Marc Cooper
Greetings from Santiago.
I was visiting friends and family here as January 6 came and went, a date that MAGA is trying to erase from memory and doing a pretty good job of it.
Chileans are quite aware of the infamous events that spun out on that date. What's striking is that almost nobody asks how we got there. They know.
After 150 years of democratic rule, General Augusto Pinochet and his followers ended it all overnight on September 11, 1973. What followed was 17 years of brutal, bloody dictatorship, the abolition of all politics, the shut down of the legislature and the closure of a free press. Some 3200 people were murdered, 1100 disappeared and more than 50,000 tortured.
Chileans have nothing to learn about autocracy nor oligarchy from Americans. Chilean oligarchs stood in line here to pay tribute to the Dictator before, during, and after the coup.
Initially stunned into inaction, the Chilean people regained their confidence. They began to defy the dictatorship and eventually, peacefully, defeated it in a plebiscite. Even though the vote was rigged to extend the dictatorship, the sentiment among Chileans was strong enough to change the country's course.
An imperfect democracy immediately followed. After 35 years it still has flaws but generally functions, affording full civil liberties and political expression in a pluralistic society. There’s an underlying trauma, but mostly among the elderly. The president of Chile is a 39-year-old former student leader who is an authentic Democratic Socialist. His congress is mostly center-right. There’s friction but there is still rational political discourse and reasonable civility.
People here understand better than Americans what authoritarian rule can mean, but they also know how it can be defeated, just as it was defeated in the last few years in Brazil, Peru, and South Korea.
What Chileans do not fully grasp, and what I am getting asked, is not so much about the nature of authoritarian rule but rather how in the hell is this happening in the United States of America, of all places.
Chileans admire the US, some for the wrong reasons but mostly for very noble ones. The U.S. looms large over this country where scores of English words have crept into the daily Spanish lexicon, where American culture is omnipresent, and from where our feminist and LGBTQ movements have inspired people who have modeled their own movements after ours. Even during the socialist period of Salvador Allende, there was great anger against the Nixon administration, but not against America and Americans. Hell, this American was the translator to President Allende and nobody was spooked about it.
And because prior to the Pinochet dictatorship, the decades of democracy here made it easy for Chileans to admire American democracy and to learn from it. Chile has been and is a pro-American country in the broadest terms.
There’s some discomfort among some, say for the invasion of American fast food, and American TV and cable networks and streamers, but there is also a somewhat liberating aspect to this Americana as Chile is so remote from the rest of the world that it previously experienced a sort of radical isolation and monolithic uniformity.
Not anymore. For better or worse, Chile is now integral to a global economy and culture with many Chileans viewing America's monolithic influence as a positive rather then a negative. In a few ways, Chile’s civil society is more advanced than America's, with a great emphasis on public health, the absence of AR-15s in schools, and a certain amount of mutual aid and solidarity, though reduced compared to the Allende period.
And January 6? What befuddles Chileans the most is that and MAGA and Trump have defiled the country that so many Chileans looked up to, believing, like so many people in other countries where freedom has been quashed, that the American Dream was real. It’s as if the Statue of Liberty has been gang raped by a mob of hooligans. They just can’t fathom how that was allowed to happen.
They ask me and I have no good answer unless they have 4 or 5 hours to spare.
Here is what MAGAs need to know. In Chile, after the experience of dictatorship, there is only a smattering of people who would want it again. Yes, there are conservative and wealthy pockets of the population that justify the military dictatorship arguing, falsely, that it was a political necessity to head off socialism. But I would estimate that 90 percent of wealthy Chileans now defend democracy. They want no return to death and darkness.
In short, the harsh lessons of anti-democratic rule have been learned – the hard way—here in Chile. It has been been burned and branded into the national soul.
As somebody who escaped the dictatorship eight days after the coup but came back several times to assess and witness the damage, I am heartened by the across the board respect for rule of law and democratic processes that have once again, slowly but surely, taken root.
Unfortunately, it also makes me wonder if Americans are ready to fiercely resist the incoming regime. Are they naïve and unexperienced enough to be forced to learn it the hard way like they have here in Chile? Will a newfound respect for democracy spark a fight that will continue after January 20th? Or are we going to have to be deprived of democracy for many years before it once again is appreciated? It’s a long hard slog to rebuild it once it has been torn down. My fear is that Americans are not taking seriously enough what is now before them. Too many are thinking this is no big deal – just as many Chileans did prior to 1973.
Marc Cooper has written for Harper's, The New Yorker, The Nation, and many others. At the University of Southern California he was the founding director of Annenberg Digital News. Read him on Substack at The Coop Scoop.
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