Funny Latins Chileans Are Not
From 1964 to 1970, Chile's President was Eduardo Frei. His party, the Christian Democrats, felt itself committed to a mission of reform without revolution, despite occasional cleavages between its activist and conservative sectors. Frei and his party won a good press in the United States; and among officials here, Chile had unusual support, channeled through AID and major international lending agencies. Frei aimed to moderate and modernize Chile's economy. Increased state economic planning and participation were to complement private investment, not eradicate it. Popular political participation was emphasized; more equitable distributions of income and social services were a major goal. Frei's Chile was where one looked if he sought an answer to Cuba's challenge.
Although I hope that Peter Cleaves was able to collect enough material for another book on Salvador Allende's three-year administration, the present book concentrates on the Frei years. The period studied is significant, not to be forgotten or ignored for being less dramatic than the heady and then tragic events through which Chile passed since Frei left office. How his administration tried to carry out his aims still deserves study, if only for the sake of understanding the choices facing those few governments in today's Latin America that are run by honest and purposeful civilians.
Cleaves has a profound understanding of the general political system of Chile as it was, though I wish he had made clearer the tension that existed between government administrators basing their practices on what they considered technically efficient criteria, and the Left opposition and its supporters emphasizing human need and viewing the political arena as a place for shaping and resolving conflicts of class interest. Still, Cleaves' title is an honest indication of how he deliberately, and I think fruitfully, limited his scope. His particular interest lies in the state apparatus formed to administer the programs and people necessary for trying to transform reformism from platform rhetoric to finished projects.
The book begins with a study of how budgets are planned and implemented - or overcome and avoided - throughout the Chilean bureaucracy. There follows an exploration of how organizational, ideological, and political factors affect decisions made by economic planners at the highest levels. Thereafter, emphasis falls on the state housing and construction agencies and their relations with building contractors as a key interest group, and with a politically mobilized poor population seeking new homes.
I admire Cleaves' dogged plowing through a mountain of agency reports, the source of a lot of useful information and solid documentation. Equally impressive is how he uses his own writing to transform these materials, to give them felicity and flow. In some places the documentation is less impressive, but the subjects treated there are fascinating in their own right, for they have been drawn from interviews with 150 of the Frei administrators. Indeed, Cleaves' adroit use of his inside dope permeates the entire book without ever descending to mere gossip, for all the materials are analyzed in light of theories of administration and organization. Cleaves' observations enrich that body of thought too.
While I like having a codebook for translating a proliferation of agency acronyms I remember to have been bewildering, it is far more important to appreciate Cleaves' understanding that Chileans are not funny Latins. They are people who have to do many of the same things as we, in most of the same ways, but with remarkably fewer resources and under far greater immediate pressures. Keeping that in mind, we can easily compare some of Cleaves' details about Chile to those from any number of other places where governmental or private agencies have to carry out major social changes. Like there was once this guy named Lindsay, see, and he tried to make some changes in New York, but . . .
BUREAUCRATIC POLITICSAND ADMINISTRATION INCHILE. By Peter S. Cleaves '66.University of California Press, 1974.352 pp. $16.75.
Dartmouth Professor of Sociology, Mr. Segalteaches Introduction to Social Analysis,Conflict and Change in Latin America,Contemporary Social Theory, and a course inClass, Prestige, and Power.
