A defamatory attack provides a chance to look at the Russian Revolution's real achievements

By ORLANDO SEPÚLVEDA

FORMER CHILEAN dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, died last December at age 91. His death brought forth reactions of both joy and anger; joy that a man responsible for the deaths and torture of thousands of Chileans was finally gone; anger that he had managed to escaped the popular justice he deserved. ORLANDO SEPÚLVEDA analyzes Chile after Pinochet’s coup and the struggle to revive the popular democracy he brutally strangled.

IN 1973, the level of class struggle in Chile had been escalating for half a decade. In 1970, workers and peasants had elected socialist Salvador Allende as president, seeing his election as a mandate to bring socialism to Chile. Allende’s Popular Unity coalition promised to bring these changes about peacefully and constitutionally. By 1972, amid factory and land takeovers, strikes and protests, peasants and workers were gaining in strength and political experience.¹ Alarmed by the escalating class struggle, Chile’s ruling class—backed by the United States—set about to derail this process of mass radicalization, halt the “Chilean road to socialism,” and remove Allende from power. The right wing began promoting insubordination inside the military and conducting terrorist attacks, and the business community called a series of bosses’ strikes and lockouts to destabilize the economy to create the preconditions for a military coup.

But the counter-revolution was missing its strongman. In the armed forces many were willing to heed the call for sedition, and coordination began among generals and officers to put their guns at the service of a future coup. Standing against the plotters, however, was the army’s commander-in-chief and Minister of Defense, General Carlos Prats. After a political maneuver involving the high command of the army and the bourgeois media, Prats, “the main factor mitigating against the coup,” as a Defense Intelligence Agency report described him, resigned.²

Insisting that the military remained committed to the constitution, Salvador Allende named General Augusto Pinochet to replace his loyal commander-in-chief of the army after Pinochet was proposed by Prats himself.³ There has been lots of speculation about the willingness of Pinochet to take up the call for a coup. Some, emphasizing his treachery and cowardice, point out that Pinochet was very careful not to assume any role in the plot until its success was guaranteed.⁴ But based on documentation recently declassified by the State Department, author Peter Kornbluh concludes that a special coordination team had already been set up, and that Pinochet himself, as head of that group, was to determine the hour when the coup would begin.⁵

The terror years

The military coup began the morning of September 11, 1973. The navy blockaded the ports, the air force bombed La Moneda, Chile’s presidential place, and the army and police occupied public offices, factories, schools, and working-class neighborhoods. Thus began one of the most brutal repressions the continent has ever witnessed. Jails and stadiums were filled with prisoners. No fewer than 45,000 were arrested in the first few days. Thousand were killed. Leftist media and organizations were banned, and the Central Única de Trabajadores (CUT)—the main trade union federation—was outlawed. “Political crimes” became the concern of the military tribunals, where confessions obtained under torture were admissible as evidence.⁶

This was a new kind of military dictatorship. Ideologically, it assumed the precepts of the National Security Doctrine, the Cold War counterinsurgency doctrine elaborated in the United States in the 1960s in response to mounting postwar national liberation struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The great post-Second World War conflict between the two superpowers now involved combating internal communist insurgencies, and the need for total war justified placing the state in military hands until the threat to Western civilization was rooted out. This “internal enemy” consisted not only of alleged communists, but anyone fighting for democracy and against human rights abuses.⁷ Under the doctrine’s auspices, Pinochet ended democracy and crushed dissent using the methods of outright terror.

While the concentration camps filled up, Pinochet sent General Sergio Arellano Stark around the country to ensure that repression was vigorously carried out. According to the report of one colonel, Arellano was furious when he was informed that a certain region had been secured peacefully. The general’s Caravan of Death resulted in the execution of more than seventy political prisoners.⁸ Pinochet created the Directorio Nacional de Inteligencia (DINA) under the control of Colonel Manuel Contreras. Its logo was a fist with a gauntlet.⁹ DINA, with hundreds of agents from all sectors of the police and armed forces, clandestine detention centers and torture clinics, was charged with designing and executing a medium-term strategy which would destroy any challenge to Pinochet’s rule from inside or outside the country.¹⁰ DINA unleashed a campaign of terror, nationally and internationally, of which Operation Condor, the assassination of Pinochet’s enemies outside the country, is the most notorious. In what was its most high profile assassination, DINA agents using a car bomb murdered outspoken Pinochet opponent Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., on September 21, 1976.

The reign of terror lasted until the end of the decade. In 1978, in response to mounting pressure, particularly from outside Chile, Pinochet dissolved DINA. In its place he created the Central Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI). In the same year, the government declared an Amnesty Law, not only to grant immunity to the violators of human rights, but also to prevent anyone from investigating the crimes and abuses of Pinochet’s regime. The dictatorship destroyed all opposition, claiming the right to act with impunity. Among the middle classes, it won the complicity of many “well meaning” people—in the name of the “greater good”—to use violence and inflict damage on its political enemies.¹¹

The national reconstruction

Many at the beginning believed the military adventure would be short lived, and that the scope of the military intervention would be limited to dismantling the gains of the popular movement. The military regime would return land seized by peasants, factories occupied by their workers, and other businesses to their “rightful owners,” and then gradually recede in favor of more democratic civilian rule.¹² Such illusions were soon dispelled. In March1974, the military junta published the Declaration of Principles of the Chilean Government. The document declared that there would be a new constitution, and elections would be held at an opportune time, but that even after new elections the armed forces would play a strong role in safeguarding national security.¹³ Pinochet grasped permanent power, differentiating himself from the rest of the junta. He set no limits to his term, citing the need for a strong hand to guide the national reconstruction of the country, materially, institutionally, and morally.

Alongside the savage repression came a new economic policy. The Chilean ruling class and its patrons in Washington imposed on Chile the most savage neoliberal policies. One month after the coup, Pinochet outlined his economic priorities. “True nationalism,” he said, “does not consist in refusing foreign investment.”¹⁴ And in the Declaration of Principles of 1974, they defined the new role of the state as subsidiary, expected to intervene only where private hands were not adequate to the task. But it was not until 1975 that the junta gave a clear indication of having adopted the new orthodoxy. That year, Pinochet met with Milton Friedman, the leading figure of the monetarist “Chicago school” of economics. Later that year Pinochet named Jorge Cauas—one of the 150 Chilean economists known as the “Chicago boys” who studied free market economics in the United States—as head of the economic team chosen to refashion Chile’s economy.¹⁵

Amid talks of a second independence for Chile, the dictatorship imposed a “modernization program” that included a reduction of the state’s role in the economy, vast privatization of public companies, opening the economy to foreign investment through deregulation, and the elimination of labor rights to promote labor “flexibility.” It also gave the management of education and public health systems to the municipalities, privatized social security, and introduced a private system of health care.¹⁶ By 1977, these moves, which weighed heavily on the working class, started to produce macroeconomic numbers that allowed many to talk of a boom in Chile that lasted until 1982, when an international monetary crisis shook the foundations of the new economic structure.
Politically, it remained the task of the junta to provide the country with a new constitution. In October 1978, a special committee nominated by the junta presented a first draft of a project containing the central points of the regime’s constitutional theory. It introduced the notion of “protected democracy,” which allowed for military oversight of the constitutional order through institutions like the State Council, in practice the highest power on the land composed mainly of military men. The new constitution ensured military control over the civilian authorities, stipulating that the first presidential election would be a yes-no plebiscite for a single candidate chosen by the four leading military commanders. Both the right to private property and the restriction of labor rights were written into the constitution, and future laws would give the same character to the statutes for education, health, and others. To enshrine the new constitution, the junta also established very high quorums to initiate any future changes.

Furthermore, in accordance with the precepts of the National Security Doctrine, which viewed liberal democracy as weak, and even as a facilitator for the rise of “populists and demagogues,” Article VIII of the constitution outlawed “doctrines that undermine the family, propagate violence, and promote a conception of society, the state, or the judicial order based on class struggle.”¹⁷ The final project, put forward by the junta in August of 1980, increased the power of the military in the State Council and the autonomy of the armed forces with respect to the president, raised the quorum for reform, extended presidential terms from six to eight years, and decreed that Pinochet’s provisional government would rule until 1988.¹⁸

The military government chose September 11, 1980, just one month after its final document was ready, to put forward a proposal for a national plebiscite on the new constitution. The vote was carried on in conditions of the utmost abnormality that favored widespread fraud. No electoral registry was open, and the government controlled each phase of the balloting process without any independent electoral oversight. The option “yes” to the new constitution received 67 percent, and “no” received 30 percent. Many studies later proved that the results were obtained fraudulently. One report calculated that the number of people who voted in relation to the total number who registered in the 1982 census was 101.6 percent.¹⁹ The conclusion of the small political opposition was that Chileans ware going to vote out of fear, so the best option they had was calling for a “no” vote, which, according to author Tomás Moulian, made Pinochet confident in the coming years that the opposition would be resigned to accepting the next plebiscite in 1988.²⁰

The constitutional dictatorship

Moulian calls the period from the plebiscite of 1980 to the plebiscite of 1988 the constitutional dictatorship. According to Moulian, there were two constitutions—one that guaranteed rights like habeas corpus, and the other, under the guise of a “transitional period,” which nullified all rights and stalled the political process until the second plebiscite in 1988. A new body of political laws operated as a source of legitimization for the military government, while the framework of the transitional period allowed Pinochet the continued use of political terror with impunity.²¹
Pinochet pushed through his plebiscite in a period of economic upturn, before the world economic crisis of the early 1980s hit Chile. From the year 1981 to 1982 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 14 percent, and unemployment in Santiago alone went from 11.1 percent to 22.1 percent. Inflation, which was 9.5 percent in 1981, shot up to 23 percent in 1984. Chile’s foreign debt more than doubled between 1978 and 1981. As one historian of the period noted:

Built on unrealistic economic assumptions and a fragile edifice of debt, high interest rates and speculation, [the Chilean economic “miracle”] was highly susceptible to world market downturns and excessively dependent on the fortunes of a few conglomerates whose intricate financial activities were virtually unsupervised.²²
The first reaction of the government was to deny the crisis, which delayed any attempt to correct the course. But in June 1982 the government went public with a strong devaluation of the dollar, which soon spun out of control, ruining business that had rapidly expanded on the expectation of high exports. In January of 1983, the government had to intervene to salvage a number of financial institutions from bankruptcy. Economist Oscar Muñoz noted the odd paradox that under neoliberal direction the Chilean economy reached a level of state intervention for which Allende had only dreamed.²³
For most analysts, this economic crisis triggered the political awakening of the masses, not because of the immediate economic constraints that workers and the middle class had to confront, but because the crisis destroyed the idea of the omnipotence of the regime. The Chilean elite and its government found its confidence sinking from the precariousness of their much-touted economic model. This was the signal for a popular democratic movement to move into the political space now opening up.

There had been some protests even in the darkest period of the dictatorship. Copper miners paid dearly after staging a protest at the end of the 1970s, and sectors of students had demonstrated in their schools.²⁴ But the first national protest did not take place until May 1983, called by the National Coordination of Unions and the Confederation of Copper Workers. The unions were somewhat less exposed to the dictatorship’s reprisals, so they quickly became the place where political parties could carry on their political debates.²⁵ The first national protest was called as a strike, but it did not paralyze the country. For most of the day things ran normally. At midday, the most active, the hardcore, marched, and many students protested in their schools. But it was not until later that, under the protection of darkness and in the familiarity of the neighborhoods, the mass of Chilean city dwellers erupted in a deafening surge of pot banging and honking. In the poor districts many ventured into the streets; the middle and upper classes caravanned in their cars.

The protests snowballed. In June of 1983 a second national protest was called, this time not as a labor stoppage, and it followed more or less the same script. For the third protest, in July, newly formed neighborhood-based organizations and political alliances added their names to the call—the Democratic Alliance, (AD) led by the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), and the Democratic Popular Movement (MDP), led by the Communist Party (PC). Toward the end of the evening, some groups had engaged in incendiary bombings of symbolic targets and electrical towers.
In August, the unity reached at the third protest began to break apart at the fourth, with two different calls being made. The AD wanted to force a negotiated exit of the military government, while the MDP called for a popular rebellion to oust the dictator—though there was agreement on the need to keep the pressure on with further protest. So a call was made for a demonstration on August 11, 1983, by both the AD and the MDP, but the latter called for continuing the protest on the following day.

Meanwhile, repression worsened. The first protest took the dictatorship by surprise. A number of arrests were made during the day and political persecution through the judicial system followed. Mass arrests started with the second protest, and by the third there were widespread raids in the barrios. For the fourth national protest the dictatorship tried a curfew that had no effect. The state developed a new technique of repression—indiscriminate shooting. It began sporadically at first, but by the third demonstration it had become standard procedure. Its effectiveness resided in its randomness; the anonymous character of the deaths created a sense of terror. Twenty-nine people were shot down during the third protest, another twenty-nine during the fourth.²⁶

The division of the democratic forces was welcomed and accentuated by the government. The official media denounced the protests as vandalism, and the government named Sergio O. Jarpa as Minister of Interior to start negotiations with the opposition. Over the next two months, while the AD dialogued with Jarpa, the MDP organized four days of protest, from September 8–11, and another three days in October, both resulting in a number of deaths and hundreds of wounded. By October, the negotiations with Jarpa had broken down. The AD decided to call another protest, but this time they moved it from the streets into O’Higgins Park. Five hundred thousand attended the demonstration. The next protest, in March 1984, was heavily repressed in the neighborhoods. Ten people were killed. In August, the Catholic Church called for a Journey for Life, which initiated another round of monthly protests, followed by the first effective national strike on October 30. Pinochet’s response on November 6 was to decree a state of siege and the suspension and censorship of the opposition media. This measure put an end to the first cycle of protests.²⁷

In the next cycle, between September of 1985 and July of 1986, the opposition was strategically divided. The AD had started a second round of negotiations, this time not with the government but with the moderate right-wing parties. The outcome of these negotiations was the National Agreement for Transition to Full Democracy, a broad accord laying the basis for a transitional government. The accord demanded a lifting of the state of siege, the legalization of political parties, and free elections. But Jarpa was out of the government, and Pinochet insisted that there would be only a slow, incremental transition to limited democracy under his control. In this context, demonstrations were called separately by the MDP and the AD, even if they happened on the same days. The expectations generated by the National Agreement demobilized many, for whom the protests had become merely a routine. Under the state of siege the demonstrations now became a space for cadres and seasoned militants to clash with the state’s repressive forces.²⁸

On September 6, 1986, the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodriguez (FPMR), the armed wing of the Communist Party, tried to assassinate Pinochet. Their failure gave new wind to the dictatorship’s sails. A massive demonstration of support for Pinochet was carried out on September 11, the state of siege was extended, Pinochet delivered a heavy blow to the FPMR, and the opposition became unable to call any more demonstrations. Pinochet now seemed likely to stay in power for the entire period of his constitutional dictatorship. Between the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1988 a series of electoral laws were issued establishing new rules for the upcoming election. Seeing that some even in the right-wing camp favored competitive elections over a plebiscite, some in the opposition decided to attempt a last campaign for free elections in 1987. Beginning in 1988, however, the debate inside the political parties shifted toward whether or not to participate in the plebiscite, attached to which was the question of accepting or rejecting Pinochet’s constitution.

The plebiscite and the “amarre”

The main aim of the protest movement in Chile between 1983 and 1986 was to prevent the consolidation of the constitution that Pinochet had imposed on the country in 1980. The opposition vowed either to oust the dictator through mass protest, or at least to obtain a negotiated exit and an agreement for a new constitution. Despite the divisions that developed in the movement from 1984 on over how to proceed, the national consensus, which included the moderate right wing, was that the 1980 constitution was an obstacle toward the recuperation of democracy. But the protest movement was not able to prevent Pinochet from running out his eight-year term.

In 1987 the four military commanders chose Pinochet as the single candidate in the upcoming plebiscite. The regime also legalized all non-Marxist parties who could come up with the signatures of 35,000 registered voters. The opposition now faced a dilemma: Should they register and participate in the plebiscite under Pinochet’s electoral law—running the risk of legitimating the system and suffering eight more years of military rule—or should they refuse and organize a boycott?

Meanwhile, Pinochet was not done with terror. After the attempt on his life, Pinochet intensified the selective assassination of his opponents. This tactic had been used sporadically to terrorize those organizing within the labor movement during the protest years. In 1987, under the name Operation Albania, the national intelligence directorate (CNI) executed and disappeared dozens of members of the FPMR, twelve of them in just two days. Many believe this, the Corpus Christi massacre, to be an act of revenge for the September 1986 attempt on Pinochet’s life. Aimed at the most militant youth among the opposition, this campaign also had the goal of isolating those who still advocated mass protest to bring down the dictatorship. While he was repressing these militants, Pinochet also began preparing for an electoral transition.

When Pinochet opened the electoral registry, the moderate opposition in the Democratic Alliance publicly lent its support, pulling the rest of the opposition behind it. The Law of Political Parties approved in March 1987, and also the constitution, outlawed parties based on class struggle, so for some parties in the AD and for all parties in the MDP, registration as a legal party was not an option. In August, the Christian Democratic Party decided to register, leaving the Left to deal with the problem alone. To skirt the law, the center Left created the Party for Democracy (PPD) in December, but an important faction of the Socialist Party (PS-Almeyda) and the PC did not enter.²⁹

The participation of the moderate opposition in the plebiscite had already been decided by force of inertia. In January 1988 the PDC called for a “no” vote in the plebiscite. The socialist faction still in the MDP did the same twenty days later, effectively killing the left-wing coalition. A new one emerged—the Coalition of Political Parties for Democracy (Concertación). The change of strategy of the PS-Almeyda was the final acknowledgement that the politics of protest was finished and that political participation was going to be framed by Pinochet’s constitution.³⁰ That same month, with the slogan “Chile: Happiness is on the way,” a group that was for the “no” vote, called the Command, was established to campaign for the registration of seven million voters, and for the mobilization of thousands to monitor the plebiscite. The PC called for a “no” vote in June of 1988, but never entered the Command.

Pinochet pulled out all the stops for victory, mobilizing all the military and administrative power at his disposal. Local commanders and town mayors were put in charge of campaigning. The regime made over a thousand political arrests in the run-up to the election; opposition offices were firebombed, its rallies dispersed, and its activists harassed and beaten. At the same time, to boost his appeal, Pinochet lifted the “state of exception” weeks before the election and permitted exiles to return. His officials warned that a “no” vote would bring anarchy and revolution.

On election day—October 5,1988—the Command for the “no” mounted a parallel count of votes, the biggest mobilizing effort of its kind in Chile. Late that night the government delayed the results, and rumors of a new military coup spread. The Concertación decided to announce its own results: 55 percent for the “no” and 45 percent for the “yes,” and the streets filled up with demonstrators celebrating. Pinochet had lost the plebiscite. Finally, at 2:40 a.m., the government recognized its defeat, ending a long anxious wait by no-vote supporters.³¹ But the defeat was of Pinochet only, not for the political system he had established. In July of 1989, with the strength given by the October victory, the Concertación was able to negotiate some reforms to the constitution that did not change its fundamentals, with one very important exception: Article VIII, which banned “doctrines based on… class struggle,” was removed. Eighty-five percent of voters confirmed it in a popular consultation.³²
Pinochet had gotten away with imposing his timetable. According to the constitution, he would remain in power for another seventeen months before multi-party elections installed a new government. This gave him the opportunity to initiate the “proceso de amarre”—the tightening process to prevent any legal repercussions against his years as dictator, and to prevent or make difficult political reform. Pinochet stacked the Supreme Court with sympathizers, consolidated the 1978 Amnesty Law, prohibited the future parliament from investigating the dictatorship, and dissolved the CNI, passing all its assets to the army. In institutional terms, Pinochet stacked the Constitutional Tribunal with supporters, decreed the immobility of functionaries nominated by the dictatorship, and designated mayors were given three extra years in office.³³ Also, a series of legislative norms were rushed through to consolidate the dictatorship’s social and economic reforms in the areas of education, privatization, health, and other regulatory statutes.

Pinochet would remain commander-in-chief of the army until 1998, as determined by a transitional article of the 1980 constitution. This would give him, and the political groups formed around him, a cloud of extra-official power to intervene in Chilean political affairs. The most undemocratic precepts of Pinochet’s constitution would remain in place: the binomial electoral system, which grants chamber and senate seats only to the biggest political coalitions; and the designated senators, which gave the right wing an additional nine senators in congress, and therefore an automatic majority, as future elections showed. And despite some changes, the norms to reform the constitution remained very rigid.³⁴ Before the new multi-party elections were held, Pinochet redrew congressional districts to increase the number of deputies from rural areas, where conservative parties dominated. Before being dissolved, the CNI carried on two more political assassinations in 1989—a CNI economic contributor who wanted his money back, and the youth leader of the Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR), Jécar Nehme.

Pinochet and the transition to democracy

On December 14, 1989, Chileans celebrated the first democratic elections in more than seventeen years. Patricio Aylwin, the Concertación’s candidate, won the presidency of the republic by a landslide. A new parliament was also elected. Both began their terms in March of 1990. This event inaugurated a political period known as the transition, the end of which was declared as many times as a new reform to an undemocratic institution was made. Yet none of the reforms fulfilled the democratic expectations of the majority in Chile. It was a period in which the political system operated on the basis of the “democracy of the consensus”—that is, compromise between the remnants of the old regime and a cautious, timid new democratic regime. The non-democratic enclaves in the new state institutions and the unresolved justice for the victims of human rights violations contributed to the sense of incompletion of the transition to democracy.

To understand the limits of democracy in Chile, it is necessary to review how Pinochet and his political heirs constituted a bloc of undemocratic, de facto, and invisible power inside the new democracy. As commander-in-chief, Pinochet ensured the broad participation of the military in the new system and its repressive apparatuses. The Chilean officer class entered into state administrative functions as never before, thus allowing them to consolidate military, political, and business careers. This way Pinochet built within the state apparatus a sizable and powerful force whose loyalty was assured, not least because judicially their fate was attached to their leader’s. The dictatorship also gave birth to a new generation of right-wing politicians who emerged from the middle layers of the administration of the military government. Mostly not trusted by the masses, these elected officials depend in the continuity of a binominal system of elections to ensure a quota of representation. And last, but not least, the rich in general, for obvious reason, and the new rich in particular, whose fortunes derived from running in economic circles closest to Pinochet, and whose fortunes have obscure origins, are an important part of this new power bloc.35

These groups operated in crucial moments to stall democratic reforms and the realization of justice. After the reforms of 1989, there have been numerous attempts to deepen the reforms toward a more democratic constitution, but the logic of the democracy of the consensus has made it impossible to achieve the reforms sought by the democratic majority. Many small reforms were implemented in 1991, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2003, but they did not change the undemocratic character of the constitution. It was not until 2005 that more substantial reforms were achieved: elimination of the designated senators, granting the president the right to remove the commander-in-chief of the army, and giving the president power over the National Security Council. The binomial electoral system, however, remains in place.

Using the modifications that Pinochet had made to the judicial system just before leaving power, the military has been able to impede investigations related to human rights abuses during the dictatorship. In September 1990 and May 1993, Pinochet called the army to their quarters as a way to successfully pressure Aylwin’s government to stop investigating an illegal economic operation involving high-ranking officers and one of his sons. The army was also very active between 1994 and 1995 trying to prevent the jailing of Colonel Manuel Contreras, who was responsible for the assassination of Orlando Letelier.

In 1998, Pinochet was arrested in London by petition of a Spanish judge to answer for the death and torture of Spanish citizens living in Chile during the coup. The right wing and the military mobilized all their forces to free their leader, even threatening the future of the democratic system. Shamefully, the Concertación government gave in to the pressure and became an active part of Pinochet’s defense on the grounds of state immunity.36 After a year Pinochet was released to Chile, where the government promised to initiate judicial actions against the former dictator. But by a combination of the Right’s mobilizations and the government’s cowardice, these were delayed. In November 2006, the government finally indicted Pinochet for the murder of two of Allende’s bodyguards, but it turned out to be too late. Two weeks later Pinochet died in his bed at home. After his death, the judicial procedures against him were cancelled, along with many against his family and associates, too.

Conclusion

The Chilean road to socialism was unacceptable to the Chilean ruling class, who felt its rule under threat; and to the United States, itself in the middle of a fierce imperialist competition with the Soviet Union. It needed to be stopped and made an example of so others would not try that road. In the context of the Cold War, Chile needed to be reconfigured to reestablish the rule of capitalism in Chile, and to conform to the strategic plans of American imperialism—hence the brutality of the coup, and of the terror afterward. The neoliberal paradigm needed the military inferno.
The crisis of the early 1980s opened a door to resist the dictatorship and its neoliberal policies, but the political maneuvers of Pinochet, by skill or sheer terror, partnered with the inability of the opposition to act in a united manner, allowed him to create his own timetable for the installation of the (pseudo) democratic institutions of the constitution of 1980. Pinochet lost the plebiscite intended to extend his rule, but the new political order based on his constitution was legitimized. In that way democratic rule was postponed, and justice denied. The later efforts of the democratic governments would create great expectations among Chilean people for change, but as Tomás Moulian writes about the two first governments of the Concertatión: “All seemed to change, so all could stay the same.”