Geography Archives: Chile

FIFTY years back, Pinochet’s coup destroyed Allende’s government and the structure of liberal democracy in Chile. Allende died with a machine gun in his hands, defending his attempt to build socialism in Chile against the combined power of the U.S. and the forces of reaction in Chile, including the military.

It is 50 years since the coup d’état and there is an important generational change on the streets, many thousands of young people who feel the need to express their discomfort with society, to express their pain at the breakdown of democracy and all that followed.

“History is ours, and people make history.”
Salvador Allende

For the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état in Chile against the then president, Salvador Allende, analysis and publications are flourishing.

As Chile’s people, led by the Popular Unity government, took control over their economic and political lives and worked hard to improve their social and cultural worlds, they sent a flare into the sky announcing the great possibilities of socialism.

The relationship between Chile, the curtailment of its socialist reforms, and the ongoing processes in other countries in the region and in the Global South more generally have been systematically erased in Chile, from official historiography and media narratives alike.

The current temperature is between 10 and 20 degrees Celsius above what is normal for this time of year in parts of Chile and Argentina.

Chile’s neoliberal government is close to securing a new law that expands the right of security forces to use firearms against the population. The Naín-Retamal Law, a proposal of the executive branch, was today approved by the Senate for a third and final reading.  

Every dawn, during my daily walk to the foothills of the Andes, I pass by the Tobalaba Aerodrome, a facility that caters to a wide variety of private aircraft. In a year marking the 50th anniversary of the coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, that airport arouses less affable feelings.

Rodolfo Reyes, a lawyer and nephew of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, charged on Tuesday that the reports from two laboratories in Canada and Denmark confirm the assassination of the Nobel Prizewinner for Literature with a biological weapon.

Nine political prisoners of the Mapuche people in southern Chile have been on hunger strike since November 27. Now, their protest has reached a dangerous and crucial moment.

On the morning of September 21, 1976, a car bomb took the lives of Orlando Letelier, Minister of Foreign Relations and Ambassador to the U.S. under Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973), and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old fundraiser for the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-wing think-tank in Washington, D.C.

The Chilean people demonstrated at the ballot box against the proposal of the new Constitution of Chile, with an unappealable result, according to the final official bulletin of the Electoral Service of Chile (Servel) with a 62% rejection of the constitutional project against a 38% of approval; the vote was mandatory, hence the participation has exceeded 13 million voters.

The President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, during his campaign promised to reform the country’s uniformed police.

Gabriel Boric, president-elect of Chile, considers that the leftist governments headed by President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua “have failed.”

Doctor Sepúlveda Allende’s open letter to Boric is translated and reproduced.

At 35 years of age, Gabriel Boric is the youngest president-elect (he will be 36 when he takes office on March 11) and the most voted in Chilean history, with an unprecedented 55% of electoral participation.

The search for the new era in Chile has two important avenues: the writing of the new constitution, which is what the 155 members of the Constitutional Convention are doing, and the presidential election to be held on November 21, 2021.

In Chile, community food networks and mutual aid tell us that the revolution starts close to home writes Jumanah Younis

Independent and progressive candidates won more than a two-thirds majority in the Constitutional Convention, a body responsible for writing Chile’s new constitution.