The Clearing of the Alameda

This is a video excerpt taken from a "work in progress" associated with a Cinco Metros documentary which focuses on the alternative video movement in Chile during the Pinochet regime. The work in progress coincided with the death of Pinochet, which is why this excerpt is oriented towards what occurred on that day a few hours after the announcement was made at 2:15 PM. The action starts at around 5:30 in front of the La Moneda Palace with the water cannons spraying the congregation of people, most of whom migrated from Plaza Italia during the initial hours after the announcement. At around the same time, the military hospital was flanked by Pinochet supporters who, upon hearing the news, had made their way down to where the ex-dictator had died. The ratio between the number of people at the La Moneda palace and the people in front of the hospital was probably around 8 to 1.

Yerko Yankovic was interviewed on December 11 making the ex-general's death an inevitable topic of discussion. Yerko was the main cameraman for the Teleanalisis project, a clandestine informative program which covered the activities of the opposition during the Pinochet regime. This program, along with any and all programs not submitted for official review, was explicitly prohibited by the 1980 constitution (written by Pinochet himself)and therefore distributed on VHS to underground subscribers which included religious organizations, human rights groups, political factions, and concerned individuals. More than fourty episodes were recorded, edited and distributed between 1984 and 1990. This valuable material has almost never been seen in Chile.

The on-the-street interviews were made at the same location just a few minutes before the order was given to clear the area. They are a testimony of the people who came out to celebrate the end of an era. They are individuals who in some way or another were affected deeply by the almost 20 years of military rule.

The Pinochet footage is part of the Teleanalisis archive and it shows the ex-dictator making a speech at an exclusive club in downtown Santiago. It is towards the end of his rule and he is campaigning for the eventual referendum that will take place the following year. Here, we see that he is determined to retain power for another eight years, until 1997.




January 13, 2007

I was walking across Alameda street a few days ago in Santiago with a couple of friends; in front of us was the Moneda Palace which seemed to burn under the intense mid-day heat, behind us the infamous Bulnes promenade stretching almost a mile all the way down to Parque Almagro.

It had been exactly a month since we had come down from our office located right above the Plaza de la Ciudadania to rejoice along with hundreds the death of a man whose very presence on this earth as a living and breathing human being still held enormous sway over the country, its people, and its politics. Here on the street, hundreds and hundreds of people came out in a spontaneous act of celebration and remembrance. From Plaza Italia most of them came, to cry, to scream, to chant obscenities, to drink a bottle of champagne, to smoke a joint; some even climbed on top of the new Transantiago bus stop structure to the dismay of the more prudent celebrators who insisted that they act more peaceful in case some authority needed an excuse to clear the area and re-establish the flow of traffic down Santiago’s main Alameda. Many of the collective voices we heard rebounding off the walls of these government buildings have a familiar ring. In the eighties, Chileans on these same streets built up an elaborate library of chants and songs that together have come to represent a tradition of street defiance in the face of authoritarian violence and oppression, and perhaps this isn’t the last time we hear them either. On any given day, in fact, the echoes of these voices of the past still resonate across the narrow streets and promenades of this busy Latin American city. Chileans are pretty good at hitting the streets when they are not allowed to. That December 1oth was no exception. "Those who don’t jump are Pinochet!" they would scream and "goodbye carnival, goodbye general!"

Of course a carnival is not exactly what the current concertación government wanted. In fact, a carnival atmosphere is the last thing they wanted. We had already returned to the Cinco Metros "office headquarters" when the order was given to clear the street of the by now thousands of people who had congregated in front of the whitewashed presidential palace. At this point we had a sinificantly enhanced perspective on the action unfolding below. Four heavily armored carabinero vehicles equipped with water cannons as well as two to three tear gas "skunk" vehicles emerged from their hiding places. As these vehicles proceeded to clear the Alameda by spraying everything in sight and invading the air with a poisonous tear gas from hell, an ad hoc reception committee made up of young (and now masked) Chileans greeted their well rehearsed operation with the David vs. Goliath ground assault of sticks, rocks and bottles accompanied by incessant whistling and the tearing down of things. It’s interesting that in these sorts of operations, the police never get out of their vehicles, you never see them. They have the most remarkable ability to abruptly terminate any sort of unauthorized congregation just by spraying everything that moves and then forcing people to migrate as far away as possible (in different directions) from the powerful chemicals that can sometimes linger in the air for days after the clearing.

The dictatorship lasted almost 18 years and during this period, the desire on behalf of the military to prevent people from voicing their discontent in the streets was institutionalized. New war-looking vehicles were designed and built, a new task force was created, riot gear, intricate planning, helicopter support. Needless to say, this institution remains active and healthy to this day and it reflects a continued desire on behalf of government authorities to turn a deaf ear to the collective voices who struggle every day to be heard.

In my opinion, the people who went to these celebrations on that day when Pinochet died from heart failure in a military hospital were trying to break what is practically impossible to break in today’s Chile: The official story. Immediately after Pinochet´s death was announced, the factories of mass opinion were hard at work producing just the right tone for the country’s latest headlines.

A controversial but respected man had just died, an ex-president, a former head of the armed forces even. Never is the word "dictator" used on television to refer to him and certainly not now that he’s dead. The factory continues to produce. The country is divided between those who loved him and those who loathed him. On one side people demand justice for the crimes against humanity NOBODY had the courage to convict him of, on the other side, experts talk about the economic advancements he brought to the country. Who’s right? You decide, we just give you the facts! The reporting continues. It could very well be that the claims of political persecution against Pinochet by judges out to make a name for themselves are true and that Pinochet is as innocent of everything as a new born baby. But you decide.

In the mean time, caller after caller applauds Pinochet and his bravery, how he saved the country from chaos, how he put people to work. How can these people who have come out to drink champaign and to dance around in the streets celebrate the death of a person?

A circus parade funeral is broadcast live on television, on every channel. Illustrations in the newspapers, the itinerary, the horses, the cannons, the flags, the swords, everybody watching. The military absurdity described in detail. If this isn’t the funeral of a respected and honored man, then what the hell is it? If this is not a state funeral, then what is it? If this is not the honorable funeral of a mass murderer, then what is it?


Read more carefully between the lines and observe with precision the flickering of the television. The official story seeps through.

In Chile, the story has yet to be overcome and until we do so, then we are never going to mature enough in order to solve the real problems we have in this country.

There are conversations in Chile that one can overhear in bars or restaurants or even at the dinner table which reflect a sad reality. These voices represent the generous spaces that remain open for fascism, and they should not be considered normal or else we run the risk of repeating history. Mostly out of ignorance but often as a calculated reaction to a truth that would be too costly to admit, the story is disseminated by the mass media in little bits of information which together build the foundations for a limited debate based on senseless logic and ahistorical observations.

The official story is the story of the 1973 coup, a story that talks of sacrifice, honor, and a shared shoulder of responsibility for the unfortunate, but minimal "when compared to to other coups", human collateral damage. Although unfortunate and full of lamentable violations, the coup was a necessary and appropriate response to the threat of a communist takeover and a general state of chaos brought about by Allende´s inability to control his own fanatical supporters and co-conspirators. People got so carried away with their idealistic visions for the country that they began to act irresponsibly (responsibility here defined by the military and the business men which ruled Chile when this story was made up) and since nobody could control these swarming child-like dreamers or the yuppie agitators defending their threatened privilege, the military had to destroy everything the people had built and put democracy on hold for twenty years.

These next twenty years of institutionalized violence are almost never talked about and the only purpose they seem to serve in the collective memory is to separate Allende's Unidad Popular from the new government coalition and to remind people periodically, to the dismay of the right-wing politicians who participated in the military government, just how much better we are today in comparison. In either case, these dark years serve to clear, like a violent shake to the etch-a-sketch (like the clearing of the Alameda), decades of advances made by social movements in the fifties, sixties and seventies. The dictatorship was so successful that it erased history and allowed for a new neoliberal order to take power. The official story, the official lie, tries to hide the true recent history of Chile, an invisible rupture of the social fabric, a flagrant betrayal where one group crushed another with impunity and made itself the legitimate owner of Chile and the bearer of its collective memory.

Whether or not advances have been made since the dictatorship ended in Chile, the ruling coalition government today is just as an accomplice to this lie than the right wing political establishment is. And the effect this has on the collective identity of Chileans shouldn't be underestimated. Instead of reconnecting with the social movements that had gained so much ground by the time Allende was elected, the concertación chose the easy path by endorsing this official lie and effectively erasing history.
They gave Allende a funeral and built a statue of him in front of La Moneda and they thought that this would be enough to feel a connection with a history that was so violently suppressed. But the truth is that building a statue doesn't make up for the slow destruction of Chilean identity and history which has come about thanks to the extreme commercialization and commodicfication of the neoliberal model strengthened by three consecutive concertación governments. Every day, small histories which make up who we are are destroyed by demolition teams and replaced by heinous concrete apartment highrises, all identically sown with fake plastic bushes. Large transnational and national mega holdings invade and rip apart the very fabric of communities, forcing people into poverty or into dead end jobs, which is practically the same thing.

That statue might look like Salvador Allende, but he's not there. Not even close.

And so the order to clear the Alameda isn't even a surprise. It's expected. The masked children of the dictatorship react and play and throw rocks and destroy light posts. Why shouldn't they? They grew up listening to the tanks and the helicopters, they learned to throw rocks at police vehicles that invaded their streets and swallowed their fathers and uncles; they understood that rocks and sticks wouldn't make them dissapear, but they threw them anyway. It's all they had left.