Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, 2007, Edited Excerpts
In Argentina 1976, a junta seized power from Isabel Peron. That meant that Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil were now all run by U.S.-backed military governments and were living laboratories of Chicago School economics. The Chicago Boys had been working with the military before the coup even took place, and the economic transformation began on the day the junta took power.
By the sixties and early seventies in Latin America, the left was the dominant mass culture – it was the poetry of Pablo Neruda, the folk music of Victor Jara and Mercedes Sosa, the liberation theology of the Third World Priests, the emancipatory theater of Augusto Boal, the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, the revolutionary journalism of Eduardo Galeano and Walsh himself. It was legendary heroes and martyrs of past and recent history from Jose Gervasio Artigas to Simon Bolivar to Che Guevara. The juntas were a declaration of war against this entire culture.
The legendary singer Victor Jara was among those taken. First the soldiers broke both his hands so he could not play the guitar, then they shot him forty-four times. To make sure he could not inspire from beyond the grave, the regime ordered his master recordings destroyed. Mercedes Sosa, a fellow musician, was forced into exile from Argentina, the revolutionary dramatist Augusto Boal was tortured and exiled from Brazil, Eduardo Galeano was driven from Uruguay and Walsh was murdered in the streets of Buenos Aires. A culture was being deliberately exterminated.
In Argentina, Ford supplied cars to the military, and the green Ford Falcon sedan was the vehicle used for thousands of kidnappings and disappearances. The junta provided Ford with a service of its own – ridding the assembly lines of troublesome trade unionists. Before the coup, Ford had been forced to make significant concessions to its workers. Soldiers prowled the facility, grabbing and hooding the most active union members.
Particularly brutal throughout the region were the attacks on farmers who had been involved in the struggle for land reform. Leaders of the Argentine Agrarian Leagues were hunted down and tortured, often out in the fields they worked, in full view of the community.
The pattern of these disappearances was clear: while the shock therapists were trying to remove all relics of collectivism from the economy, the shock troops were removing the representatives of that ethos from the streets, the universities and the factory floors.
Galerias Pacifico is the crown jewel of the Buenos Aires’ shopping district. For Argentines who know their history, the mall stands as a chilling reminder that the Chicago School Project was quite literally built on the secret torture camps where thousands of people who believed in a different country disappeared.
Friedman claimed that Pinochet’s entire reign – seventeen years of dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured – was not a violent unmaking of democracy but its opposite. “The really important thing about the Chilean business is that free markets did work their way in bringing about a free society.” Friedman said.
Argentina Debt
In 1983, when the junta collapsed after the Falkland War, Argentines elected Raul Alfonsin as their new president. Washington insisted that the new government agree to pay off the debts amassed by the generals. During junta rule, Argentina’s external debt had ballooned from $7.9 billion the year before the coup to $45 billion at the time of the handover – debts owed to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the U.S. Export-Import Bank and private banks based in the U.S.
The remainder of the national debt was mostly spent on interest payments, as well as shady bailouts for private firms. In 1982, just before Argentina’s dictatorship collapsed, the junta did one last favor for the corporate sector. Argentina’s central bank announced that the state would absorb the debts of large multinational and domestic firms. Among the companies to receive this generous treatment were Ford Motor Argentina, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, IBM and Mercedes-Benz.
It was these odious debts that Washington insisted Argentina’s new democratic government had to repay. Powerful arguments were made, both moral and legal, that these debts were “odious” and that newly liberated people should not be forced to pay the bills of their oppressors and tormentors.
