[Mb-civic] Why they hate Bush in Chile

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Why they hate Bush in Chile

By Roger Burbach*

Fifty thousand demonstrators greeted George Bush on his arrival in
Santiago Chile for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit
meeting of twenty-one Pacific Rim nations. The largest and most militant
demonstration since the dictatorship of General August Pinochet, the
protestors called for an end to neo-liberal free trade agreements like
those advanced by the APEC leaders. The demonstrators carried banners
proclaiming “No to the dictatorship of the market” and asserted that trade
accords drive workers and peasants into a “race to the bottom.”

The ire of many protestors centered on Bush and the war in Iraq. Chants of
“Terrorist Bush,” and “ Bush, Fascist, Thief, Murder!” rang through the
air. The demonstrations were overwhelmingly peaceful, but groups of
anarchists, punks and others broke away from the main march to vandalize a
McDonald’s restaurant and corporate stores. About 200 people were arrested
and over 25 injured.  Bush, on his first trip outside the United States
since the election, found another unwanted answer to the question he posed
in the aftermath of 9/11:  “Why do they hate us?” It is certainly not for
“our freedoms” as Bush inanely asserts. Aside from the war in Iraq, many
protestors in Chile are deeply hostile because the United States backed a
military coup on September 11, 1973 that took away their freedoms. It
deposed the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and
marked the beginning of a seventeen year dictatorship. One banner stated:
“US Terrorist State: The First September 11.” A common refrain of
demonstrators who want no further US meddling in their affairs proclaimed:
“Bush, listen, Chile is not for sale.”

More than three thousand people perished in the aftermath of the coup,
another 35,000 were imprisoned and tortured. With the acquiescence of the
CIA and the cooperation of military regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay
and Paraguay, the Pinochet dictatorship set up an international terrorist
network, Operation Condor, that targeted opponents throughout the world.
Prior to the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the most
sensational terrorist act in Washington D.C. took place in 1976 when
Orlando Letelier, a leading Chilean opponent of the Pinochet regime, died
when a bomb was detonated in his car just blocks from the White House. A
young assistant, Ronnie Moffit, was killed along with him.

Even when Pinochet gave up the presidential sash in 1990, he continued to
dominate the country’s politics as commander-in-chief of the military. The
United States orchestrated a controlled “transition” in which a coalition
of political parties took office on a centrist platform and followed the
authoritarian constitution drawn up by Pinochet. The Communist party and
other militant organizations on the left that had backed Allende were
excluded.

This austere civilian order was shaken by Pinochet’s arrest in London in
1998 for crimes against humanity. Returned to Chile in March 2000 for
alleged health reasons, the quiescent Chilean judicial system finally
turned on Pinochet and became prosecuting him for his crimes. The Chilean
political establishment, now headed by President Ricardo Lagos, sought to
defuse tensions with the business community and right wing backers of
Pinochet by pressuring the judges and medical examiners to get him off the
hook, this time because he supposedly had “light dementia.”

Events of the past year however have shaken the inertness of the Chilean
political system. In a lengthy interview with a Miami television station,
Pinochet insisted that the left owed him an apology for trying to get rid
of him.  This interview, in which he was evidently coherent the entire
time, undermined his claim of suffering from dementia and led to the
filing of new charges against him, this time for his role in Operation
Condor.

It appears that Chile is at long last prepared to confront the crimes of
the dictatorship as never before. Earlier this month an official
commission backed by human rights organizations presented a report to
President Lagos detailing the abuses and torture committed against
prisoners from 1973 to 1990. Then just this past week the Supreme Court of
Chile ruled that a clause in Pinochet’s constitution that exempted many
members of his secret police from prosecution was invalid and superseded
by international law.

Nation-wide municipal elections at the end of October have also given
momentum to the progressive forces in Chile. The ruling centrist parties
decisively defeated the right wing parties while a left coalition led by
the Communist and Humanist parties garnered almost 10 percent of the vote,
the most since the days of Allende.

To oppose the right wing parties in the presidential election, the ruling
coalition appears to be giving the nod to one of its more progressive
leaders, Michelle Bachelet, who served in Lagos’ cabinet. Her father, an
Air Force General, was one of the few military officials who strongly
supported Salvador Allende, heading up the country’s food distribution
system as the right wing tried to orchestrate a crisis by hoarding or
reducing food supplies.

The left is also putting forth a dynamic candidate for president, Tomas
Moulian. A radical sociologist who is rector of a university, Moulian is a
talented speaker who will mince no words in going after the ruling parties
as well as the right wing for their politics of complacency and the
failure to deal with the workers and impoverished in Chile who are victims
of globalization.

As the demonstrators greeting Bush showed, there is clearly a mass base
for new politics in Chile. Simultaneous with the APEC summit, 7,500 people
attended workshops and seminars sponsored by the Chilean Social Forum. The
main theme of the forum as well as the organizing slogan of the
demonstration was “Another World is Possible.” The forum called on Chilean
society to “carry on a debate of democratic ideas, related to unequal
social relations, issues of gender, sustainable development, and
alternatives to globalization.”

Bush spent much of his time in Santiago trying to bludgeon the other
twenty heads of state into endorsing his war-mongering schemes for going
after North Korea and Iran for their alleged weapons of mass destruction.
There is indeed a Chilean alternative to Bush:  it is to pursue former
dictators and the real terrorists by using international law and building
a global international criminal system that will be based on an
egalitarian economic system that empowers people at the grass roots to
build their own future.

*Roger Burbach is the author of “The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and
Global Justice. He also co-authored with Jim Tarbell “Imperial
Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire. To order the books
see: www.globalalternatives.org

Special thanks to Elias Padilla for his reporting assistance and to Paul
Cantor for his editorial comments.

***

American blues
Our liberal cousins are in despair. Defenders of the Enlightenment
unite!

Timothy Garton Ash in San Francisco
Thursday November 18, 2004

The Guardian

I 'm getting seriously worried about anti-Americanism.
Anti-Americanism in America, that is. Here are just a few of the
things that I've heard travelling through blue, ie liberal, America
over the two weeks since George Bush won the election. "The truth is, they
just are stupid." (A New Yorker, of people in the red, ie conservative,
states.) "The snakes." "Fascism." "Christian fascism." "I wanted to make a
film about a time when young Americans fought against fascism and not for
it." (A producer, explaining why he commissioned a film about the Spanish
civil war.) For some days after John Kerry conceded, Democrats were
telling me that the vote may have been rigged. The Diebold automatic
counting machines were manufactured by a Republican crony; perhaps they
were programmed to undercount Democratic votes. The Democrats' own exit
polling showed them well ahead in counties they then lost. And so on.

Some felt impelled to apologise to the rest of us. If you go to the
website sorryeverybody.com, you can see a young American holding up
a hand-written sign saying "Sorry World (we tried) - Half of America."
Others, despairing, talked of emigration. A liberal radio host told me he
had started looking at homes in New Zealand. "Oh yes," said another
journalist, "a lot of my friends are talking about New Zealand." Visits to
the Canadian immigration website soared - giving a new meaning to the
cartoon map that showed the blue states of the west and north-east coasts
joined with their northern neighbour in the "United States of Canada", and
separated from "Jesusland" in the south. There's also jocular talk of the
blue north seceding from the southern states of the Confederacy, thus
reversing the story of the American civil war.

"For years I've looked down on countries that mix religion and
politics - as in the Middle East - and now we've become one," Heather from
Lafayette emailed CNN. While the right claimed this as a victory for
"moral values" - down with abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research and
gun control - a letter-writer to the New York Times said values were
indeed the issue: "But the values in question are those of the liberal,
secular modernity that defined and animated western culture over the last
century of social and economic progress, and that now appear to be under
at least as great a threat from within the United States as they are from
forces like radical Islam."

To an outsider, this incredulity, despair and self-flagellation can
seem a little hysterical - although, as a friend countered when I said as
much, we don't have to live with the consequences in the way liberal
Americans do. Moreover, even ifthey make exactly the same criticisms of
the United States as many Europeans do, that does not mean Europeans can't
be anti-American. Sometimes the difference between a Jewish joke and an
anti-semitic joke is who is telling it.

We should beware of what the philosopher Henri Bergson once called
"the illusions of retrospective determinism". There was nothing
inevitable here. In American society, there probably has been a
further modest shift in the direction of religious, nationalist
conservatism over the last few years. But 59.7 million votes against
56.2 million was no landslide. Red has not swamped blue.

Had the Democrats fielded a better candidate - more folksy, more
appealing in the South - they might have won. Putting up a millionaire
Boston brahmin was rather like the Tories proposing an Old Etonian
stockbroker for prime minister. As Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair has
observed, one lesson is simply that Democrats should start the hunt for a
man with a drawl and a farm, who looks like a regular guy and plays ball
in the yard. (Incidentally, that does not describe Hillary Clinton, who
would probably stand a better chance if she stood for president of
Europe.)

Red and blue are also more mixed up together than the famous map
suggests. Another version produced by the University of Michigan, and
reproduced in the Guardian on Tuesday, shows shadings of maroon for the
split of the popular vote in different states. And the fact that Americans
move around their country so much, with a labour mobility that is the envy
of Europe, means that many people have lived part of their lives in red
and part in blue states. When the children go back to their parents' homes
for Thanksgiving next Thursday, there'll be blood on the turkey if they
turn to politics.

When all that has been said, the fact remains that America is now one of
the most deeply divided countries among all the liberal democracies of the
world. Looking at the unfolding debate on the website I have set up in
connection with my book, Free World, I'm struck by the fact that the
fiercest, most bitter arguments are not between Europeans and Americans
but between Americans and Americans.

The United States is torn not just about what America should do but
about what America should be. If Bush nominates to the supreme court
judges who, for example, want to ban gay marriage or abortion, this
could split the country, as such nominations have in the past.
(Remember Clarence Thomas? Remember Robert Bork?) If these judges
are confirmed, they could skew that court to the right for a generation.

Battle may soon be joined to preserve the strict separation of church and
state that the founding fathers intended. Or, to put it another way, to
defend the legacy of the Enlightenment. No wonder liberal Americans have
been feeling so blue. But there is one silver lining to the cloud hanging
over them. Overstated though the dichotomy is between red and blue
America, it does mean that no one who is at all well informed can believe
that America is Bush and Bush is America. If the west is divided, the
dividing line runs slap-bang through the middle of America.

And, on the other side of the pond, through Europe. We don't have so
many Christian fundamentalists any more. Compared with the American
religious right, Rocco Buttiglione, the withdrawn Italian Catholic
candidate for European commissioner, is a dangerous liberal. But we do
have Islamic fundamentalists, in growing numbers. And, I would say, we
have secular fundamentalists: people who believe that to live by the
tenets of Islam, or other religions, is incompatible with what it is to be
fully human, and want citizens to be educated and the state to legislate
accordingly. While I have been in America, the possible consequences have
been played out on the streets of prosperous, pacific, tolerant Holland,
with the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and the counter-attack on
an Islamic school. If America has its culture wars, its Kulturkampf, so do
we. And ours could be bloodier.

So the expressions of European solidarity after the September 11 2001
terrorist attacks ( "Nous sommes tous Américains" ) should acquire a new
meaning and a new context after the November 2 2004 elections. Hands need
to be joined across the sea in an old cause: the defence of the
Enlightenment. We are all blue Americans now.

www.freeworldweb.net

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

---




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