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CHAPTER 2

Social Debt, Silent Gift

LOWER THE POINTS

We sat in the living room on a couch covered with thick plastic. Paz's two-year-old daughter, Felicidad, sat in the lap of her grandmother Sra. Ana. As she combed her hands through the child's blond hair, Sra. Ana told me how Paz had begun smoking pasta base again two months earlier. Paz had started intermittent pasta base consumption six years previously. She had stopped consuming when she became pregnant after selling sex to a fifty-year-old neighbor. Paz's return to pasta base had palpable effects within the home. She sold her daughter's formula, received from the local primary care center, as well as the child's diapers.

Sra. Ana was sixty-five years old and widowed. She lived with her two daughters, Paz and Pamela, on a housing site comprised of a two-room house and a provisional shack. Pamela worked in subcontracted office-cleaning, and her husband worked in construction. They had three children and lived in the shack. Sra. Ana worked as a security guard in the women's prison in the municipality of San Joaquín in the southern zone of Santiago. Her other daughter, Paz, had had a number of temporary jobs, the last one working for the municipality in park maintenance, picking up trash in the plazas and parks in the neighborhood.

Woven into these difficulties were Sra. Ana's feelings of shame produced by Paz's thefts from one neighbor's almacén (shop) and another's liquor store and, just recently, from Susana and her husband, Antonio, Sra. Ana's friends across the street. Paz had broken into Susana and Antonio's house while they were visiting relatives on the coast. She passed their DVD player, their son's PlayStation, and Susana's heirloom clocks to a youth in the neighborhood who sold stolen goods in other neighboring poblaciones. The next-door neighbor's son, Miguel, noticed the door open and found Paz lying on the couch asleep. He called the police. She was arrested.

Sra. Ana recounted, “Paz robbed my purse that had 28,000 (USD 46). She is stealing from the neighbors. I don't even want to walk in the street and show my face. The others say, ‘She is the mamá of this girl who walks around robbing.’” Sra. Ana's husband had died of pancreatic cancer eleven years earlier. She commented that, after his death, she thought, “Now we can have a happy family, all tranquil. But, no. One son of mine has been in prison for the past six years for the same porquería [filth]. He walked around robbing, and was jailed for robbery with intimidation. And I say, What mamá has so many bad children? We have a big cartel [media cartel] here in the house. I think I did what I could. I don't know how I failed.”

Sra. Ana apologized “a thousand times” to Susana. She bought another PlayStation for her son on credit, the only item left that they had not been able to recuperate through neighborhood channels. On top of monthly utility bills and food, which she shared with her daughter Pamela, Sra. Ana was paying for replacements for the stolen powdered milk for her granddaughter and monthly quotas on the PlayStation, as well as monthly payments to the neighbors for stolen goods and money. She and Susana usually relied on each other when faced with a “critical moment,” moments when they would not make it to the end of the month. But, in the midst of the gossip over the thefts, she told me that she had “shame” (vergüenza) to ask Susana for a loan.

Sra. Ana applied for a municipal subsidy to offset her water bill, money that she could then use for covering monthly costs of bread. At the time of my visit to her house, she was waiting for a social worker to conduct a household needs assessment, which, she hoped, would provide her with a point score low enough to qualify: “I have to lower the point score” (Tengo que bajar el puntaje). She recounted that, on a visit one year earlier, the social worker had seen three old televisions in her home. None of them worked, she said, “but, the social worker wrote something down on the piece of paper, and I didn't get the point score.” This time, “I heard from friends that if you walk around dirty, make the house dirty—if you look poor, like animal, then they lower your points. This is why I will not shower. I will not shower until after the social worker comes,” she remarked to me defiantly and angrily. She said she was pasando hambre (experiencing hunger) but always made sure that her granddaughter had enough to eat. “How do you bear it?” I asked. She responded, “I grew up with cow's milk. I am strong. At times, I think that God is testing me, but then I think, how long the test. I would never wish this to happen to another person, not even to my worst enemy.”

Sra. Ana's desire to make good on her obligations to her neighbors, her sense of shame in asking a friend for help in the face of a theft that betrayed their intimacy, her experience of hunger, and her resentment of social workers' criteria for need reveal potent frictions between a moral fabric of neighborhood life and official assessments of poverty: between a “living with dignity” that is contingent upon neighborhood relations and their boundaries and the state's criteria for poverty.

In the previous chapter, I explored an “active awaiting” as a mode of care for the mentally ill and the addicted made possible through institutional credit and through domestic relations beyond the home. The availability of credit has also significantly altered the nature of poverty itself, providing access to consumer goods typically outside the low-income monthly budget while extending a temporality of debt payments that may not be matched with stable work and incomes. The very dynamics of economic precariousness generate what men and women call “critical moments,” when temporary work is cut short, wages unpaid, or illness episodes generate more expenditures than can be handled by families.

This quality of economic precariousness has, however, emerged alongside the state's own debt to the poor: the “social debt” to the poor accrued during the Pinochet regime's market reforms, a debt that would be paid through expansion of targeted poverty programs. In this chapter, I bring into focus the critical moment as a way of considering the moral dimensions of poverty in relation to the social debt: what those critical moments reveal about the boundaries of speech and silence tied into a living-with-dignity and the frictions between this living-with-dignity and the visions of the poor embodied in official assessments of need.

EXTREME POVERTY AND THE SOCIAL DEBT

On May 21, 1990, President Patricio Aylwin gave a speech to the National Congress marking the beginning of democratic transition in Chile and outlining the temporal and moral contours of that government's vision of transitional justice. Addressing poverty would be one crucial aspect of reconciliation. “I think that if we want to strengthen national unity, we need to set our eyes on a common future that unites us, more than a past that divides us. Let us leave history to judge that which has occurred and put our zeal toward the tasks that the patria [fatherland] now demands of us 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.

When I arrived at their house, Valentina came out to greet me. Through the front window, I could see her husband turning off the TV. The silver fifty-inch Panasonic TV extended from the living room's corner to its center. It rested on a table, under which a large silver Sony sound system flashed its red and green lights. Two overstuffed tan armchairs sat close to the TV. Valentina guided me past the living area to the dining table, where teacups were set out. While Valentina prepared tea in the kitchen, I asked Pato about his work history. Pato had been a taxi driver for the past two years. Fifteen years earlier, however, he had started working at the Machasa textile factory.⁴ During that time, he said, he was earning well. His monthly income was 250,000 pesos (USD 410). Machasa provided the basis for this house, he explained, because it was a “time of stable work…. The company treated the workers well. There were benefits to working there, respect for the worker. Machasa was a Chilean company, but it went bankrupt.”

After eight years of employment, Pato moved to Sodimac, a manufacturer of transformers and lighting fixtures. There, he worked in a parttime trucking job, transporting goods from warehouse to stores. His starting monthly income was 60,000 pesos (USD 100). “From 250,000 to 60,000, just like that,” he told me. “It was virtually impossible to live during this time. We were paying dividends [on the house] of 25,000, then paying for school for the children, and the rest of the bills. No alcance para comer.” (It isn't enough to eat.)

Then, after six years of working for Sodimac, Pato renounced his work. The company had hired an external subcontractor to find workers, “un contratista [subcontractor] who receives his income for each worker that he brings to work, 5,000 pesos per worker, but pays the worker the minimum 115,000 pesos. Two months before I left work, the contratista came up to me and asked me to work with him, but for half the income, and it wasn't acceptable to me [no me convenía], so I left.” He told me that work is like this “everywhere now. You have to work for a contratista, who can tell you to sign a contract for two months, then two months more, afterward another month. And if you work for a while, you pass to an indefinite contract without signing anything, but when they throw you out, they pay a smaller indemnity, because all of those months when you had a definite contract do not count. The system now is like this. El mano de obra [manual labor] now is very cheap.”

Pato analyzed how labor laws generated new labor hierarchies and everyday instability. As an outcome of Pinochet's Labor Plan, as historian Peter Winn discusses, regimes of flexible labor continue to exert one of the most detrimental effects on the livelihoods of the poor (Winn 2004). Consisting of a series of decree laws designed primarily by Pinochet's labor minister, José Piñera, the Labor Plan worked in three broad directions.⁵ First, Decree Law 2.200 (1979) and Law 18.018 institutionalized new forms of unstable labor by giving the employer the power to terminate contracts with thirty days' notice, without justification, and to unilaterally change the nature of the work or the actual work site (Silva 2007; Winn 2004). Second, Decree Law 16.757 (1979) amplified the role and scope of subcontracting to all areas of a company's labor, allowing companies to subcontract out labor inherent to principal production, such as equipment maintenance and repair (Silva 2007, 4). Third, Decree Laws 2.758 (1979) and 3.648 (1981) severely restricted collective bargaining by allowing companies to replace striking workers after fifty-nine days and by abolishing specialized labor courts (Winn 2004).

Starting with the Aylwin administration, successive Concertación governments attempted to reform the Labor Code. As sociologist Volker Frank has pointed out, however, the Labor Code has produced “an ever increasing tendency to substitute permanent contract workers with temporary and subcontracted labor, a lowering of income for the total labor force, a decrease in fixed individual incomes for Chile's workers, and an increase in incomes tied to productivity gains, bonuses, and other ‘incentives’” (Frank 2004, 74; see also Henríquez and Riquelme 2006). For historian Gabriel Salazar, this “logic of employment,” in which “no work contract should be permanent and every worker, according to business interests, is dispensable,” has become “the third vertex of the ‘social pact’ of neoliberalism” (Salazar Vergara 2005, 88).

Indeed, by 2005, the Decree Laws' legacy in the current Labor Code produced an extremely precarious labor situation in which more than 93 percent of new work contracts lasted less than one year, and 50 percent lasted less than four months (Riesco 2005, 59). In La Pincoya, this high turnover and limited lifetime of the work contract tied into new hierarchies between local contratistas and their neighbors. These contratistas reap substantially higher incomes through subcontracting neighbors on “definite,” or time-delimited, contracts that last less than twelve months, typically two to three months, depending on the type of work. For the urban poor, the state's regulatory environment has institutionalized work as discontinuous and unpredictable.

Valentina returned to the table with bread, margarine, and cold cuts. Pato continued talking, spreading margarine on a piece of bread. After Sodimac, he decided to become a taxi driver. His family lent him money to buy a car. But, he told me, this work is even more unstable. “I don't know if this day will go well or badly for me. During the week, I can earn 20,000 to 30,000 pesos, and this is not sufficient for the house. So, I go to work on the weekends, Friday at night, Saturday at night, to equilibrate the week.” Pato returned to commenting on labor and politics. “In Chile, factories have turned into warehouses. I can say this because I lived it [lo viví]. In a factory—before—one worker painted the cup, the other made the cup, the other put the stamp on it, the other packaged it. But today, the cup arrives here made. The only thing that the worker can do is put the stamp on it that says ‘equis’ [X] country, and packages it. And they throw out the ten workers that before made the cup. The CUT [Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, the national union organization], which supposedly should protect the worker, does not want to do anything, because it does not want to criticize the government now. But, I say, if Lavín [then mayor of Santiago, and a member of the Unión Democrática Independiente party, backed by Opus Dei, an ultraconservative Catholic organization] were president, then maybe we would have a change with the CUT, because we would have to fight against something.”

Valentina yawned. The discussion of the CUT did not seem to be holding her attention. But as I turned the conversation back to the home, she became animated. “Do you make it to the end of the month?” I asked. Valentina answered, “We use the [credit] cards—Falabella, Rip-leys, Almacenes París—because you have to buy materials and clothes for the children to go to school. We can't pay with money, so we have to use cards.” She continued: “You know, I went to the municipality to do trámites [paperwork]. I spent the whole day tramitando [doing paperwork] to get the subsidies, but the asistente [social worker] there said that they would use the same information, the same paper [hoja, literally, the “sheet of paper”] that we had in 2002, and now it's 2004. Las cosas han cambiado” (Things have changed). Right now, she said, “we are passing a critical moment”.

She told me about the social worker's visit two years earlier, in 2002. She had petitioned the municipality to have the social worker assess their household for a water and electricity subsidy when Pato was out of work. “He only looked at what we have. Our TV, our stereo system, refrigerator, and he gave us a point score that was higher.” Pato latched on, with frustration in his voice: “The most grave is that I am without work now; now I have unstable work. For that, I ask for help now. They see the tele and think that we are well, but they do not understand that I beat myself up [me saque la cresta], almost going crazy, working to buy this tele, working twelve hours a day. But it was because of this, because I could do it with overtime.”

Pato and Valentina sketched out the temporal disjuncture between discontinuous work patterns and needs assessments materialized in social workers, paperwork, and point scores. This temporal disjuncture took on moral intensity with respect to specific material objects—televisions, stereos, and more recently, computers and laptops. Pointing to the TV, Valentina joined in: “But, they do not understand this achievement. That we achieved buying this tele when he was working well, overworking, more hours because we wanted to buy the tele. And, now, what do I do? Like most people around here, take the tele to the house of a friend, hide this table [pointing to the table on which the TV sits], hide the stereo system and the refrigerator, to show that, yes, we are poor. Today, things are so bad. It's bad will” (la mala voluntad).

Pato and Valentina illuminate a few crucial observations with respect to the experiences of economic precariousness. Let us first consider the unpredictability of wages and work. On the one hand, working “extra hours” has become one way to save money in order to buy large consumer goods. These consumer goods, then, are taken as part of household assets in needs assessments, without consideration that “extra hours” and “almost going crazy” in fact allowed for their purchase. On the other hand, working “extra hours” may be necessary just to cover monthly expenses, or may be insufficient to cover the month. Second, institutional credit through department stores and supermarkets is often necessary in order to “make it to the end of the month.” Yet, as we also have seen in chapter 1, the unpredictability of work is at odds with predictable monthly debt payments, but this unpredictability also means that credit must be relied on.

Third, there is an intense moralism articulated around the relations of the poor to consumer goods. This moralism may be related to an image of the poor as nonmodern or precariously modern. In this view, consumer goods bring the poor into modernity, and being deprived of consumer goods then qualifies a household to be a recipient of state intervention and aid. But, at the same time, many households do have consumer goods, and it is the plethora of consumer goods that feeds arguments that the poor are engaged in profligate spending: that they are not being “responsible” consumers. Thus, we can understand Valentina's gesture of pointing at the television and her vehement remark that it is an achievement. The argument about profligate spending not only forecloses a consideration of the multiple demands and desires that the poor experience but also asserts and demands a hyperausterity and hyper-rationality of the poor that those who are not poor—and who do not struggle to get to the end of the month—could simply never live up to. It grounds decision making in the division of reason and emotion. And it limits poverty to survival, but in doing so, forecloses careful attention to how need might be enmeshed in a whole range of relations.⁶

GOVERNMENT OF THE POOR