Why The Dictator

Notes from Iquique

I am not partial to strongmen rulers, but my visit to Iquique, Chile, which I am leaving as this post hits your inbox, helped me put Pinochet and others of his ilk into perspective.

Iquique is beautiful and scary. The picture below is from my window. The boardwalk smells of sun-baked urine and has an undercurrent of incipient violence. Lots of people get murdered here.

Pinochet ruled Chile from roughly the time I was born until I graduated college. We know what we are supposed to think about such people. It’s Voldemort versus Harry Potter. Voldemort is Putin, Hitler, Mao, Idi Amin, Chavez and many others.

Dictators come to power in part based on the leader’s psychological profile—narcissistic and controlling. But it also may be that in the public’s eyes Voldemort is disorder, both perceived and real, physical and financial. Disorder fueled Hitler and also Trump in 2016. In Germany’s case defeat on the battlefield was followed by hyper-inflation. In Trump’s case, years of flat real wages, the 2008 housing crises and an opioid epidemic. In both cases, lack of physical and financial safety.

In terms of physical safety, Latin America does not score well. The region is the most violent place in the world as this chart from a World Bank study¹ shows (see the footnote to read the actual study). This is despite having a significant increase in per capita wealth over recent decades. In other words, this is not just about wealth, something else is going on.

Outside My Window

At 1 am the night before driving five hours to get here, I asked a question to the guide who was showing me the thick stars over Atacama’s desert. The desert is home to a scientific observatory (ALMA) and the stars are so luscious it felt like my head was inside a glittering trellis.

“Ever been to Iquique?” I asked the guide.

“Yeah, I don’t like it,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I got robbed at knife point. They stole everything and slashed me here,” he said, pointing to a scar that ran from the outside of his hand down his arm.

Wednesday on the boardwalk, my valuables stashed in the hotel safe, I used my primitive (but improving!) Spanish to talk to a cop positioned on the beach.

“On the beach here, it is safe,” he said. “I am here and other officers are here, however if you walk into the city, it isn’t safe.”

“How far can I walk, if, say, if I want to buy some water?”

“Four blocks,” he said.

That’s not very far, I thought. To get to the hotel, I drove through the stretch of city the cop had mentioned, doors locked, and I am leaving in a few moments, hopefully, the dangerous people are asleep. Based on statistics the cop shared with me, Iquique is more dangerous than St. Louis and less dangerous than the worst cities in Mexico, like Tijuana and Juarez.

Flows of Desperation

Iquique’s beach is pushed up hard against a high altitude wall of desert that stretches over Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. This dessert is where the mineral wealth is located. I drove past the Chuquicamata mine on the way here.

Across this desert trek people fleeing dysfunction, like that in failed state Venezuela, and Bolivia, whose per capita GDP is one-fifth Chile’s.² ³ I didn’t realize how desperate these people were until I drove through the desert myself. It felt like I was sliding over a hot skillet, not a spot of shade visible for miles. I was scared of getting a flat tire and can't imagine how terrifying and difficult it is cross on foot.

The disorder isn’t just Bolivia and Venezuela. On Reddit, one commentator, referring to an abduction that took place in Iquique, said that he felt it was a “curse” to be born in Latin America. The dysfunction is Peru, which I fly through tonight, hit by waves of political instability. Brazil is wracked by corruption scandals and swings from radical left to right. Wednesday, the US convicted Mexico’s former top cop for being in the pay off of the Sinaloa cartel, while AMLO announced that he was gutting the agency that oversees election integrity.⁴

Chileans, understandably, note that their country typically scores at the top of most lists in Latin America. Yet, it is still firmly Latin. The current President, Boric, is sympathetic to Hezbollah and more in the tradition of Morales (Bolivia) and Castro (Cuba), even if his inclinations have, so far, been constrained by Chile’s rule of law.

Crime Wave and Culture

Inject a sharply rising population of desperate migrants into a country without the wealth to absorb them and the result is a terrifying crime wave—terrifying like peoples’ throats getting slit with no motive, captured on CCTV in downtown Santiago. Two Venezuelans were arrested.

To be sure, some I spoke with were uncomfortable tying the 40% increase in violent crime in recent years to increased immigration, fearing it made them sound xenophobic. I could not find data that broke down Chile’s crime by nationality. News reports tie the increase in crime less to individuals than criminal groups, though one of the most lethal criminal groups is Venezuelan.⁵

“I don’t even look at the news anymore,” said one friend. She is a mother of two small children and moved here from Europe almost 10 years ago. She is now moving back to Europe.

I suspect the best way to understand this violence is to use the “attachment” framework I shared in my first book, Raising a Thief. A person who is unattached to others lacks a conscience and can commit heinous acts easily. I suspect by the time some people escape a failed state and walk across the desert their mind no longer works properly.

As I watched a man walking what looked like a Rottweiler on the boardwalk I thought about what draws people to such lethal dogs. The answer is that it makes them feel safe. Labradors and Obama (who I voted for) work well for my Connecticut suburb. It’s a tougher sell here.

In the press, Latin dysfunction is often blamed on external events—US imperialism, the CIA, tightening monetary policy (which sucks money out of the region) and the ebbs and flows of Chinese demand for Latin America’s raw materials. Another explanation is that the issue is internal—something is off with the culture.

This culture creates great writers and poets, no doubt. I recently read fantastic short stories by Borges and Beneditti. But this same culture may also create people who are tough to govern and administrators that are not great at governing, or at least not yet.

The Small Things Betray the Big Things

While here, I have been treated with the utmost courtesy and consideration. I also notice a chronic lack of attention to details. Concrete examples are all minor but also real.

• Overturning in a raft on a previous trip to Chile and the guides having no idea how to perform a rescue.

• The website for LATAM Airlines lacking buttons to allow you to switch the language and referring to the US by different names in different places.

• Being directed to a gas station that led me to a closed bridge.

• Being told tickets were not available to get to where I was going, then being pulled into a side room two feet away where tickets were suddenly available.

I have a dozen of these micro examples. Of course, the same thing exists in other countries, but it is a matter of degree. Apply this same process to administering a government, company or school and loose logic can create big problems, like being sympathetic to Marxist-Lenninst thought despite its track record in the Soviet Union and Cuba.

“It’s a Latin thing,” said one of my sources. “I can’t quite explain it. There is a value put on the family, hanging out, friends, that I enjoy but it somehow leads to what you are describing.” By which I think he meant a lack of rigor that permeates society.

How To Organize

So how do you organize such a place? I’d hope democratically but if a democracy does not produce safety, I can see why people embrace alternatives. This may be particularly true in places that lack the resources to police aggressively, like China and Chile. Fear creates internal control where external control is weaker. Chile has roughly 187 police for 100k people, less resources than places that are wealthier and face less severe problems. Japan is an extreme center-example.

Of course, turning to a dictator is scary.

“He didn't kill that many people,” said one of my conversationalists in Santiago, referring to Pinochet. Inside, my jaw dropped. “And you have to look at what the Left was doing before he took over. Chaos, sheer chaos, 100% inflation, land seizures, nationalizations.”

I was told that if Boric goes too far or is replaced by a person that continues on his path the military will again intervene. Pinochet’s “Operation Condor” killed about 2,000 people,⁶ tortured tens of thousands and carried out assassinations abroad, including in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a story that inspired a scene in my thriller, Master, Minion.

Dictators are easy to hate. But I’m also interested in why they exist and persist. And I think the answer is that when people are worried their throats will get slit, they want a Rottweiler, not a Lab. I’m not trying to say how it should be. I’m describing it as it is.