Chile, which many in the Dissident Right uphold as one of the world’s few conservative and libertarian success stories, has descended once again into social and political chaos because of Latin America’s ancient bête noire: left-wing populism.

Beginning in October 2019, hundreds of thousands of Chilean protesters took to the streets and engaged in battles with the Chilean Army and police services. Some of these scenes are reminiscent of the bad old days under the Marxist Salvador Allende just before the September 1973 coup. For readers in North America and Europe, the current chaos in Chile should remind them of Antifa and their many violent protests since the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. Indeed, since the protests began, black-masked thugs, most of whom are supporters either the Communist Party of Chile (PCC) or one of the other far-left parties currently organizing the protests, have taken to destroying Chile’s churches and cathedrals. As part of their protests over income inequality, rioters have decapitated statues of Jesus, smashed statues of the Virgin Mary, and have looted and burned some of Chile’s most beautiful houses of worship, including in Santiago’s Plaza Italia.[1]

While the severity of the protests has weakened since November, this is in part because the center-right government of President Sebastián Piñera agreed to write a new constitution for the country this year.[2] Because of this decision, 2020 looks to be a conflict-heavy year for the South American nation, as all of its left-wing parties are likely to agitate for sweeping reforms and more “rights” enshrined in the new constitution.

The Riots: A Tale of Overreaction

How did it come to this? How did Chile, the most stable and prosperous nation in Latin America, suddenly erupt in massive protests? The immediate answer is a minor increase in public transportation fares. The more comprehensive answer is that despite the success of Augusto Pinochet’s regime, Chile, like its mother nation Spain during the reign of General Francisco Franco, failed to eradicate Marxism and left-wing dogma from its national conscience. Thanks to the continued employment of left-wing high school and college teachers, and to liberal scribes in the Hispanophone and Anglophone worlds, who for so long have focused on the repressions of the Pinochet era without mentioning the horrors of Allende’s government, socialist pipe dreams continue to live on and breathe new life into failed social engineering experiments.

Along with the underreported demographic changes in Chile (more on this later), Chile’s current predicament can be blamed on complacency and the poison that exists at the center of all successful societies. Namely, during prolonged periods of peace and prosperity, soft-handed malcontents will always rise and demand more for their ilk out of a combination of anger, class resentment, and religious fervor (i.e. the false religion of historical materialism).

According to Isidora Cepeda Beccar, one of the leaders of the protests (although she likes to claim that the protests are leaderless), the Chilean government’s price increase on public transportation was “not a large amount.” In fact, the price increase was 30 Chilean pesos, or about 4 US cents.[3] Beccar also admitted to a interview for Jacobin that the high school students who began protesting the increases were not effected by the new price because they have their own, separate fees:

“It started, in the first instance, because the government increased public transport fares. In Chile, there is a Panel of Public Transport Experts in charge of defining these readjustments. They argued that this particular rise was due to the rise in the price of oil, the variation in the consumer price index, and other factors, such as the price of the dollar. So they increased prices thirty pesos, which is not a large amount and the government didn’t expect protests. But students organized and started to encourage people not to pay. It was high school students, actually, who have their own fares, so the increase didn’t impact them at all.”[4]

Despite being untouched by the price hikes, high school students in Santiago began jumping turnstiles and encouraging others to do so too. (Such a phenomenon recently made news in the US, with cities like New York promising to cut down on fare evaders, who cost the city $215 million in 2018.[5]) Santiago’s wild youth gave a patina of “social justice” to their delinquency by claiming that they were doing it for their parents and working class Chileans who spend hours on buses and trains in order to go back and forth from work.[6] From this minor headache, most of Santiago descended into chaos as protesters managed to shut down the public transportation system and occupy major thoroughfares in the city.

Economic Standing

According to the Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom, the Chilean economy is not bad at all. Chile ranked 18th in the world in terms of economic freedom and vitality. Chile’s score of 75.4 is just behind the United States’ 76.8. The World Bank also shows good numbers for Chile, although they do mention that the GDP fell during the first half of 2019. Another number to note is that in 2018, Chile was at the top of Latin America in terms of yearly per capita income. For the average Chilean, annual incomes were at $25,222, which was $1,692 higher than second-place Uruguay.[6] Also in 2018, Chile had an income inequality coefficient of 46.6, which meant that it had less economic inequality than Brazil (53.3), Colombia (50.8), and Venezuela (46.9), but more income inequality than Peru (43.3), Argentina (41.2), and Uruguay (39.5).[6] By all accounts, Chile is a successful and modern economy.

Chile’s success and how it achieved that success is the root of the current problem. During a conversation with Stefan Molyneux, a Chilean caller said that since 1990, when Pinochet voluntarily stepped down from office following a plebiscite in 1988, a succession of center-left and social democratic governments in Chile have increased the size of the central government and expanded “secondary rights,” otherwise known as false rights like the “right” to free education or affordable housing. The caller also admitted that Chile’s public education remains in the hands of credentialed Marxists, which means that new generations of young radicals are churned out continually.

But truth be told, the riots in Chile are all about forever severing ties with the legacy of the Pinochet government. Jacobin and other left-wing outlets have repeatedly admitted that the protests are about creating “a laboratory of popular democracy” wherein all ties to military junta that came to power in 1973 are severed.[7] This why the protesters have demanded the revocation of the Constitution of 1980, which was written by the Pinochet government and put in place protections for the free market. The 1980 Constitution, which replaced the centralist 1925 Constitution, is based on the US Constitution and includes the right for Chileans to invest their public pensions in private accounts and the right to send their children to private schools.[2]

Over the years, various amendments have been added to the constitution in order to appease left-wing populism, which has been a plague in Latin America since the age of Bolivar. The erosion of the “Chilean miracle” has been the objective of the Chilean left since 1973, and if the protesters get a victory this year when the new constitution is drafted, then one may expect Chile’s chief legal document to include the “Four Central Points” of the PCC:

“for the government to withdraw its market-based privatized pension reform, re-implement a previous tax reform, reducing the workweek to 40 hours, and changing the country’s constitution through a constituent assembly.”[8]

The Four Central Points are the same pablum that every socialist and Marxist movement in the West demands. However, what makes the Chilean story different is that the left is rioting against success and trying to change its most embarrassing defeat.

The Ghosts of Franco and Pinochet

The Spanish left has a long memory. Not long after the new socialist coalition government came to power in Madrid, they decided to dig up the long-dead corpse of General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen (a massive grave for the Nationalist dead of the Spanish Civil War) and move it to a private cemetery. The Socialist Party (PSOE) praised their own decision as a way to heal the divisions stemming from that conflict. The truth is that Spain’s left punished Franco from the grave for winning the war, destroying the Second Spanish Republic and its anarcho-communist supporters, and stopping the popular destruction of Catholic shrines, churches, and organizations.[9]

Franco, like the later Pinochet, also oversaw the overhaul of Spain’s economy. Prior to the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Spain was considered a medieval backwater. Under Franco, Spain posted a $159 million surplus in its foreign exchange account in 1959.[9] Franco modernized the Spanish economy and, in the 1960s, agreed to certain social liberalization programs. This, along with the facts that France gave asylum to Spanish Republicans and used anarchist militiamen to liberate Paris in 1944, earned them social credit points with the already pro-Republican Anglo-American allies. This helped the Spanish left to seize power within a year of Franco’s death in 1975.

Despite all condemnations of Franco and Pinochet as genocidal tyrants, their regimes did not even come close to the extermination reigns of left-wing monsters like Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot. And like Franco, Pinochet took a declining economy and made it robust, thereby leaving behind a legacy of liberty and economic advancement. Such a legacy is tenuous, however. Pinochet’s accomplishments have been outlined in great detail in this publication before[10,11], so there is no reason to return them in-depth here. Suffice it to say that, after sixteen years of Pinochet’s rule, 90 percent of Chilean homes had inside bathrooms where, in 1970, only 50 percent of the population enjoyed such luxury.[12] Pinochet’s government put Chile on a sound economic footing, and when all was said and done, he left behind a country with a 6.4 percent poverty rate, which is unheard of in most of Latin America.[13] This will only change for the worse if the current leftist protests turn into a legal coup in Chile.

For Chile’s socialists and Marxists, the riots of 2019 are all about exorcising the ghost of Pinochet – his victory against Allende in 1973 and his success in the 1970s and 1980s. The Chilean left hates Pinochet so much that they are pursuing the failed ideals of Castro’s Cuba and the Jacobins of the French Revolution in order to publicly spit on his bones. The only hope for liberty in Chile right now is a counter-coup. If that fails, then the Chilean people have to bank on President Piñera and his Chile Vamos party finding a spine, which is unlikely.

Future Prospects

What is to be done in Chile? The most obvious answer is for the government to refuse to give in to the demands of the unhinged left. It is too late for turning back now, as Santiago has already promised its citizens a new constitution in 2020. Hopefully there are enough conservative and centrist Chilean voters to turn the tide against Jacobin and atheistic democracy of the protesters, and recent trends in South America, from the removal of the Marxist government of Evo Morales in Bolivia[14] to the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, show that this could be case.

Chile’s existential problem is its rapidly changing demographics. Chile, long a castizo and mestizo nation, may soon be a multicultural one. Thousands of Haitians immigrate to Chile every year. This may seem like a small number, but it means that Chile is more African today than at any time since it achieved independence from Spain in 1818.[15] By 2017, Chile had a foreign-born population of 1,119,267.[16,17] Most of these immigrants are from Chile’s neighbors, with Peruvians making up the largest at 23.8 percent.[16,17]

As in the United States, the rapid demographic changes in Chile (which were never approved by voters) have led to the rise of multiculturalism and left-wing politicians who castigate Chile’s overwhelmingly white middle and upper classes for everything wrong in the country. Racial hectoring coupled with the “demon of democracy,” otherwise known as the growth of centralization, identity politics, and the steady elimination of liberty[18], will only serve to further destabilize Latin America’s most stable state. If this destabilization continues apace, which will happen so long as the myth of multiculturalism remains unchallenged and unquestioned in popular public forum, then it will behoove Chileans to find another Pinochet.

References

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