President Gabriel Boric said the atmosphere in Chile was “electric” and while his supporters agree with him, the opposition questions how much the ruling party itself has helped fuel public debate in the countdown to the 50th anniversary of the coup. Boric – the first president of Chile since 1990 who was not born to commit the coup – caused a stir last week after the Supreme Court ratified the final verdict in the trial surrounding the death of Víctor Jara on September 16, 1973, which includes convictions for kidnapping and qualified homicide against seven former soldiers. It was an example of how long it took for justice to provide answers: half a century.
Not even 24 hours had passed when one of the convicts committed suicide just as the police were about to search for him and arrest him. Another symbolic milestone a few days before the anniversary of the democratic collapse is the death at the age of 79 of the President of the Communist Party, Guillermo Teillier, who, as his party’s military commander, authorized the attack on Augusto Pinochet in 1986. Boric, at the honorary events he assured: “[Teillier] He died a dignified man, proud of the life he had led. There are others who die as cowards to avoid being brought to justice. There are human differences,” he said, referring to the suicide of Hernán Chacón Soto, 86, a retired brigadier general in the Chilean army.
This Sunday, after days of heated debates – the leader of the far-right Republican Party, whom he called a “coward,” went to Boric – the president tried to clarify his words in an interview with the Mesa Central program on Channel 13, the president said , that he is “not the one to judge the decision to commit suicide” and that he respects the decision whoever makes it for whatever reasons. “What I wanted to say and I repeat is that there were those who committed heinous crimes, they bragged about them for a long time, they hid them, they lied, they did everything possible to avoid justice, and given the consequences of one’s own actions, responsibility is evaded in different ways. This development – I am referring not only to the case of Brigadier Chacón, but to Augusto Pinochet himself – seems to me deeply cowardly.”
“Camarín de Mujeres” memorial site, which was used by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet as community cells in the National Stadium of Santiago (Chile). Elvis Gonzalez (EFE)
Boric recalled that two of the seven former soldiers convicted in the Jara case were refugees. But when asked on Channel 13 about the lack of mercy, he assured: “The reference to cowardice was in the course of events, not only in this case, but in many.” And about the reference to Chacón’s suicide itself, he said: “That wasn’t my intention, I regret it and it doesn’t add to the debate.”
It is part of what is happening a week after September 11 in Chile, a country where there is no consensus to condemn the coup, as one of the left-wing sociologists, Manuel Antonio Garretón, analyzed in EL PAÍS: “Unfortunately “ There is no consensus in Chile to condemn Pinochet’s coup,” he said in early July. And he explained it: “The problem is that there is an important part of the population that continues to justify the 1973 coup. It is the 44% who voted for Augusto Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite and – exactly the same thing” – the 44% who voted for José Antonio Kast in the 2021 presidential runoff who say the coup was necessary or justified been. But condemning the coup is an ethical principle that must be upheld.”
Chile is facing this historic milestone with a left-wing government weakened after two electoral defeats that, although not directly, had a strong impact on the navigation map of Boric and his generation. In the referendum a year ago, on September 4, 2022, 62% of Chileans rejected a text that proposed a strong transformation of Chile’s institutions. Last May, Kast’s far right won an overwhelming victory in elections to the Constitutional Council, the body responsible for drafting a new constitutional proposal that will be put to a referendum in December. “Chileans today are willing to sacrifice freedoms to ensure order,” Chilean intellectual Arturo Fontaine analyzed in an interview with EL PAÍS in March, explaining the apparent swings of citizens from the 2019 outbreak to today.
A few days before the commemorations – this week and until next Monday there will be countless events, seminars and discussions throughout Chile to commemorate September 11, 1973 – the atmosphere is electric, as President Boric said. Analyst Max Colodro said a few days ago: “Chile is today more divided and polarized.” “The social outbreak has opened a new rift in Chilean society and made political violence a subject of confrontation again. Added to this is the bitter defeat of the left in the constitutional process. I believe that this is an aspect that has aggravated the atmosphere of this anniversary, making it very difficult to celebrate it from a historical perspective, with self-criticism from all sectors and the search for meeting places that can help heal the wounds. It is very unfortunate, but this anniversary will make Chile more confronted not only with the past, but also with the present and the future,” assured the philosopher EL PAÍS a few weeks ago.
The political dialogue has a heated tone and is shown in Congress, where the right reveals how it has retreated from its own sector in recent years in terms of recognizing the coup and the dictatorship, probably due to the tensions that the Republicans exercise the right. While in 2013 President Sebastián Piñera marked a milestone by speaking of the “passive accomplices” in the 40 years of the coup, referring to civilians in the conservative world, today in Congress statements about democratic collapse are being revived.
On August 23, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies reread the 1973 resolution, which declared the Allende government unconstitutional and interpreted it as supporting military intervention. Some right-wing members of Congress today even question the sexual violence perpetrated against victims – particularly women – that has so often been proven in court.
President Boric’s government has had serious problems implementing its agenda for around 50 years. Under pressure from the (official) Communist Party and human rights organizations, the president’s adviser on these matters, the writer Patricio Fernández, was forced to resign at the beginning of July. During the last cabinet change, the president fired the person responsible for coordinating the anniversary, Culture Minister Jaime de Aguirre. He had to contact an advertising agency to try out a story like Boric was looking for: memory, democracy and the future.
Given the majority of citizens who were not born for the coup – almost 70% of Chileans – the government is pursuing an agenda consistent with Chile’s most left-leaning government since 1973: the search plan for more than 1,000 missing people of the dictatorship. It is Boric’s biggest bet 50 years after the military coup and one of the South American country’s main debts. But in the process, the government is upping its game and could close Punta Peuco, the prison for human rights violators that has been the subject of controversy since its founding in 1995 in the midst of the transition. The president neither denied nor confirmed this in the interview this Sunday.
Boric even evaluates formulas for uncovering the Valech secret within the framework of the 50 years of the coup, that is, the testimonies of thousands of victims of political imprisonment and torture who told a commission in the government of Ricardo what happened during the dictatorship in Lagos, in 2003. It was Lagos himself, a socialist, who explained the reasons for preserving the testimonies.
The political scientist Ricardo Israel, who made the statement in the early 2000s, explained a few days ago on the social network Committed to secrecy and would feel violated if the government managed to break this rule.”
It is just a glimpse of the broken Chile that awaits the commemoration of another week in which former soldiers who dared to take steps other than those institutionalized, such as the former army commander Ricardo Martínez, rejected by some become part of the uniformed world. “Neither an official truth nor a common history is possible, simply because society split in two in 1973 and we are heirs to this rupture,” said journalist Ascanio Cavallo a few days ago.