Approximate reading time: 5 minutes, 30 seconds
The strategic triumph of far-right culture, which extends as far as the eye and assumption can see, has on the other side the incredible paralyzing desolation of those who once, truly, with heart and conviction, believed and risked it. for the most patriotic and popular project that has ever been put forward in this country as a political proposal.
That left that is no longer, that suffocated at some point when reality could no longer enter of its own volition into its proposals and declamations.
And when the previously pruned theories were not enough to understand what was necessary to understand, nor to change what was necessary.
The cultural victory of the right has as invaluable support the cowardice of what was once the left, among others, that which threatened to take power and considered Salvador Allende a reformist who did not think about the revolution.
Today, any of the measures that supported the popular government’s program, including the first forty, would not only not be possible, but would be considered unconstitutional and those who proposed them would be classified as extremists who want to destroy the country, irresponsible, populists, Chavistas. outdated, etc.
Maybe they would be imprisoned.
The historical legacy of the process that gave rise to the most important government in history, if seen from the perspective of the poor, begins to fade on the horizon of forgetfulness and renunciation. If not cowardice.
Salvador Allende and his sacrifice that attempted a moral legacy that would punish criminals, becomes a commonplace that is impossible to dribble for the holders of power, and, to those lost, they refer to his name with a touch of still water, to watery coffee, to history without people behind it: without conviction or passion.
As if it were just a statistical fact or an uncomfortable date.
Salvador Allende and the Popular Government burn in those mouths. Uncomfortable Bothers. It can trigger the irritation of the extreme right, what will they say about the gang. And, why not, the shame of those who had to defend what they shouted with definitive slogans and who cowered at the time of the quiubos. Those who, after becoming millionaires, live comfortably and satisfied in the neighborhoods where only the enemy previously lived.
Others are content to leave a wreath of flowers at the foot of their statue and then wait for it to wither.
Countless books were published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the riot that demolished the superficial bourgeois democracy, but democracy nonetheless, in which the Popular government proposed fundamental changes.
As we have always known, there was no such democratic breakdown: there was betrayal, cowardice, a conspiracy by the CIA and its promptly paid local agents and the inexplicable weakness of those who should have lost the fear of death. And despicable ones that were rented for a handful of dollars a day to create panic.
Researchers, academics, artists, organizations and writers racked their brains trying to discover the best and most original perspective for the original complaint, the novel point of view, the unpublished revelation on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Coup d’état.
What was left of that? Nothing.
It would be important to know where the people, the common people, the losers, the victims of order, were in those days of moving commemoration.
The left owes a debt to the current state in which the hegemony of a cavernous, criminal, cruel, lying and greedy right for wealth at any cost prevails without any opposition: it has not been able to raise a new idea in a world that changes. fast and light, although it is not noticeable here.
The abrupt cultural cut, that interference that separated the enormous combat experience during the dictatorship and what followed, largely explains the state of prostration of the left and the victory of the most extreme extreme right. Few have taken care of that.
And many do away with it.
The fact is that, suddenly, almost as quickly as the enthronement of the neoliberalized left in the form of the Concertación/Nueva Mayoría governments, all the mystique, strength, conviction, decision and experience gained in seventeen years of fighting, let’s call it , with different emphases, weapons and objectives, was lost in some corner of the agreed and hidden surrender.
Where are those who fought every day to end the dictatorship? Where are those leaders who were capable of facing state terrorism, persecution, fear and near death? Where is this culture of resistance and fight against dictatorship?
Are they old or dead? Disenchanted and dejected? Or perhaps struck by an overwhelming nostalgia? Prisoners of the pain of not having been able to?
The loss of the drive that we had at the end of the dictatorship, the organizational experience of daily combat, of the increasingly bold actions that began to corner the enemy who responded with brute force should be investigated as a rarity in history. who still had nothing to respond with. And thousands who showed their willingness to march into combat.
It would have been nice.
The resistance and fight against the dictatorship took on notable forms in its diversity and quality. Along the way, without experience and with more desire than technique, conspiratorial methods, homemade weapons, and forms of social and combative organization were refined. There was an operation that tried to provide the unarmed people with combative means that would balance things.
It could not. Strangely, it couldn’t.
It would have been an example of universal scope. Perhaps that was the stage fright that paralyzed the bureaucrats who had to make the decisions expected by a contingent of heroic, disciplined, brave, long-suffering and experienced combatants who came directly from the people they claimed to represent.
Perhaps you will never know the number of books, records, films, sculptures, documents and infinite intellectual, academic, artistic days and the countless streets and squares of the most diverse countries that are named after Salvador Allende. In unimaginable regions the songs that were sung then in our Alamedas are sung, now with a capital letter.
We know of African countries that adopted social plans that were conceived during and for the Popular Government and developed them with notable success.
Those of us who have heard the Venceremos in remote languages can say of that indescribable emotion.
The solidarity of the people of the world, many say, was broader and more widespread than that displayed by the Vietnam War.
Solidarity countries offered their internationalist help to train professional, political and military cadres, appealing to the legitimate right of peoples subjugated by bloody tyrannies to defend themselves.
In this act of love of the people, the noble Cuba that shared the little it had and never gave leftovers shone with its own light.
The secret agreements that threw that feat overboard from history left the people with empty hands and held high. With the shock of defeat on the surface. With the feeling of failure lodged where the heart is common.
What came next was a farce in which the abandonment of principles, strategies, experiences and a very rich combat culture was the distinctive feature. It was the triumph of the pragmatics of accommodation and cowardice that defined what we experienced on this very day.
Some were in charge of cutting the historical line that connected that hard and heroic time with this soft and shameful time now. And a cultural discontinuity occurred that is almost impossible to reconstruct from the memory of those of us who lived those three years, whose days seemed the first and the last at the same time, and those almost two decades of sacrifices impossible to quantify and value from a position of defeat. and defeated again.
The idea was to quickly forget what had happened.
And restart everything for the new times of accommodation, of the new powerful, of the renegades, of the traitors, turncoats and pigs. Those for whom history ends on the horizon that they are able to see from their podiums and mansions.
Now, among those pretty, well-dressed people, who smell good and who consider poverty a statistical nuisance, Salvador Allende is said in a neutral and dull tone, with a certain shame and fear of what they will say. It is not called Popular Unity. That heroic and tragic era is not talked about with the historical justice it deserves.
Nowhere does the joy of that people on the march resonate.
Children are raised in the middle of a barren history devoid of the color of blood and the aroma of the heroic. Salvador Allende is a statue on which tourists pose and not a faith, a heart and a hope. The one that made us say something impossible today: I believed, I tried.
I was there.
Except for the immoral and scoundrels who take advantage of those who truly suffered torture and imprisonment, the miserable reparations serve more as a reminder of how expensive it is to fight. It seems that that is the idea in amount and humiliation.
What links the daily ardor of the fight against the dictatorship with this time of cowards and well-off?
Only the memory of the nostalgic old people and the hearts of the Allende people who do not forget and raise their children by telling them stories in which there once was a town and a president…
The story continues to be told by those who won and those who let themselves win. The losers are still biding their time.
Ricardo Candia Cares