As if it were a snake biting its tail, Chili pepper This Monday, we reach the fiftieth anniversary of the brutal coup, with levels of polarization that seem to hark back to that fateful September 11, 1973. “How do we compromise? With justice, with truth, by searching for the lost, I unequivocally condemn what happened,” the president said Sunday night. Gabriel Boric. “It is always healthy to return to the past, but we should not confuse the victims with the perpetrators, because There was no war here; “There was a massacre.”
If the social epidemic at the end of 2019 seemed to herald the final farewell to the neoliberal agenda, turn to the political right This tragedy, which began to unfold after the defeat of the progressive Magna Carta at the ballot box in September 2022 and was reaffirmed by the victory of extreme conservatives in the founding elections last May, colors the way many citizens view this tragedy.
A May poll by consulting firm Mori reported that 36% of those interviewed believed the military was right to overthrow Salvador Allende. At the beginning of the month, the company re-inspected the company. Only 47.5% of Chileans estimate that General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) was a dictator. A poll by Pulso Ciudadano ahead of the commemoration found that almost 40 percent of Chileans blamed the violently ousted president for what happened.
“I feel like there’s a regression” he admitted, embarrassed. Michelle Bachelet. According to the former president, there was greater consensus three decades ago. In this context, President Gabriel Boric, who is not immune from controversies and revisionist desires, signed the decree initiating the National Plan for the Search for Truth and Justice regarding 1,162 disappeared persons. The efforts of the left government to rally the entire political community around “never again” against situations like September 11 did not yield results.
“On the 50th anniversary of the violent collapse of democracy in Chile It cost many people their lives, dignity and freedom.As Chileans and other countries, we wish to jointly undertake, beyond our legitimate differences, to preserve and defend democracy, respecting the Constitution, the laws and the rule of law.” This phrase comes from the document signed by Boric and four Chilean predecessors in the Palacio de La Moneda, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Ricardo Lagos, Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera.
The gesture of the great leader Piñera was not accompanied by the right-wing forces that kept him in power between 2018 and 2022. The Chilean Vamos coalition – National Renewal (RN), Independent Democratic Union (UDI) and Evópoli – published its own document in 2018. he the word “not mentioned”explosion“. These parties preferred to talk about “the culmination of a profound social and political rupture that seriously affected coexistence.”
Lack of basic agreements
This Monday’s commemorations therefore intersect with these dividing lines; This situation was met with sadness by General Manager María Fernanda García. Memory Museum. “Unless we agree that the execution, torture, murder and disappearance of citizens can never happen again, we can never grow and develop as a country, neither economically nor socially.” “. The museum itself accompanied this disturbance with data from the Children’s Ombudsman Observatory: It was determined that 150 minor children were victims of execution during this period. dictatorship40 people were victims of enforced disappearance. But in addition, 956 children and adolescents were subjected to political imprisonment and torture; 102 children and adolescents were in political prison accompanied by an adult.
Political positions are stronger than any number. Scholar Sebastián Rumie observes a debate among various sections of the right expressed in three approaches to 9/11 and its consequences: “denialist, relativist and revisionist“. The first position deliberately denies proven facts “in order to fit the truth into a story.” The second does not deny what happened, but relativizes it “according to a historical context that would justify it”: Allende and the “Marxist danger” The third position does not deny or relativize facts , revises them to create new interpretations, is not the majority trend in the field.
The move of a former chief of general staff
While the right and the far right are measuring every intervention to avoid becoming the wagon of the Government, former Army chief retired general Ricardo Martínez Menanteau now stands as a strong voice denouncing the horrors of the past. in his book An Army of Everything “disappearance of people”One of the darkest pages regarding violations human rights It represents an open wound in the national psyche at that time.
Defense Minister Maya Fernández, Allende’s granddaughter, believes that there is a break in military structures compared to the past. “The men and women who are officers and petty officers today, They are the comeback generation of democracy. “Today, we do not have any active officers who took part in the coup.”
Debate about economics
However, 39 percent of those who participated in the survey by the Mori consultancy firm think that Pinochet will go down in history as “the man who developed and modernized the Chilean economy.” According to Ignacio Silva Neira of the Economic Policy Observatory (OPES), this is a misconception once again exposed by defenders of the military regime. Neira relies on impressive data from the World Bank. In 1973, Chile’s GDP per capita was equal to 24.2% of the GDP per capita of the United States. In 1989, Pinochet’s last year, this value dropped to 9.9 percent. Dictator “resulting in an economy that grows more slowly than other high-income countries Another economist, Guillermo Larraín, is in the same vein, assuring that the real driving force behind the “Chilean boom” was not the dictatorship, but the establishment of the rule of law regime in 1990.
times of revenge
Conflicts between academic or political elites, sometimes followed indifferently by the public, run parallel to the attacks of the harshest sections of the right, which glorify only the army of the ’73. A campaign was launched on social networks in favor of former captain Patricio Maturana, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison. blinded current senator Fabiola Campillai with tear gas canister. The campaign goal of $100,000 was far exceeded in record time.
The far right, unaware of the commemoration of 9/11, claims that the private sectorproperty rights“Streets, squares, roads, the neighboring sea and beaches. Even Pinochet’s Magna Carta did not go this far, and this seems the best tribute to the dictator.