days of Independece, in the early 19 century. She would hardly described thus, the imposing mansions of the slave planters of Brazil, where her best friend, the English adventurer and creator of the Chilean naval squadron, Lord Cochrane, ended his days.
Such settlers and small lords, formed a tightly knit elite, a denser tissue than in the rich estates further north. Probably because those scarce resources did not allow for constantly quarreling with its neighbors, as happened there. Acquired the habit of resolving their disputes through uniquely democratic means, most of the time. Early established a unitary state and were able to defeat their wealthy neighbors in successive wars, seizing rich mining districts.
A tiny minority, were maintained as a segregated caste. With characteristic traits in race, language and customs, clearly distinct from the rest of a predominantly crossbred population. However, as described by the historian Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, they had the flexibility to incorporate within, those arrived later who managed to get rich in trade, finance, mining and finally in industry. A practical marriage of convenience, because land provided power but scarce cash. In this way, they managed to maintain their hegemony, sustained mainly on their monopoly of land ownership, until the second half of the twentieth century.
This elite exercised hegemony mainly by political and democratic means, for the time. Usually. Not excluding insurrections and civil wars among its main fractions, the Conservative dominated by landowners and the Church, against Liberals and Radicals, in which merchants, lenders and miners had a higher weight. Nor, indeed, ruthless conquest of Mapuche territories, ferocious repression of peasants and especially, the nascent working class, all of which they massacred with some regularity.
Before Pinochet, the only military coup of the twentieth century was against them, in 1924. It was driven by the contemporary Chilean equivalent of the "Young Turks" of Istanbul, as were later general Vargas in Brazil and Peron in Argentina. Among many other anti-oligarchic military caudillos of the twentieth century, in Latin America and other regions. All of them founded developmental states, as they did in Chile.
Developmental State progressively cornered the old agrarian oligarchy, in a process that spanned much of the twentieth century. Always pushed from below by successive popular eruptions. They were finally liquidated in the government of Salvador Allende, who led an outright popular revolution. The most distinctive feature of developmentalism and the Chilean revolution, earning the appreciation of the whole world, was the singular attachment to impeccably legal, democratic and quite peaceful methods.
After the coup, the old oligarchy was resurrected as a zombie, transmuted into the "Sons of Pinochet ". However, like the Afrikaners in decline, never again were they able to govern by consensus. They have held their regained hegemony for four decades. The first two through plain terror and then through its scars. These have so far inhibited the people to get rid of a constitution imposed by the dictatorship, which has given the elite a right to veto, in a rather particular flavor of democracy. Contrary to the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of citizens in all matters of importance.
This is what is now ending. In the twilight of the "Sons of Pinochet."
The end of Apartheid certainly did not mean the disappearance of the Afrikaners. Hardly. They remain an integral part of the social, economic, academic and cultural elite of South Africa. In a proportion that is a lot higher than that of whites in the population. The same goes for political representation, to a lesser extent. It can even grow back temporarily, if the African National Congress party lost the elections in the future.
Nevertheless, the non-white majority increasingly integrates the elite. It will become dominant at all levels, as appropriate to their weight in the population. Similarly dominating the political space for two decades.
In the same way, a new Chilean elite will have to emerge, which will be very different from today. Obviously it will break sharply and definitely with its dictatorial past. Also, with its existing rentier character. Hegemony inside will tilt to true capitalist entrepreneurs. In Chile there are many. That is, those who understand that the only source of modern wealth of nations is the work that adds value in the production of goods and services sold in the market. An elite of these features is by definition open and porous. The capitalist economy truly rewards the ability to compete and innovate their business. Not the cradle.
Preaching will not achieve this change. It will take some time. In significant part, it will emerge from the new generation of the current elite. So today the fractures are of great importance. Sebastián Piñera seems intent on leading a process of this nature. A sort of transformation led "from above". A sort of Chilean version of the classic Junker or Meiji routes to modernity. Not impossible, but unlikely. Or a sort of local Frederik Willem de Clerk?
Basically, the transformation of the elite will come "from below." It will be imposed by the State, in turn driven by successive popular irruptions. Democratization and the renationalisation of natural resources are essential conditions to do so. It has been happening along a century, it will probably happen again.