The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

In 1976, Chilean economist and former minster under Allende, Orlando Letelier, had moved to the United States, where he was a vocal critic of the Pinochet regime, its violation of human rights, and its violent implementation of free market policies. In August 1976, he published an article in The Nation criticizing Milton Friedman’s policies, writing, “Regression for the majorities and ‘economic freedom’ for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin” (99). He was assassinated by the Pinochet secret police with a car bomb in Washington, DC a month later.

In the 2000s, some of the leaders and operators of the oppressive juntas were put on trial in their respective countries. For instance, Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz was convicted of homicide and torture in Argentina in 2006. The judge, Carlos Rozanski, characterized the regime’s policy of targeting leftists with torture and murder as “genocide.”

Cleansing Cultures

The juntas targeted left-wing cultural and intellectual figures, including professors, musicians, and writers. For instance, Chilean folk singer Victor Jara was imprisoned and his fingers broken so he could not play. Right-wing culture became the only permitted form of expression, and street gatherings in Chile were put down by water cannons.

Who Was Killed—and Why

Klein argues that many of those targeted by the “cleansing campaign” were “people whom the juntas had identified as posing the most serious barriers to their economic program” (106). A particular target were trade unionists, who were characterized as “terrorists” by the regime.

Corporate-Sponsored Torture

Attacks on union leaders were often supported by corporate ownership. For instance, the Ford factory in Buenos Aires was used as a prison to hold union leadership. Soldiers also attacked community workers, including those linked to the Catholic Church. In 1976, six high schoolers who had protested for lower bus fares in Argentina were tortured and killed.

Leaders of the regime recognized that brutal repression was a necessary component of their economic reforms. The oppressed people had been shocked into complacency with the poverty and other hardships engendered by the policies.

Torture as “Curing”

Within the regimes’ prisons, torturers aimed to break the solidarity between inmates and throughout movements. They would use isolation, beatings, and electric shocks to compel inmates into denouncing each other. Klein argues that, in this way, they were forced to “succum[b] to the cutthroat ethos at the heart of laissez-faire capitalism—‘looking out for No. 1’” (113). Both economists and torturers described themselves as using shock to cure the country of its diseased parts.

“Normal” Children

The children of Argentinian leftists who were imprisoned were given away to “good” families and never told of their true background on the basis of the theory that they could be indoctrinated away from leftism. Klein argues that this is similar to the residential schools First Nations and Indigenous peoples were forced to attend in the US, Canada, and Australia to beat and indoctrinate their native cultures out of them.

In 1987, a torture dungeon was discovered underneath the Galerías Pacífico luxury mall in Buenos Aires. Klein argues this shows how closely the free-market policies and the regime of torture were connected.

Klein argues that the language of human rights is used to decouple the economic project from the authoritarian one. In the 1970s, the Chicago School and its adherents were criticized for their connections to authoritarian regimes. In response, the Chicago School economists denied the claims and obfuscated the history.

In the 1970s, the Southern Cone “was also a laboratory for a relatively new activist model: the grassroots international human rights movement” (118), which focused on the abuses of the juntas but not the motivations behind them. Klein focuses on Amnesty International, which won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 for their work drawing attention to abuses by these regimes. Amnesty was committed to an “apolitical” approach that “presented the conflict as one restricted to the local military and the left-wing extremists” (120) without acknowledging the roles of international systemic actors like the CIA or multinational corporations. 

Local activists adopted the politically neutral “human rights” language instead of the classic leftwing revolutionary class warfare language in order to shield themselves from further oppression by the regimes, what Klein describes as “a way of engaging in politics without mentioning politics” (121).

Ford on Ford

The Ford Foundation, which had been a major funder of the intellectual milieu that contributed to the various juntas, was concerned about the bad press due to the oppressive nature of the regimes. To temper the public outrage, in the mid-1970s, the foundation pivoted to support apolitical “human rights” organizations which “had little to say about the radical transformations taking place in the economic sphere” (124). This dynamic contributed to the separation of these two related policies—torture and economic reform—in research and discourse.

“Apolitical” human rights discourse has been critiqued by many actors, including French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that torture, colonialism, and free market economic policies are “simply an all-pervasive system” (126) to control people against their will.