Unfortunately, institutional violence has accompanied us throughout almost all of our republican history. Ever since the bloody battle of Lircay imposed an extremely authoritarian and conservative de facto order, well disguised in the Constitution of 1833. As Diego Portales himself acknowledged in 1834: “I can tell you that, law or no law, that lady they call the Constitution must be violated when the circumstances are extreme, and what does it matter if it is, when in one year the kindergarten has been violated so many times because of its perfect uselessness” (Ernesto de la Cruz – Epistolario de don Diego Portales, Tomo I; Carta a Antonio Garfias del 6 de diciembre de 1834; Ministerio de Justicia, 1937; p. 379). And as early as March 1822, Portales was advocating a non-democratic regime: “Democracy, which is so much touted by the deluded, is an absurdity in countries like the Americans, full of vices and where the citizens lack all virtue, as is necessary to establish a true Republic” (Ibid., Vol. I, p. 377). (Ibid., Vol. I; Letter to José Cea, University of Chile, 1930; p. 12).
A factual authoritarian view shared by the liberal leader, Domingo Santa María, half a century later: “I have been called an authoritarian. I understand the exercise of power as a strong, directing will, creator of order and of the duties of the citizenry. This citizenship is still very much unconscious and it is necessary to direct it with sticks. And I recognise that in this matter we have made more progress than any other country in America. Handing the ballot boxes over to the rotaje and the scoundrels, to the insane passions of the parties, with universal suffrage on top (formally, universal male suffrage was established in 1874 in Chile, but it was to be distorted until 1958) is the suicide of the ruler, and I will not commit suicide for a chimera. I see well and I will impose myself to govern with the best and I will support every liberal law that is presented to prepare the ground for a future democracy. I mean future democracy. I have been called interventor (electoral). I am. I belong to the old school and if I take part in the intervention, it is because I want an efficient, disciplined parliament, one that collaborates with the government’s public good. I have experience and I know where I am going. I cannot leave it to the theorists to undo what Portales, Bulnes, Montt and Errázuriz did (…) in the two times I was minister (…) I learned to command without delay, to be obeyed without reply, to impose myself without contradiction and to make authority felt because it was of right, of law and, therefore, superior to any human feeling” (Mario Góngora). Ensayo Histórico sobre la noción de Estado en Chile en los siglos XIX y XX ; Edit. Universitaria, 1992; pp. 59-60).
Why do we talk about the “pacification of Araucania” where our State proceeded to plunder the Mapuche territory through genocide in the strictest sense of the term; and the virtual extermination of the southern indigenous people by private individuals with the acquiescence and impunity of the State. In addition to the occupation of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), turning its inhabitants into virtual serfs until well into the 20th century. And extreme violence was also used to settle political differences between oligarchic factions, as in the civil wars of 1851, 1859 and – above all – 1891.
Remarkably, the triumph of the anti-balmacedistas in the latter provoked a total change from a presidentialist regime to a parliamentary one, without the need to change a comma of the Constitution of 1933, but only by reinterpreting it! … A parliamentary regime which also used extreme violence against the emerging mining and industrial proletariat, expressed particularly in the great massacres of Valparaíso (1903), Santiago (1905), Antofagasta (1906) and above all Iquique (1907) which, because of the number of victims (estimated at around 2,000 people), the short time in which it took place and the completely peaceful nature of the demonstrators, can be considered one of the greatest peacetime massacres in the history of mankind.
With the crisis of parliamentarism, the 1920s saw a return to extreme presidentialism, albeit with the integration of the middle classes into the state apparatus and the replacement of the complete laissez faire economic system with import-substitution industrialisation. However, authoritarianism remained the de facto rule. Thus, prior to the 1925 Constitution, another of the greatest peacetime workers’ massacres in the history of mankind was carried out: La Coruña, whose victims are also estimated at thousands of people. Moreover, the Constitution was drafted by a small number of people handpicked by Alessandri (like that of 1980!) and then imposed on a larger commission because of the threat of a new military coup by the commander-in-chief of the army (and a member of it), Mariano Navarrete. Likewise, an electoral system continued (until 1958) that profoundly distorted the will of the people through bribery and the carriage of the tenancy of the haciendas. And new repressive laws were progressively introduced against the popular sectors, culminating in the “Law for the Defence of Democracy”, which was in force between 1948 and 1958.
In short, until the 1960s there existed a social system that strongly discriminated against “employees” over “workers”, in terms of wages, pensions, housing, health, etc. And which kept the agricultural workers as virtual serfs without any rights whatsoever. Even a government like that of the Popular Front – that of Aguirre Cerda – maintained a strong repression of the workers and peasants. Thus, his Interior Minister, Arturo Olavarría Bravo, boasted in his memoirs published in 1962 (Chile entre dos Alessandri) that on one occasion in 1941 he prevented a railway strike by threatening all the train drivers who took part in it with summary execution. And when he informed other high authorities of the criminal order to that effect, General Arturo Espinoza told him with emotion: “Allow me, Minister, interpreting the feelings of all my comrades in the army, to express that, at last, there is a government in Chile. It was what was needed, maximum energy, maximum sense of responsibility. You can be sure, Minister, that you can count on the most resolute cooperation of my comrades in arms” (Volume I, Nascimento; pp. 508-9).
On another occasion, he prevented a mining strike in the north by ordering the intendants of Tarapacá and Antofagasta “to arrest that same night, en masse, all the workers’ leaders who were caught inciting the strike. Once arrested, they were to be taken on board the first steamship that passed south” (Ibid.; p. 506), as indeed was done, releasing them on their arrival in Valparaíso… On the other hand, he prevented peasant strikes by threatening the tenants with expulsion from their homes for generations and leaving them out in the open. “I turned this procedure into a system and General Oscar Reeves Leiva, Director General of the Carabineros, amusingly called it the ‘final judgement’, because of the idea of putting the good guys (who wanted to continue working) on the right and the bad guys on the left (…) Of course, I did not need to apply the ‘final judgement’ many times” (Ibid.; p. 453).
The political, economic and social deterioration of this unjust, exclusionary and only formally democratic model finally led the centre-left, at the end of the 1950s, to become independent of the right and to come together to repeal the Law for the Defence of Democracy and to establish the single electoral card that made it possible to establish for the first time genuinely democratic, free elections with a secret ballot.
Unfortunately, the blinding historical myth – of believing that democracy had existed in Chile since Independence – prevented him from establishing a solid coalition that would consolidate genuine democracy in our country. On the contrary, aggravated by the global radicalisation of the 1960s, the national centre-left committed a tragic historical waste and virtual political suicide. Thus, if we take the parliamentary elections of 1965, the right won 9 deputies; and the centre-left (PDC, PR, PS and PC) 138! Eight years later came the military coup that would put an end to democracy, the Agrarian Reform, trade union and neighbourhood power, the nationalisation of basic wealth, etc…
And, as we have witnessed, the centre-left returned – and in an exacerbated form – after 1990 to its traditional pre-1958 factual positions of subordinating itself to the right; peacefully consolidating the neoliberal model imposed with extreme violence by the former through a military dictatorship. A model that has finally collapsed in 2019 by a citizenry fed up with so much injustice, exclusion and deceit. Let us hope that this time we will be able to build a democratic future with social justice for Chile.
