...horrible U.S. meddling in Latin America, which only got worse over the following decades, and included the U.S. teaching torture techniques to LatAm juntas, the utter destruction of LatAm democracies, not to mention economies, outright war on Nicaragua, the slaughter of two hundred thousand Mayan peasants in Guatemala, the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs," and on and on into all the circles of Dante's Hell.
The horrors in Vietnam were in progress. The coverup of the CIA assassination of President Kennedy was in progress. The smashing of the U.S. peace and justice movement with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and that coverup was also in progress. It was, really--except for the brief tenure of President Carter--the beginning of the end of U.S. democracy, once the fair hope of the world for peace and justice.
To think that Allende's granddaughter has just been elected mayor in a district of Santiago! My, my, my!
And Jimmy Carter, that democracy stalwart, is still alive to see it! His work on re-building democratic institutions in Latin America, and most especially the work of the Carter Center on honest, transparent elections, is one of the key factors in the democracy revolution that we have seen in LatAm over the last decade.
Although Chile has suffered a bump in the road, with the election of RW billionaire Sebastian Pinera, it is likely that he will soon be gone, and, meanwhile, the political landscape of Latin America has been utterly transformed, with leftist governments elected in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Peru, Nicaragua, El Salvador and in Honduras and Paraguay until the U.S.-backed coup d'etats in those two countries (in 2008 and 2012, respectively). Despite those coups, the collective power of the remaining democracies is very great and, what is more, the new leaders of the region are more than smart, savvy and visionary, they are brilliant in their analysis of what was wrong and in their remedies for putting it right. Above all, they understand that they must stick together--help each other out, have each other's backs--and create entirely new institutions for political/economic cooperation among themselves. South-south cooperation is the route to sovereignty, independence, democracy and prosperity for individual countries.
This, of course, is why Pinera--tool of U.S. and other transglobal corporations and war profiteers--targeted that new cooperation on his first day in office, by canceling the agreement forged by Chile's socialist president, Michele Batchelet, with Bolivia, which gave Bolivia access to the sea, at long last, and thus settled a hundred year old dispute. That agreement was created in the context of UNASUR's defense of Bolivia against a U.S. (Bush Junta)-instigated white separatist insurrection in 2008. That was UNASUR's first action, and all of the richer, more powerful countries contributed something to help stabilize Bolivia and to support the very popular but besieged government of Evo Morales. Pinera canceled the Bolivia sea access agreement hours before he was even inaugurated--he was THAT anxious to undo this act of peace and cooperation.
This by-election in Chile and the coming presidential election are quite important in this respect. Pinera--whose approval has dipped to 25% (last I read)--has been the most active agent of disruption and conflict since the Bush Junta's "made man," Alvaro Uribe, in Colombia. Pinera may be a bit more civilized (which is not saying much), but he has been out to cause trouble from the beginning--and a most specific kind of trouble, targeting the new cooperative spirit in South America.
I hope that Maya Fernandez Allende's election is a harbinger of better things to come in Chile. The polls were saying that Batchelet's socialist party was re-gaining ground in the by-elections. Batchelet herself left office with an 80% approval rating (!) yet couldn't transfer her popularity to her designated successor (as Lula da Silva did in Brazil). The socialist party apparently had compromised too much on economic issues, and the poor majority has suffered with cuts to education and other "austerity" crapola, which, of course, Pinera is making much worse. The students are up in arms and may be providing the "new blood" that is needed to throw Pinera out and get on with the new regional cooperative prosperity.
Heard anything about the other by-election results?
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