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An Anniversary and a Death: Latin America After Pinochet

December 13, 2006

By Suzanne Rumsey

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A reflection on the death of former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet and his influence in Latin America

On December 10, 2006, International Human Rights Day, former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet died at the age of 91.  His death marks a symbolic watershed, not only for Chile, but for Latin America as a whole. 
Pinochet came to power in a bloody military coup in 1973, for 17 years he ruled Chile with an Iron fist. During his dictatorship, over 3,000 people were killed or disappeared and thousands more were forced into exile.  While Pinochet spent the final years of his life fighting charges of human rights violations and crimes against humanity, as well as corruption charges, he was never found guilty of those charges by the Chilean courts.  Thus, while many are celebrating his death, they are also mourning the fact that he will forever enjoy impunity from justice.
Pinochet’s neo-liberal economic program led to deregulation, privatization of everything from state industry to pensions, the roll back of unions and the rewriting of the constitution.  These measures, hailed as a  “miracle” by the promoters of neo-liberalism and instituted a group of Chilean economists known as “The Chicago Boys”, resulted in the slowest overall growth in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s and increased inequality among Chilean citizens. By 1989, Chilean workers were earning less than in 1973. 
As in Chile, justice for the victims of past and present human rights violations remains elusive throughout much of Latin America, and the legacy of structural adjustment programs and free trade has made the region the most unequal in the world according to the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean’s (ECLAC) 2006 Social Panorama on Latin America. 
What then does the other side of this watershed moment that Pinochet’s death marks look like in the region?  In early 2006, Michelle Bachelet was elected as Chile’s first woman president, heading the centre-left coalition. Her father, an army general who opposed the coup, died in prison, and Bachelet and her mother were themselves imprisoned for a period of time.  As has occurred recently in other Latin American countries (Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina, and most recently, Nicaragua), elections have brought to power a number of left or centre-left governments, along with the region’s first indigenous president elected in Bolivia.
But with the exception of Venezuela and Cuba, all of these governments have found their hands tied by previously imposed IMF and World Bank economic conditionalities.  This has left them to tinker with, but not transform their national and regional economies.
In Mexico, Central America and the Andean region (Bolivia excepted), where right or centre-right governments hold sway, free trade agreements are being signed with the U.S. and Canada while repression grows against civil society, including indigenous organizations, who oppose these cornerstones of neo-liberal economics.  At the same time “Another World is Possible” continues to be a rallying cry for the region’s people’s movements who locally, nationally and regionally are pressing for more just and equitable economic policies even in the face of repression.
Others in the region are voting with their feet and leaving their communities to the region’s large urban centres, and increasingly to El Norte.  According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) between 2000 and 2005, the number of Latin American and Caribbean emigrants increased from 21 million to 25 million.  19.3 million of those went to the United States, and 60% were of Mexican origin.  As the United States has militarized its border, some 1.2 million people were detained in 2005 trying to enter the U.S. undocumented.  Families and governments alike, particularly those of Mexico and Central America, increasingly look to the remittances that this social upheaval results in.  In 2005, Latin American countries received $54 billion US in remittances from their citizens abroad.  Nevertheless, 38.5% of the 525 million Latin Americans live in poverty and 14.7% live in extreme poverty.
 
Throughout the region, the work of those seeking justice for the victims of past and present human rights violations continues.  From the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, to the National Movement for Human Rights in Guatemala, to the families of the women murdered in Ciudad Jua¡rez on the Mexico/U.S. border, the painstaking and often painful, investigations and gathering of DNA and other evidence continues despite threats and repression against these organizations and their members. 
With the exception of Colombia, “peace”  that is, the formal end of internal armed conflicts  has come to the region and the military dictatorships are a thing of the past, and yet much of the region’s population continues to experience violence, be it economic, political or simply, criminal.  Violence against women in countries like Mexico and Guatemala appears to be on the increase.  One of the most brutal forms of violence against women is known a “femicide”, the killing of women simply because they are women.  In some countries, such as Mexico and Guatemala, femicide is now known as “feminicide”, defined as the genocide of women when the state offers no guarantees nor creates the conditions of security for women in the community, home or workplace.  In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, over 300 women have been killed and in Guatemala, close to 700 women were killed in 2005 alone. 
The wounds of war and dictatorship have sadly, not been healed, the military and security structures — and the weapons– that caused those wounds have not, in most instances, been dismantled, and as noted in the case of General Pinochet, impunity prevails.  Some describe the region’s present political reality as one of “low intensity democracy”.  The institutions of democracy exist — regular elections, legislative bodies, legal systems — but in many instances they are nothing more than hollow shells, unable or unwilling to address the root causes of violence.
In this time on the other side of the watershed marked by General Pinochet’s  death, and in the face of the enormous challenges facing Latin America and the Caribbean, neither we nor our partners can do everything.  But we can do “something” and do it to the best of our abilities, knowing that others are also doing something in common cause with us, and that together we are “prophets of a future that is not our own.” 

We plant seeds that one day will grow. 
We water seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future  promise.
We cannot do everything,
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. 
This enables us to do something and to do it very well!
We are workers not master builders, ministers not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future that is not our own.
–Archbishop Oscar Romero

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