“Midnight, our sons and daughters
were cut down and taken from us
hear their heartbeat
we hear their heartbeat
In the wind we hear their laughter
in the rain we see their tears
hear their heartbeat
hear their heartbeat”
----- “Mothers of the Disappeared” U2 “Joshua Tree”
The last cut on the album The Joshua Tree is a song called “The Mothers of the Disappeared” in which U2 sings about the thousands of dissidents who were 'disappeared' in Latin America in the 70's and early 80's. When I first heard the song, images of Nazi concentration camps immediately sprang to mind, not knowing what had transpired south of the border.
I was to learn later, reading Naomi Klein's “The Shock Doctrine” of the horrors perpetrated by fascist regimes in Latin America during those years. There was Augusto Pinochet's Chile:
“Pinochet held power for seventeen years, and during that time he changed direction several times. The country's period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties—a full decade after the Chicago Boys (here referring to Friedman's University of Chicago acolytes who now held high positions within these governments) implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction. That's because in 1982, despite its strict adherence to Chicago Doctrine, Chile's economy crashed: its debt exploded,, it faced hyperinflation once again and unemployment hit 30 percent—ten times higher than it was under Allende. The main cause was the piranhas, the Enron-style financial houses that the Chicago Boys had freed from all regulation, had bought up the country's assets on borrowed money and run up an enormous debt of 14 billion....
What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance's share of the national wealth.
That was—what many Chileans understandably see as a war of the rich against the poor and middle class—is the real story of Chile's economic “miracle”. By 1988, when the economy had stabilized and was growing rapidly, 45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world—out of 123 countries in which the United Nations tracks inequality, Chile ranked 116th, making it the 8th most unequal country on the list” (1)
The experiment was repeated by the military junta then governing Brazil as well as the governments of Uruguay and Argentina, with strikingly similar results. And, as the reforms spread the people began to disappear.
“The newly declassified documents from Brazil show that when Argentina's generals were preparing their 1976 coup, they wanted 'to avoid suffering an international campaign like the one that has been unleashed against Chile.” To achieve that goal, less sensational repression tactics were needed—lower-profile ones capable of spreading terror but not so visible to the prying international press. In Chile, Pinochet soon settled on disappearances. Rather than openly killing or even arresting their prey, soldiers would snatch them, take them to clandestine camps, torture and often kill them, then deny any knowledge. Bodies were thrown into mass graves. According to Chile's truth commission, established in May 1990, the secret police would dispose of some victims by dropping them into the ocean from helicopters “after first cutting their stomach open with a knife the keep the bodies from floating.” In addition to their lower profile, disappearances turned out to be an even more effective means of spreading terror than open massacres, so destabilizing was the idea that apparatus of the state could be used to make people vanish into thin air.
“Night Hangs Like a Prisoner
Stretched over Black and Blue
Hear their heartbeats
Hear their heartbeats”
By the mid-seventies, disappearances had become the primary enforcement tool of the Chicago School (3) juntas throughout the Southern Cone—and none embraced the practice more zealously than the generals occupying Argentina's presidential palace. By the end of their reign, an estimated thirty thousand people had been disappeared. Many of them, like their Chilean counterparts, were thrown from planes into the muddy waters of the Rio de la Plata. (4)
In Argentina, Klein reports, prisoners were taken to one of 300 camps and tortured. And so it went, year upon year.
Sound familiar? This is the playbook our Maggots are now seeking to emulate. 14 billion dollars has been appropriated to construct hundreds of concentration camps in this country. People are openly and brazingly being disappeared with much fanfare. The Maggots, as any fascist worthy of the name, are proud of it. All in service to the newly minted Oligarchy that has seized power in the United States.
“In the trees our sons stand naked
Through the walls our daughters cry
see their tears
in the rainfall” (5)
----------------------
Klein, Naomi. “The Shock Doctrine” The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Copyright 2007 Henry Holt and Company, New York, New York. Pages 104-105
ibid. pages 109-110.
Milton Friedman was head of the Economics department at the University of Chicago. A staunch advocate of 'free market' economics his theories have been widely debunked. Friedman, the darling of America's Idiot Wrong spent his last days advising every tin-horn fascist dictator who would pay the freight. Thankfully, he is no longer with us.
Ibid. page 110
U2, “Mothers of the Disappeared”, from the album Joshua Tree.
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