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(My lecture of today it is based on Róbinson Rojas Sandford,
"Fifteen years of monetarism in Latin America. Time to scream")(17-10-98)
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Like the Brazilian the Chilean "miracle" was built upon a
triple alliance:
the alliance between the state, domestic monopolic capital and
transnational capital. The latter led by U.S. transnational
capital.
But, unlike the Brazilian state, the Chilean state adopted since the
very beginning the monetarist approach, leaving the economic arena to
the other two partners, and concentrating on doing the dirty work,
murdering, imprisoning, torturing and exiling the dissidents.
All the wealth that the Chilean capitalist class and the foreign
transnational corporations accumulated in my country since 1974
until today is stained with the blood, the sweat, the tears and
the nightmares that many thousands of Chilean citizens had to suffer
victimized by the murderers, from Pinochet until the last
member of the Chilean secret police, from Henry Kissinger until the
last member of the CIA and the Pentagon, who were leading a
counter-revolutionary process aiming at restoring to a small Chilean
minority the economic, social and political control it gradually
lost over the years from the 1930s to 1973, particularly in the years
of the Popular Unity government.
Today, that economic, social and political control is totally
restored, and so is the economic, social and political control of
U.S. transnational corporations.
In this lecture we are going to see how Chile's ruling class
counter-revolutionary experiment, spread to the totality of Latin
America in the last fifteen years, is creating an extremely
polarized society, extremely wasteful of resources, extremely
dependent on international capital, and extremely unsustainable.
All the above was supported with the most brutal dictatorship in the
history of Latin America. The four assasins Pinochet, Merino, Leigh and
Mendoza created a systematic way of maintaining the Chilean people under
terror.
As already documented several times over in the United Nation's
Commission for Human Rights, military and civilian interrogators used
the following methods of torture to extort confessions and prepare
conditions for a return to "democratic" governments:
1.- Both men and women are given electric shocks in the genitals. This
happens on a metal bed to which the naked victim is bound with
his/her arms and legs spread apart. This torture is called
"roasting".
2.- Blows are dealt to all parts of the body an in many cases this
results in the deliberate rupture of the ear-drum.
3.- The victim receives burns to parts of the body by cigarettes or
other forms of direct naked flame.
4.- The person to be interrogated has his/her nose and mouth blocked
in order to bring on suffocation.
5.- For periods at a time the prisoner's head is put into a bucket
filled with water or excrement.
6.- Women detainees are raped.
7.- Women detainees are forced to have sexual intercourse with dogs.
8.- Hot iron objects are inserted into the vagina of women.
9.- Iron objects are inserted into the victim's anus.
10.- Detainees are made to comply by threats that if they refuse to
make any statement their families will be tortured. Sometimes
these threats are really carried out.
11.- Pharmaceutical products, especially drugs, are commonly used in
the interrogations.
12.- Hypnosis is part of the interrogation procedure.
In the last few years, "protected democracies" in Chile, Brazil,
Argentina and Uruguay have been managing the economic system implanted
by the generals. The results are rather dramatic: more poverty for
the many and more wealth for the few.
Please, go now to Róbinson Rojas, "Fifteen years of monetarism..."
I recommend reading also:
K. Coughlan, "The dark side of Chile's economic miracle"
O. Letelier: "Chile: Economic 'freedom' and political repression"
and
C. Schneider, "Chile: the underside of the miracle"
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