Thomas FreemanGlobal Topics: Global ViolenceProfessor Joyce Apsel12 May 2014The Miracle of Gonzalo: Necessary Violence and the Whitewashing of History in the 2004 Chilean Film MachucaThe young passive son of a wealthy Chilean family enters his luxurious new house in a suburb of Santiago. His mother, opulently dressed, greets him at the door, kisses him on the cheek and asks him if he is happy in the new family home. The boy remains silent. This final scene of Chilean director Andrés Wood's 2004 film Machuca appears to be a scene of bright optimism – of a cultured, aristocratic family appreciating the benefits of the first stage of Chile's modern "economic miracle". However, the typically bright eyes of the cherubic-faced boy, Gonzalo, are overshadowed by the gruesome events he had just witnessed in the midst of his nation's 1973 military coup. Present during a bloody military raid in one of the capital's slums, Gonzalo had just witnessed his destitute best friend, Machuca, being rounded up and sent to a military extermination camp (Machuca). His family's newfound wealth was the result of Chile's successful and widely lauded neoliberal economic model, which was implemented through the brutal repression of its challenger: the politically powerful, socialist-aligned underclass. In his intimately told film, director Andrés Wood addresses a country that extols its prosperity while speaking softly about the atrocities committed against its proletariat. Wood demands that his audience look beyond the facade of Gonzalo's palatial new home and recognize that his wealth - and indeed the nation's wealth - was only made possible by the shedding of blood. The audience, through Gonzalo's brief friendship with Machuca, gets a glimpse of the 'disa ...... middle of paper ...... New York:Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2007. Print. Klein, in various accounts of US involvement abroad, explains that the US commonly engages in a practice of "shock therapy".' The United States brings bloodshed and war to foreign nations in order to restructure their economies and governments to serve US interests. In the case of Chile, Klein argues that the United States, in the midst of Cold War paranoia, wanted to maintain its political and economic hegemony in South America. Washington consequently whipped the Chilean army into an anti-Allende and anti-communist frenzy, resulting in the bloodshed of the “Caravan of Death” and years of tyrannical military dictatorship. Also significant was the fact that the neoliberal economics implemented in Chile was taught to Chilean junta economists by Americans at the University of Chicago.