At 11:58 a.m. this Monday, September 11, in the middle of the commemorative event for the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état, a minute of silence was held in the square in front of the Presidential Palace of Chile. At that exact time, half a century ago, the Armed Forces bombed La Moneda, beginning the 17 years of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Among the thousand guests were relatives of the disappeared, victims of torture and national and international authorities. The event was marked by the figure of Salvador Allende, who committed suicide that fateful day; for the Search Plan for the more than a thousand missing persons presented by the Government of left-wing President Gabriel Boric and for the need for all political forces to commit to never again replacing democracy. The right left the ceremony.
After the solemn minute of silence, a chant broke out among the guests and the hundreds of Popular Unity sympathizers who gathered outside: “Comrade Salvador Allende! Present, now and always! Former Chilean socialist presidents Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet attended the ceremony, who was applauded every time she was named. In addition, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro; that of Bolivia, Luis Arce; that of Uruguay, Luis Calle; and that of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, among other authorities. Foreign personalities also attended, such as the Argentine activist Estela de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo association; the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón; and the former American guitarist of Rage Against The Machine, Tom Morello, who remembered the Chilean singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, murdered with blows and bullets by the dictatorship in 1983. “The spirit of Víctor Jara lives in every chord I play,” he said.
Representing the family of the ousted socialist leader, Senator Isabel Allende offered a speech in which she recalled the last meeting with her father and his legacy: “Social fighter and interpreter of the desires for social justice, in a decades-long political career, “which ended consistently and with dignity a few meters from here.” In the front row, the Ministers of Defense, Maya Fernández, Allende’s granddaughter, were excited; and the Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, daughter of Allende’s Minister of the Interior and Defense José Tohá, assassinated in 1974.
The senator also criticized the voices that hold the Allende Government responsible for the democratic breakdown. ”We have seen with pain, with concern, that historical revisionism is promoted. An attempt has been made to reverse the responsibilities of the tragedy that we experienced in the last 17 darkest years in our history (…) The true culprits are those who broke the institutions, bombed this palace, persecuted, tortured, murdered and disappeared thousands of Chileans ”.
By September 11, 1973, many of us were probably not alive. However, what happened 50 years ago and lasted during 17 years of dictatorship, is a wound that has not completely healed. pic.twitter.com/1ZGppi7snI
— Gabriel Boric Font (@GabrielBoric) September 11, 2023
On stage, mothers and sisters of victims of forced disappearance, who are part of the Group of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees, performed a piece from the Cueca alone, the traditional Chilean dance as a couple. Another emotional moment was when the Chilean poet Elvira Hernández recited: “They threw them into the sea and they did not fall into the sea. “They fell on us.” It is a reference to what happened during the dictatorship.
Chile has reached this commemoration in a climate of strong political polarization and without consensus on September 11, 1973. In recent months, part of the hardest right has claimed the figure of Pinochet and justified the coup, ensuring that it was “inevitable” because democracy was already broken in Allende’s last period. “The coup d’état cannot be separated from what came after. From the moment of the coup d’état, human rights were violated,” President Boric stated in his speech. “We rebel when they tell us that there was no other alternative. Of course there was another alternative! And tomorrow when we experience another crisis, there will always be another alternative that involves more democracy and not less,” he added.
Boric highlighted the former presidents of Chile, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei and the socialists Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet, who were part of the Concertación, a conglomerate that governed between 1990 and 2010, and Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014 and 2018-2022), of the traditional right, who signed the Santiago Commitment for the protection of democracy and human rights.
It is an agreement to which foreign leaders or heads of state also adhered, including Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil; Guillermo Lasso from Ecuador; Pedro Sánchez of Spain; Michael D. Higgins of Ireland; Luis Abinader from the Dominican Republic; Gustavo de Petro from Colombia and Andrés Manuel López Obrado from Mexico, as well as the president of the Federal Council of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the prime minister of Portugal António Costa. “It is in diversity and among those who think differently that we can build a better society.” “I also dare, in this commemoration, to reinforce the learning and reflection of progressive and left-wing forces about our own processes. Democracy is the only way to move towards a more just and humane society and is, therefore, an end in itself, not merely instrumental, and political violence does not fit within it,” Boric noted.
Allende’s shoes
On 80 Morandé Street, specifically where the door of the presidential palace is where the body of President Allende was taken, Boric inaugurated on Saturday the 10th an installation titled The walk of a democratwhich displays through a glass case the shoes that the socialist leader was wearing on the day of the coup d’état.
During the commemoration, dozens of his supporters, most with red carnations in their hands, lined up to be photographed with Allende’s shoes. The place, furthermore, is especially symbolic and sad and, this September 11, a canvas with the faces of his closest collaborators, who accompanied him in La Moneda while the bombing was happening, was spread at Morandé 80.
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