Past is Prologue

The past as prologue; or the Chilean political cycle.

After nearly three months of the “estallido social” (social outburst) the strong distrust of a certain section of the Chilean population towards the police continues unabated and seems to increase with every burned building and metro station. It has become the one immutable constant in a flurry of misinformation and gossip that floods the collective unconscious of the Chilean body politic. For a substantial proportion of the population, the hand of the Carabineros is behind every sinister act, be it the burning of the many metro stations or the burning of the church of San Francisco, the official church of the Carabineros. This phenomenon is not confined to the police, any announcement by the government is met with complete incredulity and ridicule, even when said announcement is a simple statement of fact, such as the publication of the latest economic data. Many would claim that this is a global phenomenon and that Chile is simply an example of the distrust with which citizens view their government around the world. While this may be true, the seeds of this distrust were already present, and there is a specific Chilean aspect to this mistrust that I think is underexplored. There is something particular about how the left views the government (left or right) in Chile and it is closely related to its legitimacy in the eyes of a large proportion of the Chilean left. This is an attempt at trying to untangle this phenomenon in the larger context of Chilean history.

I think this is a necessary exercise to try to understand the fundamental causes of the chasm between the Chilean government and a section of the governed. The past few months have been particularly difficult to untangle, especially for someone who is not from Chile. The cacophony of voices almost by definition drowns any reasonable or even well-intentioned question, and the Chilean pundits seem to be either incapable of, or unwilling to, understand the fundamental causes of the current state of affairs. This is not to say that there is one such cause, or that there is a dominant explanation for all of this. The fundamental human response to a negative shock is to try to see a pattern so as to discover a cycle from a long-term viewpoint. What I hear from the chattering classes is a myopic explanation that almost never takes into account the context of the relationship between Chilean labour and capital.

Part 1. Definition

I first heard the phrase “past is prologue”[1] while reading an article about Roger Stone, one of the political masterminds of Donald Trump’s campaign and an advisor to Nixon. As far as I can gather, Stone believed that the silent-majority that elected Nixon never really went away, or truly absorbed the illegal aspects of the Nixon white house. Or at least it was never convinced that Nixon’s illegal acts nullified whatever made him attractive as a political figure. By this I mean to say that the average Nixon voter did not disavow Nixonianism, even after he was removed from office. Stone seems to believe that the same spirit (but not necessarily the same people) that elected Nixon was there to be exploited to elect Trump, a more stripped down version of Nixon, or at least a more direct and less politically savvy Nixon-like figure. In this context, “past is prologue” implies that radical shifts that upend the political landscape (in this case Nixon’s impeachment) do not necessarily imply that the underlying causes that brought the old order into being somehow disappear into thin air. They lie dormant, ready to be reactivated by some political force with the wherewithal and the cunning to reanimate their political will. Often, we view political realignments as a sharp divergent rupture with the past, and this is a mistake; these realignments are neither inevitable nor irreversible. The political forces that facilitated them can fail and the old order can return in full force.

So what does this have to do with Chile? I think there are two inflection points in recent Chilean history that can be viewed as divergent from trend; the military coup and the return to democracy. Both of these events are points that can be considered under the above definition. Both involved sharply overturning the ideologically opposite movements that preceded them, and both failed to convince the movements that they replaced of their legitimacy.[2] To be more precise, the coup created a large group of people who were strongly (and rightly) opposed to the dictatorship and, when democracy finally came, some members of this group never really viewed the new regime as legitimate and continued to regard the government as an extension of the coup, even though it was democratically elected. There are many reasons for this, and in this post I will try to explore some of these reasons. But at this point, it is important to reiterate that the return to democracy never really fully dealt with the legacy of the dictatorship from a political point of view. This created a sizeable chunk of Chileans on both the left and right (the size changes depending on economic conditions) that are still fighting the 1973 ideological battle even though they were not born then. To the left, any and all actions of the state are a confirmation that the struggle continues, that nothing has changed and the same regime that murdered and violated human rights is still in power. To the right, any attempts at redistribution and fairness is an attempt to return to the excesses of the Allende years. The use of the word dictatorship, military, vengeance on social media and the walls of Chile is not an accident, it is a reflection of the fact that, for some Chileans, the dictatorship never really went away. This moral equivalence is confusing for many non-Chileans, but even if we find it distasteful, we must try to understand it.

Part 2: The context

If one looks at Chilean economic history in the twentieth century, one cannot escape the dominant role that the resource sector plays in its development. First nitrate and then copper mining dominated the Chilean economy for most of the twentieth century. A lot of its mines were foreign owned, and workers in those mines lived in deplorable conditions. When miners demanded higher pay or better working conditions, the state intervened violently and was not beyond executing a large number of strikers (women and children were not spared) in order to force striking miners to go back to work. Often, these strikes affected British or American owned mines, and the government intervened on behalf of foreign owners to subdue workers (see for example the Sta Maria strike in Iquique for a particularly egregious and brutal intervention). The Wikipedia list includes 15 massacres between the beginning of the century until 1989. There maybe others that did not make the list because they may have not been deemed large enough. The point is that this, by far, is one of the most chilling aspects of Chilean history, and it is a fundamental violation of one’s right to organize. Many on the right may want to dismiss this as ancient history and really irrelevant to the current uprising, but they do so at their peril. Others will view this post as a leftist screed, and dismiss it outright. This is a positive argument; not a normative one. It describes the world as it is, not as it should be. These facts, even though they may be a century old, carry disproportional weight on the Chilean psyche and led directly to the election of Allende and its aftermath. And when Allende was deposed violently, they became mythical in their endurance. The coup was just another data point in the long history of suppressing the Chilean worker’s right to organize his political and economic life. It gave continuity to this model of the world, and confirmed, once again, the perception that the Chilean state does not exist to protect all its citizens, it only exists to protect the wealthy and the connected. I reiterate, it may be that this model of the world is easy to falsify post democracy, but for a large section of Chileans, it was never falsified.

In fact, both the Allende overcorrection and the ensuing dictatorship confirmed the bias of both sides of the Chilean divide. The right’s worldview that the left’s policies would be ruinous for the Chilean economy and the left’s view that the right could only rule by force to serve the moneyed classes, were reinforced. That’s why the referendum of 1989 was so close (or at least too close for a non-Chilean, given the choices). Both sides live with the memory of the past and find it difficult to update their beliefs; one side fears the economic chaos of the Allende years, the other the oppressive power of the Chilean police state. Democracy was supposed to flatten these differences, and to some extent it did. But it did not flatten them quickly or deeply enough and left plenty of low hanging fruit to be picked on both sides.

Part 3: Democratic Chile

One fact is striking; of the past 30 years, Chile has been governed by a centre-left coalition for nearly 24 years. The only two right of center governments were the first Piñera administration and the current second one. Rightly, the Aylwin government set up a reconciliation commission, but it was not really that reconciliatory given that the main culprit really never faced true punishment. This is due to both the presence of pro-Pinochet members of parliament, and probably, and I am speculating here, the real risk that a second coup was indeed possible. For a political class that had grown under dictatorship, the risk of its return (however inflated it may seem ex-post) must have been ever-present. Maybe the political class made the calculation that persecuting all members of the military government would have been imprudent given the nascent fragile democracy, maybe they thought that it was infeasible and only egregious human rights violations could be prosecuted clearly and without much doubt. Either way, for many Chileans this process was incomplete, and they never got the vengeance they desired.

The Chilean growth miracle managed to hide these differences in outlook and, at least for a while, it looked as if the past was quickly vanishing from view. However, signs of impending conflict were ever present. This could be seen in the discussions over the funding of the Museum of Human Rights, the numerous cases against perpetrators of violence, but nowhere was it more clear than in the unpleasant political presence of people who had actively participated and supported the Pinochet government. While they may have not been directly involved in the crimes of the dictatorship, they in fact participated in its structures, lending their intellectual talents to its survival. Many of them even benefited financially through their participation and many of them issued half-hearted apologies for their involvement. The list here is long, but it includes quite a large number of currently active Chilean politicians, (see for example Lavin and Chadwick for two very prominent examples). At least from an optical aspect, this is just bad PR. From a moral viewpoint, it is bankrupt. It is impossible for a democracy to have moral authority when it is led by figures who actively participated in a murderous dictatorship. And yet, these figures do not seem tarnished by the past. If anything, for their core support, their moral failings are actually an asset. If the Chilean body politic is divided into two opposing and irreconcilable points of view, the stronger your opposition to the other side, the better your chances of gathering support. UDI is still full of these figures, and it garners quite a bit of support.

The post dictatorship Chilean left governed as a centre-left coalition. It maintained the institutional integrity of the Chilean state, it expanded rights and set up a technocratic, knowledge based method of governance. I think most would agree that the Concertación coalition was overall a success. Also, it had the moral authority to govern, since its intellectuals were not in any way tainted by the dictatorship years. However, moral authority is not enough. When eventually the centre-right coalition incorporated some of the redistributive ideas of the left into its platform, and after the corruption scandals of Bachelet 2, the centre-left lost most of its shine. The arrival of a governing centre-right, especially Piñera 2, laid bare the brewing conflict between the left and right. Piñera’s re-election was anathema to a large chunk of the Chilean left, especially those that considered the new regime a continuation of the dictatorship years. Coupled with slowing economic growth, this created enough tinder for the fire to follow.

Part last: Epilogue

There was once upon a time a Chile with a strong centre-left, it worked because it was an immense improvement over the dictatorship years, economically and politically. However, the structural deficiencies left over from the old political order such as an inefficient public education and health system survived nearly unscathed. There were those on the right who accepted the new order because it allowed them to prosper and it did not threaten their economic privilege. But they viewed any redistribution program with apprehension because they were imbued with the fear-of-Allende syndrome. There were those on the left that accepted it because it expanded rights and did some redistribution, but viewed any attempts to preserve institutional integrity as a continuation of dictatorship by other means. Both sides were weary of the new Chile, but went along with it for a while. 

Today, the left is out on the street arguing that we are living in a dictatorship. The right is up in arms screaming Venezuela. The centre is being called out as traitors when they insist that democratic institutions are essential and inviolable. The left is slowly eating itself, it does not understand that Chile has created a large enough mass of citizens truly invested in the status quo and they will lose this portion of the population if they threaten their property. By fighting the 1973 ideological battle it paints itself in a losing position. There are too many Chileans that benefited from the last 30 years. There is a need for deep structural reform in the health and education system, this is true. However, there seems to be an antidemocratic vein running through the modern Chilean left that justifies the overthrow of a duly elected government because it views it as "dictatorship lite". This is a sophomoric political mistake, and dangerous. On the other hand, the right thinks of itself as the rightful nobility that gifted Chileans democracy, they congratulate themselves on having been magnanimous in offering it. They don't seem to care that their monopoly hold over the Chilean economy is inefficient and retrograde. Their mercantilist mentality is damaging to growth. Both sides are prisoners of a recent past that, like a parasite, seems to subconsciously guide their every move. If they keep at this, it will tear this country apart.

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[1] This is to say the first time I heard the phrase used to describe a political phenomenon. Naturally there are many misappropriations of Shakespeare’s line in “The Tempest”.

[2] This is more intense in the case of the coup; by definition a violent takeover of the government is less concerned with its legitimacy.