2023-08-29 19:44:53
On September 7, Chilean television will premiere The thousand days of Allende. The series directed by Nicolás Acuña, and narrated by the imaginary Manuel Ruíz, a character inspired by the Valencian lawyer Joan Garcés, who served as an adviser to the leader of the Popular Unity (UP), hits the screens in the midst of tensions that arouses the 50th anniversary of the bloody State coup. It could not be otherwise: it still lives in the shadow of September 11, 1973, although 75% of its current inhabitants were not born when Sea Harrier planes bombed the Palacio de la Moneda. disagreements about the past they overlap with the divergences of the present, the sustained advance of the extreme right and the opinion of judicial sentences against ex-repressors of high symbolic content.
barely a 47.5% of Chileans believes that General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) was a dictator, according to a recent survey by the consultancy Pulso Ciudadano in the framework of 50 years. A poll from CERC MORI last May had already hinted at an alarming change in perception of the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende: 36% of those consulted justified the coup against Allende because “he freed Chile from Marxism”. Two decades earlier, only 16% of people believed that the military “was right to carry out the coup.”
At the beginning of the week, another investigation carried out by the Alberto Hurtado University and the opinion research company Criteria became known. 91% of those interviewed value free elections, while 88% defend human rights. Tolerance is, however, a value for 64% of those interviewed. 60% in turn justify authoritarianism under certain situations.
Counterflow
The efforts of the Government of the President Gabriel Boric For finding a space for consensus to address the commemoration, they not only collide with the right, which in its hardest wing dominates the Constitutional Council. The interpretative dispute also shakes the left and the center-left.
Since the beginning of the year, the exercise of memory has taken a step forward and, at the same time, it has gone back several boxes. The presence in June of the Commander in Chief of the Navy, Admiral Juan Andres de la Maza, on Dawson Island, 2,200 kilometers south of Santiago, where the regime set up a concentration camp after the riot, with advice from exSS Walter Rauff. “Never again, that these events never happen again, not here, nor hopefully anywhere in the world,” De La Maza said there. Socialist senator Fidel Espinoza (PS) appreciated the message. “It has been a very important advance for the Navy because before there was a round denialism“.
hour of revisionism
But those recognitions have just been questioned by none other than the former right-wing president sebastian pinera who, unlike his brother José, an economic battering ram of the dictatorship, was always anti-Pinochetista. In the heat of the new rearrangements, which mark a clear setback of the left, the tycoon considered that “in the end”, the 1973 coup “was not avoidable” because the Popular Unity did not seek to build socialism attached to constitutional norms but ” establish a Marxist dictatorship”. Piñera did nothing more than add his voice to a chorus of protest or indulgence in the face of that September 11.
Congress has become a sounding board for these discussions. The right-wing and ultra-right bloc found enough votes to approve the reading of the declaration made by the Chamber of Deputies on August 22, 1973 and for decades it was used to justify the overthrow. Those opposition legislators half a century ago called “put an immediate end to all situations”, that at your discretion, “violate the Constitution and the laws”, with the purpose “of guide government action through the paths of Law and ensure the constitutional order of our country and the essential bases of democratic coexistence among Chileans”.
“The worst thing that can happen to us, half a century after the tragedy, is that we repeat the polarization,” warned the political scientist Gabriel Gaspar, in a column published by The counter.
The turn corresponds to the new relationship of forces arose from the defeats at the polls of the left in the hands of the right and the extreme right. First, last September, when the approval of a Magna Carta of a progressive nature was rejected by vote. Then, in May, when the Constitutional Council was formed with a majority of those nostalgic for the military era. These changes have not been isolated. There is a rearrangement of opinions in relation to the military coup and the figure of Pinochet himself.
A book adds to the debate
Before the arrival of The thousand days of Allende on television, the unpublished memoirs of the former president were published Patrick Aylwin who, in 1973, had been one of the most important leaders of the Christian Democracy, an opponent of Allende, and had an important role in events that cannot be forgotten. The appearance of The political experience of the Popular Unity 1970-1973 could not but cause a stir. Aylwin served as president of the Senate and was a privileged witness and very critical of the failed attempt by the Popular Unity. Despite their marked differences, he repeats twice in his pages a question that acquires greater relevance for these hours: Was the impossible done to avoid the unfortunate outcome? The former president Michelle Bachelet he especially valued this question posed at the beginning and at the end of a book that, he stressed, “is key” to recovering “serenity” when looking back at that unfortunate month. Bachelet participated in the presentation of the reports and told those present his concern about “discussions in the public sphere where things are questioned that, in our opinion, are not questionable“. And that is why he stressed, perhaps without the desired effect: “a coup can never be justified“.
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