Is Pinochet the Model?

Angelo M. Codevilla

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1993

Summary:  The "Pinochet model," a potent mixture of authoritarianism and liberal economic reform, is sold as the elixir to nearly any country ailing under socialist transition. But the years of improvisation by Chile's reformers actually leave scant recipe to follow. The secret of Chile's turnabout, if any can be found, was simply the inspiration to shrink the state. Any country can do it, without a caudillo in charge.

President Salvador Allende's socialist-communist coalition, elected in 1970 with 36 percent of the vote, represented the culmination of a long history of statist government in Chile. Although Allende's economic policies differed more in degree than in kind from modern interest-group redistributionism, the regime presented itself as avowedly Marxist. It instituted food rationing, introduced a new school curriculum that amounted to indoctrination, ignored more than 7,000 court rulings, and replaced the rule of law with the prerogative of its partisans. As popular resistance mounted, Allende did his best to bring the military into his fold, hoping to borrow its force or at least to deny it to his enemies, which by 1973 included the entire political spectrum outside the extreme left. Both the congress and the supreme court formally declared that Allende had breached the constitution and asked that the military intervene.

It did, and during Pinochet's 16 years in power the regime and the far left goaded each other in word and deed, producing death and rancor. In a typical incident, a riot squad caught a young couple with a Molotov cocktail and used it to set them afire. Torture was common. Many observers of Chile's experience have thus concluded that Pinochet's repressive rule was ultimately responsible for the eclipse of the country's deeply entrenched leftist culture. But they are as mistaken as those who predicted in the 1980s that Pinochet was merely a goon unwittingly paving the way for communism. Both views focus on a struggle between counterinsurgency and opposition forces that was more violent than meaningful. They overlook the more significant political battle that Pinochet waged against the entire establishment that had ruled Chile since the 1930s.

The generals' guns proved far less important than the ideas they adopted. None of the Chilean reforms that have drawn the world's interest were accomplished by force. In fact, the generals' agenda required peculiarly unmilitary kinds of force-the force by which one conceives plans and holds one's team together, the force by which one persuades people to vote yes rather than no, or to abandon an old social security scheme and sign up with a voluntary new plan, and the force to say no to friendly business people looking for a special break.

Each of the groups that had asked for the military's intervention to overthrow the Allende government in September 1973 hoped to be the generals' special beneficiary. The generals, however, judged that Allende's avowedly Marxist regime was only the climax of the long-growing tendency of Chileans to use state power to try to live off one another-a tendency to which all parties had contributed. Rather than arbitrate indefinitely among bad alternatives, the generals took power having already decided to try to break the political system's bad habits and to inculcate new ones.

When Pinochet made the generals' agenda unmistakable in March 1974, Chilean politics divided along a new line. The business community split. Some business people hard-pressed by the Allende regime were even more frightened by generals who promised to do away with all privileged relationships. Others kept their fears to themselves and sided with the generals. In the conservative parties the split was generational, with the young tending to support the military's promise of economic freedom and impartial government at the expense of a long political time-out. On the other side, the Christian Democrats, who had begged the army's help against the socialists and defended the coup abroad, now joined the socialists and communists in demonizing Pinochet.

Pinochet wavered between reformers and old-style conservatives, and the long exercise of power dulled his political focus. Nevertheless, more often than not he stuck to an inherently productive agenda, one that used consumer sovereignty to combat the power of politicians to draw rent from society. The thrust of the regime's reforms combined the military's attachment to the idea of frugal, impartial, authoritative government with the free-market preferences of its favorite civilians. Legal-constitutional and economic reforms worked to a coherent end because the regime understood that liberal government requires liberal economics and vice versa.

REINVENTING GOVERNMENT

The world has known innumerable brutal regimes that have not bettered their country's economy or mentality. But the drafters of Chile's new constitution and "organic laws," as well as those charged with the economic reforms, concentrated on fixing what they saw as previous regimes' fatal flaw: the state, they believed, had manipulated, distorted and increasingly embittered group competition.

The authors scorned nothing so much as modern states that tout their citizens' freedom to elect their own government while forcing them to obtain permission to work out the least details of personal, family and professional life. The new constitution thus puts special emphasis on safeguarding citizens' freedom from government. It is deliberately friendly to individual rather than group rights. Equal treatment before the law is safeguarded by allowing citizens to take the government to court for perceived arbitrariness or illegal behavior. It specifies that the right of free association also implies the freedom not to join a group, that each family may educate its own children without state interference, and that no law may deprive a person of property or professional preference. The right to life is protected even before birth.

Chilean policymakers did not try to improve the economy through economic policy alone. They realized that weakening party bossism by requiring democratic procedures within parties and cutting the ties between politicians and interest groups is at least as important to securing an investment climate as establishing an independent central bank. Chile's reformers tried to think of as many ways as possible, tiny steps along with big ones, to reduce political patronage and to remove government from the majority of people's lives while maintaining a safety net for the poorest.