Next in line for NAFTA? Images from Chile - North American Free Trade Agreement

In June begins the strange atmospheric inversion of Santiago's winter. Tears and burning eyes interfere with the view of pristine snow recently fallen on the foothills of the Andes. Seventeen years of pro-development, free-market policies under the military dictatorship and its University of Chicago-trained economic advisors have led to unregulated expansion of industry and automobile transportation. Now, as Santiago's 7 million residents creep along congested streets, they breathe some of the most polluted air in the world.

On the other hand, it is a rare event to see a homeless person or a person without shoes in Santiago's streets or parks. Despite Chile's 40 percent poverty rate, the poor remain nearly invisible throughout most of the nation's capital. This invisibility reflects the military regime's success in forcefully displacing working-class and poor communities from the city's center to its periphery. Business people visiting Santiago encounter a prosperous and industrious population, struggling with air pollution but otherwise unencumbered by the gross conditions of poverty so common in other Latin American capitals.

In this context, the Chilean government and the Clinton administration are negotiating an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to include Chile. During May 1994, Eduardo Aninat, Chile's minister of finance and property, came to Washington for talks about NAFTA. Santiago newspapers covered the event with upbeat, page one articles, which usually left out "North American" from the name of the treaty, referring to it simply as "Free Trade Agreement." These articles ignored or downplayed environmental concerns or protection of workers' rights, which have been crucial parts of the debates about NAFTA in Mexico and the United States. Chilean coverage of the Chiapas uprising in Mexico did not mention the rebels' criticism of NAFTA.

Legacy of Dictatorship

May 1994 also marked the debut in Santiago of La Flaca Alejandra ("Skinny Alejandra"), a documentary by Carmen Castillo and Guy Girard, which won the Fipa d'Or Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Castillo, recently returned from exile, escaped from Chile in 1974, after the home from which she, her husband Miguel Enriquez, and other leaders of the Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR, Movement of the Revolutionary Left) were continuing armed resistance against the junta was firebombed by the secret police. In the attack, Enriquez was killed; Castillo, seven months pregnant, eventually made her way to England.

Skinny Alejandra, the endearing nom de guerre that Marcia Merino was assigned by her friends in the MIR leadership, was jailed shortly after the coup. Under severe torture, Alejandra cracked and divulged information that led to the firebombing of MIR headquarters. In the documentary, Alejandra and Carmen Castillo depict their reconciliation, Alejandra's coming to terms with her own treason, and the residual impact of torture many years later.

Invited to the screening because of solidarity work, I felt strange as the only North American in an audience of more than 100 in the small conference rooms of the Salvador Allende Foundation - strange because in the palpable tension during the screening and the tearful discussion that followed, in which members of the audience related horrible accounts of their own torture, murders of family members, and the agonies of surviving while friends and relatives remain disappeared, not one word was mentioned about the complicity of the CIA, Henry Kissinger, and U.S. business interests in all these events.

To arrive at the Allende Foundation, one walks from the smog-filled, once beautiful broad avenue, the Alameda, that traverses the city from east to west, onto a small cul-de-sac whose white buildings contrast with the smoke-darkened commercial structures on the Alameda itself. The foundation, in the center of the cul-de-sac, opened during the first year after the restoration of formal democracy in 1990. Under the direction of Salvador's daughter, Isabel Allende (a sociologist and now an elected congressional deputy, the cousin of her more famous namesake, the novelist), the foundation houses a documentation center and hundreds of major art works donated by European, North American, and Latin American artists to the cultural programs of the Unidad Popular government before its fall in 1973. After the coup, this world-class collection, now mostly in storage at the foundation due to lack of display space, survived as a clandestine collection in what is now the basement of Santiago's contemporary art museum.

Transition to electoral government has achieved a space in Chile for the memory of Salvador Allende, and the return of his family members, as well as thousands of others on the Chilean left who had to leave during the dictatorship. (The change in government also has facilitated journeys to Chile by many foreigners like myself, who have unfinished business there because of involvement in the Unidad Popular's failed experiment with the "peaceful road to socialism," or in the international solidarity movement that followed the coup of 1973.) A funeral in Santiago during 1990 commemorated for the first time the dead president's passing. A huge plaque with the names of thousands of disappeared people graces a monument in Santiago's municipal cemetery. Murals with portraits of Allende, Victor Jara, Pablo Neruda, and other cultural and political leaders who died during the first months of the dictatorship again have appeared on walls of working-class neighborhoods, but usually are hard to notice amid the graffiti of Santiago's youth gangs.

Cultural events that recall the memory of the dictatorship years - La Flaca Alejandra, The House of the Spirits (the film version of novelist Isabel Allende's book about Chile, which appeared this year in English with Spanish subtitles to clarify the words of Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, and Winona Ryder for Chilean viewers), even the Allende Foundation itself - attract small groups of participants. Inti-Illimani and Angel Parra, who helped develop with Victor Jara and Isabel Parra and many others the "new song" so widely influential in Latin America, now give concerts in barrios of Santiago to large audiences, who applaud the technical mastery of these performances, but without the sense of political connectedness that was such a fundamental part of this music in earlier years.

What dissuades more from coming or connecting? From many Chileans who were adults during those exciting and anguishing times, one hears a longing to forget the past and to move on. From the younger generation who remember only the dictatorship, one hears a desire not to learn about the sadnesses of Chilean history. On all sides, the products of the marketplace also create diversion for a well-dressed and style-conscious public; secondhand markets permit acquisition of beautiful clothes and electronic equipment at prices that even Santiago's low incomes (averaging less than $500 a month) can afford. The pornography and sex industries create diversions of a different kind, visible for instance at hundreds of kiosks and newsstands. And then there still is fear, stemming partly from years of repression, and partly from knowledge that the same military officers who perpetrated the coup and ran the dictatorship still control the armed forces.

Dismantling the Public Sector

Arturo Jiron, chief of surgery at San Juan de Dios Hospital, a public hospital in a working-class neighborhood several blocks from the Allende Foundation, sat in his dimly lit office, his tall frame bent over a notebook computer, as I arrived for our interview about social medicine in Latin America. He has returned, like thousands of others, from exile to the reality of Chile's dismantled health and welfare systems.

Jiron trained on the Harvard surgical services at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, Peter Bent Brigham, and Lahey Clinic. Salvador Allende, himself a pathologist who as a senator during the 1950s had initiated Chile's path-breaking national health service, chose Jiron as Minister of Health for the Unidad Popular government. Although Jiron had not been particularly active politically and had no background in public health, he brought a reputation as a superb surgeon and medical educator. As Minister of Health, he convened a "council of elders" from the University of Chile's renowned School of Public Health, the first such school to be founded in Latin America.

On 11 September 1973, Jiron was the last person in the line of ministers and government officials who walked down the stairs to the first floor of La Moneda, the presidential palace which was on fire after the air force's precision bombing, to surrender to the military victors of the coup. Last in line because of his height, he says, Jiron also was the last person to see Allende alive. In answer to my question, Jiron notes simply that of course Allende committed suicide, in the tradition of Jose Manuel Balmaceda, the reformist president of Chile who killed himself in 1891 rather than surrender to a military coup.

After his own arrest, Jiron was tortured and sent for a year of prison, without a name, with only a number, on frigid Dawson Island near Antarctica. After his release, he worked in exile for fourteen years as a professor of surgery in Caracas. Following the plebiscite in 1988 that led to a transition to elected government, Jiron returned as chief of surgery in the same public university hospital where he worked before the coup.

These days, Jiron writes mainly for the clinical journal that health professionals and workers at his hospital have produced since 1953. He is working on a series of articles that he has introduced with a quote from Alice in Wonderland: "Could you tell me please what road I should take?" These articles describe the deterioration of Chile's previously outstanding public health system under both the dictatorship and the country's present civilian regime, whose "neoliberal" policies call for the further privatization of public industries, housing, education, and health programs.

Currently, Chile's public health sector cares for about 80 percent of the country's population, mostly working-class and poor people, yet it receives only 60 percent of public funds devoted to healthcare. On the other hand, a government-funded system, the Institution of Planned Health (Institucion de Salud Previsional, ISAPRE), channels 40 percent of public funds into the private sector to cover 20 percent of the population. This prepaid system, modeled by Chilean economists after large health maintenance organizations in the United States, provides services to employees of private firms and to some of their families, as well as other public-sector employees or self-employed people who can afford to pay the monthly premiums. Conservative economists in the current government believe that a prepaid system of managed competition should be extended throughout the public health sector. Jiron is surprised to learn about opposition to managed competition and advocacy for a single-payer national health program in the United States. The problems of market models in the health sector, he notes, have received no meaningful attention in Chilean policy discussions.

Public subsidization of private health care should prove advantageous to multinational corporations in Chile, if free-trade treaties allow these firms to hire and to provide health benefits for larger numbers of Chilean workers. From Jiron's viewpoint, NAFTA would also help expand markets in Chile for expensive medical technology manufactured in the United States. Predictably, this technology would be made available mainly to the private sector in health care, which would further divert critically needed funds from the public health sector.

Economic and Military Scandals

The year 1994 was one with many scandals in Chile. On the financial front, the public-sector Corporation of Copper (Corporacion del Cobre, CODELCO), announced an unprecedented annual loss of $260 million. CODELCO originated during the early 1970s, when the Unidad Popular government, under Allende's direction, nationalized the large copper mines owned by Kennecott, Anaconda, and other multinational corporations. Although the dictatorship increased financial compensation to these corporations, CODELCO survived pressures to privatize state industries during the dictatorship and also during subsequent elected governments whose neoliberal policies have promoted privatization. Right-wing politicians have failed so far in efforts to return to private hands the national resource that copper represents.

During the months after the announcement of CODELCO's loss, several investigations led to revelations that most of the loss stemmed from unsuccessful investments of CODELCO's profits in the futures market. These investigations also revealed that CODELCO's executives not only miscalculated in these bad investments but also may have been trying to benefit personally. Criminal proceedings have been initiated against three executives implicated in the case.

In the military realm, the notorious "Case of the Slit Throats" ("Caso Degollados") continues to threaten the delicate equilibrium between the civilian and military branches of government. During 1985, the bodies of three left-wing politicians were found in Santiago, all with their throats slit in the same way. In the waning years of the dictatorship, this embarrassing case contributed to the loss of international support that the military government received from countries like the United States and also heightened internal opposition to the military regime.

From the beginning, evidence implicated military officers and paramilitary conspirators in the assassinations. During the presidency of Patricio Aylwin, which began in 1990, investigations moved more quickly under the leadership of a judge, Milton Juica. These efforts culminated in March 1994, when charges were issued against General Rodolfo Stange, the current director of the national police force (Carabineros), as well as fifteen subordinate officers. From here, the case will wend its way through military courts, where substantial delays are expected, before it eventually reaches Chile's Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the center-right government of Eduardo Frei, who was elected to the presidency in December 1993, asked General Stange to resign because of his complicity in the case, but the general refused to comply. A dance ensued, choreographed by military leaders and civilian officials in the Department of justice. A series of announcements by the executive and military branches of government first communicated to the public that Stange would remain on paid vacation during continuing deliberations. Later, Frei personally repeated his request that Stange resign; Stange again refused. Stange's vacation was extended two more months. One week before his scheduled return from vacation, the civilian government and Carabineros jointly announced an agreement whereby Stange would remain in his paid position as director of the national police but would delegate all his duties to subordinate officers. In the end, Frei and his civilian colleagues in the executive branch lost face to the military.

Chile's constitution permits this kind of dance whenever a human rights case reaches a conclusion adverse to the military, and whenever policy differences arise between the military and civilian sectors of government. During the dictatorship, the military government put into effect a new constitution, which formally separated the military and civilian branches. This constitutional arrangement allows General Augusto Pinochet, head of the military junta, to remain as permanent commander-in-chief of the armed forces until at least 1997. The same provision gives the elected president of Chile no power to fire military officers like Stange, even with extensive evidence of wrongdoing. Most observers see little chance of the military's retaking control of the country, mainly because of the unfavorable international reaction that another coup would generate. But Chile's constitution continues to support the power of the same military leaders who ran the country during the dictatorship, as well as embarrassing dances like the Stange case, which reduce the civilian government's credibility both within and outside Chile.

A constitutional inability to control the military plays a crucial role in maintaining the ultra-free-market policies established during the dictatorship. The coalition government assembled by President Frei, who was elected with a 58 percent majority, includes ministers who represent the Christian democratic, social democratic, and socialist parties. Despite the previous commitment of these parties to welfare state politics and a strong public sector, Frei and his cabinet continue to reiterate their commitment to further privatization of state industries and services. The power of the military and the weakness of democratic institutions also mean that economic policies such as free trade agreements receive little meaningful debate.

Excluded from Frei's cabinet are the Communist Party and several splinter left parties, as well as representatives of the progressive coalition, Concertacion para la Democracia, that sponsored the surprisingly popular presidential candidacy of Manfred Max-Neff in the elections of December 1993. Emphasizing Chile's disastrous ecologic deterioration, Max-Neff s campaign generated local environmental organizations that remain active throughout the country.

Still hewing to a slightly updated Stalinist line, the Communist party continues to lose members. Volodia Teitelboim, long-term head of the Party, who survived the dictatorship because he was abroad at the time of the coup, has returned from exile and occasionally receives sardonic treatment in the Chilean media. As Pinochet left for a tour of the ex-Communist countries of eastern Europe, a cartoon in El Mercurio, Chile's conservative daily newspaper, depicted Pinochet dressed in a Russian hat and topcoat, asking Teitelboim, "I'm going to Moscow. Do you think I should offer them something?"

In other political actions, members of the revolutionary left in Santiago, numbering in the hundreds, occasionally toss Molotov cocktails into the streets of the capital. The resulting traffic snarls usually prompt the Frei government to issue further threats to wipe out these remnants of the guerrilla past. Some groups of workers, such as coal miners and primary care health workers, raise intermittent protests about working conditions, and residents of the low-income neighborhoods (poblaciones) that surround large cities like Santiago and Valparaiso raise intermittent protests about working or living conditions. But these protests remain sporadic and do not reflect organized social movements. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of university students march almost every week between the University of Chile and La Moneda subway stations, demanding rollbacks of the latest increases in student fees; no other political goals are discernible in these events.

Environment and NAFTA

In Chile's far south, talk of NAFTA appears frequently on television and in newspapers. Free trade with North America carries a promise of expanded markets for the region's products and expansion of shipping operations.

For Punta Arenas, the world's southernmost city, the prosperity that its strategic location on the Straights of Magellan has generated historically through shipping has continued to increase through exploitation of off-shore oil and mineral reserves. Contemplating the French rococo mansions of Chilean shipping magnates on Punta Arenas' central plaza, a visitor finds it hard to imagine that this city was once the scene of some of the strongest labor organizations in the Americas. Smashed by seventeen years of dictatorship, unions now are permitted to organize only within specific companies, rather than by trade across companies. Weak labor organizations, lax environmental regulations, and low taxes facilitated by the dismantling of the public sector provide the same attractions that NAFTA offers for Mexican entrepreneurs and their collaborators in the United States and Canada.

Throughout Chile's southern region, the climate is rapidly getting warmer. Punta Arenas, the gateway to Antarctica, seldom sees snow anymore. Near Torres del Paine National Park, one of the world's most stunning wilderness areas, sheep farmers continue to reduce the size of their herds, as the greenhouse effect and depletion of the ozone layer, experienced most drastically in this part of the southern hemisphere, reduce precipitation and increase the costs of maintaining grasslands.

Tourists to Punta Arenas usually go to the Seno Otway pinguinera, a remote beach where hundreds of penguins waddle in from the ocean in the late afternoon. There, the headmistress of the local German school has bought a parcel of coastline and set up a sanctuary for this species. German exchange students explain the complicated procedures that visitors must follow in walking two miles through Antarctic winds to get a glimpse of the penguins without endangering their habitat.

On the return trip to Punta Arenas, penguin enthusiasts can also observe modern mining techniques. In addition to penguins, the Seno Otway region contains coal reserves, which proponents see as a major contributor to Chile's economy as the country enters into NAFTA. Mile after mile of dirty slag fields from mining operations, situated in the otherwise pristine beauty of these vast Patagonian flatlands, makes the visitor wonder how the penguins will fare from economic progress.

Howard Waitzkin teaches internal medicine and social sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and is completing a Fulbright research project on social medicine in Latin America, based in Chile. His most recent book, the Politics of Medical Encounters, was published in 1993 as a Yale University Press paperback. The author expresses thanks to Chilean friends and colleagues who commented on an earlier draft of this article; they should best remain anonymous.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
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