December 17,
2000, 9:20 p.m.
Thanks to John
Burke and Kaite for grammatical and factual corrections to my Cooper
review. I usually can't edit my own work until at least a day later.
I updated my links, finally!
4:40 p.m. ||
Marc Cooper and me
listening: Le Tigre s/t LP, Cyndi Lauper,
She's So Unusual LP, Huggy Bear Taking the Rough with the
Smooch 10"
wearing: hot pink dress, black tights, and Cherries in the Snow lipstick
also working on: final grades, my column, and my dance moves
I wrote a review
of Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir, by Marc Cooper
(Verso Books: London, 2000) for Maximumrocknroll. If anyone
sees errors (grammatical or factual), let me know!
What would otherwise read
like fiction is instead a harrowing premonition. When Marc Cooper meets
the socialist nephew of General Augusto Pinochet at a street celebration
in Chile, the encounter is spine chilling. We already know that
bloodshed is but months away, even as the nephew spits, "My uncle is no
democrat. He's a fascist."
Now
an awarding-winner journalist and an editor to The Nation, Marc Cooper was a
translator to President Salvador Allende until the U.S.-supported
military coup of 1973. Banished from the California university system by
then-Governor Ronald Reagan for his anti-war activities, a twenty
year-old Marc Cooper came to Chile in 1971. The first democratically
elected Marxist head of state, Salvador Allende had long been targeted
as an enemy of the Chilean elite and the vested interests of the United
States government (headed by President Richard Nixon, infamous for his
dirty dealing). And as Cooper notes, "the example of a peacefully
elected Socialist government coming to power was even more threatening
to U.S. geopolitical interests than the model of armed revolution."
Seeing no reason "to stand by and watch a country go communist because
of the irresponsibility of its own people," Henry Kissinger orchestrated
the "destabilization" of the Allende administration. Nixon accordingly
earmarked millions in funds for right-wing activities (including
parliamentary bribes and grants to opposition parties), covert
propaganda machinery and several coup attempts - the last of which was
successfully led by General Augusto Pinochet.
Following the coup
thousands of suspected communists, socialists and all stripes of
leftists were detained, tortured, raped, and/or murdered, many in
Santiago's National Stadium. During his seventeen-year regime, the
Pinochet dictatorship declared a sustained "dirty war" against the left
in which thousands of people were "disappeared" by the security forces.
(At least three thousand people are known to have been murdered, and
estimates of the total number of disappeared range upward of 15,000;
many more were "simply" imprisoned, tortured, and raped.) And as an
avowed capitalist (and thus a suitable U.S. ally), Pinochet instituted a
series of neoliberal economic policies guided by "the Chicago Boys,"
free-market economists trained at the University of Chicago thrilled for
the opportunity to test their theories. Not surprisingly their "free
market" was accomplished by the brutal repression of labor organizing and
produced the inevitably massive inequalities of income and wealth.
What develops from
this passionate anti-memoir is an evocative series of impressions (and
analyses) of the political turmoil as Cooper chronicles the downfall of
Chile: "A century-worth of accumulated democratic and social advances
would be bloodily dismantled overnight, and a new, radical capitalist
order... was built in its stead." Writing from Santiago, Cooper
reconstructs the tense atmosphere of the final days of the Allende
government, including political tensions (between leftists, between
leftists and rightists), the steady hastening of class war, and his
hiding and subsequent evacuation under armed U.N. protection. In his
struggle to escape, his attempts to negotiate with the U.S. embassy are
particularly disturbing. Denying him an emergency passport ("There is no
emergency"), the embassy employee chuckles as she watches the tanks roll
by: "Allende's going to get it!" Cooper's devastation upon hearing
Allende's defiant last words broadcast over the last free frequency (all
other radio and television stations and tower had either been seized or
destroyed) is palpable.
Almost as
heartbreaking as the frantic communiqués from the midst of the coup are
Cooper's later dispatches from a contemporary Chile. Returning (i.e.,
sneaking in) in a series of visits during the Pinochete regime, the
despair from the streets is vivid. By 1975 all civil rights had been
abolished and torture institutionalized in police interrogations. The
U.S.-sponsored laissez-faire program destroyed the national economy,
producing twenty-five percent unemployment and sustained poverty for
about forty percent of Chile's population. So terrible was this
devastation that in 1983 Cooper witnessed new opposition -in spite of
violent repression-- in the waning years of the dictatorship. Mass
movements and Days of National Protest are attended by both the poor and
economically ruined middle-classes, now haunted by the lingering, almost
utopian memory of Salvador Allende.
Cooper has harsh
words, however, for the Chile that emerges in the aftermath of
Pinochet's junta. Cooper incisively portrays a Chile gripped by
historical amnesia and political cowardice, radically divorced from a democratic
and socialist past. In 1998 Cooper writes, "Today, after seventeen years
of military dictatorship and eight years of 'democracy,' what passes for
the Left is complicit in managing a grotesque system that allows
murderers to walk free and torturers to be elected to national office,
that boasts one of the most unequal economic systems in the world, where
even public schools are privatized. Chile, perhaps more than anywhere on
earth, is a place where idolatry of the market has most deeply
penetrated." His discerning portrait of a capitalist order and commodity
culture determinedly ignoring the abuses of the dictatorship and the
present failure of the new "democracy" resonates strongly in the United
States.
As a contributing
editor to The
Nation, Marc Cooper would undoubtedly argue
that we would be remiss in believing that this era of U.S. Cold War
policy is over, or irrelevant. The legacy of Kissinger - who repeatedly
assured Pinochet that the United States supported his regime with
friendship and mutual purpose- was echoed during the Reagan-Bush
administration. (Reagan ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick was rather
fond of totalitarian regimes and
right-wing terrorism.) The free-market economics of Milton Friedman,
close advisor to Pinochet during the dictatorship, are acclaimed in an
era of accelerating globalization and transnational capital. And now
that the junior Bush stands elected after a bloodless coup, we would do
well to note the advisors and committees he will depend upon for advice.
Moreover, the seeming indifference of
the American public to the recent declassification of CIA
records --detailing the pivotal role the U.S. played in the
destabilization and coup of a democratic Chilean state-- is instructive. In
the mainstream media the death of former President Nixon inspired magazine
covers and eulogies, the renaming of a library and perhaps a
few avenues, but no in-depth recovery of his blatant abuses of democratic
principles or his authoritarian ambitions. (Although a 1975
Senate committee headed by Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, did
establish that the CIA had been involved in covert operations in Chile
and had tried to foment a military coup in 1970, it seems to have
had little lasting impact on either the American consciousness about Chile or
U.S. international policy.) Nothing about Viet Nam nor Chile, and the
scandal of Watergate became the backdrop of a (still clever) teen comedy
starring Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams from Dawson's
Creek. (Appropriately titled Dick.)
As for Pinochet, he
was arrested in London in 1998 and spent 503 days in custody before
being allowed to return home earlier this year. A British court finally
ruled that he was too old and sick to undergo trial for international
human rights abuses in Spain. Since returning from London, however, the
Chilean Supreme Court has stripped him of his immunity, paving the way
for Pinochet to be tried in his own country for abuses committed during
his 17-year dictatorship. Cooper considers too, the impact of
international attention in Chile and the possibility that Pinochet (and
his U.S. supporters) may finally be brought to justice in the "official"
historical record.
Pinochet
and Me is not a comprehensive history but rather a "personal
journal," one that nevertheless demonstrates the everyday impact of
historical and material forces and the necessity of recognizing
those forces for what they are, and crucially, what they do.
Politics is not separate from the daily routine of Cooper nor any of his
Chilean contacts, but figures centrally in limiting and defining the
ways they each are allowed to move -or not move- through the world. But
it's also a skillfully executed political thriller (way better than
those mass market novels by Tom Clancy and other shills), which may
engage those who aren't necessarily versed in the real-life intrigues
and coups helpfully instigated by the U.S. government. Maybe they will
seek out those histories after paging through this--?