Were Women and Young People the Heart of the Pinochet Regime

Translated from the Spanish by Thomas Holloway. — eds.

This article is part of Fondecyt Project No. 1080162, “La guerra social de Pinochet,” supervised by the author. I am grateful for the collaboration of the entire research team.

1. The literature on the Chilean military regime is extensive. See in particular Eugenio Ahumada et al., Chile: La memoria prohibida: Las violaciones a los derechos humanos, 1973 – 1983, 3 vols. (Santiago: Pehuén, 1989); Patricia Verdugo, Los zarpazos del Puma (Santiago: CESOC, 1989); Alejandro Foxley, Experimentos neoliberales en América Latina (Santiago: Corporacion de Investigaciones Economicas para América Latina, 1982); Pilar Vergara, Auge y caída del neoliberalismo en Chile (Santiago: FLACSO, 1985); Paul W. Drake and Iván Jaksic, eds., El difícil camino hacia la democracia en Chile, 1982 – 1990, trans. Fernando Bustamante (Santiago: FLACSO, 1993); Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile under

Hispanic American Historical Review 93:4doi 10.1215/00182168- 2351638Copyright 2013 by Duke University Press

Were Women and Young People the

Heart of the Pinochet Regime?

Rise and Decline of the Secretariats

Verónica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate

On the day of General Augusto Pinochet’s funeral in December 2006, an important contingent of those in attendance were women and men who had spent their youthful years during the military regime and were its supporters. Their presence reflected the leadership that Pinochet represented for groups of women and youth, whose loyalty did not die with him.

This situation should not be surprising. The military regime proclaimed itself a government with and for young people and defined the Chilean woman as its most dedicated supporter. More concretely, the regime’s two most impor-tant government agencies were the National Secretariat of Women and the National Secretariat of Youth, whose constituencies have become the political heirs of the Pinochet regime, the most prominent supporters of its program and the most notable defenders of it against accusations of human rights violations.

The secretariats and the social underpinnings of the Chilean dictatorship have not attracted the interest of researchers, as studies have focused instead on repression, structural changes, the authoritarian political system, and the tran-sition to democracy.1 Female voluntary organizations were the topic of some

Hispanic American Historical Review

Published by Duke University Press

548 HAHR / November / Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate

studies by sociologists in the 1980s. The mothers’ centers were seen as instru-ments of social regulation and patronage, providing symbolic compensation for the Feminine Power organization that had fought against the Popular Unity government.2 For other scholars, the Centro de Madres de Chile (CEMA Chile) and the Secretariat of Women were “civil bulwarks” for the regime, engaging in welfare activities and, secondarily, indoctrination. They were seen as mecha-nisms for social control intended to strengthen the patriarchal order.3

Carlos Huneeus has suggested that in many respects the Pinochet regime resembled that of Francisco Franco in Spain, which was a principal point of reference for Pinochet because Franco’s corporatism was influential among important sectors of the Chilean political Right. For instance, one such per-son influenced by Franco was Jaime Guzmán, who founded the Secretariat of Youth in order to mobilize young people and influence the government with their ideas, accentuating the militancy of so- called national reconstruction. The political failure of that secretariat then led Guzmán to create the Youth Front for National Unity, which was inspired by the Youth Front of the Spanish Falange.4 Other scholars, including myself, have suggested that the secretari-ats resulted from the desire to organize civilian support for the regime among those who had opposed the Popular Unity government, while the Secretariat of Youth specifically grew out of the anti- leftist political agenda of Guzmán and gremialismo.5 Guzmán’s project of building the right- wing movement of the

Pinochet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Carlos Huneeus, El régimen de Pinochet (Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana, 2000); Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, El golpe después del golpe: Leigh vs. Pinochet: Chile 1960 – 1980 (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2003).

2. Teresa Valdés et al., Centros de madres 1973 – 1989: ¿Solo disciplinamiento? (Santiago: FLACSO, 1989).

3. Norbert Lechner and Susana Levy, Notas sobre la vida cotidiana, vol. 3, El disciplinamiento de la mujer (Santiago: FLACSO, 1984), 2.

4. Huneeus, El régimen de Pinochet, introduction, 357 – 70. Constable and Valenzuela also recognize the seductive power of Franco for Pinochet, but with insufficient emphasis on it. See Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, 70 – 71.

5. The word gremialismo refers to the Movimiento Gremial founded in 1967 at the Catholic University of Chile by law student Jaime Guzmán. This was a franquista- inspired movement with corporatist tendencies. Its thought came to be known as gremialismo and its members as gremialistas, and its roots may be traced to traditionalist Catholicism and the ideas of the Spanish conservative thinker Juan Vázquez de Mella. It held a hierarchical, top- down view of society, which was understood as a harmonious, conflict- free community conducted by a “natural” leader. On account of these antidemocratic features, this movement was quite marginal in Chile’s early twentieth- century history, and its ideas only became influential in the struggle against the Popular Unity Party and subsequently under the military cover of Pinochet’s regime.



Were Women and Young People the Heart of the Pinochet Regime? 549

future required broad social support, especially among the lower classes, which the Secretariat of Youth was intended to build. By this interpretation, the secre-tariat emerged from Chilean political developments rather than from external inspiration and was one of the original elements of pinochetismo.6

Aside from these debates, it is important to point out that the secretari-ats have been downplayed in analyses of the Chilean dictatorship. Sociologists studying these agencies have focused primarily on patriarchy rather than on their political role. Huneeus analyzes gremialismo as a political project and as part of the construction of a new Right rather than focusing on the role of the secretariats in the political system. While he recognizes that the Secretariat of Women was important, he concludes that it did not succeed because it “lacked a leadership cadre and a core of activists who would promote its activities through the whole country.”7 No study has focused on the role of the General Secretariat of Government, the agency in charge of the Secretariats of Women and Youth; it was one of the most powerful ministries of the dictatorship and was linked directly to the personal rule of Pinochet. This situation has persisted because studies of the dictatorship commonly fail to distinguish between the military and civilian sectors, as if both followed the same logic. Because of such assump-tions, the interests of the gremialistas and the neoliberals are taken to represent the views of the armed forces. Thus most of the literature on the dictatorial project in Chile focuses on civilian actors rather than on why the armed forces accepted their proposals, some of which clashed with the military’s worldview. This is reflected in scholarship on the secretariats, in which the interests of Guzmán and the military are seen as the same.

This article analyzes the role of the Secretariats of Women and Youth as part of the military regime in an effort to understand the logic of what the gov-ernment had in mind for those agencies. This includes the question of whether the civilians in the secretariats had their own projects, but my intention here is not to study the civilians who participated in the secretariats but rather to

6. Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Nacionales y gremialistas: El “parto” de la nueva derecha política chilena, 1964 – 1973 (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2008), chap. 7; Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Rolando Álvarez Vallejos, and Julio Pinto Vallejos, Su revolución contra nuestra revolución, vol. 1, Izquierdas y derechas en el Chile de Pinochet (1973 – 1981) (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2006), chap. 2; Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “Construction du pouvoir et régime militaire sous Augusto Pinochet,” Vingtième Siècle, no. 105 (2010): 93 – 107; Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “ ‘¡Estamos en guerra, señores!’: El régimen militar de Pinochet y el ‘pueblo’, 1973 – 1980,” Historia (Santiago) 1, no. 43 (2010): 163 – 201.

7. Huneeus, El régimen de Pinochet, 355.




approach the topic from the perspective of the military. According to the pos-tulates of political science, a highly repressive regime such as Pinochet’s might have pushed for the political demobilization of social groups, as happened in Argentina and, although not as completely, in Uruguay. Why, then, did Chile’s dictatorship decide to organize and mobilize its social bases of support? The Pinochet regime did not totally renounce social mobilization or the existence of civilian political cadres. Instead it promoted them, in contrast to other authori-tarian models in the Southern Cone.

While I will not focus on the social consensus behind the dictatorship, that issue is related to my analytical problem, because one of the purposes of the secretariats was to build bases of support.8 The secretariats reflected the singularity of Chile among Southern Cone dictatorships. These organizations followed the political evolution of the regime, serving different objectives and situations and changing as the regime developed a defined program. This is important for understanding the Chilean case, because not all dictatorships have a long- term political project. More specifically, the secretariats responded to the need to transform the civilians who supported the coup d’état into bases of support for what followed, in addition to legitimizing the regime and serv-ing as intermediaries between society and the state during the period when the dictatorship did not yet have a defined project and political parties, unions, and social organizations were banned. Thus the secretariats’ high point was from 1973 to 1978. After this, when the regime defined its project and began to put it into practice, the secretariats lost their central purpose and began to decline. They did not disappear completely, however, because their original role as a political base remained unchanged. This interpretation puts great importance on the development of a long- term political project by the Chilean regime and distinguishes the period of searching for that project from the period when a clear programmatic framework had been defined, in which political and social organization were to have a specific role.

8. Ian Kershaw, La dictadura nazi: Problemas y perspectivas de interpretación, trans. Julio Sierra (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2004); Robert Gellately, No sólo Hitler: La Alemania nazi entre la coacción y el consenso, trans. Teofilo de Lozoya (Barcelona: Crítica, 2002); Aldo Marchesi, “ ‘Una parte del pueblo uruguayo feliz, contento, alegre’: Los caminos culturales del consenso autoritario durante la dictadura,” in Carlos Demasi et al., La dictadura cívico- militar: Uruguay 1973 – 1985 (Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2009), 323 – 98; Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo, La dictadura militar (1976 – 1983): Del golpe de estado a la restauración democrática (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2003); Gabriela Águila, Dictadura, represión y sociedad en Rosario, 1976 – 1983: Un estudio sobre la represión y los comportamientos y actitudes sociales en dictadura (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2008).




This interpretation also differs from those that see the secretariats as rep-licas of similar organizations in Franco’s Spain, even while it still recognizes that the latter were a point of reference for Jaime Guzmán. The Franco regime should not be totally ignored as a model, but the political logic of the rise and fall of the secretariats more closely followed the reality of Chilean political struggles. This interpretation complements analyses of the Chilean dictatorship that emphasize the neoliberal transformation and the regime’s alliance with its country’s transnational upper classes, keeping their increasingly globalized eco-nomic interests in mind while highlighting the strategies the regime developed to legitimize its existence and its project and to co- opt the lower classes.

Women and Youth in the Pinochet Dictatorship

The last days of the Popular Unity government were plagued by opposition demonstrations, which mobilized various organizations in the streets of the capital. Women, students, sectors of the working classes, owners of small busi-nesses, and craft workers all were opposed to the socialist government. The Left mobilized its followers in its own defense of socialism. The street was disputed space, reflecting the high degree of politicization and social mobilization within the country.9

The political situation leading up to the military coup is crucial for under-standing the specificity of the Chilean case among the Latin American mili-tary dictatorships of the 1970s. Although in every case the armed forces sought to demobilize society, the specific contours of the crises in each country were key factors in determining the types of regimes that followed. For instance, in Argentina, the political crisis created a general fear of a broad outbreak of violence, which undermined both confidence in democracy and the credibility of political parties and social organizations. The fear of generalized violence pitting leftist guerrillas against the extreme Right facilitated the passive accep-tance of the military coup. The crisis led to a broad process of depoliticization and demobilization, which the military tried to push further. No one mourned the situation preceding the coup.10 In Uruguay, the economic and social crisis

9. Tomás Moulian, “La Unidad Popular: Fiesta, drama y derrota,” in La forja de ilusiones: El sistema de partidos, 1932 – 1973 (Santiago: FLACSO, 1993), 267 – 84.

10. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar, chaps. 1 – 2; Paula Canelo, El proceso en su laberinto: La interna militar de Videla a Bignone (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2008); Eduardo Luis Duhalde, El estado terrorista argentino: Quince años después, una mirada crítica (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1999); Mariana Caviglia, Dictadura, vida cotidiana y clases medias: Una sociedad fracturada (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2006).




led to activism by peasants, students, and unionized workers, which became the context in which the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional- Tupamaros devel-oped, influenced by the Cuban Revolution and the third- world nationalism of the period. That coalition resolved to confront the dominant classes and their imperialist allies, and its armed actions targeted the military and the police. The strengthening of the leftist parties and their convergence in the Broad Front in 1971 challenged the political stability of the country, as bipartisan agreements broke down. That situation led in turn to the reinforcement of the authoritarian and repressive capability of the state, which abridged democratic processes by legalizing the armed forces’ repressive actions in mounting a countersubver-sive campaign. The coup of June 1973, headed by the president of the repub-lic himself, was a response to the institutional crisis, but it was not brought about by a high degree of social polarization.11 Only the 1964 Brazilian military coup could be partly construed as a result of social effervescence, which was promoted by the government of President João Goulart: during this coup the peasant leagues in the north and the political movements supported by non-commissioned officers and rank- and- file army troops were the most conflic-tive groups. The mobilization by labor unions and especially by the opposition União Democrática Nacional party, with significant participation by women, gave the final push toward the coup. The military takeover, however, did not take place in a political and ideological environment like the one that accompa-nied the Chilean coup of September 11, 1973.

The military coup in Chile was the result of a confrontation between two social projects: socialism and capitalism, with the Marxist Left in power prior to the coup. The Chilean Left did not represent an armed danger but rather a threat to the very existence of capitalism and social domination.12 The coup was thus a struggle between ideological convictions. Pressure on the armed forces to mount a coup d’état only took effect when the unfolding of the socialist pro-gram challenged the rights of private property by eliminating the landed estates

11. Álvaro Rico, “Sobre el autoritarismo y el golpe de Estado: La dictadura y el dictador,” in Demasi et al., La dictadura cívico- militar, 179 – 246; Silvia Dutrénit, “Del margen al centro del sistema político: Los partidos uruguayos durante la dictadura,” in Diversidad partidaria y dictaduras: Argentina, Brasil y Uruguay, ed. Silvia Dutrénit (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 1996), 235 – 317.

12. Guillermo O’Donnell, El estado burocrático autoritario: Triunfos, derrotas y crisis, 1966 – 1973 (Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, 1982), 52 – 53; Peter Winn, “ ‘Por la razon o por la fuerza’: Estados Unidos y Chile en la América Latina de los años sesenta y setenta,” in Frágiles suturas: Chile a treinta años del gobierno de Salvador Allende, ed. Francisco Zapata (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2006), 35 – 58.




and bringing important banking and industrial sectors under state control. The coup took place when the opposition, with the support of the US Central Intel-ligence Agency, succeeded in bringing the court system, the national congress, and broad social sectors to its side of the political table, which provoked serious problems for the distribution of goods. Both the high degree of state takeover of the economy and social mobilization led to the military coup. Moreover, the officer corps had been brought into the socialist program in social and economic areas but was not involved in political repression, except for the law controlling access to weapons implemented on the verge of the coup. There was no con-sensus in the army regarding the coup, and in order that the event not cause an institutional crisis it was necessary to remove General Carlos Prats, commander in chief of the army, and to gain the complicity of his successor, Augusto Pino-chet. In contrast to the coups in Argentina and Uruguay, for nearly half of Chile’s population the action of September 11 was traumatic.13

The firm commitment of each side to defending their respective cause meant that once the coup took place the demobilization of the losing side would be applauded. It was more difficult, however, to deactivate the winners. This sit-uation was worsened by the fact that some sectors of the political Right (includ-ing neoliberals and gremialistas) had succeeded in putting together part of a program that they hoped to pass on to the military and to thus prevent the coup from resulting in a simple restoration. Women had also reached a high level of autonomy and prominence. While they did not have their own political agenda, the role they had played in the struggle and the fact that the armed forces recog-nized their collaboration in promoting the coup were obstacles to their return to hearth and home. In Chile, postcoup demobilization meant that society would not be the same as in other Latin American countries. Once the coup had taken place, only the right- wing political parties abandoned the political stage, while the social movements supporting the coup remained mobilized.14

As September 1973 approached, groups such as Feminine Power (Poder Femenino, PF) were well organized and prominent in the public eye, which cru-

13. Of the national congress elected in March 1973, 43 percent of its members were affiliated with Popular Unity. Peter Kornbluh, Pinochet: Los archivos secretos, trans. David Leon Gomez (Barcelona: Crítica, 2004); Augusto Varas, La dinámica política de la oposición durante el gobierno de la Unidad Popular (Mexico City: FLACSO, 1977); Augusto Varas, Felipe Agüero, and Fernando Bustamante, Chile, democracia, fuerzas armadas (Santiago: FLACSO, 1980), chap. 14; Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “ ‘Todos juntos seremos la historia: Venceremos’: Unidad Popular y Fuerzas Armadas,” in Cuando hicimos historia: La experiencia de la Unidad Popular, ed. Julio Pinto Vallejos (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2005), 177 – 206.

14. The National Party dissolved itself, as did Patria y Libertad.




cially determined the size and class composition of opposition demonstrations. The political mobilization of women began in 1964, when the political Right and sectors of the Christian Democratic Party participated in the campaign of fear, bent on preventing Salvador Allende from winning that year’s presidential election. That strategy was revived in 1970 with the creation of Women’s Action of Chile (Accion Mujeres de Chile), which was linked to the National Party, and Free Chile (Chile Libre), a youth group controlled by gremialistas. Both were part of the campaign of fear meant to mobilize women and youth against Allen-de’s candidacy, and their activism continued after Allende’s victory at the polls. Women again came to the fore in the March of the Empty Pots in December 1971, protesting the visit to Chile by Fidel Castro and the food supply shortages that were beginning to occur. The march resulted in the birth of Feminine Power, which became one of the most important groups for mobilizing women and pressuring the armed forces to carry out the coup. Despite their activism, Feminine Power projected the discourse of traditional gender roles, its members asserting their positions as wives and mothers.15

After the coup these women wanted to collaborate in what was called national reconstruction through their existing organizations. The new govern-ment, however, asked Feminine Power to disband because it had no more reason to exist. The new regime wanted to create its own organizations and to promote supportive voluntary associations. Margaret Power interpreted this decision as resulting from gender bias on the part of the military, which relegated women to the roles of wife and mother.16 It seems, however, that the dissolution of Fem-inine Power was due to a variety of factors. The question of gender played a cru-cial role, as the PF’s female activists were both politicized and largely autono-mous, both of which were unacceptable to the military mentality. The military’s conservative view of gender cast feminine nature as essentially maternal. Thus the military rejected the sexual and sociopolitical liberation of women that had taken place in the 1960s. The new regime strengthened male legal tutelage over women, and initiatives for judicial modernization in the areas of civil rights for married women and the regulation of conjugal affairs made no headway. In con-trast to the dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina, which approved gender equal-

15. Margaret Power, La mujer de derecha: El poder femenino y la lucha contra Salvador Allende, 1964 – 1973, trans. María Teresa Escobar (Santiago: Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, 2008); Edda Gaviola, Lorella Lopresti, and Claudia Rojas, “Chile, Centros de Madres: ¿La mujer popular en movimiento?,” in Nuestra memoria, nuestro futuro: Mujeres e historia: América Latina y el Caribe, ed. María del Carmen Feijoo (Santiago: Isis Internacional, 1988); Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Nacionales y gremialistas, chap. 5.

16. Power, La mujer de derecha, 267 – 68.




ity and democracy within the family, the Chilean regime did not eliminate the principle of potestad marital that legally subordinated wives to their husbands.17

In addition to such generalized conservatism, there were political struggles among civilian groups on the Right, including alessandristas, nacionales, gremi-alistas, and nacionalistas, all jockeying for influence in the new political order.18 The alessandristas, with whom Guzmán was allied, suggested creating social organizations to channel political action by government supporters. It is pos-sible that the dismantling of Feminine Power was related to that effort, because PF was connected to the National Party, an adversary of gremialismo. What-ever the case, it seems that a determining factor in Feminine Power’s dissolu-tion was the connection of important figures in PF, several of whom were party activists, to political parties. The armed forces did not trust political parties, and from the beginning they pushed the parties aside and avoided bringing their leaders into positions within the regime. Feminine Power represented the participation of women in independent political activity, which the military wanted to relegate to the past. This becomes clearer when we consider that other less politicized and less prominent women’s organizations, such as the Movimiento Cívico Familiar SOL (Family Civic Movement Solidarity, Order, and Liberty), were not dissolved.

The experience of the Movimiento Gremial of the Catholic University of Chile and its leader Jaime Guzmán is another case in point. They participated in the main political actions against the Popular Unity government and made contact with other involved groups. The gremialistas put together a political platform that, although unfinished at the time of the coup, had achieved basic consensus in advocating an authoritarian political regime along with a free market economy and a reduction of state structures, a program they hoped the military would adopt.19 To this must be added Guzmán’s own political agenda of creating a political Right for the future, for which he needed to keep his gre-

17. Mala Htun, Sexo y estado: Aborto, divorcio y familia bajo dictaduras y democracias en América Latina, trans. Marcela Dutra (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2010), chap. 3; Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “¿Las ‘mamitas de Chile’? Las mujeres y el sexo bajo la dictadura pinochetista,” in Mujeres: Historias chilenas del siglo XX, ed. Julio Pinto Vallejos (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2010), 87 – 116.

18. Alessandristas were the followers of Jorge Alessandri, who served as president of Chile from 1958 to 1964 and was the right- wing coalition’s presidential candidate in 1970. They included gremialistas, neoliberals, and authoritarian liberals. The nacionales were members of the Partido Nacional. The nacionalistas were members of a collection of groups inspired by corporatism and the Franco regime.

19. Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Nacionales y gremialistas, chap. 7.




mialista supporters politically active. Those interests came together when Jaime Guzmán, Gisela Silva, and Eduardo Boetsch, all alessandristas, proposed that women and young people who supported the regime should be reorganized. In October 1973 the Secretariat of Women and the Secretariat of Youth came into existence.20

Another factor in the rise of the secretariats was the military regime’s administrative reorganization, which redefined the role of the General Secre-tariat of Government. This agency had been created by the Popular Unity gov-ernment in 1972 and was originally put in charge of relations with community organizations and women, tasks it did not have enough time to carry out. The dictatorship enlarged this governmental department because it wanted a chan-nel of communication with poor people, renaming it the Directorate of Civil-ian Organizations and separating it from the Secretariats of Women, Youth, and Gremios; all of these were now part of an expanded General Secretariat of Government. According to Colonel Pedro Ewing, the general secretary of government, the purpose of the secretariats was to “channel their enthusiasm and their work into national action in support of governmental operations.”21 The Secretariat of Women would “open a channel for the participation of those volunteers who were able and ready to collaborate with the government in the tasks of reconstruction.”22 The Secretariat of Youth was consistent with the government discourses that circulated in the days following the coup, in which the government declared its desire “to govern with young people, making their participation prominent,” as “a government today that wants to establish itself for the long term cannot ignore the voice of young people.”23

As we see, the secretariats had a variety of origins, including the anti – Popular Unity movements as well as sources within the new government. A priority for the regime was to demobilize the masses of young people by depo-liticizing them. Repression would play a role, but it was insufficient on its own to carry out civic reeducation. In effect, as Colonel Ewing explained, the idea was to sweep aside the political passions and resentments of young people and

20. Eduardo Boetsch, Recordando con Alessandri (Santiago: Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello, 1998); Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “ ‘¡Estamos en guerra, señores!’ ”

21. Qué Pasa (Santiago), 5 Dec. 1973, p. 33.22. República de Chile, Primer año de la reconstrucción nacional, 1974 (Santiago: Editora

Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1974), 197. See also the commentary of Carla Scassi, the first secretary of women, in Qué Pasa (Santiago), 16 Nov. 1973, p. 17.

23. El Mercurio (Santiago), 29 Oct. 1973, p. 21; José Weinstein, Los jóvenes pobladores y el Estado: Una relación difícil (Santiago: CIDE, 1990).




“reteach them national and moral values . . . such as generosity, selflessness, and enthusiasm to reclaim patriotism.”24

From the beginning, the military regime decided to legitimize its actions among social groups beyond its supporters in the upper reaches of society. Several studies, including those of Tomás Moulian, Pilar Vergara, Eduardo Silva, and Alejandro Foxley, have shown that the regime developed a long- term project for reshaping Chilean society. Its program, according to these scholars, included the neoliberal economic model, which came out on top over a corporatist alternative in the ideological debates; the decline of the import- substitution model and the changes in the world economy; and state terror as the fundamental underpinning of the regime and as a requirement of its capital-ist project. State terror, central to military doctrine, would be used to impose the neoliberal transformation and the alliance with Chile’s transnationalized bourgeoisie.25 While that assessment is generally correct, one should add that from the start the regime wanted legitimacy, especially among the lower sec-tors of society. The push for legitimacy was due to the international context, the economic crisis that swept over Chile, and the military doctrine that mixed the remains of developmentalist ideologies with state terror as an instrument of power. The military wanted to destroy any influence from the Marxist Left as well as the liberal political parties by beginning a deliberate process of depoliti-cization defined as anti- Communist resocialization. That task was carried out by the General Secretariat of Government until 1980, when a municipal reform changed the functions of government departments. In that framework, the Sec-retariats of Women and Youth were originally used to demonstrate political support, but they quickly became useful instruments for legitimizing the gov-ernment’s neoliberal thrust and its authoritarian political model. In this analy-sis, state terror was insufficient as a means of imposing the neoliberal model because neoliberalism’s impact on society required other policy tools to mitigate the potential for conflict.

This drive to depoliticize and resocialize differed from the other Southern Cone dictatorships, in which national security doctrine and the war against sub-version took different directions. In Argentina, French influence and the coun-try’s political evolution, especially after the Peron era, led to a radical under-

24. Qué Pasa (Santiago), 5 Dec. 1974, p. 33.25. See the works listed above in note 1 and Eduardo Silva, “La política economica del

régimen militar chileno durante la transicion: Del neoliberalismo radical al neoliberalismo pragmático,” in Drake and Jaksic, El difícil camino, 193 – 242. Huneeus even writes of a “developmentalist regime.” See Huneeus, El régimen de Pinochet.




26. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar, 27 – 36; Prudencio García, El drama de la autonomía militar: Argentina bajo las juntas militares (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995); Caviglia, Dictadura, vida cotidiana y clases medias; Paula Guitelman, La infancia en dictadura: Modernidad y conservadurismo en el mundo de Billiken (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2006); Martín Obregon, Entre la cruz y la espada: La Iglesia católica durante los primeros años del “Proceso” (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2005).

27. Marchesi, “ ‘Una parte del pueblo feliz’ ”; Aldo Marchesi, El Uruguay inventado: La política audiovisual de la dictadura, reflexiones sobre su imaginario (Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Trilce, 2001); Isabella Cosse and Vania Markarian, 1975: Año de la orientalidad: Identidad, memoria e historia en una dictadura (Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Trilce, 1996); Emilio Irigoyen, La patria en escena: Estética y autoritarismo en Uruguay: Textos, monumentos, representaciones (Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Trilce, 2000).

standing of national security doctrine that saw Communism as an intrinsic evil directed from Moscow and bent on world domination. The counterinsurgency struggle in Latin America was a total war requiring the defeat of the enemy, which justified the use of repression. The Argentine dictatorship’s Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional sought to put an end to disorder in the state’s func-tioning by using state violence to create a docile and depoliticized society. To do so, it would maintain a military government for an extended period to over-see the accomplishment of its programmatic goals and to create the conditions for legitimizing a new political system blind to special interests. Rather than expecting support from political and social groups, the military government aimed to break down such groups and to then restructure society into new, more reliable groups. Disillusionment with the earlier military government of Juan Carlos Onganía, which involved an alliance with civilians, along with a consensus in the military on rejecting the economic and political populism they associated with mass mobilization, conflict among interest groups, and sub-version, influenced the Argentine military’s lack of interest in creating their own support movements. Depoliticization and social reeducation would come from state terror and intervention in education, with the participation of the Catholic Church.26

The Uruguayan military regime placed culture at the center of the psycho-social conflict of the Cold War, promoting the depoliticization of everything in the cultural realm. In its view, culture offered an alternative to politics as a way of acquiring support as well as a path toward forming individuals who would comply with the authoritarian order. The Uruguayan regime was interested in developing consensus by focusing on patriotic exaltation, media manipulation, and policies directed toward youths. They tried to do this not by organizing their own support groups but by using secondary school students, the govern-mental bureaucracy, and nativist organizations.27




28. Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “ ‘¡Estamos en guerra, señores!,’ ” 166 – 77; Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, El golpe después del golpe, chaps. 3 – 5.

29. Huneeus, El régimen de Pinochet, 327 – 29; Orden Nuevo (Santiago), Sept. 1974.30. La Segunda (Santiago), 14 Mar. 1974, p. 11.

While the Chilean military was influenced by national security doctrine and countersubversive warfare, it developed an interpretation of legitimation focused more on the problem of socioeconomic development than on subver-sion. The older military doctrine of a state- directed economy and social devel-opment was reinterpreted within the framework of counterinsurgency, empha-sizing developmentalist ideas shared by many in the officer corps of the army and air force such as the redistribution of property, especially the rural estates. After the coup, the countersubversive war was also seen as a social war, to the extent that the infiltration of Communism into society at large had to be fought not only with focused repression but also with modernizing policies offering economic development and the eradication of poverty. The depoliticization of society would not be achieved by state terror alone but also by a broad pro-cess of resocialization that would change what was thought of as the popula-tion’s mindset. It was an ideological war for the conquest of people’s minds. In this framework, organizing young people and women stemmed from the military’s conviction that it was imperative to resocialize those groups. The task was turned over to neither the Catholic Church, which was politically opposed to the regime, nor the nativist societies. Instead, the regime organized its own instruments of resocialization: the secretariats.28

In the early period of the regime, the secretariats were used to demonstrate social backing for the goals of the military authorities, a decision influenced by international criticism of the dictatorship’s human rights violations. Carlos Huneeus is correct in concluding that the secretariats were among the organiza-tions intended to mobilize political support without creating an official govern-ment party, as occurred in other authoritarian regimes. The Chilean regime rejected that path, which nationalist sectors strongly pushed for from the start.29

The Secretariat of Women was turned over to the wives of armed forces officers and to women connected with groups that had opposed the Popular Unity government. In the beginning the secretariat was directed by Carla Scassi, about whom we have no further information. She was in that position for only a few months, succeeded in March 1974 by Sara Phillipi. Phillipi had not been a party activist, but she had established the first female professional agricultural schools in South America and for ten years had been a delegate representing private schools in Chile’s national Superintendency of Education. Like her predecessor, she was replaced a few months later.30 From mid- 1974 the




secretariat was directed by Carmen Grez, who stayed in that post until 1980 and can be considered the director who defined the identity of the Secretariat of Women. Grez was educated at such elite schools as Sagrados Corazones and Monjas Argentinas, where she received a degree in humanities, and had been connected with mothers’ centers since the 1950s, directing the community union of mothers’ centers in the municipalities (comunas) of Providencia, Las Condes, and Ñuñoa as well as in La Reina, an upper- class neighborhood of Santiago with many pockets of poor residents. She was also “active in the Family Civic Movement SOL.”31 Grez’s biography shows that the regime chose as the head of its women’s organization someone connected not to Feminine Power but to a conservative anti- Allende organization.

SOL was an organization for families founded by couples who, while not political party activists, “decided to convert our concerns into a family- based civic movement that would fight for the ideals and rights that we Chileans were losing.”32 After the coup, according to one of its members, “SOL remained in existence because it had nothing to do with power. Feminine Power had to dis-band because of the word ‘Power.’ ”33 Although many women from PF might have participated in the Secretariat of Women, its leadership was given to the type of woman who best fit the military’s conservative patriarchal mindset, a woman who had no party connections and who would reinforce traditional gen-der roles by accepting the subordinate role that the regime intended to grant her. As the wife of General Sergio Nuño explained, “We also did not want a campaign for women’s liberation. We are not feminists, but women above all. It is necessary to balance our work with the functions God gave to us as wives and mothers.”34 That being the case, the secretariat also brought together anti- Allende activist women, who gave the agency substance in its early stages.

The membership of this voluntary organization came from several sources. The first contingent of 700 women came forth on their own initiative after the coup to support the government, with which they agreed politically, in the so- called national reconstruction.35 Others were women with a history of charitable activities, attracted by the government’s call for reconstruction and

31. Diccionario biográfico de Chile, 18th ed. (Santiago: Empresa Periodística Chile, 1984 – 1986), 502. On Carla Scassi and Sara Phillipi, see Qué Pasa (Santiago), 16 Nov. 1973, p. 17; Qué Pasa (Santiago), 15 Mar. 1974, p. 16; La Segunda (Santiago), 9 Mar. 1974, p. 25.

32. Quoted in Power, La mujer de derecha, 192, 195.33. Quoted in ibid., 267.34. Qué Pasa (Santiago), 16 Nov. 1973, p. 17.35. La Segunda (Santiago), 14 Mar. 1974, p. 11.




national unity. This seems to have been the case for doña Elena, a middle- class Catholic dedicated to her religious duty to help the poorest of society. Since the 1950s she had volunteered in shantytowns under the direction of a priest and worked in a mothers’ center, where she taught women job skills. She then joined the Secretariat of Women “when it revitalized . . . the work of charity and con-nected it to patriotic education and encouraging poor women,” going “once a week . . . to a neighborhood to distribute goods to the needy or to help someone find work or solve a problem.”36 Elena’s story was in ways similar to that of Grez, who was also a Catholic with links to mothers’ centers. Perhaps for some women the social work of the secretariat was a continuation of their charities. In the case of Grez, however, there was also a record of political activism, which was something the secretariat would also encourage.

Once the initial enthusiasm faded, the secretariat deliberately strove to increase its volunteer membership by using personal contacts and looking for both ex – Christian Democrats and nonmilitant women connected to the politi-cal Right by family or social origin. Volunteers also included older women whose children were grown and who had the time and desire to participate in formal organizations.37 Socially the leaders of the Secretariat of Women belonged to the Chilean upper class; they had links to such so- called found-ing families as Donoso Balmaceda, Covarrubias, Correa, and Despouy and had gone to elite schools such as Sagrados Corazones. Regional and provincial dele-gates seem to have come from the same social sector, or they were well known at the local level. The monitors, who worked among the rank and file, were from the middle class.38 The secretariat had 7,700 volunteers in 1976 and 10,000 by 1980, according to official data. With that many members, its social composi-tion was fairly diverse, with the upper- class women probably occupying only positions of national and regional leadership. Such heterogeneity among volun-teer members may have made the emergence of a program difficult, in contrast to gremialismo, which was very homogeneous in social composition and unified in its platform. The indoctrination that secretariat volunteers received, while it created a standardized message and political activities, reflected the interests of the military regime, with little input from the women volunteers themselves.

The Secretariat of Women achieved prominence at the national level. In

36. Steve J. Stern, Recordando el Chile de Pinochet: En vísperas de Londres 1998, trans. Jacqueline Garreaud (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2009), 71.

37. Lechner and Levy, Notas sobre la vida cotidiana, 56 – 57; Valdés et al., Centros de madres, 42.

38. Lechner and Levy, Notas sobre la vida cotidiana, 56 – 59.




39. The original source lists 372 offices. See Secretaría Nacional de la Mujer, Memoria 1977 – 1978 (Santiago, 1978), 2.

40. Qué Pasa (Santiago), 15 Mar. 1974, p. 16; Secretaría Nacional de la Mujer, Memoria 1977 – 1978, 2; Amiga (Santiago), Jan. 1976, p. 28.

41. Diccionario biográfico de Chile, 16th ed. (Santiago: Empresa Periodística Chile, 1976 – 1978); Diccionario biográfico de Chile, 17th ed. (Santiago: Empresa Periodística Chile, 1980 – 1982); Alfredo Joignant and Patricio Navia, “De la política de individuos a los hombres del partido: Socializacion, competencia política y penetracion electoral de la UDI (1989 – 2001),” Estudios Públicos, no. 89 (2003): 157 – 61; Renato Cristi and Carlos Ruiz, El pensamiento conservador en Chile: Seis ensayos (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1992).

March 1974 the government assigned it a headquarters, and at the time it had offices in the center- south of the country. Four years later it was present in all regions, with 40 provincial offices, 282 municipal offices, and 37 branch offices in smaller locations, for a total of 359 offices throughout the country.39 By 1976 its brochure Notebook for Rural Teachers circulated from the extreme north to the southernmost tip of Chile, showing the secretariat’s national reach and ability to penetrate into the furthest corners — a fact confirmed by the establishment of an office on remote Easter Island.40

The Secretariat of Youth, by contrast, was turned over to the gremialistas. The Movimiento Gremial of the Catholic University of Chile was organized in 1967 by students in the departments of law and economics as a rejection of the university reform program led by the university’s student federation and inspired by Vatican II, with its embrace of the principle of the option for the poor. The gremialistas defended a version of traditional Catholic thought focused on church doctrine and removed from the problems of the mod-ern world. Its founders had deep roots in Chile’s traditional oligarchy. Jaime Guzmán’s ancestors included two presidents, many members of congress, and high officials of the Catholic Church; he had connections with the wealthy right- wing Matte Larraín family and had been educated at Sagrados Corazones. Jovino Novoa was descended from two distinguished families of the Chilean oligarchy, the Mackenna and Echaurren clans. He was an alumnus of the elite Saint George secondary school, as was Hernán Larraín, who was from another family of the landed elite. Raúl Lecaros was also an alumnus of Sagrados Cora-zones. Ernesto Illanes, an economics major at the Catholic University of Chile, had also graduated from Saint George. As other studies have shown, some 73 percent of the congressional members from the Union Democrata Indepen-diente (UDI, Independent Democratic Union), the political party eventually formed by Guzmán, had been students in elite secondary schools, from where they converged on the Catholic University of Chile to study law or economics.41




The elite students of this university fed the growth of gremialismo during the Popular Unity government.

The Secretariat of Youth had little financial or infrastructural support. It did not have a headquarters of its own and it operated out of an office loaned to it by the Secretariat of Women. According to a report by its executive director, the Secretariat of Youth had few resources at the time of its creation and did not have the means to carry out its mission. The gremialistas would have liked to organize the secretariat throughout the country, with branches in all provinces, departments, and municipalities as well as in neighborhood associations and secondary schools. But only in 1975 did it begin to receive consistent support from the government.42 That situation seems to have been the result of a debate within the government regarding the role the secretariats were to play. General Gustavo Leigh, commander of the air force, was in favor of their existence, but not as governmental agencies. As he said of the Secretariat of Youth, “there can be no official intervention other than providing them with a place to work and keeping in touch with their activities. They are free to organize their work . . . the same for the women, which has not gone as I would have liked. For women there should be a volunteer social services organization.”43 From the start, dur-ing its spread across the country and in its indoctrination of its volunteers, the Secretariat of Women had been controlled by the government, but there was no consensus within the government junta on such a policy. This seems to have been part of a larger debate over organizing a civic movement to support the gov-ernment, which General Leigh publicly rejected: “Personally I am against it . . . support should come voluntarily from positive actions. . . . There is a group of hotheaded fascists that would like to have uniformed youth groups giving the stiff- armed salute, Mussolini- style, which I reject.”44 Thus the two secretariats followed different trajectories related to the military’s decision to control the politicization of women and to indoctrinate the Secretariat of Women’s volun-teers. As General Leigh put it, “It was not a matter of ordering people around just because we could, but of providing training and guidance to people who already know where they are headed.”45

Accordingly, feminine tasks were framed in the context of the role of women as the transmitters of spiritual and patriotic values, which were central

42. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and Cristián Valdés Zegers, El general Pinochet se reune con la juventud: Textos de los discursos pronunciados en el primer aniversario de la Secretaría Nacional de la Juventud (Santiago: Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1974), 24 – 25.

43. Qué Pasa (Santiago), 20 Sept. 1974, p. 35.44. Ibid.45. Qué Pasa (Santiago), 15 Mar. 1974, p. 16.




to the work of shaping future generations to participate in so- called national reconstruction by helping to mobilize the resources needed to overcome the crisis and by working at the community level. Great importance was assigned to mothers’ centers as places where women would be prepared for their proper tasks, while the Secretariat of Women would focus on preparing leaders. The Secretariat of Youth was also supposed to play a part in the work of reconstruc-tion by channeling the concerns of young people in the areas of social issues, culture, sports, and recreation. This was supposed to develop a greater sense of unity through patriotic values.46

This importance of national reconstruction also figured prominently in the formation of the Secretariat of Youth. It is quite possible that Guzmán sug-gested that the secretariat follow the example of Franco’s Spain, but Chile’s experience of socialism also influenced its organization. In his interpretation, the strength of the Left derived from its influence in various sectors of society, one of which was young people. In the university, Movimiento Gremial acted as a counterweight for right- wing students in their battle for influence over their age group. Thus whether or not it resembled the franquista model, the Secre-tariat of Youth was created for a more immediate political task.47 Looking at what the secretariat set out to accomplish, we see that it stuck to the logic of its country’s dictatorship, including national reconstruction and the recovery of patriotic values. Therefore the Chilean secretariats were not given the task of organizing their respective social sectors, as were the Youth Fronts and the Feminine Section in the Franco regime. These latter groups were dominated by members of the Falange and were intended to ensure that Spanish youth were trained and disciplined in the paramilitary and Catholic spirit that dominated the building of fascism in the post – civil war era. After the initial fascist push, the activities of these Spanish groups evolved to include recreation and sports, thus reaching the entire youth population.48 The goal in Chile was likewise to

46. On the Secretariat of Women, see República de Chile, Primer año de reconstrucción, 192 – 97; on the Secretariat of Youth, see Qué Pasa (Santiago), 2 Nov. 1973, p. 16; El Mercurio (Santiago), 29 Oct. 1973, p. 21. Constable and Valenzuela note that Pinochet did not encourage these political movements. See Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, 77.

47. Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Álvarez Vallejos, and Pinto Vallejos, Su revolución contra nuestra revolución, vol. 1, chap. 1; Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate et al., Su revolución contra nuestra revolución, vol. 2, La pugna marxista- gremialista en los ochenta (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2008), chap. 3.

48. José A. Cañabate, “Juventud y franquismo en España: El Frente de Juventudes (1940 – 1960),” in Jóvenes y dictaduras de entreguerras: Propaganda, doctrina y encuadramiento: Italia, Alemania, Japón, Portugal y España, ed. Conxita Mir (Lleida, Spain: Editorial Milenio, 2007), 144 – 77; Stanley G. Payne, El régimen de Franco: 1936 – 1975, trans. Belén Urrutia




redirect youthful political activism, but without the all- encompassing aspects of the totalitarian Spanish experience. That may be why in its initial stages the sec-retariat continued activities that university student organizations were already engaged in, including social work in poor or geographically isolated zones and recreational activities such as the Spring Festival. But neither its programs nor its reach attained the magnitude or meaning of its historical Spanish models.

The governing junta was interested in the support of young people, but not necessarily with the same objectives as the gremialistas. According to Gen-eral Leigh, the task facing youth at the time was “to imagine and propose new forms of participation” that would locate young people in the new institutional structures, for which “the development of all youth activities, especially in the field of sports, cultural creation, and social action,” would be encouraged.49 In other words, the Secretariat of Youth was seen as an instrument of depoliticiza-tion that would encourage the development of a healthy group of young people engaged in social action within their communities. But the official promotion of sports was in the hands of the General Directorate of Sport, headed by an army officer. If the Secretariat of Youth was to engage in activities in that area, it would be together with that directorate.50

The organization of the secretariats and their role in this initial period must be seen as part of the struggle for power taking place within the ruling junta, in which General Pinochet was consolidating his position in advance of becoming president of the republic in late 1974. This consolidation meant that Pinochet was recognized as the leader and driver of the political process, with his own base of support. This is important because the personalization of the regime was connected to the interests of the civilians attempting to influ-ence its political direction. The gremialistas soon identified General Pinochet as the member of the junta most disposed to hear their proposals, and they participated in consolidating his leadership position and in personalizing the regime. In this process the secretariats acquired a pinochetista shading that they

Domínguez and María Rosa Lopez González (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987), 254; Javier Tusell, Dictadura franquista y democracia, 1939 – 2004 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2005).

49. General Gustavo Leigh, 20 Dec. 1973, quoted in República de Chile, Primer año de reconstrucción, 75 – 76.

50. Something similar happened in Uruguay, where the dictatorship set about symbolically bringing in young people and facilitating their reorientation. To do this, it was necessary to find new channels and models for youth to identify with, including sports. Thus the Uruguayan regime made formal sports education obligatory, renovated playing fields and gymnasiums, and organized massive festivals and sports competitions. See Marchesi, El Uruguay inventado, 108 – 16.




did not initially have.51 The international isolation of Chile due to its regime’s human rights violations contributed to this process. Condemnation of Chile by the United Nations in 1974 set off a celebration of the first anniversary of the September 11 coup during which demonstrators chanted the name of the junta’s head, already recognized as its leader. During the celebration of the first anniversary of the Secretariat of Youth, its executive secretary honored the presence of “our jefe máximo, the chief of state of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet.” A year later, after another international condemnation, the leaders of the Secretariat of Youth recognized Pinochet as the “symbol of Chile and of our September 11.”52 The women, in the voice of Carmen Grez, made their loyalty explicit: “We want to thank you, Your Excellency Mr. President . . . in the great task that you face day in and day out, in doing battle against Chile’s enemies, you have now and will always have the unshakable loyalty of the women who yesterday fought for freedom, and who today tell you . . . we are here, in time of peace or time of danger.”53 In sum, the primary function of the secretariats was to organize support for the government and for General Pinochet. They were useful in consolidating legitimacy within the country and, especially, in the international arena.

The historical context, however, imposed other constraints. From the start the secretariats were assigned social tasks, but these tasks lacked a clear focus in a period of economic adjustment. High inflation in 1975 led to radical measures of neoliberal stabilization, which in turn brought massive unemployment and increased poverty.54 The regime was obliged to offer palliatives that previously were left to the social services provided by the Catholic Church. This involved using the women of the secretariat as instruments for socializing the popula-tion in the new neoliberal ideology and for preaching the virtues of savings and austerity at both the governmental and household levels. The primary vehicle

51. Arturo Valenzuela, “Los militares en el poder: La consolidacion del poder unipersonal,” in Drake and Jaksic, El difícil camino, 57 – 144; Constable and Valenzuela, Nation of Enemies, chap. 3; Huneeus, El régimen de Pinochet, 129 – 74; Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “Construction du pouvoir,” section 1.

52. El Mercurio (Santiago), 12 Sept. 1974, p. 12. The expression jefe máximo can be found in Pinochet Ugarte and Valdés Zegers, El general Pinochet se reúne; Boletín de la Secretaría de la Juventud (Santiago), Sept. 1975. Emphasis added. (Hereafter this latter title will be cited as Boletín SNJ.)

53. Amiga (Santiago), Apr. 1977, p. 10.54. Foxley, Experimentos neoliberales en América Latina; Jaime Ruiz- Tagle P. and

Roberto Urmeneta, Los trabajadores del Programa del Empleo Mínimo en el capitalismo autoritario: Condiciones de trabajo, comportamiento, rol sociopolitico (Santiago: PET / Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, 1984).




of socialization, the family, would be the medium in which women were the main instruments because “their role is now more important than it was before September 11.”55 Volunteers from the Secretariat of Women taught women in the neighborhoods the importance of good “resource management,” based on the idea that households should be assimilated in an “economic unit, thinking of each home as a business . . . extracting the maximum . . . of goods and services from the limited resources available.”56 To do this the secretariat emphasized courses in consumer economics, which taught women how to make purchases, allocate family resources, and accumulate savings. The classes were held regu-larly in mothers’ centers and in neighborhood and community organizations.57 The secretariat also took on social assistance functions through day- care centers that looked after children up to six years of age and which also provided jobs for unemployed women through the minimum employment program. Many of the secretariat’s brochures provided low- cost kitchen recipes. The secretariat also cooperated with other government programs for the elderly and mal nourished population and provided a basic literacy program.58 For the period from 1975 to 1978 the Secretariat of Women was one of the most important tools for social-izing housewives to neoliberalism and for representing a social response to the contraction of state services. In other words, the imposition of neoliberal poli-cies required not only state terror but also persuasion.

The Secretariat of Youth also joined the effort of legitimizing neoliberal economic policies, focusing on attracting adolescents to the campaign. An arti-cle in its newsletter noted that economic recovery and the defeat of inflation “come at a cost.” “Inevitably,” the article pointed out, “we have to deal with a relative increase in unemployment and a transitory contraction of some eco-nomic activities,” calling on the secretariat’s constituency to “join a true crusade of solidarity.”59 The crusade in question consisted of collecting clothing and nonperishable food for distribution and assessing the social situation in each municipality in order to direct assistance to the most vulnerable groups.

While most of its efforts were directed to this “crusade,” the secretariat continued its recreational, social, and sporting events, with sports moving to the fore after 1976. In 1977 its official magazine abandoned its ideological

55. La Segunda (Santiago), 7 June 1974, p. 33.56. Qué Pasa (Santiago), 21 June 1974, p. 14; Amiga (Santiago), Sept. 1976, p. 17.57. Lechner and Levy, Notas sobre la vida cotidiana, 67.58. Amiga (Santiago), Aug. 1977, p. 38; Amiga (Santiago), Mar. 1979, p. 32; Valdivia

Ortiz de Zárate, “ ‘¡Estamos en guerra, señores!’ ”59. Boletín SNJ (Santiago), June 1975.




60. Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Álvarez Vallejos, and Pinto Vallejos, Su revolución contra nuestra revolución, vol. 1, chap. 2.

61. Boletín SNJ (Santiago), May 1975.62. Tusell, Dictadura franquista y democracia, 22.

tone and its efforts to provide social information, shifting its focus to music, film, and television, with only a few political interviews and reports on cur-rent affairs.60

As this overview suggests, in the period from 1975 to 1979 the secretariats, in addition to mobilizing political support, engaged in other important func-tions. They acted as agents of ideological indoctrination and as defenders and propagandists of neoliberalism, substituting for the extinct political parties and other mediating institutions such as labor unions. This indicates that the gov-ernment communications services were insufficient as tools for propaganda and socialization, in contrast to those of Uruguay at this same time. The secretari-ats also provided administrative services directed at the population during the contraction of state functions in an effort to give the state a veneer of social con-cern. This activity was clearly characterized by paternalism and charity rather than an assumption of social rights.

Along these lines, the Secretariat of Youth engaged in an important ideo-logical mission. Starting in 1975 it provided new members with political prepa-ration by creating the Diego Portales Institute, a study center that dealt with basic ideological education and political guidance. This interest in training came from Guzmán, who considered it essential for producing the political Right of the future, but it also coincided with the regime’s decision to develop a long- term political project. The Diego Portales Institute aimed to “provide doctrinal education and training, with the objective of creating the basis for a unified body of thought, an identity of ideas that will inspire the future action of youth.” This was “the channel by which support must be provided to the regime represented by this government.”61 The Portales Institute’s purpose, how-ever, was not the mass indoctrination of young people and organization by age groups, as in other totalitarian regimes and nontotalitarian dictatorships,62 but the creation of a young political elite immersed in the state’s political project, with contributions from the gremialistas, the neoliberals, and the armed forces. The institute was intended to transmit the truths of open economics and the role of the market and authoritarian government along with a dose of national-ism, standardizing the message to be conveyed by those who would become the state’s spokespersons and activists. Thus economic policies occupied a central




place in the institute’s curriculum, as did the Declaration of Principles issued by the government on March 11, 1974.63

While its project was elitist, the Secretariat of Youth also taught courses and field schools for local leaders and young people in neighborhood settings. This training sought to normalize the ideas that were spread among young people and to coordinate these ideas with the various agencies engaged in com-munity development, as well as to disseminate government policies and to teach leadership skills. Thus there was an effort to spread indoctrination on a broad scale, though the central interest was in the formation of future leaders.

The Secretariat of Women also carried out indoctrination activities. It had been designated a center of ideological formation for producing activists on the ground, which was one of the functions that volunteers engaged in. The volun-teers had to undergo periodic ideological training, as they were considered “the vehicles of the government’s ideas” who “must carry the government’s notions for raising up the nation to the entire population.”64 To do this the secretar-iat’s leaders frequently attended classes and lectures by government officials, especially by the ministers of the treasury and interior. The main topics were Marxism, economic policies, the international economic crisis, Chilean history, and the foundations of the new institutional order, a course Jaime Guzmán was in charge of. The secretariat then disseminated those topics through seminars at the national, provincial, and community levels and through the courses in civic education offered by the various community organizations, which by 1978 numbered nearly 37,000.65

In view of their leaders’ training, it is possible to think of the secretariats as also taking on the role of elite recruitment traditionally assumed by political parties. In this case the secretariats took charge of the indoctrination of poten-tial recruits, thereby controlling the ideological message being transmitted by the state. While the guiding principles came from the military authorities, eco-nomic aspects were in the hands of the Chicago Boys — a group of economists trained at the University of Chicago who followed Milton Friedman — while the gremialistas provided the new institutional order. The same secretariat lecturers participated in educating the army high command on these topics. Beginning in

63. Boletín SNJ (Santiago), May 1975. The Declaration of Principles was the foundational document of the dictatorship, promoting the regime’s new institutions and the principles they inspired.

64. Interview with Augusto Pinochet, Amiga (Santiago), Nov. 1977, p. 9.65. Amiga (Santiago), Nov. 1976, pp. 44 – 45; Amiga (Santiago), Sept. 1977, p. 38; Amiga

(Santiago), Jan. 1979, pp. 42 – 43; Lechner and Levy, Notas sobre la vida cotidiana, 67.




1975, any officer who hoped to achieve the rank of general was required to take courses in the war academy, where he was submitted to ideological homogeniza-tion with regard to neoliberal economics and the new authoritarian institutional structure.66 The regime decided that its spokespeople should both internalize and disseminate this body of thought.

To sum up, in the early period of the military dictatorship the secretariats were centrally relevant to the regime’s desire to build legitimacy and to resocial-ize politics by mobilizing political support; they assisted in the personalization of the regime around Pinochet, acted as agents for spreading neoliberal ideol-ogy, carried out public service functions, and trained leaders. This multiplicity of functions, several of which resemble those of political parties, is character-istic of the stage in Chile’s dictatorship when a long- term project was not yet well defined. It was a period of reformulation, the regime taking over various functions of the state and the political system with clear aspirations to establish hegemony but without a defined plan. By 1978 the regime had passed that tran-sitional stage and set forth its project: limited democracy and neoliberal eco-nomics. That formulation, in turn, led to a change in the meaning, functions, and activities of the secretariats.

A Dictatorship with a Plan: The Decline of the Secretariats

One of the themes stressed by supporters and later analysts of the military regime was its economic program and the great economic transformation that changed Chile, which was seen as counteracting any criticism of its human rights violations. That interpretation sees a major difference between Pinochet’s dictatorship and others of the era, which had plans for change but were unable to develop them into projects leading to a newly configured state and a new way of understanding and engaging in political activity — a new political culture. In Chile there was no serious armed subversive threat that might justify the coup d’état and the long- term seizure of power. Thus it was important for the regime to develop a program that would justify imposing state terror and holding on to power. The program needed to generate economic growth, eradicate poverty, and depoliticize society, while at the same time providing a logic for maintain-ing a national security state. Unlike in Argentina and Uruguay, in Chile holding power after the coup could not be justified as necessary to battle armed guer-rillas plunging the country into chaos. The postcoup regime decided to hold

66. Augusto Varas, Los militares en el poder: Régimen y gobierno militar en Chile 1973 – 1986 (Santiago: Editorial Pehuén, 1987), 30 – 36.




on to power as long as it took to lay the foundations of a new Chile based on neoliberalism and authoritarianism, on which a necessary minimum consensus could be built.67

The several groups involved in the 1973 coup did not have an articulated and agreed- upon project. Such a project began to take shape with the emer-gence of the gremialistas and the Chicago Boys. Those two groups, however, delayed defining their positions, given the differing opinions among gremialis-tas regarding corporatism and the role of intermediate structures. In the early period the war against subversion and national security doctrine were impor-tant in certain circles, and they showed signs of becoming the dominant ide-ology. The regime’s high degree of personalism, centered around the figure of Pinochet, and concerns about the imposition of a militarized state became political issues, and one emerging faction, the gremialistas, known as the “soft line,” pressured the new regime to define its institutional structures.68 That pressure paid off in July 1977, when for the first time Pinochet laid out the stages of military control of the government and provided a general outline of the future institutional structures. That coincided with the first reports of suc-cess in the realm of economic policy, with falling inflation and unemployment. Those developments, in turn, helped to validate neoliberal policies, which by the following year came into full development.

By 1978 it was possible to talk of a neoliberal model, as its promoters moved beyond the economic sphere and pushed their market- oriented ideas into the political arena. In economic policy they looked to the market as the great regu-lating mechanism. The lowering of barriers to trade and finance, along with the privatization of state industries and agricultural resources, repositioned Chile as a producer of agricultural staples and raw materials. In the political sphere the promoters of neoliberalism redefined the basic principles of freedom, equal-ity, and democracy in relation to market forces. Freedom should be understood not in political terms but rather as strictly confined to economics and markets. Equality was understood as the absence of any limitations on the free function-ing of markets. And democracy was understood as a means to achieve economic

67. Tomás Moulian, Chile actual: Anatomía de un mito (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 1997), part 2; Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Rolando Álvarez Vallejos, and Karen Donoso Fritz, La alcaldización de la política: Los municipios en la dictadura pinochetista (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2012), chap. 1; Canelo, El Proceso en su laberinto; Demasi et al., La dictadura cívico- militar.

68. Vergara, Auge y caída del neoliberalismo; Moulian, Chile actual; Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Álvarez Vallejos, and Pinto Vallejos, Su revolución contra nuestra revolución, vol. 1, chap. 2 and conclusion. The “hard line” were the franquista nationalists.




69. Vergara, Auge y caída del neoliberalismo.70. The idea of a subsidiary state, in the Chilean case, was elaborated by neoliberal

technocrats bent on an ideological defense of free- market policies and on imposing those ideas on the institutions being set up. Subsidiarity implies a substantial weakening of the state’s social and economic role, restricting its intervention solely to issues the private sector would be unwilling or unable to take up. In this view, society’s motor would be the individual.

71. Vergara, Auge y caída del neoliberalismo, phases 2 – 3; Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Álvarez Vallejos, and Pinto Vallejos, Su revolución contra nuestra revolución, vol. 1, chap. 4; Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate et al., Su revolución contra nuestra revolución, vol. 2, chap. 3; Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, Nacionales y gremialistas, chaps. 3 – 5.

72. Canelo, El proceso en su laberinto.

freedom, thus making an authoritarian regime compatible with freedom thus defined.69 Along with this came changes in the functions of the government, which included dismantling its ability to operate state enterprises and to engage in social functions. What in Chile is called an estado subsidiario would be created that would turn over such state functions to private initiative and would leave the state to deal only with people mired in what was considered extreme pov-erty.70 The so- called modernizations of 1979 – 1981 introduced the logic of the market into the social arena by privatizing all services and decisions in the areas of labor relations, welfare, health, and education.

The debate between neoliberalism and corporatism moved toward reso-lution in 1978, when the draft of the new constitution was made public. The resulting constitution of 1980 included all the economic and political principles just described and established an authoritarian regime, called protected democ-racy. Since for neoliberals freedom was compatible with authoritarianism, the system established in the new constitution did little to preserve classical civil and political rights. Instead, it strengthened executive power and weakened par-liament and political parties. It accepted universal suffrage but created institu-tional counterweights that minimized the sovereignty of the vote. This authori-tarian system was one of the central features of the political program of the Chilean New Right that the neoliberals and gremialistas finally agreed upon.71 In contrast to Argentina, where it was not possible to develop consensus around neoliberalism and the dismantling of state enterprises,72 in Chile the leadership group of the dictatorship coalesced around this project, providing the cohesion necessary to sustain the regime over the long term.

Modernization, development, and poverty were central issues in the debate, because for the military those topics were connected with subversive activities. Most studies focus on the decision to reimpose market capitalism and disman-




73. Pilar Vergara, Políticas hacia la extrema pobreza en Chile, 1973 – 1988 (Santiago: FLACSO, 1990), 35 – 48; Mapa de la extrema pobreza en Chile (Santiago: Universidad Catolica de Chile, 1974); Veronica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “Al rescate del municipio: La síntesis ideologica de la dictadura pinochetista,” Observatorio Latinoamericano 1, no. 8 (2011): 108 – 33.

74. Vergara, Políticas hacia la extrema pobreza, 49.

tle the state. But it is important to note that both the policy of regionaliza-tion, which was supposed to decentralize the government by divesting politi-cal tasks to the municipality, and the neoliberal model seemed useful to the military objective of ending what was called extreme poverty, suffered by those people who were incapable of providing for their essential needs. In the gov-ernment’s analysis, extreme poverty resulted from the lack of adequate policies selectively designed to serve only those families that found themselves “below the indispensable level of welfare”; such limited policies would also prevent the emergence of universal policies applying to society as a whole.73 The principle of subsidiariedad would make it possible to reduce state activities in the social realm, turning over the provision of such services to the private sector, with the market as the distributive mechanism. If equality implied access to a minimum level of services, then state action aimed at those in extreme poverty was meant to ensure that everyone would participate in the market and to prevent sub-version. The state would abandon its universal social functions to concentrate exclusively on that part of the population defined as extremely poor, who were incapable of accessing the goods and services offered in the market and would therefore be assisted by the state.

Once the government’s program reached that level of specificity, it was pos-sible to claim that the dictatorship had social policies aimed at the lower classes, which it called the social safety net. In the regime’s analysis, all previous strate-gies had failed because the assistance did not reach those truly in need, having been taken instead by social groups with strong ties to labor unions. Extreme poverty could only be addressed by selective policies through which the state would focus on providing direct subsidies to those who could not otherwise access goods and services available in the market.74 For this approach to succeed, it was necessary to clearly delineate the poverty line, for which it was necessary in turn to generate social data to be able to identify the target population.

The municipality was assigned a central role in this plan as the local unit charged with putting the principle of subsidiariedad into practice. Municipali-ties were defined as functionally and geographically decentralized; they were intended to address the needs of local communities and to encourage their par-ticipation in the planning and practice of their own social and economic devel-opment, whether by direct action or through other public and private services.




75. Interview with Jaime Guzmán, La Segunda (Santiago), 7 May 1982, p. 2.76. Vergara, Políticas hacia la extrema pobreza, 49 – 56; Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, “Al

rescate del municipio.”77. La Segunda (Santiago), 6 Aug. 1981, p. 2.

A law of municipal revenue supported municipal autonomy, enabling local com-munities to engage in social, economic, and cultural activities previously in the hands of the central state. Thus the administration of schools, health centers, and child- care facilities, along with the tasks of community development and social assistance, was transferred to the municipality. All this meant the privatization of a wide range of social activities, bringing in private investment and embody-ing the estado subsidiario. As Jaime Guzmán explained, “putting into practice the principles of subsidiariedad and both functional and territorial decentraliza-tion . . . the 1980 constitution . . . sets up a new municipal structure . . . which broadens and strengthens the freedom to exercise the everyday rights . . . that have been transferred to the municipalities.”75

The new state would operate through the municipality, as this local unit would identify those in a condition of extreme poverty through the municipal Social Assistance Committees (Comités de Ayuda Social, CAS). These com-mittees would administer the Social Stratification File (Ficha de Estratificacion Social) designed by the government to collect information on the households in extreme poverty in each community. The municipal committees coordinated the services of public and private agencies and the activities of voluntary orga-nizations, in addition to conducting the surveys that would make it possible to place poor people on a scale of poverty. The municipality would then register the potential beneficiaries to whom social services would be directed.76 The Pinochet regime thus transformed the role of the municipality in the new insti-tutional apparatus, putting key social issues in its charge and giving it responsi-bility for executing the newly designed policies.

Thus the new star of social policy in the early 1980s was the municipality. It is no surprise that the municipal mayors would be identified as the most impor-tant figures in the new structure. As Metropolitan Intendant General Carol Urzúa declared, “In great measure the political success of this government rests on you, the mayors.”77 The dictatorship never forgot that the municipalities were key to its success in eliminating pockets of subversion, which were associ-ated with extreme poverty. Thus the new institutional structure was intended not only to strengthen the role of private capital but also to design a housing policy that would make it possible to eradicate poverty, removing poor people




from the slums and moving them to new public housing in outlying areas, with the assistance of voluntary associations.78

In this scenario, with social assistance programs institutionally located in the municipalities, the secretariats were relegated to an instrumental role. They lost the prominent position they held in the 1970s and became just a link in a system focused on communities. The bywords of the new institutional struc-ture were market forces and protected democracy. The secretariats kept up some of their activities, but they now directed them toward more restricted target groups: secondary school students, whose schools would be controlled by the municipalities, and residents of substandard areas in the process of eradica-tion. In practice their mission was to concentrate on high school students and leaders at the neighborhood level.

Old practices were called upon to spread the word about and to legitimize the new policies. Volunteers were mobilized to socialize the population regard-ing the nationwide project that had at last been formulated. Army general René Vidal recognized the work of indoctrination carried out by the Secretariat of Women as “of primordial importance” because the group had “educated itself in order to educate,” with the government showing the secretariat its “goals and . . . role in achieving them.”79 Pinochet himself stressed the importance of this propagandizing role, expressing the hope that “the training you have been charged with will be the seed that when disseminated . . . will yield the fruit that the fatherland has always expected of its daughters.”80 The confir-mation of this role was consistent with the permanent program of seminars at the regional, provincial, and community levels carried out since 1979 that was focused on the new institutional structure and the program of so- called mod-ernizations. The connection was made explicit by the undersecretary general of government at the time, Jovino Novoa: “We want people to understand these measures, to study them, and to disseminate them so that they can be known in their entirety. This is the most important aspect of these training courses . . . when they return to their home bases they will convey these ideas, because that is how they will be helping to build this new institutional structure.” As Car-men Grez confirmed, “The Secretariat of Women was created to train Chilean women across the length and breadth of Chile.”81 In other words, the emphasis

78. Vergara, Políticas hacia la extrema pobreza, 207 – 8.79. Amiga (Santiago), Apr. 1978, p. 10.80. Interview with Augusto Pinochet, Amiga (Santiago), May 1979, p. 14.81. Amiga (Santiago), Sept. 1979, pp. 13 – 14; La Segunda (Santiago), 11 Sept. 1979, p. 13.




82. Amiga (Santiago), Aug. 1980, p. 5.83. Amiga (Santiago), Feb. 1982, p. 3; Amiga (Santiago), Apr. 1982, p. 3.84. La Segunda (Santiago), 17 Jan. 1984, p. 4; Moulian, Chile actual, part 3, chap. 2;

Vergara, Auge y caída del neoliberalismo, postscript.

on training and indoctrination was meant to inject the government’s new truths and principles into the lower sectors of society, without which a minimum con-sensus was impossible. That consensus was to be formed around the legitimacy of market forces and authoritarianism.

In the final push toward installing the new system, the discourse on the importance of volunteerism was again taken up, with the publication Amiga stressing that it “has a multiplier effect. Every act by every volunteer is going to have more and more repercussions, we cannot even imagine how many.”82 Vol-unteers were asked to redouble the efforts they had been engaged in for almost a decade and to finish the task of building a new society. The military regime understood the political potential of volunteers, who were transformed into a veritable “army of women in blue.”83

The Secretariat of Women’s task in this phase was to legitimize the mod-ernization program. To do this, a series of training seminars were held for women volunteers — 28 in 1980 alone — dedicated to studying the new constitu-tion along with the reforms in education, labor relations, and social services; the seminars were addressed by the cabinet ministers responsible for these areas. This became particularly important in a period of economic crisis and social upheaval, when the so- called neoliberal utopia and the supposedly scientific neoliberal model were seriously questioned not only by the democratic opposi-tion but also by broad groups of the regime’s supporters. In this situation the indoctrination provided by duly trained volunteers became even more impor-tant, as they explained to lower- class women that “if the country is poor it is because there is a global recession and because the price of oil is very high and the price of copper very low. They understand it all very well.”84

The Secretariat of Youth focused its efforts on students at both the uni-versity and secondary levels. Seminars for leaders were increased in local com-munities and for representatives of student organizations in secondary schools. The purpose was to provide those future leaders with the information necessary to conduct themselves as such and to carry out the mission of communicating the government’s goals to young people. The regime, in turn, hoped that with all the information acquired during the training seminars these leaders would “spread the word to the entire student body, because as presidents of student organizations of secondary schools you have the obligation to be familiar with




this material and to share it with the constituents you represent . . . because this government . . . has reiterated that the new institutional structure, the Chile of tomorrow, is with you, distinguished young people.”85

The Secretariat of Youth’s clear turn to adolescents in spreading the word on the modernization program was also signaled by the appearance of publi-cations targeting that age group and dealing with the themes that interested the government. While teenagers had always been part of the purview of the secretariat, its main focus had been on the universities from which the future political and social leaders would emerge. In the context of the new institutional structure, however, the secretariat paid special attention to adolescent students and to those in the lower classes, which led to new training seminars and new magazines broaching such topics as drug addiction or teen pregnancy and talk-ing about the shift of education to the municipalities as a way of both institut-ing the policies of subsidiariedad and “improving the quality” of education by conducting professional development courses for teachers.86 This approach was maintained through the first half of the 1980s in an effort to sustain contact with leaders who would take the word of the government to secondary schools and lower- class neighborhoods, reinforcing anti- Marxist discourse during the time known as The Protests. The camps and congresses organized for young people were intended to strengthen support for the government’s program and to renew courses of ideological orientation and “advice and support for student organizations.”87

After educational reform privatized the university system in 1981, a pro-gram of training seminars and camps was organized by the Secretariat of Youth for more than 1,000 student leaders to explain the features of the new laws regu-lating universities. The program focused on the aspects of the legislation, plan-ning for the new program and its implementation, and the role of young people in the process. According to Luis Cordero, the national secretary of youth at the time, “for us the new law regulating universities represents the first institu-tional advance that will be of direct benefit to young people. . . . There is a great demand for information.”88 In previous years the youth camps had been devoted mostly to sports and recreation, but the program now changed back to empha-

85. Interview with the director de organizaciones civiles, El Cronista (Santiago), 16 Oct. 1979, p. 6.

86. Diario Loco (Valparaíso), July 1980; Diario Loco (Valparaíso), no. 2 (n.d.); El Trebol (Santiago), 1981; El Trebol (Santiago), 1982.

87. La Segunda (Santiago), 18 Jan. 1984.88. La Segunda (Santiago), 19 Jan. 1981.




sizing their educational function. In Cordero’s opinion, the 1980 – 1981 period had “seen so many changes and the start of so many measures that benefit young people that this summer we need to concentrate our efforts mainly on spreading the word about the good things that are happening in the area of education.”89 In that vein, the seminars took up such topics as economic and educational poli-cies and the role of the student leader.

The purpose of these seminars, congresses, and summer camps, however, was not only to disseminate information on the new policies but also to put the new institutional structure into practice. The indoctrination of student lead-ers and women was intended to lead to an increase in the number of commu-nity organizations, especially neighborhood associations, youth groups, sports clubs, and mothers’ centers, which would give life to the new democracy. The overall goal of the new institutional structure promoting membership in com-munity organizations was to situate the participation of Chile’s population in the local arena and not in political activities. For the regime a “truly participa-tory democracy” took form in the Local Development Councils (Consejos de Desarrollo Comunal, CODECOs), which were to serve as advisory bodies for the mayor of each municipality. The CODECOs would include representatives of commerce and industry in each local area, along with neighborhood associa-tions, youth groups, and women’s organizations. This plan drove the interest in training camps and courses intended to prepare leaders who would then serve as the heads of their respective neighborhood and community organizations and invigorate the young democracy.90 According to the regime’s thinking, the new institutional structure would supersede the old idea of participation based on political parties and elections and transform it into social participation. General Pinochet insisted on the need to strengthen democracy by focusing on people’s daily lives rather than on elections. The idea was to promote “the conscious cooperation every resident must exhibit as a member of the community, in the decisions affecting local affairs as well as in directing municipal activities,” because “the municipality is, in essence, the socially organized community.”91 The role of the mayors was to bring this new democracy into existence by stim-ulating the creation of community organizations controlled by leaders imbued with the official line of thought.92 The municipality was to be the nucleus of the new institutional structure.

89. Amiga (Santiago), Jan. 1982, p. 8.90. La Nación (Santiago), 4 July 1980, p. 9C.91. La Segunda (Santiago), 26 Oct. 1982, p. 2.92. El Cabildo de Santiago (Santiago), Oct. 1984; La Segunda (Santiago), 29 Sept. 1982,

p. 4; La Segunda (Santiago), 19 Jan. 1983; La Segunda (Santiago), 20 Jan. 1984; La Segunda (Santiago), 17 Mar. 1984.




93. Huneeus, El régimen de Pinochet, 362.94. La Segunda (Santiago), 2 Aug. 1983, p. 4.

This shift to the local community as the focus of economic, social, and political activities meant that voluntary associations and the secretariats would lose their central role. The mayor of each municipality would direct social assis-tance, implement slum eradication programs, mobilize political support for the regime, and make the new democracy a reality. When the regime developed its overall project to impose the estado subsidiario and the new democracy through local communities, the secretariats went into decline.

An illustration of this phenomenon is the openly political activity of the Movimiento Gremial from the mid- 1970s on, particularly after the founding of the Independent Democratic Union in 1983. The expansion of the Secretariat of Youth notwithstanding, it was telling that in 1975 the gremialistas created an organization independent of the government, the Youth Front for National Unity (Frente Juvenil de Unidad Nacional, FJUN), to defend their political interests. According to Carlos Huneeus, the FJUN was created because the sec-retariat had failed to mobilize young people, as the government was adverse to the secretariat’s participation in politics and the official sponsorship of the secretariat was unattractive to its intended constituency. Thus the gremialis-tas tried to increase their political influence by creating the FJUN, following the model of the Youth Fronts of Franco’s Spain.93 Huneeus’s interpretation is problematic in that the Spanish precedent was part of the state apparatus, while Guzmán’s FJUN was intended to be independent of the regime. But it is true that the Secretariat of Youth was not as successful as had been expected. While it managed to expand its membership somewhat into the general population, it was not able to attract the massive participation hoped for among the lower classes or the middle- class youth.94 In that early stage its interest was more in forming a leadership cadre, all of whom were university students and members of the upper classes.

By 1975, moreover, Chile was suffering from severe international isolation and the national security doctrine had become influential in the higher circles of the government, developments that affected Jaime Guzmán’s political direc-tion. It is no coincidence that the FJUN began to grow beginning in 1976, when the dispute between the so- called hard line and soft line broke out. While the FJUN was consistent with Guzmán’s original idea of creating a civil- military movement based on the Declaration of Principles, the timing of its creation and the form it took could lead to the conclusion that it was intended as a weapon in the political battle against the nationalists in order to press for the regime’s institutionalization. The FJUN declared that it was created to defend Chile




from international aggression and “to make September 11 into a project,” so that the “principles that inspired National Liberation, set forth by the govern-ment in its Declaration of Principles, would become a reality, and to advance resolutely toward the higher national goal of making Chile a great nation.”95

These phrases capture the general goal of the gremialista movement in its collaboration with the dictatorship: to impose its own political program, drawn from the Declaration of Principles. With the direction the government was taking in the mid- 1970s, that objective was put in question. The Secretariat of Youth was just one of the instruments gremialismo used to carry out its agenda. It produced some results, but it did not preclude the creation of other tools for gaining political influence. From its beginnings the FJUN saw as its duty the shaping of a new democracy that it described as humanistic and authoritarian, structured and participatory, protected and inclusive, along with an economy based on private property and individual initiative.96 To achieve its goals gre-mialismo became one of the elements in the personalist politics supporting Augusto Pinochet, because only Pinochet could give any guarantee that there would be profound changes. The FJUN worked to build its membership, but it also kept itself in the public eye, participating in political debates and reminding the governing junta of its commitment to “create a new democracy capable of serving freedom and progress, the higher ideals that guide us,” asserting “the right of the present government to guide the process of building the new insti-tutional system to its completion.”97 The creation of the New Democracy group in 1980 had a similar purpose.98 It is perhaps not coincidental that the Secre-tariat of Youth declined in importance beginning in 1978, at a time when it was important to be involved in the process of drafting the new constitution. The gremialista movement concentrated on that issue while never entirely abandon-ing the quasi- governmental channels the secretariat provided.

Along with such general efforts, however, gremialismo focused on munici-palities when the new institutional structure turned to them and on mayors when their political role grew. It targeted a few key municipalities for its politi-cal purposes, including Santiago, the most important comuna in the country,

95. FJUN (Santiago), July 1976, p. 3.96. Ibid., 11 – 14.97. Interview with Juan Antonio Coloma, El Cronista (Santiago), 10 July 1979, p. 5.98. La Segunda (Santiago), 11 Dec. 1979, p. 25; La Segunda (Santiago), 14 June 1980,

p. 3; La Segunda (Santiago), 13 Aug. 1980, p. 23; La Segunda (Santiago), 18 Aug. 1980, p. 27; La Segunda (Santiago), 4 Apr. 1980, pp. 2 – 3; La Segunda (Santiago), 11 May 1981, pp. 2 – 3; La Segunda (Santiago), 6 Apr. 1982, p. 3.




99. Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate et al., Su revolución contra nuestra revolución, vol. 2, chap. 4; Huneeus, El régimen de Pinochet, 370 – 76; La Segunda (Santiago), 26 Sept. 1983, p. 4; La Segunda (Santiago), 1 Oct. 1983, p. 2.

100. Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate et al., Su revolución contra nuestra revolución, vol. 2, chap. 4; Carolina Pinto R., UDI: La conquista de corazones populares (1983 – 1987) (Santiago: A and V, 2006); La Segunda (Santiago), 25 June 1984; La Segunda (Santiago), 16 July 1984, p. 4; La Segunda (Santiago), 7 Dec. 1984, p. 4; La Segunda (Santiago), 24 Jan. 1985, p. 4.

101. La Segunda (Santiago), 5 Dec. 1981. Emphasis added.

some others in lower- class areas, and those in cities such as Valparaíso and Concepcion.99

Perhaps nothing expressed the changing situation better than the outburst of public protests in 1983. The secretariats had already lost prominence by the early 1980s, but the social upheaval and the public reemergence of the Marx-ist Left renewed political activism in poor neighborhoods and shantytowns. In another example of his nose for political opportunity, Jaime Guzmán created his own political party, the Union Democrata Independiente. The UDI was the first right- wing party to include in its structure a Departamento Poblacional, which was created to combat the Left in lower- class areas and to compete for the political affiliation of the poor. Through its neighborhood committees the UDI could continue to develop its social activities and political proselytizing.100 The Secretariat of Youth had already become almost superfluous. At this point the struggle had shifted elsewhere, and the government also did not need the secretariats as it did in its early days.

The Secretariat of Women, in contrast, never had its own political agenda. It was subordinated to the interests and instructions of the government, which restricted any impetus toward it developing an independent political stance. It is possible that control exercised by Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, the general’s wife, prevented the emergence of any autonomous projects and made the Sec-retariat of Women a fully pinochetista organization that embodied the regime’s project by identifying with its leader. Margaret Power is correct in emphasizing the regime’s forced dismantling of anti- Leftist women’s organizations and the subordination of women to the new authorities. In this regard, the Secretariat of Women followed the trajectory of the dictatorship very closely, sharing its ups and downs. As its most important national secretary, Carmen Grez, said as she left the position, “I am leaving proud to have accomplished a beautiful task. I have been able to participate like a grain of sand within the government. . . . I am about to deliver my evaluation, and declare myself adjourned.”101 In contrast to Guzmán and the gremialistas, Grez stood down when so instructed by the regime, as did many other female volunteers. In her case, it turned out that the




adjournment was brief, as she was appointed mayor of the comuna of Providen-cia, a post she held until 1996.

In sum, when the regime developed a clear overall project and the munici-pality became the most important mediating organization, it could largely dis-pense with the high- profile role it had assigned to the secretariats, which had once been the heart of pinochetismo.

Conclusion

This article has focused on the role of women and young people in the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, as seen through the trajectory of these group’s two official organizations. To the extent that the regime’s efforts at resocialization and co- optation were concentrated in the two secretariats, these groups, rather than workers as a group or adults in general, were the heart of pinochetismo. While the Chilean case bears some resemblance to the experiences of other dictatorial and totalitarian regimes, in magnitude and significance it fell far short of similar examples elsewhere. This seems to have been due to the politi-cal culture of the Chilean military, which was distant from fascism, as well as the influence of historical context on the path that the Chilean regime took. International isolation and the economic crisis were key factors in the decision to build up the Secretariats of Women and Youth as instruments of external legitimacy and to institute an economic plan in 1975, with the consequences that followed. The need to alleviate poverty in the midst of the retreat of the state and the imposition of neoliberalism on the population, particularly on the lower classes, required a perfectly indoctrinated army of civilians. This explains the prominence of the secretariats in the 1970s. But in the overall project laid out and put in place in the early 1980s, the municipality occupied the central position. The secretariats lost their earlier roles and were subordinated to the authority of local mayors.

The experience of the secretariats reflected more the ins and outs of inter-nal politics than comparable examples elsewhere, even though the latter served as precedents and models. This was because the decade following the 1973 coup was a time of struggles within the regime to impose a project and to neutral-ize opponents, especially in the fight against the nationalists, who advocated a permanently militarized state structure and fascist- like social mobilization. The alliance between gremialistas and neoliberals succeeded in providing the regime with a project that corresponded with many of its own aspirations. That project focused on the municipality, thus weakening the secretariats.

The regime’s struggle to define a project is revealed in the different fates




of the secretariats’ constituencies. In the case of women, without a program of their own their voluntary organization only responded to the government’s positions, and their secretariat became less relevant as the regime became insti-tutionalized. The gremialistas, in contrast, shifted the focus of their activities from the Secretariat of Youth to their own political organizations, which had a better chance of surviving into the future, as subsequent events confirmed. Both groups, however, can be considered the hard core of pinochetismo, the embodiment of its project.

The history of the secretariats illustrates the hegemonic efforts of the military- civilian regime in power in Chile. Throughout their trajectory they played a key role in constructing societal consensus around the dictatorial proj-ect. Although the regime did not fully articulate that project until 1978, it was able to discern the importance of the General Secretariat of Government and to promote it as an agent for resocializing the lower classes through its organi-zations for young people and women. Once the tools for generating consensus were concentrated in the municipality, the secretariats were relegated to a sec-ondary role, although they never disappeared completely.



Were Women and Young People the Heart of the Pinochet Regime

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Transcript of Were Women and Young People the Heart of the Pinochet Regime