“The true blues continue to inhabit and disturb the dreams of our adolescent peoples. Now it seems to me that during the social outburst of 2019 when the whole country was taking to the streets chanting “Chile woke up”, the people were in their deepest sleep.
Dreams are wonderful. We cannot live without dreaming and we know the important role that sleep plays in the vital functions of our organism. The problem is when in deep sleep we start to make our plans in the real world. We can expect nothing but sad disappointments, such as those that Chile has lived through after the second constitutional referendum on Sunday 17 December 2023.
In the memory of my phone, there are still dozens of videos filmed in the streets of Santiago, with millions of Chileans coming out to demand a change in the political system imposed by Pinochet. It was so beautiful to see whole cities taken over by the people, thousands of examples of self-organization, solidarity, and human love in the face of brutal police repression; stones against bullets, poetry against barbarism, and a great collective need to believe that this time at last… With all my Chilean and Latin American friends who came to support us, I was part of this madness, in which we all felt the same.
The result has been a total disaster. Now with President Gabriel Boric, a former leftist student leader turned by the black magic of power into a demagogue, a faithful local representative of the northern empire and admirer of Zelenski, with whom he is even acquiring a certain physical resemblance. Chile is governed by a group of inept, arrogant and mediocre characters with a real increase in crime, but with the same forceful repression as always against social forces.
The ideal ground is being prepared for the return to power in the next elections of the purest and hardest Pinochetism, for it to make an ideal duo with the neighboring Milei.
Comparing today’s results with the Chilean political process of the last decades, we see a certain tendency towards a repetition of the collective romantic enthusiasms that always sow great frustrations and social hangovers. I am not saying that it is not worth fighting, I am just insisting that it is necessary to have our eyes wide open.
The heroic and unforgettable epic of the Popular Unity government from 1970 to 1973, a truly revolutionary process under democratic conditions, also called “the Chilean road to socialism with a taste of empanadas and red wine”, was brought down with a bloodbath and ended with the installation of one of the long and cunning dictatorships of the continent. And to this day, since 73, a terrible question remains unanswered: What chance did Allende’s project have? What else could be done to avoid the tragedy? An old socialist friend in Punta Arenas told me that “taking power away from us was as easy as taking an ice cream from a child”. Recognizing the stark reality of that historical moment, we should recognize that the great humanist project of the Popular Unity since Allende’s electoral triumph was doomed to failure. The Chilean revolutionaries had neither real force nor the mechanisms to become a power with the capacity to defend themselves. Their enemy was always at an advantage and was only waiting for the moment for an accurate blow.
The demonstrators who took to the streets of Santiago and other Chilean cities had nothing apart from a few slogans, the dream of overthrowing Pinochet’s constitution and changing the savage capitalist system so that the state would return to its fundamental duties, taking charge of education, health, and pensions. We were proud of having no clear project, no organization, no banner, and no leader of the movement. It was an ideal situation for the experienced and super cunning Chilean right wing (where the Pinochetistas for decades have been the partners of the repentant socialists) to recover from the first shock, take back control, and appoint the ambitious and egomaniacal comrade Boric as the future ‘left’ president.
We are seeing how the people themselves, for lack of ideological and social formation, facilitate the work of their enemies. Undoubtedly, to a large extent, it is the work of the media and a product of the destruction of public education, but explanations are no longer enough, we need to look for new ways.
Chile has always been a very constitutionalist country, with truly law-abiding citizens. This was long before the Pinochet dictatorship and without this characteristic of the Chilean people, Salvador Allende would never have become president. That is why the dictator Augusto Pinochet needed to change the constitution, thus ensuring the destruction of the state and the control of the economic elites over the country, regardless of the will of its citizens. Pinochet’s constitution is a masterpiece of power to legalize a profoundly amoral system and make any real change impossible.
Those who admired Chile so much in recent decades for its ‘low corruption’ of power did not see that the essence of the Pinochet Constitution was to legalize brutal social injustice as the basis of the model so that major criminals need not break any laws.
In the face of this fact, a naïve belief arose, that to end injustice in Chile it was almost enough just to change the Constitution, and the civilian citizen rebellion of October 2019 as its main demand presented the change of the Pinochet Constitution, via a constituent assembly. The change of the law needed at least a different social project and a citizen organization capable of taking charge of the transformation of the country. Unfortunately, none of this could be achieved.
The old political class found agreements with the young pseudo-left, instead of the cultural baggage of the traditional left formatted by TikTok and Twitter, and instead of creating an authentic citizens’ project, the old Pinochet Constitution was recycled, re-edited, and presented in two versions: that of the pseudo-left (failed in the referendum of 4 September 2022) and that of the Pinochetist right (fortunately, failed yesterday, 17 December 2023). Luckily, because the “new constitution” in its latest wording looks like a mockery, it was going to be more neoliberal and Pinochetista than Pinochet’s.
It is very crazy to see the statistics of public opinion in Chile regarding the new constitution. More than 78 % of Chileans in the national vote on 25 October 2020 demanded to replace the dictatorship’s constitution with a new one. Less than two years passed and the draft of the new “more progressive” constitution, which was drafted after a series of agreements and compromises between political groups and far from the initial idea of a Citizens’ Constituent Assembly, was rejected by almost 62 % of Chileans. And this last text, drafted and controlled by the right-wing, obtained a fulminating 56 % rejection.
The ‘progressive’ president sighs resignedly and the old dictator smiles from his grave. The ‘left’, which has long had nothing left-wing about it apart from its flags, nostalgic speeches and betrayed heroes, continues to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the right.
Once again, with all the mistakes the people may make by choosing wrongly, they continue to be wiser than their rulers.
