Chile: Never Again Will a President Declare War on His Own People

Ollantay Itzamná
Gabriel Boric. President-elect of Chile

The imperial agents of neoliberalism are losing ground in Abya Yala Sur. Their neoliberal Andean triad of Peru, Chile and Colombia is crumbling, at least politically. Brazil, with Lula da Silva, and Colombia, with Gustavo Petro, in 2022, will further qualify the turn of the contest against neoliberalism at the polls in the continent.

Last Sunday, December 19, more than 8 million Chileans went to the polls, on a historic day, to elect their new ruler.

The geographically southernmost country of the Abya Yala Continent, but the most neoliberalized of the region, had only one way out: Gabriel Boric, of the progressive movement Apruebo Dignidad. The suicidal radicalism of Kast, of the Liberal Party, after the current nefarious experiment with Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, was no way out.

The elected President of Chile, coming from Magallanes, the southernmost tip of Abya Yala, in his first unofficial celebratory message to his thousands of followers said: “Hope won over fear”, referring to the capacity of the people of Chile to overcome the systematic “anti-communist infotoxication” of the media.

The neoliberal system that was implanted in Abya Yala, more than half a century ago, in and from Chile, was consolidated, and is still maintained in some countries, thanks to the manipulation of popular “fears and desires” by neoliberal agents, from the hegemonic disinformation media. And precisely this continental and global army of corporate media lost an important battle in Chile.

Faced with the disastrous daily consequences of the neoliberal colonial system, in Chile, as in the rest of the countries, the peoples and popular sectors rose and rise in creative resistance, but the oligarchies, no longer able to control popular fears and desires, “declare war” on them with military weapons. It happened in Chile.

That is why Gabriel Boric, in his first unofficial message, stated: “Never again will a President declare war on his own people”, referring to the premeditated bloody military repression that Piñera, outgoing President, imprinted on the southern country in 2019.

“In Chile it was born, and in Chile it will be defeated, neoliberalism for Latin America”, is a slogan (of the many) chanted by the uprising youth in the streets of Chile, for months. And so it was. Hours after the death of Augusto Pinochet’s widow, the battered peoples celebrated with the ballot boxes still warm the electoral triumph of the “post neoliberal” proposal.

Nobody knows for sure how the agents of the neoliberal empire will respond in Chile. In 1973, in a similar context to the current popular triumph, their hands did not tremble when they overthrew then President Salvador Allende and imposed the neoliberal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Will they dare to follow the same path? No one knows.

What is certain is that more peoples of the continent no longer believe in the unfulfilled promises of neoliberal imperialism. Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras and Chile are joining the “post-neoliberal path” taken by Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

The imperial agents of neoliberalism are losing ground in Abya Yala Sur. Their neoliberal Andean triad of Peru, Chile and Colombia is crumbling, at least politically. Brazil, with Lula da Silva, and Colombia, with Gustavo Petro, in 2022, will further qualify the turn of the contest against neoliberalism at the polls in the continent.

Meanwhile, those of us who promote processes of structural change, from the plurinational territories, must not exhaust ourselves in “tactical electoral triumphs”. We are building new ways of exercising power, even in a different sense, overcoming the frontiers installed by colonial modernity.

In this sense, we must continue to strengthen the continental plurinational socio-political movements with a view to achieving electoral triumphs in order to bring about structural changes in the bicentennial colonial creole states that inflict so much damage on our peoples.

To overcome fear at the ballot box, yes, but our hope lies in the reconstruction of Buen Vivir for the entire continent, and for this, the triumph at the ballot box contributes, but it is not everything.