On the Chilean "transition" 1

Transitions as democratization processes: the "global trend" of the 1990's?

Conventional understandings and theoretical elaborations within political science and sociology around the term “transition” are part of an extensive body of work known as “transitology.” Guillermo O'Donnell is a key theoretical referent to analyze processes of authoritarianism and democratization in Latin America, and especially cited for the case of Chile are his concepts of "bureaucratic-authoritarian state" and of "pacted transitions." Conventional theories of democratization and transition also often make reference to the so-called "third wave of democratization" proposed by Samuel Huntington which groups together processes in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. According to this literature, democratization is the major trend of the twentieth-century, and it is caused/triggered both by internal factors such as pressure coming from elites and mass movements, and external ones, such as the new requirements for economic aid of international financial institutions.

Much of the literature on transitions to democracy coming from political science, or "transitology," converge in one point despite differences: the world seems to be moving progressively towards democratization as a result of an increased awareness of the benefits of democratic orders.They conceptualize these processes as subdivided in three: the initial breakdown of authoritarian rule, the transition to, and the consolidation of democracy. And even if many of these authors are cautious or moderately critical of the results of processes of democratization, they seem to engage in teleological explanations that assume a global movement of this kind within a narrative of progress. Conventional elaborations on processes of democratization seem to take as their premise that authoritarian regimes cannot sustain themselves forever as they eventually face crises of legitimacy and/or fail to obtain support from the bases. In any case, this kind of analysis suggests that authoritarian regimes enter crises because of lack of support and legitimacy, which can be misleading to analyze the Chilean case, constructing the image that a) the regime actually ended, and b) it ended because it failed to obtain popular support.

Linz and Stepan have noted that in the Chilean case, in contrast to the processes of democratization carried out in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, the military was legitimated by the strong support it received from the bourgeoisie, a support that largely continued after the dictatorship was over, even when official reports on human-rights violations were issued. In the 1988 plebiscite more than 40% of the electorate voted for the continuation of Pinochet's government, and in the 1989 presidential elections, over 40% voted against the Concertación, that is, as Loveman puts it, “the military government from 1973 to 1990 neither existed in a vacuum nor imposed itself with deep roots in civil society” (311). It is not a secret either that the ideological designers of Pinochet's regime (such as Jaime Guzmán, its key ideologue) foresaw that the military regime could only be sustained for a limited amount of time. At some point, a process of "normalization," the return to a democratic political order, would be necessary.

Then, as critics of the transition have pointed out, it can be argued that the regime only changed its institutional form because it was planned from the beginning that it would eventually transition from a military dictatorship into a civilian government. The creation of these "models" for political transitions is also problematic because they suggest a rather functionalist/systemic view of societies, constructing them as systems whose processes can be described and predicted by their own mechanisms, largely ignoring the weight of historicity and local/regional particularities, the cultural contexts and the specific meanings that each of these processes carry.

Linz and Stepan, whose work is devoted to the analysis of different cases of democratization around the world, emphasize that the question of whether a transition to democracy is over is not an intellectual, but a very concrete political problem. Declaring a transition over, like the first democratic government of Patricio Aylwin did by the end of his mandate (1990-1994), presents a scenario where struggles for further changes are not seen as necessary and therefore, they are not seen as legitimate.Under the criteria proposed by these authors for a completed transition, Chile has definitely not achieved this point, given the constraints imposed by the 1980 constitution, and will not fully complete a transition until the “authoritarian enclaves” are overcome and civilian governments have the power to formulate new policies without those constraints. In fact, I would add that because in the post-dictatorship the situation is assumed to be normalized, much of the remaining political activism is demonized and actors who continue to engage in political struggles are constructed as "extremists." In turn, to claim the end of the transition renders the authoritarian features of democracy invisible or makes them appear as acceptable.

I will focus on discourses around the transition in Chile, discussing the different meanings attributed to the post-dictatorship, and considering the potential cultural effects that different versions and interpretations may have. In Chile, political actors and intellectuals have long held conflicting views on the notion of transition, its content, and its evaluation. While the most optimistic insist that the transition was a completed and successful process, others are more cautious and while declaring the transition over, point at some of its problematic or unsolved aspects. Moderate critics of the transition see it as an unfinished process, but still give the process some credit for, at least, "moving towards" democratization. Finally, the more "radical" critics of the transition contend that the only transition there was (understood as a transit, transformation, movement) occurred under the dictatorship, when Chilean society transited from a state-center development to a free-market economy. I put the word "radical" on quote marks because this label could lead to a negative connotation of their radicalism, especially since moderation has been elevated as the most positive value of the post-dictatorship by official discourse . I will then consider how critical readings of the transition delve into the symbolic, subjective and cultural dimensions and problems of the transition and post-dictatorship that dominant frameworks coming from political science and sociology cannot apprehend.

Altogether, the elements that these conflicting positions take into account when assessing the transition and the post-dictatorship could be organized as the politico-institutional order, the socioeconomic order, and the cultural-symbolic order. Like all categorizations, this one is tricky because it creates the illusion that these three orders are clean cut, distinct realities that are independent for each other. Of course, the politico- institutional, such as the 1980 constitution is key to maintain the socio-economic order, as well as the cultural-symbolic, which in turn is a result of the economic model. However, many of the authors reviewed here use these kind of distinctions as if we could think of them independently. If it is useful as a disclaimer, I will add "for analytical purposes."

The way that different actors define and weigh these dimensions will often explain their diverging positions. At the same time, all the accounts and analyses of the transition and post-dictatorship mentioned here will be taken as necessarily partial and situated. Since this generation of Chilean intellectuals was for the most part directly and actively involved in the political processes they analyze, differences in their narrations are also determined by their personal experiential, political, and ideological position within these events. None of them are distanced nor are they detached from their object of analysis. They are invested in engaging with this topic so that part of their lives is explained too (in a similar way that the author of this essay is invested in the post-dictatorship).

However, I do not consider this a handicap in terms of objectivity. Instead of trying to determine which of these versions is closer to the "truth," I suggest that as a whole they conform the multiple (but not infinite) possible accounts or discursive repertoires that construct and give sense to the also multiple and conflicting historical experiences of the coup, the dictatorship and the transition. This is not to say that all accounts are equivalent, that everybody should have their "own version" and be left alone with it. But it means to accept that the project of a single history or interpretation of these events is just not possible, and we will have to live with the ambiguity, incompleteness and irreconciliability of the Chilean sociopolitical history. The multiplication of these accounts, from their always partial, situated and fragmented positions, may in fact be, as Nelly Richard suggests, one of the possible ways to resist state power in the form of totalizing and monolithic narratives of the transition and the post-dictatorship. Finally, I will ponder what a "queer feminist analysis" adds to the analysis of the transition and the post-dictatorship, indicating possible directions for my future research.

Chilean Transition: "successful," "long over," "unfinished"...?

In their official discourse, the governments of the Concertación have insisted that the transition is over. 'Renovated' socialist Enrique Correa, spokesperson of the first democratic government of the transition and one of the protagonists of the negotiations with Pinochet, is a clear example of the dominant position within the Concertación. Correa argues that the Chilean transition has been the "most successful of Latin America," (Qué Pasa 11, my translation) and that Aylwin's government "unified the country." He declares that political practice today consists in the conciliation of diverse interests, and speaks of the need to overcome the idea that there are antagonistic contradictions in society, as he says to have believed along with his socialist comrades in their "more fervent ideological years" (ibid 11). This shift in relation to politics and social conflict is also characteristic of the Concertación and is, in fact, what allows them to understand the transition as finished and successful. Correa, for example, attributes the success of the transition to the fact that his generation was driven by a "political realism" when they recognized "capitalism as a reality, liberal democracy as a great regime, and negotiation as the best strategy as opposed to confrontation" (ibid, 12).

Correa thinks that this success is measured by the ability they had to make agreements, thanks to the wise gradualism and reformism of the Concertación. At the same time, he acknowledges the weakness and vulnerability that Aylwin's government had when they negotiated with Pinochet, implicitly indicating how these "agreements" were taken under Pinochet's direct threats of going backwards. He indirectly recognizes it was driven by fear that the Aylwin administration decided that removing Pinochet of his role of commander in the army would put stability at risk. Still, talking about the night of the results of the 1988 plebiscite, Correa gets very enthusiastic: "that night politics not only showed all its potency and superiority to arms, but it was also the moment when the whole country took a turn forward. There, the country that the whole world admires was born" (ibid). In sum, he sees the politico-institutional order as democratic; the socioeconomic policies as successful; and at the cultural-symbolic level, reconciliation achieved. Check mark in all areas for Correa. This position summarizes the discourse that the Concertación —with more or less arrogance, undisguisable regret, or awkwardness— has defended.

But despite Correa's triumphalist perspective, the precariousness and fragility during democracy of the first two governments was made evident in a series of events that pitted the civilian authorities against the military: the "ejercicio de enlance" in 1990, and more dramatically, the “boinazo” of May 1993, when the army performed publicly a gathering of troops dressed in battle gear in downtown Santiago as an explicit threat in response to a judicial investigation of Pinochet's son fraudulent checks, and to the possible prosecution of high officers for human-rights violations. The "boinazo" forced Aylwin to engage in exhausting endless negotiations with the military and political leaders of the right, and to eventually deactivate the prosecution against Pinochet's son's fraudulent checks.

According to Loveman, the "boinazo" made evident that the army's de facto power held the government hostage, and one of its results was Aylwin administration's fear of proposing any further reforms that affected the military, such as the derogation of the 1978 Amnesty Law, which was a key component of the Concertación's original program. Pinochet's confident defiance was also expressed in his declarations after the Rettig ReportThe National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation was created by Aylwin in 1990, which issued a report on human rights violations during the dictatorship in February of 1991. This report was dubbed "The Rettig Report" for the commission's director name, Raul Rettig. was made public and Aylwin had asked for “gestures” of forgiveness. He stated that there was nothing to ask forgiveness for, as the military had saved the country from international communism and that, given the circumstances, he would act in the same way.The right-wing also went on to declare all attempts to prosecute members of the military for human-rights violations as characteristic of a resentful left driven by the desire for vengeance. And Loveman notes that if Aylwin's government had any plans of using the Rettig Report to open a public social debate on human right's violations, the assassination of Jaime Guzmán, shortly after the report was issued, buried all the possibilities and instead forced the government to change the focus of their public discourse towards terrorism. It also gave grounds to the right to claim that "they too" had victims on their side (316).
Many intellectuals of the left who are sympathetic to the Concertación have articulated moderated criticisms of the transition, still in dialogue with the literature on transitology. Agüero's review of the literature on democratization processes make evident that most authors agree to refer to post-dictatorship democracies in conditional terms, such as “fragile”, “hybrid” or “delegative”. He acknowledges that radically different assessments of the Chilean democratization process coexist: these go from optimistic views of the "consolidation of democracy," to more skeptical (or "pessimistic," in his view) evaluations that, at least, take into account the authoritarian enclaves of the democratic order, or straightforwardly see this new order as a façade for the continuity of an authoritarian structure.He attributes these differences to the chosen focus used when assessing democracy. If we are comparing democracy to the immediate past of the country, we will have a different assessment that comparing Chilean democracy to democracies in other countries. Also, it will depend on how we conceptualize the relationship between the political and economic order, and the very notions of "transition" and "democracy." On the other hand, in Agüero's view, the concept of consolidation is problematic for various reasons: it assumes a teleological, linear sequence "towards" consolidation, automatically assuming that post-authoritarian regimes are already democratic and moving further in that direction, thus not challenging the democratic nature of these new regimes at all. Furthermore, Agüero points out that while some of the criteria used to assess the consolidation of democracies is useful —such as the notions of authoritarian legacies and enclaves— there is an intrinsic risk in the notion of a “consolidated democracy” altogether, as it can be used to put closure on democratization processes by declaring the full achievement of a democratic order.

Agüero describes democratization processes in Latin America stating that in general, the military has receded in their influence and that fear has ceased to be used as a political currency in the region, even though this point is completely arguable. Beyond the institutional continuing influence of the military,Pinochet's constitution of 1980 (approved in a fraudulent plebiscite) meant the imposition of an electoral system that gave the military continuing influence and allowed for the over-representation of conservative sectors in Congress once the dictatorship was over. The effects of a pacted or negotiated transition could be seen later in the democratic government's inability to deal with issues of human rights, and the adoption of uncomfortable official discourses of forgiveness and reconciliation without justice. we can identify a deep-seated culture of militarization that permeates the whole society. In fact, in March 1994, shortly after taking office as President, Eduardo Frei faced another episode that made evident how the transition was not over, in spite of the official discourse . Sixteen carabineros were convicted for the kidnapping, killing and beheading of three communist teachers in 1985. Frei then requested the chief of Carabineros Adolfo Stange, who was being charged with obstruction of justice, to resign, a request that Stange defiantly rejected by invoking the 1980 constitution. He finally retired voluntarily in October 1995 and became an institutional Senator in 1998. Likewise, fear continues to articulate social life in the post-dictatorship in the form of social insecurity and distrust, as several UNDP reports have showed.See for example, "Desarrollo Humano en Chile: Las Paradojas de la Modernización." Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo. Santiago de Chile, 1998. And the ideology of the national security doctrine, that demonized politics and represented ideology as a destructive and divisive force, is well alive in Chile, as demonstrated by Olea's feminist analysis of Chile's participation in the UN Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

Furthermore, Agüero argues that processes of democratization have been accompanied by economic reforms that have translated into a "vigorous economic recovery," which has helped to increase the legitimacy of democratic governments, because the public has tended to perceive the strengthening of the private sector as a way to limit the power of the state.Even though this is not Agüero's own perspective, this kind of discourse strategically tends to confound "private sector" with "civil society," and often refers to the developmentalist state in negative terms, stressing its "discretionary" or "arbitrary" power, thus implicitly conflating state=dictatorship and democracy=free market. Using this discourse, the most aggressive neoliberal intellectuals often oppose the regulations of the state to the market as an attack on freedom and democracy, implicitly and many times, explicitly opposing state to democracy. But if for Agüero the economy has legitimized democracy in Latin America, it is rather the opposite that can be said for the Chilean case: a democratic "modern" political system served to finally lend legitimacy to an economic model imposed —probably nowhere else as drastically as in Chile— under a violent military dictatorship.

To be sure, Agüero does not hold a naive or too optimistic view of the Chilean transition: he considers it an unfinished process, noting that under the democratic governments there has been an uneven development that he visualizes as "faulty lines" using a geological metaphor, where different tectonic plates encounter each other causing friction and pressure. As many other social scientists sympathetic to the Concertación, he praises the economic policies as one of the positive aspects of the transition, as if they could be evaluated independently from the "underdeveloped tracks" of the transition, namely the (lack of) political reforms and justice for human rights violations. For example, when he analyzes the progresses and challenges of democratic governments, he conflates the term "privatization" of public education with "modernization," paying compliments to decentralization —a process implemented under dictatorship— in terms of the improved efficiency of the state. For him, the main problem lies in those uneven strands of modernization: while the economic one stands ahead, others strands regarding legal reforms, social inclusion and diversity, still lag behind.




At a more cultural-symbolic level, Agüero is critical of the way the Concertación presented the first democratic government (Patricio Aylwin, 1990-1994) as the "transition government" and then pretended that the process was over, making the next government (Eduardo Frei Jr., 1994-1998) appear as the "modernization government." The first two democratic governments failed to successfully address human-rights issues which finally ended up being largely avoided and considered "divisive," —what Agüero rightly describes as the "skunk in the garden party"—, but then the party was definitely ruined when Pinochet was detained in London in 1998, and the skunk re-entered the party now with international legitimacy, making it evident that the "transition" was far from over.

With Pinochet's detention, unresolved human-rights themes recovered protagonism and the political forces re-aligned around him, for and against, disorganizing coalitions and breaking the illusion of consensus that dominated the first decade of post-authoritarian democracy. Under the first decade of democratic governments, most actors across the political spectrum, with the exception of the extra-parlamentary left, had built a consensus on the areas of economic development and state "modernization" and avoided “divisive” issues. For Agüero, the re-emergence of long pending issues of human rights that resulted from Pinochet's detention was an evident sign that the transition was unfinished, and that these issues would continue to haunt the postdictatorship, not allowing for a closure as long as they were not dealt with.Agüero makes a good point when he suggests that many of the faulty lines of democracy are not a product exclusively of the dictatorship, but rather, rearrangements of features already present in pre-authoritarian regimes, that acquire new shapes in the post-dictatorship. This last point is also consistent with Loveman and Lira, who make a convincing argument about the long held authoritarian tradition of the Chilean state. Loveman, Fernández, and Salazar have all showed that Pinochet did not invent authoritarianism in Chile nor state violence, but just resourced to historic mechanisms of legitimizing, rationalizing and later forgetting the use of force under states of exception. That is, politico-institutional order: half a check mark, in process of democratization. Socioeconomic order: check. Symbolic-cultural level: the skunk at the garden party. Transition, unfinished.