Were Women and Young People The Heart of The Pinochet Regime

Hispanic American Historical Review
Were Women and Young People the

Heart of the Pinochet Regime?
Rise and Decline of the Secretariats
Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate
On the day of General Augusto Pinochets 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 regimes two most important 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 transition to democracy.1 Female voluntary organizations were the topic of some
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, 19731983,
3 vols. (Santiago: Pehun, 1989); Patricia Verdugo, Los zarpazos del Puma (Santiago: CESOC,
1989); Alejandro Foxley, Experimentos neoliberales en Amrica Latina (Santiago: Corporacion
de Investigaciones Economicas para America Latina, 1982); Pilar Vergara, Auge y cada del
neoliberalismo en Chile (Santiago: FLACSO, 1985); Paul W. Drake and Ivn Jaksic, eds., El
difcil camino hacia la democracia en Chile, 19821990, trans. Fernando Bustamante (Santiago:
FLACSO, 1993); Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile under
Hispanic American Historical Review 93:4
doi 10.1215/00182168-2351638
Copyright 2013 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press
548
HAHR / November / Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate
studies by sociologists in the 1980s. The mothers centers were seen as instruments 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 mechanisms 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 Francos corporatism was influential among
important sectors of the Chilean political Right. For instance, one such person influenced by Franco was Jaime Guzmn, 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 Guzmn 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 secretariats 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 Guzmn
and gremialismo.5 Guzmns project of building the right-wing movement of the
Pinochet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Carlos Huneeus, El rgimen de Pinochet
(Santiago: Editorial Sudamericana, 2000); Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, El golpe
despus del golpe: Leigh vs. Pinochet: Chile 19601980 (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2003).
2. Teresa Valds et al., Centros de madres 19731989: 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 rgimen de Pinochet, introduction, 35770. 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, 7071.
5. The word gremialismo refers to the Movimiento Gremial founded in 1967 at the
Catholic University of Chile by law student Jaime Guzmn. 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 Vzquez 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 Chiles 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 Pinochets 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 secretariat 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 secretariats 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 assumptions, 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 militarys worldview.
This is reflected in scholarship on the secretariats, in which the interests of
Guzmn 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 government 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. Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, Nacionales y gremialistas: El parto de la
nueva derecha poltica chilena, 19641973 (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2008), chap. 7;
Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, Rolando lvarez Vallejos, and Julio Pinto Vallejos,
Su revolucin contra nuestra revolucin, vol. 1, Izquierdas y derechas en el Chile de Pinochet
(19731981) (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2006), chap. 2; Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate,
Construction du pouvoir et rgime militaire sous Augusto Pinochet, Vingtime Sicle,
no. 105 (2010): 93107; Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, Estamos en guerra, seores!:
El rgimen militar de Pinochet y el pueblo, 19731980, Historia (Santiago) 1, no. 43
(2010): 163201.
7. Huneeus, El rgimen de Pinochet, 355.
550
approach the topic from the perspective of the military. According to the postulates of political science, a highly repressive regime such as Pinochets might
have pushed for the political demobilization of social groups, as happened in
Argentina and, although not as completely, in Uruguay. Why, then, did Chiles
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 authoritarian 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 dtat into bases
of support for what followed, in addition to legitimizing the regime and serving 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 interpretacin, trans.
Julio Sierra (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2004); Robert Gellately, No slo Hitler: La Alemania
nazi entre la coaccin y el consenso, trans. Tefilo de Lozoya (Barcelona: Crtica, 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 cvico-
militar: Uruguay 19731985 (Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2009),
32398; Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo, La dictadura militar (19761983): Del golpe de
estado a la restauracin democrtica (Buenos Aires: Paids, 2003); Gabriela guila, Dictadura,
represin y sociedad en Rosario, 19761983: Un estudio sobre la represin y los comportamientos y
actitudes sociales en dictadura (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2008).
551
This interpretation also differs from those that see the secretariats as replicas of similar organizations in Francos Spain, even while it still recognizes
that the latter were a point of reference for Jaime Guzmn. 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 regimes alliance with its
countrys transnational upper classes, keeping their increasingly globalized economic 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 businesses, 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 understanding the specificity of the Chilean case among the Latin American military 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 acceptance 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. Toms Moulian, La Unidad Popular: Fiesta, drama y derrota, in La forja de
ilusiones: El sistema de partidos, 19321973 (Santiago: FLACSO, 1993), 26784.
10. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar, chaps. 12; 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 aos despus, una mirada crtica
(Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1999); Mariana Caviglia, Dictadura, vida cotidiana y clases medias:
Una sociedad fracturada (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2006).
552
led to activism by peasants, students, and unionized workers, which became the
context in which the Movimiento de Liberacin Nacional-Tupamaros developed, 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 countersubversive campaign. The coup of June 1973, headed by the president of the republic 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 Joo Goulart: during this coup the
peasant leagues in the north and the political movements supported by noncommissioned officers and rank-and-file army troops were the most conflictive groups. The mobilization by labor unions and especially by the opposition
Unio Democrtica 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 accompanied 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 dtat only took effect when the unfolding of the socialist program challenged the rights of private property by eliminating the landed estates
11. lvaro Rico, Sobre el autoritarismo y el golpe de Estado: La dictadura y el
dictador, in Demasi et al., La dictadura cvico-militar, 179246; Silvia Dutrnit, Del margen
al centro del sistema poltico: Los partidos uruguayos durante la dictadura, in Diversidad
partidaria y dictaduras: Argentina, Brasil y Uruguay, ed. Silvia Dutrnit (Mexico City:
Instituto Mora, 1996), 235317.
12. Guillermo ODonnell, El estado burocrtico autoritario: Triunfos, derrotas y crisis,
19661973 (Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, 1982), 5253; Peter Winn, Por la razn
o por la fuerza: Estados Unidos y Chile en la Amrica Latina de los aos sesenta y setenta,
in Frgiles suturas: Chile a treinta aos del gobierno de Salvador Allende, ed. Francisco Zapata
(Mexico City: Colegio de Mxico, 2006), 3558.
553
and bringing important banking and industrial sectors under state control. The
coup took place when the opposition, with the support of the US Central Intelligence 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 consensus 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 Pinochet. In contrast to the coups in Argentina and Uruguay, for nearly half of
Chiles 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 situation was worsened by the fact that some sectors of the political Right (including 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 recognized 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 cru13. 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
Len Gmez (Barcelona: Crtica, 2004); Augusto Varas, La dinmica poltica de la oposicin
durante el gobierno de la Unidad Popular (Mexico City: FLACSO, 1977); Augusto Varas, Felipe
Agero, and Fernando Bustamante, Chile, democracia, fuerzas armadas (Santiago: FLACSO,
1980), chap. 14; Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, 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), 177206.
14. The National Party dissolved itself, as did Patria y Libertad.
554
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 years presidential
election. That strategy was revived in 1970 with the creation of Womens Action
of Chile (Accin 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 Allendes candidacy, and their activism continued after Allendes 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 government, 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 Feminine Power was due to a variety of factors. The question of gender played a crucial role, as the PFs female activists were both politicized and largely autonomous, both of which were unacceptable to the military mentality. The militarys
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 contrast to the dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina, which approved gender equal15. Margaret Power, La mujer de derecha: El poder femenino y la lucha contra Salvador
Allende, 19641973, trans. Mara 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: Amrica Latina y el Caribe, ed. Mara del Carmen Feijo (Santiago: Isis
Internacional, 1988); Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, Nacionales y gremialistas, chap. 5.
16. Power, La mujer de derecha, 26768.
555
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, gremialistas, and nacionalistas, all jockeying for influence in the new political order.18
The alessandristas, with whom Guzmn was allied, suggested creating social
organizations to channel political action by government supporters. It is possible that the dismantling of Feminine Power was related to that effort, because
PF was connected to the National Party, an adversary of gremialismo. Whatever the case, it seems that a determining factor in Feminine Powers dissolution 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 womens organizations, such as the
Movimiento Cvico 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 Guzmn 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 Guzmns own political agenda
of creating a political Right for the future, for which he needed to keep his gre17. Mala Htun, Sexo y estado: Aborto, divorcio y familia bajo dictaduras y democracias en
Amrica Latina, trans. Marcela Dutra (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales,
2010), chap. 3; Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, 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), 87116.
18. Alessandristas were the followers of Jorge Alessandri, who served as president of
Chile from 1958 to 1964 and was the right-wing coalitions 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 Zrate, Nacionales y gremialistas, chap. 7.
556
mialista supporters politically active. Those interests came together when Jaime
Guzmn, 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 regimes
administrative reorganization, which redefined the role of the General Secretariat of Government. This agency had been created by the Popular Unity government 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 channel of communication with poor people, renaming it the Directorate of Civilian 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 depoliticizing 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
Andrs Bello, 1998); Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, Estamos en guerra, seores!
21. Qu Pasa (Santiago), 5 Dec. 1973, p. 33.
22. Repblica de Chile, Primer ao de la reconstruccin nacional, 1974 (Santiago: Editora
Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1974), 197. See also the commentary of Carla Scassi, the first
secretary of women, in Qu Pasa (Santiago), 16 Nov. 1973, p. 17.
23. El Mercurio (Santiago), 29 Oct. 1973, p. 21; Jos Weinstein, Los jvenes pobladores
y el Estado: Una relacin difcil (Santiago: CIDE, 1990).
557
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 Toms 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 capitalist project. State terror, central to military doctrine, would be used to impose
the neoliberal transformation and the alliance with Chiles transnationalized
bourgeoisie.25 While that assessment is generally correct, one should add that
from the start the regime wanted legitimacy, especially among the lower sectors 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 depoliticization 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 Secretariats of Women and Youth were originally used to demonstrate political
support, but they quickly became useful instruments for legitimizing the governments neoliberal thrust and its authoritarian political model. In this analysis, state terror was insufficient as a means of imposing the neoliberal model
because neoliberalisms 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 subversion took different directions. In Argentina, French influence and the countrys political evolution, especially after the Pern era, led to a radical under24. Qu Pasa (Santiago), 5 Dec. 1974, p. 33.
25. See the works listed above in note 1 and Eduardo Silva, La poltica econmica del
rgimen militar chileno durante la transicin: Del neoliberalismo radical al neoliberalismo
pragmtico, in Drake and Jaksic, El difcil camino, 193242. Huneeus even writes of a
developmentalist regime. See Huneeus, El rgimen de Pinochet.
558
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 dictatorships Proceso de
Reorganizacin Nacional sought to put an end to disorder in the states functioning 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 oversee 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 Ongana, 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 militarys 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 psychosocial 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 governmental bureaucracy, and nativist organizations.27
26. Novaro and Palermo, La dictadura militar, 2736; Prudencio Garca, El drama de
la autonoma 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);
Martn Obregn, Entre la cruz y la espada: La Iglesia catlica durante los primeros aos del
Proceso (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2005).
27. Marchesi, Una parte del pueblo feliz; Aldo Marchesi, El Uruguay inventado:
La poltica audiovisual de la dictadura, reflexiones sobre su imaginario (Montevideo, Uruguay:
Ediciones Trilce, 2001); Isabella Cosse and Vania Markarian, 1975: Ao de la orientalidad:
Identidad, memoria e historia en una dictadura (Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Trilce, 1996);
Emilio Irigoyen, La patria en escena: Esttica y autoritarismo en Uruguay: Textos, monumentos,
representaciones (Montevideo, Uruguay: Ediciones Trilce, 2000).
559
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 subversion. The older military doctrine of a state-directed economy and social development was reinterpreted within the framework of counterinsurgency, emphasizing 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 process of resocialization that would change what was thought of as the populations mindset. It was an ideological war for the conquest of peoples minds.
In this framework, organizing young people and women stemmed from the
militarys 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 dictatorships human rights violations. Carlos
Huneeus is correct in concluding that the secretariats were among the organizations intended to mobilize political support without creating an official government 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 Chiles national Superintendency of Education.
Like her predecessor, she was replaced a few months later.30 From mid-1974 the
28. Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, Estamos en guerra, seores!, 16677; Valdivia Ortiz
de Zrate, El golpe despus del golpe, chaps. 35.
29. Huneeus, El rgimen de Pinochet, 32729; Orden Nuevo (Santiago), Sept. 1974.
30. La Segunda (Santiago), 14 Mar. 1974, p. 11.
560
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 uoa 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 Grezs biography shows that the regime chose as the
head of its womens organization someone connected not to Feminine Power
but to a conservative anti-A llende 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 disband 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 militarys conservative patriarchal mindset, a
woman who had no party connections and who would reinforce traditional gender roles by accepting the subordinate role that the regime intended to grant
her. As the wife of General Sergio Nuo explained, We also did not want a
campaign for womens 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 governments call for reconstruction and
31. Diccionario biogrfico de Chile, 18th ed. (Santiago: Empresa Periodstica Chile,
19841986), 502. On Carla Scassi and Sara Phillipi, see Qu Pasa (Santiago), 16 Nov. 1973,
p. 17; Qu 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. Qu Pasa (Santiago), 16 Nov. 1973, p. 17.
35. La Segunda (Santiago), 14 Mar. 1974, p. 11.
561
national unity. This seems to have been the case for doa 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 connected 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 Elenas 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 exChristian Democrats and nonmilitant women connected to the political 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 founding 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 composition was fairly diverse, with the upper-class women probably occupying only
positions of national and regional leadership. Such heterogeneity among volunteer 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 vsperas de Londres 1998, trans.
Jacqueline Garreaud (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2009), 71.
37. Lechner and Levy, Notas sobre la vida cotidiana, 5657; Valds et al., Centros de
madres, 42.
38. Lechner and Levy, Notas sobre la vida cotidiana, 5659.
562
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 secretariats national reach and ability
to penetrate into the furthest cornersa 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 universitys 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 modern world. Its founders had deep roots in Chiles traditional oligarchy. Jaime
Guzmns ancestors included two presidents, many members of congress, and
high officials of the Catholic Church; he had connections with the wealthy
right-wing Matte Larran 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 Hernn Larran, who was from another
family of the landed elite. Ral Lecaros was also an alumnus of Sagrados Corazones. 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 Unin Demcrata Independiente (UDI, Independent Democratic Union), the political party eventually
formed by Guzmn, had been students in elite secondary schools, from where
they converged on the Catholic University of Chile to study law or economics.41
39. The original source lists 372 offices. See Secretara Nacional de la Mujer, Memoria
19771978 (Santiago, 1978), 2.
40. Qu Pasa (Santiago), 15 Mar. 1974, p. 16; Secretara Nacional de la Mujer,
Memoria 19771978, 2; Amiga (Santiago), Jan. 1976, p. 28.
41. Diccionario biogrfico de Chile, 16th ed. (Santiago: Empresa Periodstica Chile,
19761978); Diccionario biogrfico de Chile, 17th ed. (Santiago: Empresa Periodstica Chile,
19801982); Alfredo Joignant and Patricio Navia, De la poltica de individuos a los
hombres del partido: Socializacin, competencia poltica y penetracin electoral de la UDI
(19892001), Estudios Pblicos, no. 89 (2003): 15761; Renato Cristi and Carlos Ruiz, El
pensamiento conservador en Chile: Seis ensayos (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1992).
563
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, during 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 government, 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 militarys decision to control the
politicization of women and to indoctrinate the Secretariat of Womens volunteers. 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 Cristin Valds Zegers, El general Pinochet se reune
con la juventud: Textos de los discursos pronunciados en el primer aniversario de la Secretara
Nacional de la Juventud (Santiago: Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1974), 2425.
43. Qu Pasa (Santiago), 20 Sept. 1974, p. 35.
44. Ibid.
45. Qu Pasa (Santiago), 15 Mar. 1974, p. 16.
564
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 reconstruction 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 Guzmn suggested that the secretariat follow the example of Francos Spain, but Chiles
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 Secretariat 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 countrys 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 postcivil 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 Repblica de Chile, Primer ao de reconstruccin,
19297; on the Secretariat of Youth, see Qu 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 Zrate, lvarez Vallejos, and Pinto Vallejos, Su revolucin contra
nuestra revolucin, vol. 1, chap. 1; Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate et al., Su revolucin
contra nuestra revolucin, vol. 2, La pugna marxista-gremialista en los ochenta (Santiago: LOM
Ediciones, 2008), chap. 3.
48. Jos A. Caabate, Juventud y franquismo en Espaa: El Frente de Juventudes
(19401960), in Jvenes y dictaduras de entreguerras: Propaganda, doctrina y encuadramiento:
Italia, Alemania, Japn, Portugal y Espaa, ed. Conxita Mir (Lleida, Spain: Editorial Milenio,
2007), 14477; Stanley G. Payne, El rgimen de Franco: 19361975, trans. Beln Urrutia
565
redirect youthful political activism, but without the all-encompassing aspects of

the totalitarian Spanish experience. That may be why in its initial stages the secretariat 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 General 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 depoliticization 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 influence 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
Domnguez and Mara Rosa Lpez Gonzlez (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1987), 254;
Javier Tusell, Dictadura franquista y democracia, 19392004 (Barcelona: Crtica, 2005).
49. General Gustavo Leigh, 20 Dec. 1973, quoted in Repblica de Chile, Primer ao
de reconstruccin, 7576.
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, 10816.
566
did not initially have.51 The international isolation of Chile due to its regimes
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
juntas 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 mximo, 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 Chiles 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 population 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 consolidacin del poder
unipersonal, in Drake and Jaksic, El difcil camino, 57144; Constable and Valenzuela,
Nation of Enemies, chap. 3; Huneeus, El rgimen de Pinochet, 12974; Valdivia Ortiz de
Zrate, Construction du pouvoir, section 1.
52. El Mercurio (Santiago), 12 Sept. 1974, p. 12. The expression jefe mximo can be
found in Pinochet Ugarte and Valds Zegers, El general Pinochet se rene; Boletn de la
Secretara de la Juventud (Santiago), Sept. 1975. Emphasis added. (Hereafter this latter title
will be cited as Boletn SNJ.)
53. Amiga (Santiago), Apr. 1977, p. 10.
54. Foxley, Experimentos neoliberales en Amrica Latina; Jaime Ruiz-Tagle P. and
Roberto Urmeneta, Los trabajadores del Programa del Empleo Mnimo en el capitalismo
autoritario: Condiciones de trabajo, comportamiento, rol sociopolitico (Santiago: PET / Academia
de Humanismo Cristiano, 1984).
567
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 regularly 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
secretariats brochures provided low-cost kitchen recipes. The secretariat also
cooperated with other government programs for the elderly and malnourished
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 socializing housewives to neoliberalism and for representing a social response to the
contraction of state services. In other words, the imposition of neoliberal policies 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 article 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 economic activities, calling on the secretariats 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. Qu 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 Zrate, Estamos en guerra, seores!
59. Boletn SNJ (Santiago), June 1975.
568
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 current 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 functions. 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 government communications services were insufficient as tools for propaganda and
socialization, in contrast to those of Uruguay at this same time. The secretariats 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 concern. 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 ideological mission. Starting in 1975 it provided new members with political preparation by creating the Diego Portales Institute, a study center that dealt with
basic ideological education and political guidance. This interest in training
came from Guzmn, who considered it essential for producing the political
Right of the future, but it also coincided with the regimes 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 Institutes purpose, however, 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 states 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 nationalism, standardizing the message to be conveyed by those who would become the
states spokespersons and activists. Thus economic policies occupied a central
60. Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, lvarez Vallejos, and Pinto Vallejos, Su revolucin contra
nuestra revolucin, vol. 1, chap. 2.
61. Boletn SNJ (Santiago), May 1975.
62. Tusell, Dictadura franquista y democracia, 22.
569
place in the institutes 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 community 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 volunteers had to undergo periodic ideological training, as they were considered the
vehicles of the governments ideas who must carry the governments notions
for raising up the nation to the entire population.64 To do this the secretariats 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 Guzmn 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 potential recruits, thereby controlling the ideological message being transmitted by
the state. While the guiding principles came from the military authorities, economic aspects were in the hands of the Chicago Boysa group of economists
trained at the University of Chicago who followed Milton Friedmanwhile the
gremialistas provided the new institutional order. The same secretariat lecturers
participated in educating the army high command on these topics. Beginning in
63. Boletn SNJ (Santiago), May 1975. The Declaration of Principles was the
foundational document of the dictatorship, promoting the regimes new institutions and the
principles they inspired.
64. Interview with Augusto Pinochet, Amiga (Santiago), Nov. 1977, p. 9.
65. Amiga (Santiago), Nov. 1976, pp. 4445; Amiga (Santiago), Sept. 1977, p. 38; Amiga
(Santiago), Jan. 1979, pp. 4243; Lechner and Levy, Notas sobre la vida cotidiana, 67.
570
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 homogenization 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 regimes desire to build legitimacy and to resocialize politics by mobilizing political support; they assisted in the personalization
of the regime around Pinochet, acted as agents for spreading neoliberal ideology, carried out public service functions, and trained leaders. This multiplicity
of functions, several of which resemble those of political parties, is characteristic of the stage in Chiles 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 transitional stage and set forth its project: limited democracy and neoliberal economics. 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 Pinochets
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 activitya new political culture. In
Chile there was no serious armed subversive threat that might justify the coup
dtat 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 maintaining 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 guerrillas plunging the country into chaos. The postcoup regime decided to hold
66. Augusto Varas, Los militares en el poder: Rgimen y gobierno militar en Chile
19731986 (Santiago: Editorial Pehun, 1987), 3036.
571
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 emergence of the gremialistas and the Chicago Boys. Those two groups, however,
delayed defining their positions, given the differing opinions among gremialistas regarding corporatism and the role of intermediate structures. In the early
period the war against subversion and national security doctrine were important in certain circles, and they showed signs of becoming the dominant ideology. The regimes 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 success 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 regulating 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, equality, 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 functioning of markets. And democracy was understood as a means to achieve economic
67. Toms Moulian, Chile actual: Anatoma de un mito (Santiago: LOM Ediciones,
1997), part 2; Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, Rolando lvarez Vallejos, and Karen
Donoso Fritz, La alcaldizacin de la poltica: Los municipios en la dictadura pinochetista (Santiago:
LOM Ediciones, 2012), chap. 1; Canelo, El Proceso en su laberinto; Demasi et al., La dictadura
cvico-militar.
68. Vergara, Auge y cada del neoliberalismo; Moulian, Chile actual; Valdivia Ortiz de
Zrate, lvarez Vallejos, and Pinto Vallejos, Su revolucin contra nuestra revolucin, vol. 1,
chap. 2 and conclusion. The hard line were the franquista nationalists.
572
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 poverty.70 The so-called modernizations of 19791981 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 resolution 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 democracy. 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 parliament and political parties. It accepted universal suffrage but created institutional counterweights that minimized the sovereignty of the vote. This authoritarian 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 disman69. Vergara, Auge y cada 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
states social and economic role, restricting its intervention solely to issues the private
sector would be unwilling or unable to take up. In this view, societys motor would be the
individual.
71. Vergara, Auge y cada del neoliberalismo, phases 23; Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate,
lvarez Vallejos, and Pinto Vallejos, Su revolucin contra nuestra revolucin, vol. 1, chap. 4;
Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate et al., Su revolucin contra nuestra revolucin, vol. 2, chap. 3; Valdivia
Ortiz de Zrate, Nacionales y gremialistas, chaps. 35.
72. Canelo, El proceso en su laberinto.
573
tle the state. But it is important to note that both the policy of regionalization, which was supposed to decentralize the government by divesting political 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 governments 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 subversion. 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 governments program reached that level of specificity, it was possible to claim that the dictatorship had social policies aimed at the lower classes,
which it called the social safety net. In the regimes analysis, all previous strategies 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. Municipalities were defined as functionally and geographically decentralized; they were
intended to address the needs of local communities and to encourage their participation in the planning and practice of their own social and economic development, whether by direct action or through other public and private services.
73. Pilar Vergara, Polticas hacia la extrema pobreza en Chile, 19731988 (Santiago:
FLACSO, 1990), 3548; Mapa de la extrema pobreza en Chile (Santiago: Universidad Catlica
de Chile, 1974); Vernica Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, Al rescate del municipio: La sntesis
ideolgica de la dictadura pinochetista, Observatorio Latinoamericano 1, no. 8 (2011): 10833.
74. Vergara, Polticas hacia la extrema pobreza, 49.
574
A law of municipal revenue supported municipal autonomy, enabling local communities 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 embodying the estado subsidiario. As Jaime Guzmn explained, putting into practice
the principles of subsidiariedad and both functional and territorial decentralization . . . 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 (Comits de Ayuda Social, CAS). These committees would administer the Social Stratification File (Ficha de Estratificacin
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 organizations, 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 institutional apparatus, putting key social issues in its charge and giving it responsibility 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 important figures in the new structure. As Metropolitan Intendant General Carol
Urza 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 associated 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
75. Interview with Jaime Guzmn, La Segunda (Santiago), 7 May 1982, p. 2.
76. Vergara, Polticas hacia la extrema pobreza, 4956; Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate, Al
rescate del municipio.
77. La Segunda (Santiago), 6 Aug. 1981, p. 2.
575
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 structure 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 eradication. 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 regarding the nationwide project that had at last been formulated. Army general Ren
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 confirmation 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 modernizations. 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 Carmen 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, Polticas hacia la extrema pobreza, 2078.
79. Amiga (Santiago), Apr. 1978, p. 10.
80. Interview with Augusto Pinochet, Amiga (Santiago), May 1979, p. 14.
81. Amiga (Santiago), Sept. 1979, pp. 1314; La Segunda (Santiago), 11 Sept. 1979, p. 13.
576
on training and indoctrination was meant to inject the governments new truths
and principles into the lower sectors of society, without which a minimum consensus 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 Volunteers 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 Womens task in this phase was to legitimize the modernization program. To do this, a series of training seminars were held for
women volunteers28 in 1980 alonededicated to studying the new constitution 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 opposition but also by broad groups of the regimes supporters. In this situation the
indoctrination provided by duly trained volunteers became even more important, 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 university and secondary levels. Seminars for leaders were increased in local communities 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 governments 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
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 cada del neoliberalismo, postscript.
577
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 Youths clear turn to adolescents in spreading the word
on the modernization program was also signaled by the appearance of publications 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 talking about the shift of education to the municipalities as a way of both instituting 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 governments 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 program 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 regulating universities. The program focused on the aspects of the legislation, planning 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 institutional 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 (Valparaso), July 1980; Diario Loco (Valparaso), 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.
578
sizing their educational function. In Corderos opinion, the 19801981 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 policies 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 leaders and women was intended to lead to an increase in the number of community 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 community organizations was to situate the participation of Chiles population in
the local arena and not in political activities. For the regime a truly participatory 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 associations, youth groups, and womens 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 regimes 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 peoples
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 stimulating 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 Nacin (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.
579
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 assistance, 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 secretariat had failed to mobilize young people, as the government was adverse
to the secretariats participation in politics and the official sponsorship of the
secretariat was unattractive to its intended constituency. Thus the gremialistas tried to increase their political influence by creating the FJUN, following
the model of the Youth Fronts of Francos Spain.93 Huneeuss interpretation is
problematic in that the Spanish precedent was part of the state apparatus, while
Guzmns 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 Guzmns political direction. 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 Guzmns 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 regimes
institutionalization. The FJUN declared that it was created to defend Chile
93. Huneeus, El rgimen de Pinochet, 362.
94. La Segunda (Santiago), 2 Aug. 1983, p. 4.
580
from international aggression and to make September 11 into a project, so

that the principles that inspired National Liberation, set forth by the government 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 gremialismo 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 institutional 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 Secretariat 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 abandoning the quasi-governmental channels the secretariat provided.
Along with such general efforts, however, gremialismo focused on municipalities when the new institutional structure turned to them and on mayors
when their political role grew. It targeted a few key municipalities for its political purposes, including Santiago, the most important comuna in the country,
95. FJUN (Santiago), July 1976, p. 3.

96. Ibid., 1114.
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. 23; La Segunda (Santiago), 11 May 1981, pp. 23;
La Segunda (Santiago), 6 Apr. 1982, p. 3.
581
some others in lower-class areas, and those in cities such as Valparaso and
Concepcin.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 Marxist Left renewed political activism in poor neighborhoods and shantytowns. In
another example of his nose for political opportunity, Jaime Guzmn created
his own political party, the Unin Demcrata 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 Luca Hiriart de Pinochet, the generals
wife, prevented the emergence of any autonomous projects and made the Secretariat of Women a fully pinochetista organization that embodied the regimes
project by identifying with its leader. Margaret Power is correct in emphasizing
the regimes forced dismantling of anti-Leftist womens 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 Guzmn 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
99. Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate et al., Su revolucin contra nuestra revolucin, vol. 2, chap. 4;
Huneeus, El rgimen de Pinochet, 37076; La Segunda (Santiago), 26 Sept. 1983, p. 4;
La Segunda (Santiago), 1 Oct. 1983, p. 2.
100. Valdivia Ortiz de Zrate et al., Su revolucin contra nuestra revolucin, vol. 2, chap.
4; Carolina Pinto R., UDI: La conquista de corazones populares (19831987) (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.
582
adjournment was brief, as she was appointed mayor of the comuna of Providencia, a post she held until 1996.
In sum, when the regime developed a clear overall project and the municipality became the most important mediating organization, it could largely dispense 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 groups two
official organizations. To the extent that the regimes 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 political 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 internal 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 neutralize 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 regimes struggle to define a project is revealed in the different fates
583
of the secretariats constituencies. In the case of women, without a program

of their own their voluntary organization only responded to the governments
positions, and their secretariat became less relevant as the regime became institutionalized. 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 project. 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 organizations for young people and women. Once the tools for generating consensus
were concentrated in the municipality, the secretariats were relegated to a secondary role, although they never disappeared completely.

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Hispanic American Historical Review