50 years have passed since the Chilean military under the command of General Augusto Pinochet rose up against then-President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 and took power after a bomb attack on the Palacio de la Moneda in Santiago.
Allende committed suicide in the palace when cornered, Pinochet assumed dictatorial power which he would ruthlessly wield for 17 years, and Chile was left split in two, between victors and persecuted, and with open wounds that would last for a long time not healing seem to be firmly anchored. This will become clear this Monday when it will be celebrated at the Palacio de La Moneda a celebratory event attended by Latin American heads of state and government such as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, in which the right-wing forces in the Chilean parliament did not want to take part.
The current president, Gabriel Boric, is a young leader from the ranks of the student movement claims the figure of Allende as one of his referenceshas made the condemnation of the dictatorship, the reparation of its victims and the effort for “remembrance” one of its flagships.
But there are many memories, and not everyone has the same vision of these events as Boric, one of those who was not born then. It recently became clear in the Chilean Congress when The right dug up and adopted the motion accusing the Allende government of violating the constitution just weeks before the coup and served as legitimation for Pinochet’s coup.
Boric tried to get all factions to sign his so-called “Santiago Commitment,” a document in which he expressed the commitment of all Chilean parties to the democratic regime and rejected any attempt to undermine it except for those on the right merged into the Independent Democratic Union (UDI) and the most radical Republicans left. “We are not prepared to participate in milestones that lead to even more division,” said the UDI senator. Javier Macayain which Pinochet’s coup was described as “facts that are not even apparent at first glance.”
Right-wing parties fear that the left’s unified narrative will prevail, and the Boric government’s more radical support has fueled distrust. The writer’s resignation Patricio Fernandez As an adviser to the executive branch on the commemorations, after receiving criticism from Communist Party leaders, he convinced many that Boric had handed over the leadership of the coup commemoration to the far left.
The President had to content himself with publishing this Thursday a manifesto entitled “Commitment: for democracy, always”, signed together with the four living former Chilean presidents: Sebastián Piñera, Michelle Bachelet, Ricardo Lagos and Eduardo Frei. It is a reflection on the trauma of the coup and dictatorship, in which the signatories condemn “the violent collapse of democracy that has cost the lives, dignity and freedom of so many people” and call for them to “take care of it.” . of “authoritarian threats”.
The left-wing government also agreed a few days before the anniversary the National Plan for the Search for Victims of Enforced Disappearances. It is estimated that 3,200 prisoners disappeared as a result of the Pinochet dictatorship, and it remains unknown what happened to around 1,500 of them. This is part of a legacy of human rights abuses that includes the theft of the children of Pinochet opponents who were given up for adoption. without the consent of their families.
This week the story of one of them went around the world, Jimmy Lippert Thyddenwho was reunited with her Chilean birth mother after living with an adoptive mother in the United States for 42 years.
But not even the massive human rights violations documented during these leaden years appear to be enough to convince all Chileans that they deserve unqualified condemnation, and in Bachelet’s words, a “toxic” climate has emerged on the matter.
The general’s suicide Hernan Chacon Soto, 86 years old, convicted in August of the kidnapping and murder of singer-songwriter Víctor Jara a few days after the triumph of the coup attempt, made this clear. Boric angered the family when he compared Chacón’s end to that of Guillermo Teillier, the president of the Communist Party. For Boric, Teillier died “a worthy man, proud of what he had experienced,” while Chacón is one of those “others who die cowardly to avoid being brought to justice.” His comments caused such a stir that he had to admit days later that he was not “the one to judge the decision to commit suicide.”
In recent years, toxicity has been brewing. In 2019, Chile experienced a wave of protests that went down in history as a “social outbreak”. Crowds dissatisfied with social inequality and deficits in health, education and pensions confronted the carabineros and ultimately forced the opening of a new constitutional process for Chile.
Boric, an activist at the time, was one of the biggest advocates of the need for Chile to draft a new constitution to replace the Pinochet constitution that was still in force. Due to the dissatisfaction and with the new Magna Carta as a great promise, Boric became president.
But since then his figure has suffered major wear and tear. In a referendum, Chileans rejected the constitutional project prepared between scandals and scandals by a Constituent Assembly dominated by the radical left, which, among other things, proposed the definition of Chile as a plurinational state. And in the elections of the Constitutional Councils in May this year, the Republican Party of the right wing José Antonio Kast won a clear victory, which was interpreted as the result of boredom in the face of the endless constitutional debate and the left-wing excesses of a government that cared more about ideology than with people’s real problems. These people who exploded in 2019
