The Other 9/11: It's Fifty Years Since The Coup That Toppled Salvador Allende on 11th September 1973.

 

Fifty years ago today, the democratic-socialist Popular Unity Government of President Salvador Allende was toppled in a military coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet, with the backing of the United States.

This fragment of a song is by the Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, who was shot to death by Pinochet's soldiers in the Estadio Chile, Santiago's soccer stadium, where 5,000 Chilean leftists were detained without charge and many murdered in the days immediately following the coup, it is recited by the late Pete Seeger.

May Jara's words recall to us the terrible events of this, the first 9/11 terror attack.

Music courtesy of You Tube

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Imagining Away The Opposition.

The High Tide Of Popular Protest: In 2019 Chile was racked by massive protest demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor, Chileans served notice on their government that the moment had arrived for their country to cast off “Pinochet’s Straightjacket” – the 1980 constitution imposed upon Chile by its former leader, the dictator Augusto Pinochet, as the price it must pay for even a limited restoration of democracy.

HOW QUICKLY THINGS CHANGE. Three years ago Chile was racked by massive protest demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor, Chileans served notice on their government that the moment had arrived for their country to execute a decisive break with its recent past. Politically, economically, and culturally, they said, Chile was ready to ditch the debilitating legacy of General Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year-long dictatorship. Most particularly, “Pinochet’s Straightjacket” – the 1980 constitution he imposed upon Chile as the price it must pay for even a limited restoration of democracy – must go.

For a while, it looked as though the youth of Chile, the poor of Chile, the women of Chile, and the indigenous peoples of Chile, would get their wish. A Constitutional Convention was convened. Delegates were elected from every part of Chile who engaged in passionate debates over the nature and purpose of the new rights to be enshrined in their nation’s fundamental law. When they were finished, the delegates submitted what they proudly described as the world’s most progressive constitution to the Chilean people for ratification.

According to The Guardian: “The proposed constitution: included a long list of social rights and guarantees that had appeared to respond to the demands of [the vast social movement that had called it into existence]. It enshrined gender parity across government and other organs of the state – for the first time anywhere in the world – prioritised environmental protection and recognised Chile’s Indigenous peoples for the first time in the country’s history.”

The new constitution also enshrined the social and economic rights which Pinochet’s dictatorship had swept away in the coup d’état that toppled Salvador Allende’s socialist government in September 1973. The Convention’s delegates had attempted to forbid forever the neoliberal economic policies which Pinochet’s military government had road-tested for the free-market ideologues who would go on to guide Great Britain and the USA – and New Zealand – away from the social-democratic policies of the post-war years.

It was too much. Earlier this week, the Chilean people decisively voted down the new constitution which the Convention’s delegates had delivered to them. Like Allende’s Popular Unity Government before them, the delegates had pressed ahead with the radical vision of the future they were so certain would heal the harms of the past. Like the young socialists of 50 years ago, they would not be held back by the reservations of the conservative Chileans they derided as “Momios” (mummies of the Egyptian kind) and, once again, they have paid the price.

One of Allende’s advisers, Prof. Ariel Dorfman, looking back on those days, recalled:

It would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fuelled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us.

One of the most striking features of the controversial He Puapua Report is its authors’ assumption that constitutional changes every bit as radical and all-embracing as those just rejected in Chile can be introduced to New Zealand without a Constitutional Convention, and without being voted up, or down, in a binding referendum.

Undoubtedly, some of those who favour the dramatic changes proposed in He Puapua will look at what has just occurred in Chile and say: “See? That’s what happens when you give white supremacists the chance to strike down the just and necessary changes required to heal the harms of 200 years of colonisation!” The fate of the world’s most progressive constitution will be seen as vindication of the He Puapua authors’ horror of “the tyranny of the majority”.

But this would be an entirely mistaken conclusion for radical Māori nationalists to draw from the Chilean experience. The fundamental error of the Constitutional Convention was to allow the best to become the enemy of the good.

The harms of the past cannot be healed by legislating them out of existence from on high. Healing will only come kanohi ki te kanohi – face to face – through hard but honest conversations, over many frustrating years, until, unforced, and almost unaware, the overwhelming majority of Māori and Pakeha arrive at their long anticipated destination – together.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 September 2022.

Trusting The People: Chile Elects A Far-Left President.

Heartfelt Gratitude: Gabriel Boric’s decisive win, 55 percent to his far-Right opponent’s, Jose Antonio Kast’s, 44 percent, is a reflection of Chile’s two years of political turmoil. Two years of popular mobilisation culminating, first, in the radical Left winning control of the process to create a new Chilean constitution, and now, with the election of the young leader who was dismissed consistently by the mainstream Chilean news media as too radical for the job of President.

I WONDER IF JACINDA will befriend the new President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, with the same enthusiasm that she befriended Justin Trudeau? Boric comes to the presidency at the age of 35 – two years younger than Jacinda Ardern when she became New Zealand’s Prime Minister in 2017 – making him the youngest head-of-state in Chilean history.

The far-Left Boric won his political spurs ten years ago, in 2011, when he emerged as one of the student leaders of the bitter street-fight for more affordable and equitable education services for young Chileans. Boric’s unexpected victory over his far-Right opponent, Jose Antonio Kast, was celebrated by a crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands in Chile’s capital, Santiago. Older Chileans, remembering the election of the Marxist, Salvador Allende, in 1970, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They had seen this movie before.

Boric’s decisive win, 55 percent to Kast’s 44 percent, is a reflection of Chile’s two years of political turmoil. Two years of popular mobilisation culminating, first, in the radical Left winning control of the process to create a new Chilean constitution, and now, with the election of the young leader who was dismissed consistently by the mainstream Chilean news media as too radical for the job of President.

Indeed, Boric was so radical that he drew forth as his principal political opponent an outspoken supporter of Augusto Pinochet, the brutal dictator responsible for the military coup against Allende’s Popular Unity government in 1973. Kast campaigned unapologetically on a hard-Right law-and-order platform and made promises to restore Chile’s traditional (i.e. conservative Catholic) values.

In the first round of voting Kast secured the largest fraction (but less than 50 percent) of the popular vote and, backed by the supporters of the other right-wing parties, was widely predicted to win the final, run-off, contest between himself and scarily radical Boric, the next-highest polling candidate.

Ironically, it was the very real prospect of a Pinochet clone taking control of Chile that mobilised the numbers necessary for Boric to win. Voter turnout surged, with 15 percent more people voting in the second round than the first. Critically, it was the votes of Chile’s youth that turned the tide in Boric’s favour. So radical had been the street-based protests of 2019-20 that there was little enthusiasm among the young for the business-as-usual politics of a presidential election. It was only when they realised that all the gains of the past two years could be wiped-out if they stayed at home that they rallied to the polling-booths in their thousands.

Young Chileans celebrate Boric’s election victory.

It will not all be plain sailing for Boric when he is sworn in as President, in March of 2022. The Chilean Congress remains in the hands of the same centre-Left and centre-Right moderates who have dominated Chilean politics for the past 30 years. Boric can count on a clear majority in neither the Chamber of Deputies nor the Senate, meaning that the fulfilment of his programme to construct a genuinely inclusive “social state” will require either superlative parliamentary skills, or, a willingness to keep the people mobilised – effectively daring the one percenters and their military protectors to do to Boric what they did to Allende.

So, at first blush, it seems most unlikely that Jacinda will be all that keen to be photographed giving Boric a comradely hug at his inauguration. She will be invited, of course, along with heads-of-state and prime ministers from all over the world, and from South America and the Pacific Basin in particular. But will the gal who got hitched at a billionaire’s New Zealand hideaway, and boasted Lorde as her wedding-singer, accept Boric’s invitation? Would Canberra and Washington approve of her being seen to cuddle-up to yet another left-wing Latin-American loose cannon? Once again, it seems most unlikely.

And yet, by March of next year, Jacinda will be facing some pretty daunting choices of her own. Maoridom’s judgement on the recommendations of the He Puapua Report will be out, and the broader debate on co-governance and fundamental constitutional change will be getting underway. If she and her colleagues follow the precedents set over the past four years, and step away from the big political challenges laid at their feet, then Labour’s chances of being re-elected for a third term are slim – at best. Will Jacinda be happy to rest on her Covid laurels? Or will her failure to keep any of Labour’s non-Covid promises overwhelm even those?

Wouldn’t she be wise to spend a little quality-time with President-elect Boric in the intervening months between his stunning victory and his formal inauguration – if only to quiz him about how an historic debate about the future direction of a nation, along with the constitutional reforms required to secure it, might best be organised?

He would likely tell her that once such a process is started, she will find it almost impossible to control – let alone stop. But, he will also likely tell her not to try. By giving ordinary people a real say over their future, her government will bind them to her in exactly the same way that her handling of the Covid crisis in 2020 bound her to “The Team of Five Million”. Trusting the people works, he would tell her. So when, inevitably, those with a vested interest in the status-quo launch their counterattack – don’t flinch. If the people see the future they have won for themselves threatened, they will rally to its – and their leader’s – defence.

That is, after all, his own story.

Besides, 2022 will likely be the year in which Queen Elizabeth II goes to join her fathers. If that happens in the midst of a vibrant constitutional debate in which thousands of young people – young Māori and Pasifika in particular – are engaged, then the chances are high that the inhabitants of these islands will witness the birth of the bi-cultural Republic of Aotearoa. Especially if the combined forces of neoliberal capitalism and the white supremacist Right attempt to strangle it at birth.

Assuming the people prevail, and the Aotearoan republic is born, then the chances must also be high that Chile’s President Boric will cross the Pacific to be present at the inauguration of its first President – his good friend and comrade, Jacinda Ardern.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 21 December 2021.

Re-Writing The Rules of the Game: Where Chile is Leading, Can Aotearoa-New Zealand Follow?

People Power: Ending neoliberalism requires massive and militant action on the ground. Between 2019 and 2020, the young and the poor made Chile ungovernable. Engaging in running battles with the Police and facing-down the army’s bullets, they rendered the political class and its mainstream media mouthpieces increasingly irrelevant to what was happening in the streets, offices, shops, factories, schools and universities of the nation. 

THE EYES OF THE LEFT, all around the world, should be on Chile. Over the next twelve months a Constituent Assembly, comprised of 155 elected Chilean citizens, will draft a new constitution  for their battered and abused country. New constitutions are not written very often. South Africa, post-apartheid, wrote one – to world acclaim. So did Venezuela – and the rest of the world ignored it. Undaunted, the left-wing Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, had the Constitution’s key provisions printed on milk cartons, so every citizen, even the poorest, could know their rights.

Chile’s new constitution, however, is being written from scratch, an exercise that has not been attempted in a well-established nation state for more than twenty years. What’s more, with the Constituent Assembly dominated by the Left (in New Zealand, they’d be branded “Far Left”) the constitution which emerges from its deliberations will likely break new ground. Already, the members of the Constituent Assembly (MCA) are committed to ensuring that the rights of Chile’s indigenous people (roughly 10 percent of the population) are constitutionally protected.

The legislation establishing the Constituent Assembly mandated an equal number of male and female members. Interestingly, so radical was the popular mood that considerably more women ended up being elected to the Assembly than men – requiring the men’s numbers to be topped-up! Clearly the rights of women – in all political, economic, social and cultural spheres – will constitute a central pillar of the new constitution.

Given Chile’s tragic post-1973 history, it is also widely anticipated that the new constitution will explicitly repudiate the neoliberal tenets embedded in the constitution imposed upon the Chilean people from above by the military dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, in 1980. Chilean political commentators are predicting the inclusion of a slew of “social chapters” restoring to the state its key responsibility for maintaining the welfare of the people. The privatisation of key utilities – most particularly the water supply – may well be reversed as constitutionally untenable.

Essentially, Chile is engrossed in an extraordinary exercise aimed at reimposing the status-quo ante. Taking the nation back to the point it had reached under the socialist Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende immediately prior to the military coup d’état of 11 September 1973. Allende died in that coup, and thousands more Chileans were murdered in the months and years that followed.

In the early 1970s, Allende’s government had been one of the most progressive in the world, making it that most dangerous of things – an example other peoples might feel inclined to follow. The USA, in particular, was terrified that Allende’s brand of democratic socialism might spread across Latin America. US President, Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, summed-up the Administration’s position when he declared: “I don’t see why the United States should sit back and watch a country turn communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

With the Left crushed, Chile became the proving ground for the neoliberal theories of Professor Milton Friedman. All the measures with which the rest of the world would soon become agonizingly familiar: deregulation, privatisation, regressive fiscal policies, abandoning economic protectionism and opening the economy to foreign investors, dismantling the welfare state and destroying the trade unions; were tested out on the politically defenceless Chilean people.

Although a measure of democracy was restored to Chile in 1990, it was heavily circumscribed by the point-blank refusal of the political class in general (and the armed forces in particular) to countenance the slightest attempt to dismantle the neoliberal order Pinochet had so firmly established. It required nothing less than the global Covid-19 pandemic to generate the massive popular rising necessary to force the Chilean powers-that-be to sanction the calling together of a constituent assembly to re-write the rules of the political game.

There are a number of lessons here for Aotearoa-New Zealand – providing its progressive forces are ready and willing to learn from the Chilean example.

The first of these is that ending neoliberalism requires massive and militant action on the ground. Between 2019 and 2020, the young and the poor made Chile ungovernable. Engaging in running battles with the Police and facing-down the army’s bullets, they rendered the political class and its mainstream media mouthpieces increasingly irrelevant to what was happening in the streets, offices, shops, factories, schools and universities of the nation. In the course of making this uprising, the young and the poor learned “on the job” how to conduct their own politics – independent of the political parties which had traditionally represented their interests. (In the elections for the Constituent Assembly, the ruling right-wing party received fewer that 30 percent of the votes, and the equivalent of our Labour Party was outpolled by a combination of communists, anarchists, feminists, indigenous Chileans and environmentalists.)

The second lesson to be drawn from recent events in Chile, is that changing the rules of the game – i.e. drawing up a new constitution – is not something to be left to elite theorists meeting behind closed doors. New ideas, revolutionary ideas, cannot be imposed upon the population from above and remain progressive ideas. (Never forget that Rogernomics was a revolution imposed from above – with disastrous results for workers and beneficiaries.) If what the radicals and revolutionaries who pulled together the He Puapua Report are proposing is any good, then the young and the poor will make it their own. When that happens, all the rest will follow. Demand the election of a Constituent Assembly to write Aotearoa-New Zealand’s bi-cultural constitution. Let the young and the poor chose their own candidates. For the first time in decades give them the chance to cast a vote that matters. Throw an additional 700,000 votes onto the electoral scales – and see what happens.

There’s a third lesson to be drawn from Chile’s experience. Not, this time, from its recent experience, but from the experience of 1970-1973. And that lesson is: Make sure you have someone watching your back. Because who, in the end, can protect the work of Chile’s Constituent Assembly from the same forces that destroyed the work of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government? Who will stand between the people and the armed forces – guided and resourced by the United States? That’s not just a question for Chileans. Were the young and the poor of Aotearoa-New Zealand to successfully outmanoeuvre their own political class, where should they look for protection? Australia? The United States?

In the end, it’s the question that all revolutionaries must be ready to answer: “Having made the revolution, how do we keep it?”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 10 June 2021.

Strategies Of Right-Wing Resistance: It CAN Happen Here.

Mass Resistance To A Left-Wing Government: Women bang pots and pans in protest at the shortages arising out of the right-wing strategies of resistance directed against the left-wing government of Chilean President Salvador Allende 1970-73.

CAN WE REALLY DO THIS? As the euphoria of victory wears off, and the sheer enormity of the challenge confronting progressive New Zealand reveals itself, it would be foolish not to feel just a little bit daunted. We face an economic system without the slightest idea how to solve the problems created by its discredited policies and practices. Nevertheless, the Neoliberal Establishment remains very strong, and just as soon as it settles upon an effective strategy of resistance, the fightback will begin.

Two principle lines of attack present themselves. The first, sketched out in this morning’s NZ Herald editorial, is to paint the new Labour-led coalition as little more than a pink-tinted continuation of Bill English’s National Government.

The Herald’s leader-writer dismisses any notion that the new regime represents some sort of sharp break with Neoliberalism. He is at pains to point out that all the key elements of the “Open Economy” remain firmly entrenched. All we are hearing from Labour, he says, is the rhetoric of change. But, even the most cursory examination of the Labour-NZ First-Green Government’s priorities, argues the Herald’s leader-writer, reveals them to be little changed from those of the Clark-Cullen years: priorities to which both John Key and Bill English were more than happy to subscribe for 9 years.

This is a subtle strategy, directed principally at the new government’s most ideologically-committed supporters. Its purpose is to demoralise, antagonise, and inflame suspicion. At its heart stands the figure of Grant Robertson: Finance Minister and close friend of Prime Minister Ardern. As the prime-mover of the Labour-Greens’ self-limiting “Budget Responsibility Rules”, Robertson has already positioned himself as New Zealand Capitalism’s first line of defence against left-wing fiscal recklessness. By praising Robertson’s political moderation and economic orthodoxy, the Herald’s mouthpiece intends to divide and conquer the Neoliberal Establishment’s most coherent progressive critics.

The most obvious deficiency with this “demoralisation” strategy is that it leaves the Opposition with very little room in which to manoeuvre politically. If the Labour-NZ First-Green Government is really just a slightly pinker version of its pale-blue predecessor, then how can National attack it with any credibility – or success? To raise a political storm violent enough to reclaim the Treasury Benches requires the red-hot passion of the fanatic – not the lofty sneers of the neoliberal intellectual who recognises kindred economic spirits when he sees them.

That Richard Prebble recognised this in an instant is unsurprising. Few living New Zealand politicians can claim a better rapport with the dark animal spirits needed to rouse this country’s right-wing voters. It was Prebble who recognised the futility of Act attempting to sell pure free-market policies to an electorate that wasn’t buying them. It was only when he identified the party with law and order, crime and punishment, environmental scepticism, and the deep anti-Maori prejudices of rural and provincial New Zealand that Act was able to lift itself up and over the 5 percent MMP threshold. Like Rob Muldoon before him, Prebble understands that to make right-wing Kiwis angry enough to destroy the Left, you first have to frighten them out of their wits.

Hence Prebble’s outrageous claim that Winston Peters is guilty of mounting a coup d’etat against Kiwi democracy. It is not his purpose, and neither, I suspect, does he believe it should be National’s, to convince New Zealanders that they have nothing to fear from what, in all likelihood, will prove to be a pretty mild and responsible Labour-led Government. His aim, and almost certainly the aim of most of the National Party caucus (and their surrogates in the mainstream news media) is to splash as much red paint over Jacinda Ardern, Winston Peters and James Shaw as is humanly possible.

The Labour-NZ First-Green Government will be presented by these hard-line rightists as an illegitimate and dangerously anti-capitalist regime. Its anti-business and anti-farming policies, they will argue, are not only incompatible with genuine Kiwi democracy, but also constitute a direct attack on the sanctity of private property. As such, it will not be enough to merely oppose this far-left government; it will be necessary to fight it head-on.

Interviewed on RNZ’s “morning Report” this morning, Ken Shirley, CEO of the Road Transport Forum (and former right-wing comrade-in-arms with Richard Prebble and Roger Douglas in both the Labour and Act parties) reminded listeners of the massive truck-owners protest in the dying days of Helen Clark’s government. If Jacinda’s government went ahead with its plans to use the Road User Charges collected from the RTF’s members for purposes other than the maintenance and construction of roads, then similar protests could be expected.

Prior to the coup that toppled the left-wing “Popular Unity” government of Salvador Allende in 1973, the country’s economy had been made to “scream” by a nationwide strike organised by the right-wing truckers’ union and supported by the bosses of Chile’s biggest trucking companies. The ensuing shortages brought thousands of angry, middle- and working-class women onto the streets, banging their pots and pans in protest. The right-wing newspapers maintained a relentless barrage of criticism against the “anti-democratic” and “incompetent” government of Chile’s self-proclaimed Marxist president. Calls for Allende’s forcible removal grew louder and more frequent until, on 11 September 1973, General Pinochet was obliged to overthrow the “communist dictator”.

A very similar project of economic destabilisation and political mobilisation was set in train by the right-wing opponents of the left-wing Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, in 2002.

As a strategy of right-wing resistance, it has proved successful in a distressingly large number of countries. Progressive New Zealanders would be most unwise to believe, even for a moment, that it cannot happen here.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 26 October 2017.