Reply #39: Thanks for your comments. [View All]

[heliarc]

When I say that I am a Chilean, I mean that I am a Chilean-American. I didn't have the pleasure of knowing Chile because I was born in the US after my parents went into exile, but I will admit that my mother's side of the family is on the fascist side, while my fathers was communist. My mother never bought into the racism that her classist, racist, and fascist family tried to sell her and she was punished for that by losing her homeland, and some of the friends she loved.

You say that the trouble began with communism? Because I think the problem started with starvation and oppression in the poblaciones for a half century of foreign control of capital. ITT and United Fruit and the like have been using their political and financial power to force Latin America to do its bidding for the better part of a century now, and when I look at the worker's plight I see nothing more than a demand to see their fair share of the fruits of their labor. Before communism in Chile there was the Massacre at Santa Maria de Iquique in 1907. When workers who try to address their grievances peacefully are killed in cold blood, I consider that a major problem with due process and that incident in Chile's history predates the formation of a communist party by 11 years. In Chile, the great copper and nitrate mines of the north have been owned by ITT and foreign interest since then. THAT is where the problem starts for me. Not with communism. If Chileans one day came to the US and bought up all the Oil in Texas and then paid the workers in this country in foodstamps, then killed them and their families when they tried to unionize you might also end up with a lot of angry American workers. Some of them might lose all faith in democratic organizations to protect them, and I guarantee that you would create something like a communist movement.

Besides, Allende never did anything to challenge democratic rule of law. He wasn't a communist, and he did everything in his power to keep the communists in his coalition at bay. They demanded that he arm the workers, and he didn't. He sent the police to break up the forcible takeover of some factories. He drew the ire of many in his coalition for this. Blame the communists, but they were right: The landed aristocracy was cold blooded enough to commit genocide and to be an apologist for that kind of craven greed, brutality and disruption of democracy is not acceptable. Blaming it all on communism seems to me to be the largest historical misrepresentation possible.

I wish that the film were more available for the public to view, but you should make it a point to watch the documentary La Batalla de Chile by Guzman. It is hard to find, but it has to be one of the best documents of history I have ever seen. It is 5 or so hours that chronicles every significant turn of events leading up to the Coup and demonstrates with primary documentation how desperation, poverty of morals, and capital interests led the Military and its landed aristocracy to commit what is quite possibly the greatest crime against democracy that this hemisphere will ever know.

It is a good lesson to learn now that we proceed into a new administration in the US that may face some of the similar racist and classist hatred that the Allende regime faced while it attempts to fold back the march of fascist reforms. We have a government now that has effectively held the banks hostage and demanded a ransom of almost a trillion dollars. They have enforced torture with legal action and widened political powers of surveillance to monitor the populace without judicial review. They have started wars of preemption and stoked the fears of difference and the other. They have attempted to limit women's access to birth control and abortion rights.

What faces an Obama campaign looms large when put in the context of the Allende experience in Chile. Allende attempted in his own right to nationalize services and industry much the same way that Obama will be required to with Health care and the Energy sector. He has promised to broaden freedoms in ways that extremists in the US respond to with death threats, vandalism and terrorism. Not understanding these threats from the fringes activated by the interests of the capitalist power brokers in high places also bodes ill for our new president-elect's cause. Blaming the violence of these people on our own agenda as you would blame the coup in Chile on "communism" or on the radicalization of poor and oppressed people who continue to suffer in Louisiana, Ohio, Michigan, or anywhere else where US workers are hurting is pure and utter folly.