Neoliberalism Summary

Neoliberalism and its implementation has had a major economic and cultural impact on countries in South America of which Chile being the most prominent example. From the beginning, neoliberalism was a project that was to restore the class power where the economic elites are in control. The theoretical utopianism of the neoliberal argument was primarily used as a method to justify the actions of General Augusto Pinochet’s militant rule where basic human rights were continuously violated. The basis of neoliberalism was deregulation and privatization of various sectors in a free market economy, however the consequences of these policies caused for many years of human rights violations under the rule of General Pinochet. The memories and the historical

Pinochet, with the help from the Chicago Boys, began the world’s first experiment with Neoliberalism. The intentions of neoliberalism in Chile as a political and economic movement were to restore the power of the elites and to dismantle the Welfare State of the previous Keynesian era. David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism asserts that neoliberalism could only have displaced embedded neoliberalism through the use of force such as through military power in Chile (Harvey pg. 40). Harvey discusses that any political movement that holds individual freedoms to be important is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold (Harvey pg. 41). Neoliberalism in Chile completely disregarded individual freedoms and the economic policies developed by the Chicago Boys was the main instigator for human rights violations. They advocated for deregulation and privatization as well as other free market policies as they gained higher status as leaders during General Pinochet’s rule as dictator. The Chicago Boys acting as economic advisors their positions as only to influence the Chilean economy and considered

The coup was also justified in terms of Pinochet with his fabrication of “Plan Z”. Steve J. Stern, in his book Battling For Hearts and Minds, discusses “Plan Z” and states that the leftist revolutionaries are planning to govern by an authoritarian rule and will deliberately murder those on the right. However, more importantly, Stern examines a few types of memory narratives that are correlated with the different ways in which people remember the Pinochet regime. The narrative of memory as an unresolved rupture resides predominantly in those families who are direct victims of the murders or disappearances during Pinochet’s regime. Plan Z is just one example of the misinformation and lack of truthfulness that occurred during the regime. The collateral damages of the Pinochet regime and the use of his militant force to administer new economic policies stretches to so many families in Chile. Many families lost loved ones who suddenly disappeared and then were never to be heard from again. All those who lived through the Pinochet regime and recall the repression and brute force that he had imposed on the Chilean population feel the same agony and pain. These pains are not easy to overcome and families still have hope that one day their loved ones will return or they will at least find the answers for their unresolved questions about what happened. Elizabeth