The Coop Scoop: Jan 6, Democracy and Dictatorship from a Chilean POV
You don't know what you've got till you lose it
anuary 6, 2025
By Marc Cooper
Greetings from Santiago, Chile where we will be spending several weeks visiting family and friends an dodging the dark, wet PNW winter (it’87 degrees here).
I write this on the infamous day of January 6, which MAGA is trying to erase from memory and is doing a pretty good job of it.
In talking to Chileans here and they are quite aware of this infamous date. And even more importantly almost nobody asks how we got here. They know.
They don’t have to. After 150 years of democratic rule, General Augusto Pinochet and his followers ended it all overnight on September 11, 1973. What followed was 17 years of brutal, bloody dictatorship, the abolition of all politics, the shut down of congress and the closure of a free press. Some 3200 people murdered, 1100 disappeared and more than 50,000 tortured.
Chileans have nothing to learn about autocracy nor oligarchy from Americans – the oligarchs stood in line here to pay tribute to the Dictator before, during and after the coup.
But the Chilean people, after being stunned into inaction initially by the coup, regained their confidence, began to defy the dictatorship and eventually, peacefully, defeated it in a plebiscite that was even rigged to extend the dictatorship but failed anyway.
An imperfect democracy immediately followed and after 35 years it still has flaws but generally functions affording full civil liberties and political expression in a pluralistic society. There’s an underlying trauma, but mostly among the elderly. The president of Chile is a 39 year old former student leader who is an authentic Democratic Socialist and his congress is unfortunately mostly center—right. There’s friction but there is still rational political discourse and reasonable civility.
Coming back to January 6… People here understand better than Americans what authoritarian rule can mean but they also know how it can be defeated. Just as it was defeated in the last few years in Brazil, Peru and South Korea.
What Chileans do not fully grasp, and what I am getting asked, is not so much about the nature of authoritarian rule but rather how in the hell is this happening in the United States of America of all places.
Chile is a country and a populace that admires the US, some for the wrong reasons but mostly for very noble ones. The US looms large over this country where scores of English words have crept into the daily Spanish lexicon, where American culture is omni-present, and from where feminist and LGBTQ movements have taken as inspiration and models to a great degree. Even during the socialist period of Salvador Allende, there was great anger against the Nixon administration but not against America and Americans. Hell, this American was the translator to President Allende and nobody was spooked about it.
And because prior to the Pinochet dictatorship, the decades of democracy here made it easy for Chileans to admire American democracy and to learn from it. Chile was, has been and is a pro-American country in the broadest terms.
There’s some discomfort among some, say for the invasion of American fast food, and American TV and cable networks and streamers but there is also a somewhat liberating aspect to this Americana as Chile is so remote from the rest of the world that it previously experienced a sort of radical isolation and monolithic uniformity..
Not anymore. For better or worse, Chile is now integral to a global economy and culture and as many Chileans see the American influence in those currents as a positive rather then a negative. And in a few ways, Chile’s civil society is more advanced than America, with a great emphasis on public health, the absence of AR-15’s in schools, and a certain amount of mutual aid and solidarity, though reduced compared to the Allende period.
And January 6th? What befuddles Chileans the most is that and MAGA and Trunp have defiled one of the iconic countries that so many Chileans looked up to. It’s as if the Statue of Liberty has been gang raped by a mob of hooligans and they just can’t fathom who that happened in a place where they believed the American Dream was still prevalent.
They ask me, and I have no good answer unless they have 4 or 5 hours to spare.
What is a fact in Chile is that after the experience of dictatorship, there is only a small smattering of those who would want it again. Yes, there are conservative and wealthy pockets of the population here that are willing to justify the military dictatorship arguing, falsely, that it was a political necessity to head off socialism. But even 90% of these factions now defend democracy and want no return to death and darkness.
In short, the harsh lessons of anti-democratic rule have been learned – the hard way—here in Chile. It has been been burned and branded into the national soul.
As somebody who escaped the dictatorship eight days after the coup but came back several times to assess and witness the damage, I am heartened by the across the board respect for rule of law and democratic processes that have once again, slowly but surely, taken root.
Unfortunately, it also makes me wonder if Americans are ready to fiercely resist the regime that is incoming or are they naïve and unexperienced enough to be forced to learn it the hard way like they have here in Chile. Will a new found respect and fight for democracy continue after January 20th Or are we going to have to be deprived of it for many years before it once again is appreciated? And it’s a long hard slog to rebuild it once it has been torn down. My fear is that Americans are not taking seriously enough what is now before them and thinking this is no big deal – just as many Chileans did prior to 1973. ++
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I talk d to a friend who’s family fled Cuba, and a neighbor told me how hard things were under Castro. They were rationed and received little. Patients in the hospital had to bring their own sheets, and you think about how all the germs must have traveled in the sheets. We in America have relied upon our system of government for decades, and until Trump it had worked out! We’re looking at dark days ahead, and sadly the maga nuts are too stupid to recognize just how bad it can get. I’m sure if Trump thinks he can he will never leave Washington D.C. He has said he might not leave and his cult want it. I dread what is coming!