Life in Debt. Clara Han
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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