The Post-Allende Period
In the aftermath of the coup, El Teniente went back to work losing $70 million to $100 million in production, with copper production dropping 37 percent during 1973-74 (Baldez 125). The Feminine Command of El Teniente or FCT lost total control of the strikes in that the military controlled the situation. The FCT helped their husbands, but they began to dismiss the idea that the strike to demand a readjustment of salary for the miners would ever succeed (Roxborough, O’Brien, and Roddick 215).
Still, the Pinochet regime showed a cost of living increase by 500 percent (Sigmund 268). But the Junta Militar de Chile reported an inflation rate of 693 percent with the minerss readjusted wages increasing only 20 to 40 percent. By the end of the year 1974 the Chilean government reported an unemployment crisis, the unemployment rate rising from ten percent to eighteen percent in 1975 (Sigmund 268).
Copper and wheat reached a high in production since that the absent of strikes at the mines and the growth of agricultural production (Sigmund 268). By 1975 copper production dropped, and the foreign price of wheat and other food in general. The Chilean government invested $256 million in wheat importations and the wheat invests prices growth up (Sigmund 268).
The Chilean economy reported a “balance of payments deficit for 1974 reach[ing] $196 million and despite an austerity program initiated in April 1975 reach $250 million” because the copper prices and production had dropped (Sigmund 268). United States banks provided aid for the economic crises in Chile. However, U.S. individual investors were concerned about human- rights violations: torture and abuses. U.S. private investors did not want an association with the people affected, but the Andean Pact project in Chile helped the Chilean economy to obtain new investments (Sigmund, p.269).
The government of Pinochet denied that there were any cases of human-rights abuses. Yet the military reported, in March 1974, the death Jose Toha, Minister of Defense and the Interior from Allende’s administration. General Bachelet, who was in prison “on charges of having assisted in the infiltration of the air force, also died, apparently of natural causes” (Sigmund 269). These deaths generated groups of movements against Pinochet’s regime.
Equally important was the rise of feminist groups that had a significant impact on Pinochet’s regime. Women organized protests against Pinochet’s regime, and the Catholic Church helped to mobilize support for this resistance. More than ten thousand people were exiled to different countries, with some countries establishing different international networks to support the Chilean victims of human rights abuses (Baldez 126-127).
The Directorate of National Intelligence of Chile or DINA and Pinochet’s secrets police helped to establish a fear of violence and murder in the Chile (Kornbluh 206). Operation Condor, for instance, was an international, “cross-border” machine of assassination. The purpose of the Condor was to conduct torture, kidnapping, and disappearances of those in opposition to Pinochet. The CIA helped members of the DINA to undertake military operations and terrorism in Chile. From 1974 to 1977 DINA was supervised by General Contreras, who helped to make Pinochet a hero of anti-communists (Kornbluh 213). His popularity across Latin America earned him important contacts with Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher, and Francisco Franco just prior to his death in 1975 (Dinges 12). However, the death of 119 people from the Movement of Revolutionary Left or MIR created an association called the Families of the Detained Disappeared or ADFF, which became one of the must important human-rights organizations in Chile (Baldez 130). Also, Jimmy Carter, former president of United States decided that “the U.S. government [would formalize] its insistence that foreign aid be linked to a country’s record on human rights” (Baldez 132).
In August 1977, Pinochet’s supporters and members of DINA ended all activities against terrorists and Marxists. More than one hundred Chilean people from the AFDD and National Committee for the Rights of Youth, Peace and Justice Service, Chilean Commission on Human Rights, and the Commission for the Defense of the Rights of the People held massive demonstrations against Pinochet’s regime. The Chilean police took extreme measures, including violence against the protesters, leaving families concerned about the arrests of protesters. Later, the AFDD organized another massive protest against the Chilean government about the missing people arrested in the protests (Baldez 132). Pinochet’s soldiers had conducted massive arrests on the streets and houses outside of Santiago Centro.
In 1979 a peculiar incidents in the Lonquen mine outside of Santiago Chile caused the people concern. Five bodies in the Lonquen mine where found. Previously, their families had reported them missing. The discovery of their bodies prompted the victims’ families to protest in the Santiago Centro about human rights abuses to their husbands and sons (Baldez 133).
Human Rights organizations reported that of 2,279 people who disappeared, 126 were women. At that time, the members of AFDD and other women’s organizations did not identify themselves by their gender. They had not framed the human-rights issues as women’s issues (Baldez 133). They did “not see their actions as a form of liberation of their sex” (Baldez 133). After a while, female activists and organizations began to identify themselves as women’s movements. These women’s movements “began to extend the notion of human rights to include women’s right.” In 1979, “a group of women in the Chilean Commission on Human Rights started the Committee for the Rights of Women. Many of these women would later go on to participate in feminist organizations” (Baldez, p.134).
Feminism in Chile began when middle-class women formed different activities about women’s issues linked to Pinochet’s dictatorial regime. Fourteen university-educated and professional women created the Association for the Unity of Women (SUMA). Later, SUMA became a member of the Academy of Christian Humanism or AHC. The AHC “provided feminist intellectuals a safe place to meet and allowed them to organize public events with a measure of protection from military repression” (Baldez 134-136). This group of women was different from the previous generation’s. The new group aimed to break traditional roles (Baldez 134-136), whereas the previous group were simply seeking economic redress.
Clearly, Chilean women have had a significant impact on the political structures in Chile during Pinochet’s regime. Feminist groups became more popular, increasing women’s participation. Still, somewhat before the Pinochet’s regime, Chilean women had also had an impact on Allende’s administration, the groups of El Teniente, Codelco Chile.
