In late 1977 – as the Chilean military junta extended the state of siege in place since its 1973 coup and formally dissolved all political parties – Friedrich Hayek wrote a letter to a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, to protest what he depicted as unfair international criticism of the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. When his article was rejected, he wrote to the editor expressing disappointment that the newspaper lacked the 'civil courage' to resist popular anti-Pinochet sentiment. Hayek singled out the human rights organisation Amnesty International – which had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier that year – for turning 'slander [into] a weapon of international politics'. After accepting an invitation to lecture in Chile, he complained, he was inundated with phone calls, letters and anti-Pinochet material by 'well-intentioned people I did not know but also from organizations like "Amnesty International"', who asked him to cancel his visit. Amnesty's materials on Chile from this period detail the Junta's widespread use of arbitrary imprisonment, execution, systematic torture and the 'disappearance' of political detainees, 1,500 of whom then remained unaccounted for. In a style Amnesty helped pioneer, its 1977 report on Chilean political prisoners combined legal analysis with moving accounts of missing individuals. To take only one example, it recounted that José Baeza Cruces, a trader from Santiago, had been arrested in his shop in July 1974 by personnel of the Air Force Intelligence Service. Cruces was taken to a basement in the Ministry of Defence and later to the Air Force Academy of War, where, according to witnesses, he was tortured every day for at least six months. After that the witnesses were transferred and contact with Cruces was lost.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 304