A Stateless Cold Warrior: Cristobal Unterrichter, the FAO, and Contested Indigenous Reform under the Pinochet Dictatorship

Scholars have long contended that the indigenous reforms of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet were part of the larger economic policies that the former students of Milton Friedman, collectively known as “los Chicago Boys,” enacted in the late 1970s. Recent archival evidence and ethnographic work, nonetheless, demonstrates that this assumption is overstated. The primary architect of the Pinochet regime’s indigenous policies was Italian-born Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) consultant Cristobal Unterrichter. By the late 1970s Unterrichter was a seasoned and stateless cold warrior whose policies were not the simple handmaidens of the Chicago Boys. Unterrichter’s emphasis on the formation of male-headed nuclear families that engaged in the market economy echoed agrarian reform initiatives that had taken place in Chile, and elsewhere in Latin America, since the early-twentieth century. An examination of Unterrichter’s policies and engagement with indigenous Mapuche communities in Southern Chile also provides a space to rethink state authority under military rule in Latin America. The Pinochet regime was not a monolithic state, but actually vulnerable to the whims of international experts like Unterrichter who designed policies that not only existed in direct contradiction with the military regime, but also defied the dictates of Unterrichter’s host organization, the FAO. What comes to light from Unterrichter’s story is that indigenous and agrarian policies under the Pinochet dictatorship did not exist in a vacuum, but rather within an international context comprised of various figures who were nether beholden to any one state or state policy.