2020 by the Young Diplomats Society

JOINING THE DOTS:
PINOCHET’S LEGACY AND
THE CHILEAN PROTESTS
September 11, 1973, is a day that has been indelibly etched into Chile’s history; a seismic shift in the
country’s leadership that has reverberated throughout time and continues to affect its political
landscape to this day.
Whilst ‘September 11’ has since been eclipsed in notoriety by the al-Qaeda attacks of 2001, Chileans
across the political spectrum are acutely aware of this date with reference to 1973 and the
upheaval that took place. Almost five decades ago, a then 57-year-old military general called
Augusto Pinochet led his US-backed group of officers to depose democratically-elected President
Salvador Allende and seize control of the Chilean government. As bombs shattered the walls of the
Presidential Palace and bricks crumbled to the ground, so too did Allende’s tenure as President.
With gunfire and explosions engulfing the building, Allende committed suicide that day in the very
office he was elected to serve.
What later ensued was the 16-year-rule of President Pinochet, taking power as the military dictator
of the Government Junta of Chile before the country moved back to a democracy in 1990. This
period saw the dictator brutally crackdown against political opponents and Allende-sympathisers,
with approximately 3,200 people being executed or disappearing and 28,000 arrests with cases of
torture.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Pinochet’s reign was the creation of Chile’s “Constitution of
Liberty” created from a 1980 plebiscite held in a climate of intense repression and voter fraud. With
blank votes being counted as “yes” and more votes being counted than there were voters in remote
areas, the 67 per cent majority that allowed for the creation of the constitution has since been
charged with being artificially inflated.
The constitution, which is still in place today, had two key purposes for the Pinochet government:
firstly, to enshrine an economic blueprint for a free-market and neoliberal society protected from
democratic interference and, secondly, to codify these tenets to ensure their longevity beyond
Pinochet’s reign as President. In 1977, Austrian neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek met with
Pinochet to provide his views on the danger of “unlimited democracy” and the importance of
rights, only insofar as to protect economic freedom at the expense of social welfare. Pinochet
named the constitution after Hayek’s major work which was published two decades earlier.
Fast-forward to now and the past 18 months has seen Chile gripped by protests against a range of
social and economic causes; the likes of which the country has not seen for decades. The protests
began in response to a raise in public transport fees in Santiago but quickly evolved to cover the
increased cost of living, privatisation and inequality that had been building since the Constitution
of Liberty was created. Protesters remarked that the demonstrations are “not just about the metro…
[they are] a cumulation of situations and the crisis of the economic model since we returned to
democracy” in 1990. As resentment towards the ruling-class’ grip on wealth and power built, more
than one million protestors across all generations took to the streets in Santiago to demand
sweeping economic and social reform, including replacing the Pinochet-era constitution.