The
Ghost of Pinochet Haunts
The Campaign Against Chavez
By John Pilger
19 August, 2007
John Pilger.com
I
walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago,
Chile. With the southern winter’s wind skating down from the Andes,
it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire,
the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams
echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. “This is where I was,
facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.”
Thousands of “the detained
and the disappeared” were imprisoned in the stadium following
the Washington-backed coup by General Pinochet against the democracy
of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. For the majority people of
Latin America, the abandonados, the infamy and historical lesson of
the first “9/11” have never been forgotten. “In the
Allende years, we had a hope the human spirit would triumph,”
said Roberto.
“But in Latin America
those believing they are born to rule behave with such brutality to
defend their rights, their property, their hold over society that they
approach true fascism. People who are well dressed, whose houses are
full of food, bang pots in the streets in protest as though they don’t
have anything. This is what we had in Chile 36 years ago. This is what
we see in Venezuela today. It is as if Chavez is Allende. It is so evocative
for me.”
In making my film, The War
on Democracy, I sought the help of Chileans like Roberto and his family,
and Sara de Witt who courageously returned with me to the torture chambers
at Villa Grimaldi, which she somehow survived. Together with other Latin
Americans who knew the tyrannies, they bear witness to the pattern and
meaning of the propaganda and lies now aimed at undermining another
epic bid to renew both democracy and freedom on the continent. Ironically,
in Chile, said to be Washington’s “model democracy,”
freedom waits. The constitution, the system of electoral control and
the designer inequality are all Pinochet’s gifts from the grave.
The disinformation that helped
destroy Allende and give rise to Pinochet’s horrors worked the
same in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had the temerity to implement
modest, popular reforms based largely on the English co-operative movement.
In both countries, the CIA funded the leading opposition media, although
they need not have bothered. In Nicaragua, the fake martyrdom of the
“opposition” newspaper La Prensa became a cause for North
America’s leading liberal journalists, who seriously debated whether
a poverty-stricken country of three million peasants posed a “threat”
to the United States.
Ronald Reagan agreed and
declared a state of emergency to combat the monster at the gates. In
Britain, whose Thatcher government “absolutely endorsed”
US policy, the standard censorship by omission applied. In examining
500 articles that dealt with Nicaragua in the early 1980s, the historian
Mark Curtis found an almost universal suppression of the achievements
of the Sandinista government — “remarkable by any standards”
— in favor of the falsehood of “the threat of a communist
takeover”.
The similarities in the campaign
against the phenomenal rise of popular democratic movements today are
striking. Aimed principally at Venezuela, especially Hugo Chavez, the
virulence of the attacks suggests that something exciting is taking
place; and it is. Thousands of poor Venezuelans are seeing a doctor
for the first time in their lives, their children immunized and drinking
clean water.
On July 26 Chavez announced
the construction of fifteen new hospitals; more than 60 public hospitals
are currently being modernized and re-equipped. New universities have
opened their doors to the poor, breaking the privilege of competitive
institutions effectively controlled by a “middle class”
in a country where there is no middle. In Barrio La Linea, Beatrice
Balazo told me her children were the first generation of the poor to
attend a full day’s school and to be given a hot meal and to learn
music, art and dance. “I have seen their confidence blossom like
flowers,” she said. One night in barrio La Vega, in a bare room
beneath a single light bulb, I watched Mavis Mendez, aged 94, learn
to write her own name for the first time.
More than 25,000 communal
councils have been set up in parallel to the old, corrupt local bureaucracies.
Many are spectacles of raw grassroots democracy. Spokespeople are elected,
yet all decisions, ideas and spending have to be approved by a community
assembly. In towns long controlled by oligarchs and their servile media,
this explosion of popular power has begun to change lives in the way
Beatrice described. It is this new confidence of Venezuela’s “invisible
people” that has so enflamed those who live in suburbs called
Country Club. Behind their walls and dogs, they remind me of white South
Africans.
Venezuela’s wild west
media is mostly theirs; 80 percent of broadcasting and almost all the
118 newspaper companies are privately owned. Until recently one television
shock jock liked to call Chavez, who is mixed race, a “monkey”.
Front pages depict the president as Hitler, or as Stalin (the connection
being that both like babies). Among broadcasters crying censorship loudest
are those bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA
in spirit if not name. “We had a deadly weapon, the media,”
said an admiral who was one of the coup plotters in 2002. The television
station, RCTV, never prosecuted for its part in the attempt to overthrow
the elected government, lost only its terrestrial license and is still
broadcasting on satellite and cable.
Yet, as in Nicaragua, the
“treatment” of RCTV has been a cause celebre for those in
Britain and the US affronted by the sheer audacity and popularity of
Chavez, whom they smear as “power crazed” and a “tyrant”.
That he is the authentic product of a popular awakening is suppressed.
Even the description of him as a “radical socialist”, usually
in the pejorative, willfully ignores that he is actually a nationalist
and a social democrat, a label many in the British Labour Party were
once proud to wear.
In Washington, the old Iran-Contra
death squad gang, back in power under Bush, fear the economic bridges
Chavez is building in the region, such as the use of Venezuela’s
oil revenue to end IMF slavery. That he maintains a neoliberal economy
with a growth rate of over 10 percent, allowing the rich to grow richer,
and described by the American Banker magazine as “the envy of
the banking world” is seldom raised as valid criticism of his
limited reforms.
These days, of course, any
true reforms are exotic. And as liberal elites under Blair and Bush
fail to defend their own democracies and basic liberties, they watch
the very concept of democracy as a top-down liberal preserve challenged
on a continent about which Richard Nixon once said “people don’t
give a shit.” However much they play the man, Chavez, their arrogance
cannot accept that the seed of Rousseau’s idea of direct popular
sovereignty may have been planted among the poorest, yet again, and
“the hope of the human spirit”, of which Roberto spoke in
the stadium, has returned.
John Pilger
is an internationally renowned investigative journalist and documentary
filmmaker. His latest film is The War on Democracy. His most recent
book is Freedom Next Time (Bantam/Random House, 2006). Visit John's
website.
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