If it depends on the president of Chile, José Antonio Kast, the South American country must live this September 11th, a date that marks 53 years since the military coup that assassinated former president Salvador Allende, without any reference to the historical milestone.
In recent days, the opposition had been pushing for some gesture from the Chilean government regarding the date, but Kast maintained his decision not to hold an official ceremony. It is the first time in the history of Chilean democracy — rescued in 1990 after 17 years of Augusto Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship — that the head of the Executive has not held a ceremony in remembrance of the coup. The Chilean president spends the day in the Los Ríos region, on government activities.
“Kast was elected despite everyone knowing his past and, somehow, the misfortune happened precisely in his election. This is yet another consequence of the fact that Chile accepted a leader of this nature”, assesses Chilean journalist Andrés Almeida, historian and general editor of the magazine Interferencewho spoke with the Brazil in fact about the date.
Over the past few days, parliamentarians such as Daniela Serrano, leader of the Communist Party in the Legislature, have warned of the risks of presidential inaction. “We believe that this sends a terrible message from the President of the Republic. These celebrations represent a crucial opportunity for the Chilean State to reaffirm its commitment to the search for truth, justice and guarantees of non-repetition”, accused Serrano.
Meanwhile, human rights organizations, unions and student groups decided to march in the streets of cities like Santiago and Antofagasta, which had already been done since last weekend. Last Sunday (6), for example, a walk towards the Central Cemetery of Santiago, where Allende’s body is buried, faced repression from the Chilean police forces, known as carabineros.
Even though it has experienced a more precarious democratic transition process than those undertaken by countries like Argentina and Uruguay, Chile does not tend to ignore September 11th. Over the decades, more than 1,500 agents of the dictatorship have been prosecuted for crimes committed during Pinochet’s time. The former dictator himself was arrested in England, by decision of the Spanish Court. Upon returning to Chile, Pinochet was prosecuted, but ended up dying in 2006 without being convicted.
Still in the early 1990s, Patricio Aylwin promoted the official burial with state honors for Allende, in one of the first most significant gestures of recognition of the memory of the socialist leader murdered in the heart of La Moneda Palace by coup forces. Michelle Bachelet, who presided over Chile on two occasions (2006 to 2010 and 2014 to 2018) and was a victim of bad times, expanded the ceremony, making the date an annual opportunity to demand historical reparations.
Even Sebastián Piñera (2010 to 2014 and 2018 to 2022), of the center right, even promoted ceremonies on the date and demanded, as president, the strengthening of Chilean democracy. Gabriel Boric, Kast’s predecessor, signed, in 2023, alongside other former presidents, a document entitled “Commitment to Democracy”, at the La Moneda Palace, aimed at preserving and protecting “civilizing principles from authoritarian threats, intolerance and contempt for the opinion of others”.
Those killed, disappeared and tortured by Pinochet’s dictatorship are numbered in the thousands. According to official data, around 3,200 Chileans were killed by state agents, while almost 40,000 were tortured and imprisoned for political reasons. Data from family groups indicate that the total number of dead, missing, tortured and imprisoned exceeds 100 thousand.
Kast-style nostalgia
Chile illustrates well how an adequate treatment of the issue of memory, truth and justice can prevent the return of authoritarian figures, while, on the other hand, the relativization of the horrors of the dictatorship brings problems to the consolidation of democracy. Until 1998, eight years after the end of the dictatorship, September 11th was treated in the country as a holiday of “celebration” of the military coup, and not of regret or condemnation.
In the Latin American country, the most sensitive nuance is in the economic sphere. This happens because Chile still maintains a good part of the regime’s economic pillars, at that time a kind of rehearsal of the neoliberal model propagated by names like Margaret Thatcher (former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) and Ronald Reagan (former President of the United States). Widespread dissatisfaction with the inequalities produced by the economic structure initiated by Pinochet led to the pop social of 2019.
Even with the end of the dictatorship, Chile remained on the horizon the need for commercial openness and a structure of fiscal rigor that limited and continues to limit the development of social policies. Sectors such as social security, health and education continue to be mostly dominated by private agents. In the economic field, memory does not favor the Pinochet period. Over the years, studies have pointed to the fact that the dictatorial period was marked by the deterioration of some social indicators: average unemployment in the country was 14%, between 1975 and 1981, while the salary drop was 75%, compared to the beginning of the 1970s.
The economic argument also falls apart when comparing the periods before and after Pinochet’s stay at Palácio De la Moneda. According to a survey by the Maddison Project Database, the years of the dictatorship recorded average GDP growth per capita of 1.74% per year. In the sixteen years before the dictator, between 1957 and 1972, average growth, however, was 2% per year. In the following sixteen years (i.e. between 1991 and 2006), growth was 4.3% per year.
Carlos Alberto Almeida, journalist founder of Telesurhighlights that the neoliberalism inaugurated during the Chilean dictatorship left such profound marks on the country’s society that, “even when the left returns to government, it still ends up suffering from a certain amount of intimidation”. “There is no way out for Chile within neoliberalism. It will only worsen the social crisis more and more”, he explains, in conversation with the Brazil in fact.
For Kast, the story doesn’t quite tell itself like that. Even before taking power, at the beginning of 2025, he was responsible for appointing two figures close to the former dictator: Fernando Rabat, who took over the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, and Fernando Barros, who became responsible for the Ministry of Defense. Rabat was part of the legal team that defended Pinochet against accusations of covering up the disappearance of 119 opponents, in the known “Operation Colombo”; while Barros was the former dictator’s spokesman and personal lawyer while Pinochet was imprisoned in London between 1998 and 2000.
The web of connections between Kast and Pinochet is long. During the plebiscite that served to decide whether or not to continue the regime, in 1988, Kast was one of the names to campaign for Pinochet’s continuity. The current president’s brother, Miguel Kast, became minister and president of the Chilean Central Bank during times of authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the president’s father, Michael Kast, a German who left his home country to try a life in Chile, was a member of the Nazi party in the early 1940s, the height of Hitler’s power in Germany. José Antonio Kast, however, says that his father was forcibly recruited by the German Army during the Second World War and denies that Michael was a supporter of Nazism.
The delicate place of opposition
Encouraged by Kast’s arrival in power, Chilean parliamentarians from the National Libertarian Party presented a bill that could create a “Museum of Truth” in the country, contradicting the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. The party, led by far-right deputy Johannes Kaiser, argues that the initiative aims to rescue the memory of opponents of the Popular Unity government, the coalition that governed Chile before the 1973 coup. For enthusiasts of the project, the Allende period would have been marked by strong political and economic instability, and the official memory of the political events of the early 1970s would be incomplete.
Kast’s rise to power and his omission regarding September 11th could create the opportunity for the opposition to intensify its speech of rejection of the current situation of power in Chile. But Chile’s progressive camp is still reeling from last year’s electoral result. According to Andrés Almeida, “it is not possible to explain Kast and everything that is happening without considering the weakness of the Chilean opposition, the left and the Gabriel Boric government, which, in some way, allowed Kast’s election”.
“Today, the Chilean left is deeply divided around two axes. One of them seeks to overcome neoliberalism; the other is very comfortable with it”, he summarizes. “Kast’s stance in relation to September 11th allows the left to close ranks, but it is a much more rearguard position”, he ponders.
Driven by sectors nostalgic for authoritarianism, Kast believes that now is the time to make use of undemocratic ideas to deal with organized crime. Recently, the president sent Congress a mega-reform in the field of security, which aims to create a lasting state of exception, dispensing with Congressional authorization. The initiative faces resistance even from wings of the government itself.
“Every period of time, a popular demand for authoritarianism emerges in Chile. In Kast’s case, this is caused by the commotion caused by the advance of organized crime, which is a real issue. The country reacts, in some way, with a kind of authoritarian impulse or reflex to what it considers a threat, which is organized crime. Organized crime is providing Chile with the contextual element that activates this authoritarian gene. The right has managed to transform the issue of security into a national priority and, in addition, transform security into an agenda authoritarian. But the two things are not the same thing”, reflects Andrés Almeida.
For the Chilean journalist, Kast would be “basically presenting a legal dictatorship”. This would guarantee the government the chance, “instead of persecuting drug traffickers, to end up persecuting political opponents”. The expert, however, makes a reservation. “The country also has a certain rationality. Just as it has an authoritarian gene, it also has aspects that limit it and that have been present since the first moments of Chile’s history. There is a liberal right that also fears authoritarianism for a very simple reason: if today President Kast can adopt dictatorial measures within the logic of a legal dictatorship, there is no guarantee that tomorrow there will not be an extremely radical left-wing government that will do the same thing and that these impulses will end up harming right-wing sectors”, he analyzes.
On the topic, Carlos Alberto Almeida defines the Chilean government’s security platform as a “politics of terror”. “It is a policy of intimidating society and protesters, of repression against students, against youth, and there is still an alliance to explore with Donald Trump”, he contextualizes. Looking ahead, the horizon appears tortuous, but the correlation of forces is always dynamic. “There is disappointment, but History is recovering and nourishing itself. Because, even in the face of disappointments, History cannot stop.”
Source: www.brasildefato.com.br
