in order to forge the future. But this healthy proposition cannot be an obstacle to taking on with courage the problems inherited from the past, like those in relation to human rights and the so-called ‘social debt’” (Aylwin Azócar 1990, 7–8). Effecting a vision of national consensus, his speech not only oriented the country to the future but also rendered the past as debt, one that could be empirically accounted for and paid through, in his words, “a process of democratization and modernization and the payment of the social debt contracted with the most poor” (p. 41).
The social debt was to mark a new phase in the relations between the state and its population. The payment of this debt would contrast with the regime's doctrine of “pure growth,” in which the state addressed only “residual” poverty that could not be absorbed by the economic system. For the Pinochet regime, “extreme poverty” was the necessary remnant produced by the market. And the role of the state—indeed, the only role of the state within the population—was to technically eliminate extreme poverty through the provision of selective direct monetary subsidies and targeted programs for those families who fell below an economic level considered indispensable for basic subsistence, that is, for biological survival.
In 1975, Minister of Planning Miguel Kast produced the “Map of Extreme Poverty,” which laid out how extreme poverty would be assessed: with a new means-testing tool called the Ficha-CAS (Comités de Asistencia Social) to be administered by the municipalities (Kast Rist and Molina Silva 1975). The Ficha-CAS used “home equipment”— defined as a television, refrigerator, washing machine, and stove—and housing conditions as proxies for income (Vergara 1984, 1990). These crude measures worked at the level of both the household and the population. First, households were assigned a point score. Second, all point scores were aggregated in the population and mapped according to municipality, thus allowing for a focalization of resources in specific municipalities. Households falling below a specific score would be qualified as “extremely poor” and receive direct monetary subsidies, as well as subsidies for housing units, milk and protein mixes for children under six years old, and access to free health care. The Ficha-CAS was launched on the national level in 1980 and was not revised to include income until 1987. For the regime, showing a technical reduction in “extreme poverty” would legitimate the “success” of military rule.1
The first government after Pinochet, comprised of a coalition of democratic parties called the Concertación, sought to mark a political boundary with the dictatorship through its approach to poverty. The state's “care,” however, was not a return to the welfare apparatus that had developed from the 1950s to 1973. Rather, concerned with maintaining “growth with equity,” the Concertación government strengthened the regime's focalization and decentralization of poverty programs and subsidies (Ffrench-Davis 2004; Raczynski 2008). Increased social spending accompanied an expansion of selective subsidies and programs for the poor, most of which were decentralized to the municipalities.
Modified in 1996, the Ficha-CAS II included more discriminating variables, such as widened criteria for the kinds of wall material used in home construction and the kinds of flooring, to allow for an expansion of those included within the programs. However, the means-testing tool continued to rely on the presence or absence of “home equipment” as a factor in needs assessment. Unadapted to new economic realities of the poor, it did not include data on personal and household indebtedness. Further, the Ficha-CAS II was generally administered every two years by municipally based social workers, assuming a stability of conditions that did not cohere with the precarious reality of most families. With the increase in social programs and subsidies, however, the Ficha-CAS point score gained a ubiquitous presence in the lives of the poor. Government social programs, municipally run social programs, monetary subsidies funded by ministries—such as the Ministries of Planning, Labor and Social Provision, Housing and Education—and by the National Fund for Health, all used the point score as part of their assessment of need.
While the Ficha-CAS can be critically appraised for its accuracy, it can also be understood as an instrument that disentangles material objects from human lives and thus takes them as objects denoting a stable economic status, a reading of objects that is transportable and generalizable. But the point score itself became entangled in lives as it was differentially used across ministries and municipalities. Access to each program or subsidy depended on how each ministry used and weighed the point score, as well as on the discretion of the municipality (Larrañaga 2005; Teitelboim G. 2001).
Such continuities in social policies toward poverty could be understood within the political climate of the first democratic government, but also in relation to this government's and subsequent governments' commitments to maintaining Chile's image of “economic success” by deepening neoliberal reforms (see Paley 2001). Right-wing parties and Pinochet's shadow cabinet imposed strict norms of fiscal discipline on the Concertación government, which the new government took on as its own method to address social ills while promoting economic growth.
Thus, during the 1990s, the increased funding for social spending was largely made possible by the 1990 Tax Reform, which derived most of its revenue from increasing the impuesto de valor agregado, or value added tax. The 1993 Tax Agreement made between the Concertación parties and the right-wing Renovación Nacional Party stipulated a fixed ceiling on social spending, so that the growth of budgetary spending for social policies would by law always be lower than the growth of the gross domestic product (Fazio 1996). In terms of real pesos, public spending rose progressively during the transition. Notably, when measured as a percentage of the GDP, social spending actually decreased in relation to economic growth during the transition.2
What have been the consequences of the “growth with equity” principle for the poor? Notably, poverty, as measured by the monthly income required to satisfy basic necessities, has declined, from 45 percent of the population in 1988 to 13.7 percent in 2006, while indigence, as measured by the monthly income required to satisfy basic alimentation, has decreased from 12.9 percent to 3.2 percent (Raczynski 2008).3 With national statistics showing a significant decrease in poverty, and after official acknowledgments of human rights violations and the institution of constitutional reforms, President Ricardo Lagos declared on a state visit to Australia in 2005 that the “transition” had concluded: “Twenty years ago, there was a national accord/agreement to achieve a more democratic country, 15 years ago the democratic governments started and now we can say that the Chilean transition has concluded” (quoted in Agencias 2005).
Yet in poor urban neighborhoods, this now-paid social debt continues to generate questions about the “actual justice” of the transition. That is, the justice that is empirically accounted for through poverty programs and statistics on poverty. In the everyday workings of poverty programs, the criteria to gain entrance into such programs, and social workers' visions of the poor, obscure the dynamics of pervasive economic precariousness. Experiences of poverty are shaped by the irregularity of cash flow produced by temporary and unstable forms of labor. Yet, in these programs, women contend with an assumption that recipients of state aid embody a certain kind of moral subject, as well as contend with a reading of material objects as denoting economic status abstracted from concrete circumstances. Let me turn to Valentina and Pato.
CRITICAL MOMENTS
Valentina was thirty-seven years old and Pato thirty-eight years old when I met them in 2004. Valentina stopped me outside the primary care center, where she sold used clothes strung from a rope between the trees. She wanted to sell me a pair of jeans. We ended up chatting. Her husband, Pato, was a taxi driver. The week that I met her, they were late on their dividend for their house and had withdrawn a cash advance from Líder Supermarket to buy groceries. She explained the situation to me: “It gives me despair, but one doesn't walk around crying for pity.” She resorted to selling off their clothes. Valentina had recently been diagnosed with depression and was receiving free fluoxetine and group therapy in the local primary care center. (This program is discussed in chapter 6.) I asked if I could interview her, and she invited me to her home for tea.
