The Chilean tsunami | Opinion

The Piñera regime -I insist on the "regime" because a government that represses with the brutality that everyone has seen can not be considered democratic- It faces the most serious popular threat that a government has ever faced since the overthrow of Popular Unity on September 11, 1973.. The ridiculous official explanations do not convince even those who disseminate them; We hear complaints about the vandalism of protesters, their criminal contempt for private property, or for peace and quiet, not to mention oblique allusions to the murderous influence of the "castro-madurismo" in triggering protests. have resulted in the proclamation of "state of emergency" by La Moneda, an absurd and fallacious argument previously presented by the corrupt who now governs Ecuador and who has totally denied the facts.

The official stupor and that of the sectors of the opposition in solidarity with the politico-economic model inherited from the dictatorship are totally unfounded, with the exception of the anachronism of the opulent ruling party (one of the best paid in the world), its incurable blindness or its complete isolation from the conditions under which millions of Chileans live or survive. For an informed eye, if there is anything surprising, it is the effectiveness of the propaganda that for decades has convinced his and others of the excellent virtues of the Chilean model. This has been praised until tired by the leading publicists of the empire in these latitudes: political scientists and academics of good thought, operators and lobbyists disguised as journalists, or colonial intellectuals, such as Mario Vargas Llosa, who in a recent article, mercilessly whipped the "existing or emerging populisms that disturb the region while exalting the progress" in leaps and bounds "of Chile.

This country is for happy thinkers the culmination of a dual transit: from dictatorship to democracy and from interventionist economics to the market economy. The first is not true, the second is, with an aggravating factor: in very few countries, capitalism has devastated fundamental human rights, as in Chileby turning them into expensive goods reserved for a minority. Water, health, education, social security, transportation, housing, mineral wealth, forests and the marine coast were a voracious value by the friends of the regime, under the dictatorship of Pinochet and with a new impetus in the so-called "democracy" that has come to him. This cruel and inhuman market fundamentalism has led Chile to become the most indebted country of households in Latin America.as a result of the aforementioned infinite privatization, which obliges Chileans to pay everything and to borrow indefinitely with money expropriated from their salaries and wages by the financial piranhas who manage the pension funds. According to a study by Fundación Sol, "a recent World Bank study indicates that Chile and Rwanda are among the countries most affected by poverty." the eight most unequal countries in the world. Finally, let us suppose that ECLAC found in its latest study on the social question in Latin America that The wealthiest Chile (1%) spends 26.5% of the national income, while 50% of the poorest households have only 2.1%. Is this the model?

In summary: In Chile, an explosive synthesis of a free market without anesthesia and a totally delegitimized democracy is synthesized, which retains only its name. This has degenerated into a plutocracy that, a few days ago – but not now – was measured by the resignation, demoralization and apathy of citizens, cleverly deceived by the media oligarchy of the ruling class.

A warning sign of social unrest was that more than half of the population (53.3%) of voting age did not even bother to go to the polls in the first round of voting. Presidential election of 2017. Voting abstention has been reduced to 51%. Sebastián Piñera was elected with only 26.4% of registered voters. In simple terms, only one in four citizens felt represented by him. Today this figure should be quite low and in a climate where everywhere neoliberalism is beset by social manifestations. Time has changed, not only in Latin America. Their false promises are no longer credible and people rebel: some, as in Argentina, expel their spokesmen from the government through the electoral mechanism, others try with their huge mobilizations – Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras – to put an end to an incredibly unfair, inhuman and predatory project. This is true: there is an "end of cycle" in the region. But not, as some have postulated, that of progressivism but that of neoliberalism, which can only be maintained for a long time, by the force of brutal repressions.