Chile on the cusp of change but, by the May polls, are we?

In 2022, the legacies of two fascist dictatorships which began a year apart in the month of September in the early 1970s are issues that will preoccupy Filipinos and Chileans who are committed to put an end to them. Both one-man dictatorships inflicted unimaginable human rights violations against their peoples. Likewise, both introduced and implemented US-designed economic policies that, over the decades, worsened poverty and inequality in each country.

I refer to the dictatorships of president Ferdinand Marcos and of president Augusto Pinochet. Marcos declared martial law on Sept. 21, 1972, whereas Pinochet (then Chile’s army chief) staged a US-backed coup against democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973.

Both tyrannies were officially ended by the people through peaceful means. In February 1986, a people’s unarmed uprising ousted the Marcos dictatorship; US authorities plucked the family out of Malacañang by helicopters, then flew them to Hawaii. In Pinochet’s case, he was forced to step down in 1990 after 56 percent of those who voted in a 1988 referendum rejected his continued rule. Marcos died in exile in Hawaii in 1989; Pinochet passed away in 2006.

Through the years, however, both dictators’ brutal ways in dealing with political dissenters have persisted under successor-presidents. (Except for the two-term presidency in Chile of Michelle Bachelet, a socialist, now the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.) The neoliberal economic policies both tyrants espoused also have continued to be pursued, to the detriment of the livelihoods of majority of Filipinos and Chileans alike.

The persistence of these toxic legacies owes greatly to the fact that neither Marcos nor Pinochet was criminally penalized by any of the governments that have taken over after they lost power.

Only a civil class suit filed by martial law victims before a Hawaii court resulted in a ruling that affirmed the Marcos dictatorship indeed committed massive human rights violations. It gave due recognition to almost 10,000 plaintiffs and granted them compensation through a portion of the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth recovered from two Swiss bank accounts.

For his human rights crimes, Pinochet was indicted by a Spanish judge (under the principle of universal jurisdiction over serious crimes) and subsequently arrested in London in 1998. Allowed to return to Chile, he faced more than 300 human rights related cases, plus indictments for amassing ill-gotten wealth and tax evasion (familiar cases against the Marcoses). Yet until his death, he wasn’t convicted of any of the crimes.

Back to where we are in this new year.

Most Chileans are euphoric as they await March 11. That’s the day when a 35-year-old former student activist will be sworn in as Chile’s youngest-ever president, who defeated the “far-right” politician and pro-Pinochet candidate, Jose Antonio Kast, with a 55.8 percent majority vote in the 2021 run-off election.

His name is Gabriel Boric, an undergraduate law student who dropped his studies and entered public service. Elected congressperson in 2013 and reelected for a second term, he ran for president last year. In the first round of voting under Chile’s electoral system, Boric lost to Kast by 2 percent of the votes. In the run-off, however, he managed to expand his vote base in Santiago by winning big in the countryside, including among the indigenous people. He also succeeded in winning over “centrist” votes that helped propel him to a comfortable majority win.

Identified as a “leftist,” Boric has pledged to decentralize Chile’s governance, implement a welfare state, increase public spending, overhaul the privatized pension system and to include in governance women, non-binary Chileans and indigenous people “like never before.” According to The Guardian, his ultimate goal is to “extricate Chile from the binds of Pinochet’s [17-year] dictatorship.”

In the first six months of his four-year term, Boric has vowed to fully back the ratification of a new constitution, now being finessed by a 115-member elected constitutional commission, to replace the 1988 Constitution drawn up under Pinochet.

“We are a generation that emerged in public life demanding our rights to be respected and not treated like consumer goods or a business,” Boric declared in his victory speech. “We no longer will permit that the poor will keep paying for the price of Chile’s inequality,” he added.

Vowing to unite Chile, he promised to fight the “privileges of the few” and tackle poverty and inequality.

“Men and women of Chile, I accept this mandate humbly and with a tremendous sense of responsibility,” he told a massive crowd in Santiago. “I promise that I will be a president who listens more than he speaks, who seeks unity, who looks after people’s daily needs, who fights hard against the privileges of the few and who works every day for Chile’s families.”

In our case, the official campaign period for the May 9 presidential, legislative and local-government elections will begin in February. Looming large in the public imagination is the probability that the son and namesake of the ousted dictator Marcos might be elected president, and the Marcos dynasts would reign once again in Malacañang.

That would come about if the Comelec would vote to allow Marcos Jr. to campaign and possibly capture the presidency – whether or not it has resolved with finality the several disqualification petitions filed against him.

Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte claim their team signifies unity for the nation, citing each other’s vaunted bailiwick in Northern Luzon and the Davao region of Mindanao. But what’s really obvious is that their team represents the unity of the big traditional political players – the Arroyos, the Estradas, the Dutertes and the Marcoses, who each in turn misused and abused their power.

Above all, mind that what is probable isn’t inevitable. Countervailing campaigns by various movements and groups to prevent the Marcoses from returning to Malacañang and the Dutertes extending their stay in power are sincerely, diligently working. And sincerity and diligence get rewarded.

A peaceful New Year to all!

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Email: satur.ocampo@gmail.