Chile marked the fiftieth anniversary of the coup d’état that overthrew President Salvador Allende, yesterday. Before the restoration of democracy in 1990, more than 40,000 people became victims of torture, political imprisonment, execution or “forced disappearance.” (Guardian) More than a thousand people remain disappeared.
President Gabriel Boric gave a speech outside La Moneda, the presidential palace bombed by the army during the coup and where Allende died. “Problems with democracy can always be solved … and a coup d’état is never justifiable – nor is endangering the human rights of those who think differently,” said Boric. “It is time to make up for these absences, correct the faults, repair the damage [and] project ourselves beyond our pain.”
The message was pointed, in a country where “a significant number of people, according to numerous polls, believe the 1973 coup was justified, and that Pinochet, who died in 2006, was a good leader who helped to modernize the country,” reports the Associated Press.
The Chilean government recently formally admitted responsibility for the disappearance, and presumed deaths, of over two thousand people at the hands of the Chilean military and associated paramilitary groups, and made a groundbreaking commitment to search for and identify the remains of those disappeared by the dictatorship.
But these moves have also highlighted polarization in Chile regarding the Pinochet legacy, reports Jacobin: “Major sectors of the Chilean military and Chilean society in general oppose this move and continue to extol … Pinochet’s dictatorship. The controversy over the government’s admission of guilt highlights the divisions that still rend the country.”
The vast majority of human rights violations under the dictatorship remain untried, and Boric’s efforts at truth and justice have brought pushback from conservative opposition leaders, reports Al Jazeera. “As in other countries in the region, so-called “dirty war denial” is growing in Chile, sowing anger and division on all sides.”
Ariel Dorman writes: “How our nation remembers, 50 years later, the historical trauma of our common past could not be more important than it is now, when the temptation of authoritarian rule is once again on the rise among Chileans, as it is, of course, across the world. Many conservatives in Chile today argue that the 1973 coup was a necessary correction. Behind their justification lurks a dangerous nostalgia for a strongman who supposedly will deal with the problems of our time by imposing order, crushing dissent and restoring some sort of mythical national identity.” (New York Times)
The Boric administration had hoped the anniversary could be a moment of national unity, and called for a broad political declaration condemning the coup and celebrating democracy. But the president’s efforts at what he labelled a “reasonable and minimal consensus” failed, “exacerbating both the country’s extreme polarisation and political paralysis,” and a reflection of a wider political stagnation, reports the Financial Times.
A march honoring victims on Sunday was marred by acts of violence — another example of how the legacy of the coup and the country’s relationship with democracy remain fraught, report Al Jazeera. (See yesterday’s post.)
“Decades later, the left and the right still exchange blame for the breakdown of democracy. Far from the promises of “never again” pronounced by some military leaders, some on the right justify the coup and play down the human rights violations that followed. This month, right-wing opposition leaders refused to sign a government-sponsored commitment to democracy and declined to participate in official anniversary events,” reports the New York Times.
The rightwing Unión Demócrata Independiente party issued a statement saying that the coup d’état was “inevitable” — though some leaders within the party dissented.
Only a quarter of Chileans are interested in the anniversary, and nearly 70% believe it is an issue that divides the country, according to a Pulso Ciudadano-Activa Research poll. (El País)
However, Boric and four of his predecessors signed a commitment “for democracy, forever” last week, the agreement the country’s political parties failed to reach. The five, including Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera called for democratic concordance in a context of disenchantment and tension in interviews with El País.
More Anniversary
The Washington Post has a photoessay of the coup.
The Guardian profiles the survivors of dictatorship victims, who fifty years on “fear the brutality of the death squads will be forgotten.”
El País profiles Judge Carlos Cerda, one of the few members of the judiciary who investigated human rights abuses during the dictatorship, and who in the years afterwards ordered the detention of members of the Pinochet family in relation to misuse of public funds.
El País analyzes why Chile’s regime avoided a cult of personality around Pinochet — except of a massive statue that was commissioned before the end of the dictatorship, never installed, and is now, allegedly, hidden in pieces in Army installations.
Five former political prisoners return to the sites of their confinement — Reuters photo-essay.
Thousands of people attended a concert at the Estadio Nacional de Chile yesterday — where victims of the dictatorship were tortured and executed — El País.
Chile is often seen as “a textbook case of Cold War anti-Communist machinations, but this perspective has tended to overshadow the ways in which Chile is also a study in resistance to autocracy,” writes Ruth Ben-Ghiat in the Atlantic.
The U.S. role in Chile’s coup — Fifty Years On
Fifty years after the coup, a fierce debate over U.S. contributions to the overthrow of Allende continues — though “Chile is one of the best-documented cases of covert US intervention for regime change. Nonethless “there are still top secret documents on the US role that must be declassified,” writes Peter Kornbluh in The Nation.
The National Security Archive posted “Countdown Toward the Coup,” a chapter of Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File, which records U.S. government actions, internal debates and policy deliberations as conditions for the coup evolved between March and September 1973.
Al Jazeera recognizes Kornbluh’s decades of work on sifting through declassified documents detailing US foreign interventions in general, and in Chile in particular. The goal is to set the record straight, Korbluh told Al Jazeera.
“At a time when numerous nations, including the United States, are confronting the dire threat posed by authoritarianism to the survival of democratic institutions, access to the complete historical record on what happened in Chile remains critical to us all,” writes Kornbluh in The Nation.
The U.S. role in Chile’s coup also had an effect at home, galvanizing activists and lawmakers to give human rights concerns more priority in U.S. foreign policy, reports NPR.
“Investigations in the mid-1970s into the U.S. role in Chile also led to unprecedented legislation — sometimes enforced, sometimes not – designed to ensure greater Congressional oversight of U.S. covert operations and to curb U.S. military and other assistance to governments and armies that abuse fundamental human rights,” reports Responsible Statecraft, which has an interview with Kornbluh.
Some U.S. Democratic lawmakers have backed calls to declassify information regarding U.S. support for the coup and the Pinochet dictatorship. Two-hundred years after the Monroe Doctrine, there is appetite among U.S. progressives “for a bold shift in our foreign policy,” write David Adler and Misty Rebik in a Guardian op-ed.
More International Legacy
“Because Allende’s unique experiment—the first time in history that a revolution did not resort to armed struggle to impose its views or eliminate its adversaries—had captured the world’s imagination, our defeat, and the savage repression that followed it, wielded an outsize influence far beyond the borders of what could be expected from a small, remote country at the far edge of the Southern Hemisphere,” writes Ariel Dorfman in The Nation.
“The strategy of disappearance is so shocking and difficult to comprehend because the violence is rationalised, professionalised and calculated. It is never random, even if its targets appear to have been arbitrarily selected. Its currency is emotional fear that infects the population like a virus, creating a climate of suspicion and betrayal,” writes Brad Evans in The Conversation.
Constitution
Polls show that Chile’s latest effort to rewrite its constitution is heading toward a rejection in December’s referendum, despite recent concessions by the far-right Partido Republicano, which has the largest representation on the constitutional council. Earlier this month the party withdrew four of its most controversial proposals, including a clause to “protect the life of the child about to be born,” reports Americas Quarterly.