Confronting a tyrant in Chile

by Judy Jackson
September 11, 2023

On September 11, 1973 Augusto Pinochet’s regime overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Judy Jackson reflects on what it was like to cover the dying days of the Pinochet regime.



Augusto Pinochet. Credit: Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile / Wikimedia Commons

September, 1988, Santiago, Chile. It’s the middle of the night when I arrive in Santiago. I retrieve my checked bag and find the lock has been forced open. A video camera and some papers have been stolen. But I’m here to cover a plebiscite, the first democratic vote in a brutal dictatorship in 18 years, so it’s not wise to make a fuss. Especially since they hated a documentary that I made here for the CBC in 1976.

In the morning I go to get press accreditation. I give the army press officer my new British passport. He takes it to another room and, after a long time, he returns.

“You also have a Canadian passport,” he says. I guess they’ve flagged me for that film.

“What Price Profit?” showed how, on September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet bombed La Moneda and overthrew the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende.

Canada remained silent when Pinochet’s secret police detained 10,000 in the National Stadium and tortured and killed over 3,000 more. Some were dropped, still alive, into the sea from helicopters and “disappeared” – a new word in the lexicon of terror. And how the Dictator then offered his entire country as a laboratory to controversial economist American Milton Friedman, to test his then untried theories of free market capitalism.

So the social gains of Allende’s Popular Unity Coalition were undone, in order to create “free markets” and feed international transnationals with a steady flow of cheap copper, fruit and fish. A small oligarchy have become extremely rich, but most Chileans are the laboratory rats. Union leaders have been arrested, strikes banned; unemployment has soared, and many have been forced to flee. (I couldn’t know back then that ‘neoliberalism’ would echo down the decades and become the globalised super capitalism of today, as described so brilliantly by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine.)

More:
https://rabble.ca/politics/world-politics/confronting-a-tyrant-in-chile/