Chicago Boys is a controversial documentary that tackles some very tough, deep questions. It shows how economic policies can lift countries out of poverty. Economic reforms are hard and painful, even when they lead to better outcomes for most people, some inevitably get hurt in the process.
That’s what happened in my home country in the 1990s, and it’s also what happened in Chile in the 1970s and ’80s under Augusto Pinochet. His policies transformed Chile from a struggling nation into a leading Latin American economy. But it’s crucial to discuss the price of that economic transformation.
The price was at least 3,000 lives. Augusto Pinochet’s regime killed or “disappeared” thousands and destroyed a functioning democracy. Was it the right decision?
Some defenders of the coup argue it was a necessary, preemptive strike to save Chile from a communist dictatorship. However, most historians reject this “lesser evil” justification. The scale of Pinochet’s documented, systematic violence so vastly exceeded the political conflict of the preceding years that it stands not as a necessary evil, but as a catastrophic rupture of Chile’s democratic life.
Of course, I don’t know all the details, but after watching the film I’m left convinced those deaths were completely unnecessary. The violence looks more like an emotional purge than a rational political calculation.
Destroying a sick democracy? Perhaps, there may be no point in preserving a system that has truly failed its people. But killing thousands for no clear, defensible reason? That isn’t reform, it’s a crime.
History shows that sometimes a group of people is suppressed by any means necessary because its ideology is seen as an existential threat. People in power can feel forced by their convictions to take this gamble. The DEA believes drug traffickers are evil and almost everyone agrees terrorists are evil. We often identify groups we deem so malicious that we consider their elimination a necessary, preventive act.
In the case of Chile, this logic simply doesn’t fit. The left-wing radicals were relatively toothless and lacked broad popular support. What happened looks less like a necessary, targeted suppression and more like the consequence of paranoia fused with absolute, centralized power.