My only lasting memories as a young child are associated with the military coup in Chile in 1973. I remember a mixed collection of facts, experiences and emotions. All of them have in common a sense of loss, of being denied a happiness which could have been.
This year marks 50 years since the military coup and bloody crushing of the Chilean workers’ movement in September 1973, and the beginning of the Pinochet dictatorship, which lasted until 1990. The dress rehearsal for the 11 September coup happened on 29 June and is often referred to as the Tanquetazo (for the military’s use of tanks).
1973 in Chile was a year of hope and tragedy. Hope because one of the world’s best organised and most militant working classes was engaged in a fierce class war, and tragedy because it lost. Fifty years have now passed since the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973, which established a seventeen-year military dictatorship. The lessons of the period remain important.
In the preface to his History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote that the “most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events”. Chile in the early 1970s was a society embroiled in such a process, as workers fought with growing strength and self-confidence to build a new society under—and at many points, in spite of—Socialist Party President Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity ruling coalition.
More than a million people living in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, have been unable to access safe drinking water for the last two months as the country faces its biggest drought in 75 years. All, however, are not suffering equally; corporations’ access to and usage of fresh water is increasing.
Thousands demonstrated in Jujuy province, north-west Argentina, in late June in response to the government of Governor Gerardo Morales passing a constitutional change that removes basic democratic rights.