neighbor saw us running and grabbed my arm from the door of a wooden shed.
Through the shed's wooden slats, we watched special forces carry a young man to the green truck. “Los llevan presos sólo para llevarlos no más” (They take them prisoner just to take them, nothing more), a woman whispered to me. Another whispered, “But we are used to it. It has happened for the past thirty years.” Fear was mixed with a sense of the formulaic. Taking leave of the shed, Ruby and I ran farther up the main street to the point where we could observe the fighting between the police and the youths below. The police came up the street, extinguishing the bonfires. Molotov cocktails rained down on the police vehicles, and the vehicles retreated, at which point people returned to the street and threw more garbage, wood—whatever would burn—into piles for new bonfires.
But in 2005, a presidential election year that culminated in the December election of President Michelle Bachelet, the police never came. The flames from the bonfires flickered and drizzled smoke as people ran out of garbage, wood, and old broken furniture to burn. “Ya no vienen” (They're not coming), people repeated over and over again in tones of disappointment. It was as if the commemoration of the golpe could not be realized without the state's show of force. The back-and-forth between the forces of the state and the población provided a structure through which history was to be enacted and remembered.
With that structure altered by the absence of the police, a generalized sense of anxiety spread. The undertones of fear shifted from a thrilling, if predictable, confrontation with the police as commemorative practice to a sense of impending chaos when a few youths began to laugh and fire pistols in the air. Tired people nervously started to make their way to the safety of their homes, leaving the fires to burn out on their own.
As we returned to Ruby's house, an elderly man stopped me. “Madame, madame,” he said. He was noticeably drunk. “Allende is present! Those assassins must die! Because they have the monopoly!” The young men around him started whistling and jeering. He continued, “Here, our compañero is present. Assassins, those evil Pinochet supporters! Because they are evil. And what is here? The pueblo—”
A teenage boy interrupted him, yelling, “United!” both ridiculing and predicting the man's next words. While the youth laughed, other men and women turned to walk away. The man continued, “The pueblo united will never be defeated! But, well. Excuse me, madame. Excuse me that we do not have so much education. But well, our Chile!” He turned to look angrily at the high and drunk youths encircling him, Ruby, and me. He turned back to us, saying quietly, as if addressing the nation, “Chile, they killed me…” A young man yelled, “Shut up, crazy idiot!” The man turned around, raising his fist. “They say that I am crazy, but you know, I, thirty-five years working! I am old, ah! And you know, you know…ah, you know madame, we are equal. Equal to what? For each other. Thank you, madame.” He shook my hand. The young men continued to ridicule him. Ruby intervened, saying to the man, “You are the only one talking sense here. You are not the one that is crazy.” The young men grumbled as the man thanked Ruby, holding both her hands.
September 11, 1973, is a critical event in the lives of the people in this book and for the Chilean population generally (Das 1995). Marking the beginning of a dictatorship that disappeared thousands and subjected hundreds of thousands to torture, fear, and insecurity in tandem with a profound reorganization of the state and market, September 11 evokes a complex mixture of pain, mourning, resentment, defiance, and rage in La Pincoya. September 11 commemorations in La Pincoya, as in other poblaciones of Santiago, are more than a conflictive remembering of past violence. In street scenes, grief over the loss of a political project—an alternative vision of democracy and social justice—is both ridiculed and acknowledged, crystalizing frustrations and resentments that emerge from persistent inequalities and economic precariousness that shape the lives of the poor in the present.
Since 1990, the coalition of democratic parties cast the state's project of transitional justice in terms of debts to the population. The state owed a “social debt” to the poor through the inequalities generated by the regime's economic liberalization, while society owed a “moral debt” to the victims of human rights violations. Accounting for these debts would occur partly through the expansion of poverty programs, mental health programs dedicated to low-income populations, and the official acknowledgment of human rights violations under the Pinochet regime. Through such an accounting, a reconciliation over the past would be achieved, and the unified nation could look toward a prosperous future. In casting the past as debt that could be accounted for, however, the state performatively marked a break with the past while leaving intact the actual institutional arrangements of the state and market, as well as the kind of subject imagined within social policy and interventions.
Life in Debt attends to such debts in their concrete manifestations as poverty programs, reparations for torture, and treatments for depression in the lifeworld of one población, La Pincoya. It explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by these interventions are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries, as well as through the aspirations, pains, and disappointments that men and women embody in their daily lives. It traces the forces of kinship, friendship, and neighborliness—and the shoring up of the boundaries between them—in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. And it attends to how a world could be reinhabited by those who staked their existence on political commitments and aspirations for democracy, as well as by those who live today with bitter disappointment.
In this book, I attempt to bring into focus and into question this performative break with the past by considering how and when state violence is experienced as a past continuous that inhabits present life conditions. That is, rather than assume that the past of dictatorship has been sealed through a project of reconciliation, I consider the ways in which the state's “care” in the democratic transition is inhabited by that past. Therefore, this ethnography is an extended meditation on boundaries between past violence and present social arrangements of care. But it is also a meditation on care in everyday life, care that takes shape and is experienced through concrete relations inextricably woven into unequal social arrangements. This book asks: How are the claims of others experienced in the face of minimal state assistance and institutional failures, and how do obligations track along relational modes? How can anthropology attend to the ways in which individuals are both present to and failing to be present to one another? How are modes of care and living with dignity related to boundaries of speech and silence?
Although neoliberal reforms in Chile have displaced the responsibilities for care onto families and individuals, divesting the state of crucial responsibilities for the well-being of the population, an ethnographic exploration of “care” does not move smoothly across the registers of governmental discourse to lifeworlds.2 Discourses of “self-care” and “self-responsibility” that are advanced in health and social policy presume a self that is sovereign, morally autonomous, and transparent posed against social determinations of “the poor,” who must divest themselves of such determinations to be “free” (see Povinelli 2006). Simultaneously, the expansion of consumer credit and an expanded range of consumer goods impels public discourses on the disorganizing force of neoliberalism in its fragmentation of “nonmarket” regimes of value and social ties (Greenhouse 2010). How self, agency, and collectivity are conceived through these discourses, however, comes into awkward tension with relations as they are actually lived, embodied, and experimented with. Any stable or certain notion of care becomes unsettled when ethnography explores how individuals are always already woven into relationships and how they awaken to their relationships “thus becom[ing] aware of the way they are connected and disconnected” (Strathern 2005, 26).
This book is based on thirty-six months of fieldwork consisting of short two- to three-month trips between 1999 and 2003, eighteen months of continuous fieldwork between 2004 and 2005, and follow-up visits in 2007, 2008, and 2010. Throughout the chapters, I attend to life and the singularity of lives in La Pincoya, a poor urban neighborhood
