Yesterday, President-elect Gabriel Boric officially began his term as Chile's head of state. It is a particularly important historical moment, and that signal coming to us from the end of the world has its importance at this time when everyone's eyes are turned to the East.
Chile has shown democratic solidity, with an alternation of governments of different colors for over 30 years, which would make one think that the tragic experience of Pinochet's military regime is a thing of the past. But this is not the case: democracy, in its full meaning, is still very fragile in Chile. Economic development driven by exports, especially of raw materials, has contributed to raising the average level of per capita income, but this confirms what we have always thought about statistics: they seem to show everything but hide the essential. In these decades, on the back of an ultra-liberal economic model imposed by Milton Friedman's Chicago school and that no democratic government has been able to change from the ground up, inequalities have grown disproportionately, making Chile the most divided country in all of Latin America.
Eventually, revolts broke out: against the privatized education system, against the health system that goes in the same direction (excellent private services for the rich and poor services in the public network for those without resources), against the pension system, totally privatized since the Pinochet era and obviously in favor of the wealthy classes, and above all against the non-recognition of the ancestral rights of the founding peoples of Chile. Since 2019 the country is a unique laboratory in the world, and from these struggles, democratic, despite a right-wing narrative that wanted to paint them as struggles of terrorists, a Constituent Assembly has arisen that by this summer will present a proposal for a new Constitution that will be subject to referendum. From that movement Gabriel Boric and those who accompany him came to power.
In his first speech he rightly recalled the historical figure of Salvador Allende, democratically elected president against whom the United States of the still living Kissinger organized a fatal guerrilla war. The seizure of power by the military allowed them to organize the looting of natural resources, to make even more evident the racism against the "Indians", to put in prison (or kill) any attempt at opposition, whether democratic or armed.
Now a multiple force comes to power, different in color, gender, blood, that wants to restart from the democratic design of Allende. Boric and his government will have a very complicated agenda, given the resistance of a class of oligarchs well-interlaced with international economic and financial power, they will have to face the total loss of trust of Chilean institutions (civil and military) in the eyes of the Mapuche people, treated as a band of terrorists, they will have to face the new problem for Chile of massive immigration, coming from countries like Haiti for which, once again, the color of the skin is likely to discriminate.
But this difficult experience will be carried on in a democratic spirit, in the name of those values that the West says it wants to defend in Ukraine against Putin. It will be interesting to see if this time the Americans, instead of organizing guerrilla warfare as they did with Allende, will open their doors, facilitating trade, tourism, culture and all kinds of exchanges with a democratic government that they do not like because there are "communists". It will be the litmus test to understand how serious we Europeans are: defending democratic values in Ukraine also means giving strong support to a different and multiform government like the one in Chile today.
That is why we are fighting in Ukraine, so that a people can choose its future, whether there or elsewhere. But then we have to show it concretely, and Chile can be a good starting point. There are many others who are waiting for these signals from the West, but in the meantime, we can start from a country that is not divisive, a friendly country that we all have an interest in seeing win the challenge against inequalities, be they gender, economic, ethnic or whatever.
Viva Chile, Chile vive!
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento