September 11, 2023, marks the fiftieth anniversary of General Pinochet’s military coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende. While it is now widely recognized that Pinochet authorized large-scale human rights abuses, there is an accompanying narrative that he also unleashed an economic miracle...
via embrace of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” vision of a market economy.
That said, the myth argument is about Pinochet’s policies, and not Allende’s. The argument begins by recognizing that Chile was subject to two rounds of “Chicago Boys” shock therapy, and the first round has been totally written out of the Pinochet miracle narrative.in which per capita income fell below that of 1960. The crisis was resolved by a massive government bailout of the banking system.
One final point is that Pinochet also persisted with many state-led innovations from the past. Thus, copper mining remained under public ownership and Chile still has a national health system. That further reinforces the argument that there was no “Pinochet economic miracle”. Instead, Pinochet’s effect was to move Chile in an oppressive and inegalitarian direction.
The “Pinochet economic miracle” narrative is profoundly misleading. Worse yet, it is a political menace for two reasons. First, it risks tacitly promoting the notion that dictatorship may be legitimate to the extent it offers a road to prosperity. Second, the Pinochet regime embraced Neoliberalism which promotes anti-democratic tendencies by fracturing society.
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