Chile has commemorated the 53 years since the Coup d’État under the mandate of the only president since the return to democracy who voted in favor of Augusto Pinochet continuing in power in the 1988 plebiscite: José Antonio Kast. Unlike his predecessors – including Sebastián Piñera, from the center-right – he decided not to hold any official event and to go to a schedule in the south. Criticized by the left, the president stated that, “just as I cannot erase history, I also cannot ask our compatriots to be condemned by our history and unable to look to the future.” From the opposition political side, they honored from early morning the memory of the socialist Salvador Allende, who died at La Moneda on September 11, 1973, and the victims of the dictatorship. In front of the tomb of the former president overthrown by the military, Gabriel Boric slipped a reproach to his successor in the Government House: “We do not need official ceremonies to remember history.”
At the ceremony organized by the Salvador Allende Foundation and the left-wing political parties under the slogan “Democracy Always,” leaders, former authorities, and dozens of students arrived. Most of those present held red carnations, a symbol of the labor and socialist movement, which they placed at the feet of the Allende family mausoleum. “In times when memory is attempted to be silenced, when in the end there are those who have always believed and who today again reaffirm that the best thing is to turn the page and forget, there is a people who will always say no to that,” Boric said in front of more than a hundred people. In the front row was former senator Isabel Allende, daughter of the former president, accompanied by other family members, such as Maya Fernandez, Allende’s granddaughter and former Minister of National Defense in Boric’s government.
Former senator Allende acknowledged that she found it “a bit strange” that the Executive did not hold an official event to commemorate September 11, as democratic tradition dictates. “On one hand, it is regrettable, because always, including Piñera, they have been able to commemorate all the people who lost their lives due to the break in democracy, of its institutions,” she said. Kast’s decision “reflects something that, at least in the campaign, he did not make present, but we have all heard,” she stated. And she added: “Clearly he is a defender of Pinochet, of the dictatorship, and he does not have the sensitivity to understand what the loss of human rights, lives, meant in our country, and that nothing, never, can justify having bombed La Moneda, having tortured, having persecuted, having exiled, having burned, having made disappear.”
Boric’s former Interior Minister, Carolina Tohá, daughter of José Tohá, Allende’s minister and murdered during the dictatorship, called the current president’s silence “a lack of respect” and a “historical mistake.” “I think the problem with the president is that he has a view of that date that contradicts everything we have built since the return to democracy. We have remembered it as a dark date in our history, where what was done was to destroy democracy and destroy institutions,” she assured.
In the municipality of Corral, in Valdivia, 850 kilometers south of Santiago, Kast was asked about his public position regarding the coup d’état. In some presidential campaign, the founder of the Republican Party even said that if Pinochet were alive he would vote for him, a language he moderated in his third – and successful – attempt to reach La Moneda. “Today I am President of the Republic and I have to watch over and care for those public policies that improve the quality of life of all Chileans,” he responded. Regarding the absence of a public commemorative event on September 11, he stated that “there is no better tribute to the homeland than facing the urgencies of our compatriots. That is the best tribute we can pay to Chile.”
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While the first tributes to Allende were taking place in the morning, Republican Party deputy Luis Fernando Sánchez stated on radio Cooperativa that September 11 is “a date that divides us as Chileans.” “There will be people who have detained disappeared relatives; I, personally, have relatives who were victims of agrarian reform. So, we all have stories in this, and each person’s position is influenced by their history,” he pointed out. Agriculture Minister Jaime Campos, from the Radical Party, said on Radio Agricultura that, as a government, “on this occasion we have nothing to commemorate,” and listed a series of dates that, according to him, divide Chileans. “What do we have to commemorate? On the contrary, what we have to do here is generate conditions of national unity to be able to keep moving forward, which is the purpose that drives President Kast’s government,” he stated.
At noon, the presidents of the left-wing parties – from the Communist Party to the Christian Democracy – accompanied Allende’s family members on a walk that began at Alameda with Morandé to the Plaza de la Constitución, where the monument to the deceased socialist president stands. The walk included a stop at the emblematic door of the presidential palace at Morandé 80, through which Allende’s body was taken out and then sealed by the regime. Around the former president’s monument, sisters, nieces, and granddaughters of detained disappeared gathered to leave their carnations. Guacolda Díaz, 80 years old, is the sister of Lenin Díaz Silva, detained on May 9, 1976, and taken to the torture center Villa Grimaldi: “I have come every year since the return to democracy,” she says, while holding a black and white photo of her relative.
The president of the Socialist Party, Paulina Vodanovic, encouraged those present to shout loudly so that it could be heard “all the way to Valdivia,” “you can feel it, you can feel it, Allende is present.” “There is no corner of Chile where the president can go to hide. All over Chile and the world today the life of a great man is commemorated. A man who was written in history for his consistency, for the democratic struggle to make Chile a country where social justice flourished, where there was equality,” she said in front of La Moneda, recalling the bombing carried out by the military just over half a century ago.
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