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In 1969, Warren Nutter left the University of Virginia Department of Economics to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Nixon administration. During his time in the Defense Department, Nutter was deeply involved in laying the groundwork for a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Although Nutter left the Pentagon several months before the successful 1973 coup, his role in Chile was far more direct than the better-known cases of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Arnold Harberger. This chapter describes Nutter’s role in Chile policymaking in the Nixon administration. It shows how Nutter’s criticisms of Henry Kissinger are grounded in his economics, and compares and contrasts Nutter with other economists who have been connected to Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Utopia, a term first coined by Sir Thomas More in the sixteenth century, referred to a place of unattainable social perfection. But the appeal of a concept that embraces rather than mocks the imagination has broadened its meanings and uses. In the early twentieth century, Anatole France wrote, “Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.” In contemporary vernacular, utopia has come to refer not only to imagining perfection but cures for imperfection. By this definition, any struggle for rights could be conceived as utopian to the extent that it represents a desire to make the world a better place for the would-be beneficiaries. The utopianism of rights envisions conditions in which human dignity can be ensured and vulnerability minimized.

How does state repression influence levels of mobilization in authoritarian regimes? This study argues that the relationship between repression and protest is temporally dynamic. Specifically, the short- and long-term effects of autocrats' coercive actions differ conditionally on each phase of the contentious cycle. This argument is tested taking advantage of an original database of protest events in Pinochet's Chile between 1982 and 1989. Using an Interrupted Time Series design, the results show that the State of Siege declarations issued in 1984 and again in 1986 had divergent short- and long-term influence. When the cycle was on an expansive stage, the State of Siege shows no immediate influence on the protests, followed by an increase in long-term mobilization. However, when the mobilization was declining, the State of Siege was associated with an immediate and prominent drop in mobilization, followed by a progressive decrease in the number of protests over the long term. This chapter contributes to the literature on the protest–repression nexus by providing new evidence on the dynamics shaping the relationship between state repression and civil disobedience in authoritarian regimes.

This chapter examines the delicate balance achieved by apex courts in new democracies when dealing with impunity for rights violations during times of transitional justice. While international law has clearly rejected amnesties for past rights violations, domestic politics sometimes incorporate amnesties as part of larger peace settlements. This puts courts in the difficult situation of balancing the competing demands of law and politics. Courts have achieved equipoise in this situation by adopting substantive interpretations and procedural approaches that use international law’s rights-based language but without implementing international law’s restrictions on amnesties. In many cases, courts do this without acknowledging the necessarily pragmatic nature of their decisions. In fact, oftentimes courts find ways of avoiding having to make any substantive decision, effectively removing themselves from a dispute that could call into question their adherence to international legal norms that transcend politics. In doing so, they empower political actors to continue down the road toward negotiated peace settlements, while at the same time protecting the courts’ legitimacy as institutions uniquely situated to protect international human rights norms – including those they have effectively deemphasized in the process.

This chapter explores a number of relatively unknown aspects of the controversy over Milton Friedman’s March 1975 visit to Chile through the analytical framework provided by James M. Buchanan’s late 1950s assessment of the economist-physician analogy. The chapter draws upon a range of archival and neglected primary sources to show that the topics which generally rear their head in any contemporary discussion of Friedman’s visit to Chile – for example, whether it is appropriate to provide policy advice to a dictator – were aired in a largely private mid-1970s exchange between Friedman and a number of professional associates. In particular, the controversy over Friedman and Chile began several months before Friedman arrived in Santiago.

On September 11th, 1973, started the darkest stage in the recent history of Chile. The military and the police, at the command of General Augusto Pinochet, executed the most atrocious acts against the human dignity that the country had witnessed. The martial and technocratic leaders of the dictatorship ripped apart and redesigned the institutions of the country at their will, through to the elimination of the opposition and the systematic violation of human rights, which reached any person or group. Just a few days after the coup d’état that brought Pinochet to power, the Cardinal and Archbishop of Santiago, Raúl Silva Henríquez, and a group of churches declared themselves against the devastating violence that was gripping the country. Immediately, the religious spaces took up the lead in the defense of the most vulnerable, the persecuted, marginalized, and poor. The major effort focused on the Vicariate of Solidarity, an organization of the Catholic Church in Chile that was tasked with the promotion and defense of human rights, which offered legal and social assistance to the victims and their families. The Vicariate quickly positioned itself as a leader in search of justice against the backdrop of repression, censorship, lack of representative institutions, and prohibition of popular movements. The purpose of the present chapter is to analyze the work of the Vicariate of Solidarity and its leading role in the fight against human rights violations, strengthening social reorganization, reconciliation, and the return to democracy in Chile.

This paper argues that structural and institutional reforms imposed by the military regime and accepted by the Concertación impose substantial impediments to collective action among Chile's popular sectors. In particular, labor market and social welfare policies exacerbate social stratification, deprive the public of vital resources, reinforce workers’ vulnerability to market forces and undermine social trust. These dynamics and the state structures that perpetuate them indicate the state's role in either facilitating or impeding collective action among subordinate segments of the population. They further suggest the negative impact neoliberalism has on the quality of democracy by constraining popular participation.

The marketing of neoliberalism in Chile has been premised on a sanitized view of history, erasure of collective memory, and erroneous claims of reason. This article examines neo-liberalism in Chile from the perspective of La Victoria, a working-class Santiago población, with a rich history of activism. The author shows how residents have been impacted by both economic policies and state violence, and how they have contested dominant ideology, neoliberal practices, and their problematic perspectives on time, memory, and reason. Victorianos reject collective amnesia and bring a moral imperative grounded in social justice to bear in constructing an alternative common sense.

This chapter discusses the legal and political process whereby indigenous peoples in Chile have demanded, and failed to be granted, constitutional recognition. By identifying indigenous peoples as groups that suffer from both misrecognition and maldistribution, I demonstrate political authorities' and legal scholars' lack of understanding toward indigenous peoples' demands since the resumption of democracy, in the late 1980s. I discuss the way in which indigenous peoples ultimately resort to the law from outside, i.e., international human rights law, to challenge the local understandings and the contours of a Constitution that fails to include the most disadvantaged group in Chilean society.

The overall objective of this chapter is measuring the effect of key economic indicators and trends on the media reputation of an emergent country. The case analyzed is that of Chile, since 1990–2015. To deal with our objective, we measured the media reputation of Chile following validated criteria by Deephouse (2000).

A regression analysis was conducted to test our hypothesis that the coefficient of media favorableness (CoMF) of a country depends on the favorable or unfavorable trend of key economic indicators of the country. The dependent variable of our model was the Chilean CoMF. Independent variables were the monthly GDP variation, the monthly unemployment rate, the monthly average of the stock exchange index, the monthly average fuel price, and the monthly average copper price (a very important commodity to Chile).

Our results demonstrate that key economic indicators have a significant positive bearing on the media reputation of an emergent country as Chile, that is, when an emergent country is doing well economically, the press with a global scope tends to improve the reputation of that country, showing a more favorable image about it. In consequence, our hypothesis is supported. In the case of an emergent and small Western country as Chile, the price of commodities appears as the most important predictive indicator of its favorable or unfavorable country reputation. Other implications are discussed in the study.