The first part of this article can be read here.
In the lead-up to the December 2021 presidential run-offs the gamut of opposition parties, including the despised traditional center-left bloc that was annihilated in the first round, came together in pushing a vote for Gabriel Boric, the presidential candidate of Apruebo Dignidad, as the only means of stopping the far right and its calls for authoritarian rule.
This sounding of the alarm bells and rallying around Boric was summed up by El Clarín:
A united left is necessary for Boric to become president and subsequently to govern the country. Because ending neoliberalism requires challenging powerful forces: national and foreign economic groups, neoliberal economists, the media duopoly, and the traditional right wing. It will not be easy to restructure the repressive apparatus or end corruption in the army and police…. However, disputes within Apruebo Dignidad and eventually with other more radical sectors could facilitate the victory of the right and prevent the death of neoliberalism.
El Clarín was the paper aligned with Popular Unity, the coalition government of Salvador Allende. Between the years 1970 and 1973, it had a daily circulation of up to 350,000 and a much larger readership. It similar line then served to politically disarm the working class, claiming it could not be defeated if it remained subordinated to the “united left”.
However, Chile’s “united left,” coalesced in and on the periphery of the Popular Unity government—the Communist and Socialist parties, the trade union bureaucracies, the Christian Left, MAPU and the Revolutionary Left Movement—was, in fact, hostile to developing a revolutionary socialist strategy within the working class.
Stalinism, Social Democracy and their centrist satellites, as primary and secondary agencies of capitalism within the workers’ movement, feared the independent mobilization of working class more than the threat of fascism. They demonstrated their commitment to the Chilean capitalist state by setting loose the military and the police to smash the initiatives of the working class, especially the rank-and-file actions and defense committees formed to fight employers’ lockout, fascist violence and the obvious preparation for a successful military coup after the failed Tanquetazo attempt of June 1973.
El Clarín and its ilk advance the same line today, despite the passage of five decades and the obvious transformation of the Chilean “left” into open bourgeois parties. Meanwhile Boric, whose Broad Front alliance never had any real base in the working class, had by the run-off election already spun several revolutions to the right.
Not only had Apruebo Dignidad secretly promised government posts for the center-left parties, but vowed to “dialogue” with the far right and fascists to demonstrate to its capitalist and imperialist masters that Boric would head “a government that provides certainty of change and brings stability to our country.”
“We have the duty to talk to everyone, and to bring everyone together, and in this sense, (even) large companies have to be part of this transformation process,” Boric assured.
As his inauguration neared, Boric dropped all mention of “burying neoliberalism” and his other radical catchphrases, openly adopting a law-and-order and xenophobic anti-immigrant agenda that had pervaded the previous administration’s discourse. To assuage the fears of finance capital and the markets, which had favored the fascist candidate as president, Boric announced as his pick for finance minister the monetarist Mario Marcel, Chile’s Central Bank chief.
Boric used his final Public Account address last month to justify the record of Apruebo Dignidad, which has gone further to the right than any government since the return to civilian rule.
It should be recalled that Boric promised to uphold human rights and seek the punishment of crimes carried out by the authorities, Addressing the incumbent president he said, “Mr. Piñera, you have been warned, you will be prosecuted for the serious human rights violations committed under your mandate.”
His election platform stated that Apruebo Dignidad would comprehensively reform the Carabineros military police responsible for gross human rights abuses, “promote laws that recognize the right to protest and repeal repressive laws, such as those regulating preventive identity checks, the anti-barricade law, and the State Security Law.”
Almost immediately upon coming to power, however, he junked this rhetoric and with the support of pseudo-left and Stalinist legislators began laying the groundwork for police state rule, an agenda historically associated with Pinochetism and the parties of the right.
Boric boasted in his Public Account speech that these police state measures are a defining achievement of his government.
“Crime and insecurity are the main concern of Chileans. It is a worldwide phenomenon from which our country has not been exempt,” he said, without explaining how this “ concern” had been fomented.
Following the 2019 anti-capitalist protests, the predominantly rightist corporate media saturated the airwaves with nightmarish scenarios of cities besieged by crime and a country facing an extreme security crisis. It explicitly associated this crisis with the struggle for democratic and social rights, vilifying the mass mobilizations as an explosion of criminality.
Student strikes and school occupations against dilapidated infrastructure and lack of resources now were now labeled as delinquency, while shantytowns built by desperate immigrants and the homeless on occupied land were allegedly infested with narco-trafficking and criminal gangs.
The deliberate purpose of this rightist-backed media offensive was to intimidate the youth and workers into submission, while agitating among more backward sections of the population with xenophobic demands to expel migrants and for an iron fist against crime. This facilitated the Piñera government’s passing laws criminalizing protests such as the “anti-barricades” and “anti-looting” laws and beefing up the state apparatus, an agenda which Boric intensified.
In such a reactionary environment, crime has increased from pandemic levels, driven by poverty, inequality and hopelessness.
In the post war period, social democrats and reformists promoted illusions in gradually overcoming capitalism’s brutal excesses by lifting the general standard of living. Boric, the “progressive”, eschewed such appeals, instead, insisting that his government had “acted accordingly” in response to a security crisis. “This Congress approved more than 60 laws that have made it possible to modernize our institutional framework in the face of new forms of crime,” Boric boasted during his Public Account speech, adding that “these initiatives had bipartisan support.”
“We achieved a significant increase in resources for the police,” he said bragging of new lethal equipment and greater staffing for the repressive forces, and a “Prison Infrastructure Master Plan” that will allow the state to lock up 15,000 more prisoners.
He ended his paean to security by paying respects to the notorious repressive forces, which detained, tortured and disappeared tens of thousands of victims only 50 years ago: “Security is not a partisan banner (but) a basic condition for society to prosper and live in peace... The sacrifice of officers… is a tribute to their daily commitment, often silent and always at risk, to protect us. ...they are martyrs of Chile.”
The Ministry of Interior and Public Security is virtually alone in receiving untrammeled funding under Boric. In 2023, the budget for the Carabineros military police increased by 6.2 percent from the previous year, and the overall budget for public security was raised by an unprecedented 40 percent, bringing public security spending to the highest level in 35 years, since the return to civilian rule in 1990.
Under Boric’s “National Plan Against Organized Crime”, announced months into his government, police personnel are to be increased over time by 40 percent. Carabineros are to be equipped with military grade materiel, including Arquus Bastion armored personnel carriers, helicopters, and surveillance drones.
Authoritarian bills
It is in the bills initiated by Piñera, pushed forward by Boric, and rubber-stamped into law by Congress where the trend towards police state and authoritarian rule is most sharply illuminated.
While justified in the name of fighting crime, they will be used against the working class. It should be stressed that in Chile the reliance on security laws as an explicitly political weapon to intimidate mass popular opposition dates to the early 20th Century, following the Russian Revolution and its electrifying effect on the international proletariat.
The current laws flow from the extreme crisis the state confronted in 2019 and are in preparation for the next revolutionary explosion that will inevitably erupt in Chile as world capitalism in historic descent openly adopts the methods of fascism, dictatorship and global war.
Law #21,577, enacted in June 2023, vastly expands already existing powers to spy. The security agencies will be permitted to listen in, read the private correspondence, and watch not only individuals, but whole swaths of people through the latest dragnet interception devices. Their operations will remain virtually secret and protected from civil suits.
In Article 218 for example, the Public Prosecutor's Office (PPO) can require any service provider to “provide the information it has stored relating to the traffic of telephone calls, correspondence, or Internet data traffic of its subscribers” as well as the “data it holds on its subscribers, as well as information regarding the IP addresses used by them.”
Article 226A allows agents “use of technological means to surreptitiously capture, record, and register images or sounds in closed places or places that are not freely accessible to the public.”
Articles 226N to 226V are dedicated to protecting the identity of agents, informants and protected witnesses. Provisions in 226 B permit a judge to deny in whole or in part the records supplied by them and prohibit their cross examination.
This law takes effect under conditions where the intelligence agencies of the military and police have for years wiretapped journalists, judges, human rights lawyers, students, and political figures and have especially targeted anarchist organizations. Undercover agents have infiltrated working class community groups for the purpose of entrapment, or for drawing up lists of activists to be surveilled.
Law #21,542 enacted in January 2023, modifies Pinochet’s Constitution to allow the armed forces to protect “critical infrastructure” that is indispensable for the “generation, transmission, transportation, production, storage and distribution of services and basic inputs for the population” such as “energy, gas, water or telecommunications, road, air, land, sea, port or railroad connections” and “public utility services, such as health or sanitary assistance systems.”
The president appoints by decree a general of the Armed Forces to command the protection of all the specified areas designated critical infrastructure, and the military will have the duty to safeguard public order for ninety 90-day intervals that can be extended indefinitely with congressional consent. This is in line with authoritarian national security doctrines that target the population as the enemy within.
Under the 1980 Labor Code designed by Pinochet’s Labor Minister Jose Piñera, workers in industries considered strategic were prohibited from striking. This reactionary measure remains in effect to this day. In 2024, the Ministries of Economy, Development and Tourism, Labor, and Defense met to reinstate 100 companies in the health services, electricity distribution and transmission, gas distribution, liquefied natural gas regasification terminals, and natural gas transportation sectors as excluded from legally striking during collective bargaining. It also added the ports of Arica, Iquique and Antofagasta, as well as the Central Bank and some transport companies to the list.
Now, in the case of a “threat to internal public security,” for example, the resurgence of the class struggle where workers launch strikes or seize strategic installations as they did in the 1970s, the military, equipped with lethal weapons and the protection of the law, will be dispatched to deal with it. The law was amended to also include the border zones, where desperate refugees and economic migrants enter Chile, as areas to be protected by the armed forces in cooperation with the Carabineros.
Law #21,560, also known as Naín-Retamal or the trigger happy law, was rushed through in record time in April 2023 after a spate of cop killings under murky circumstances. There are two aspects to this law that have already been applied retroactively to cases arising from 2019.
The first is punitive, drastically increasing the penalties for civilians accused of allegedly endangering the lives and physical integrity of Carabineros, Investigative Police (PDI), Gendarmerie, the armed forces and their dependents. The second provides the state apparatus “privileged status” in cases where lethal/non-lethal force is used by its agents.
A total of 36 people were killed by the military and Carabineros during the 2019 protests, out of 11,000+ complaints of institutional violence, including mutilations, torture, rape and other abuses. While most of these complaints have been closed without punishment or trial, the few that did end in prosecution and even fewer that ended in prison sentences were too much for the high command.
The military brass wants to go back to the freedom from prosecution they enjoyed under Pinochet’s Amnesty law. Law #21560 is a step closer to that level of impunity.
Prosecutors must now presume legitimate self-defense and that the rational use of lethal/non-lethal force was applied in cases where state agents caused death, mutilation or injury while performing their duties. Moreover, the state institutions will investigate themselves.
Finally, the court will consider a police defendant as a “mitigating circumstance”—even when “unlawful coercion or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” was used—and will “reduce the sentence” accordingly (emphasis added).
Rules for the Use of Force (RUF) were submitted to Congress in April 2023 and the legislation is entering its final stages, establishing general legal rules for police and the armed forces that are ostensibly in line with international legal principles aimed at protecting civilians from excessive force.
According to UN special rapporteurs and human rights organizations the amendments introduced by the Senate not only do away with civilian protections, but grant the state apparatus the right to use excessive force and award them legal protections in addition to those stipulated in Naín-Retamal. Among other reactionary measures, the amendments lift restraints on police use of disproportionate force, void instructions not to fire non-lethal weapons at the torso and face, allow use of lethal force to protect “critical infrastructure” absent any threat to life and leave investigations in the hands of the institutions that exercise force.
Boric’s Minister of Public Security, Luis Cordero, tacitly agreed with many of the Senate amendments at a Chamber session. The bill goes to a joint committee later this year where its final version will be decided.
Law #21,732, or the new anti-terror law, establishes new regulations that define and punish terrorist crimes, replacing the military dictatorship’s anti-terrorist framework. What has not been repealed but strengthened with the new law is Article 9 of Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution, which imposes sweeping 15-year bans on those found responsible for terrorism from holding or running for office, working as educators or in any kind of media or holding leadership positions in student associations, unions or other organizations.
The fact is that the whole Constitution was consciously framed by the most counterrevolutionary doctrines. It is explicitly aimed at outlawing and suppressing the struggle for socialism.
Pinochet’s anti-terrorist Law #18.314 was imposed in 1984 in a period of social upheavals that shook the regime to its foundation. While imposed in the name of combating the bankrupt adventurist actions of the guerrilla outfits, the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) and the Frente Patriotica Manuel Rodriguez (FMPR) that resurfaced during this period, the real focus of repression, was the broad masses of radicalized young workers and students that had come forward to challenge the regime amid depression-like conditions.
The center-left alliance that saved Chilean capitalism when it came to power in 1990 wielded Pinochet’s anti-terrorist law and the equally repressive State Security Law (LSE) of 1958 to continue the repression.
Chile’s entire political class worked towards establishing the new anti-terrorist law. It is of note that it was introduced by a motion advanced by Senator Paulina Vodanovic, the president of the Socialist Party, together with a senator from the fascistic Republican Party, senators from the Pinochetista UDI and National Renewal and a right-wing independent. It was enacted in February of this year after passing Congress in record speed and with almost universal support.
Law #21,732 strengthens Pinochet’s constitution, categorically stating that terrorist crimes include those actions aimed at “undermining or destabilizing the political, social, or economic structures of the democratic State” or “inhibiting a decision by a democratic State authority.”
Its sweep is extraordinary, targeting individuals, groups, associations or organizations whose aims are defined by the state as terrorist, as well as anyone providing material support to such groups, including funds and even public statements in their defense..
For decades these police state measures have been tested out against indigenous Mapuche groups pursuing the recovery of ancestral lands that were forcibly seized by large landholders and forestry giants Arauco and CMPC. This extremely oppressed section of the population has been slandered by all the civilian governments, left and right, as terrorist and insurgents financed by organized crime.
In this as well, Boric’s pseudo-left administration has excelled, declaring in May 2022 a state of emergency for the regions of Biobío and Araucanía in southern Chile that Congress has kept renewing to this day. Boric has maintained the areas under a permanent state of exception, with the military in charge, restrictions on movement and assembly in place and the indigenous communities under virtual martial law.
Under Boric, 86 Mapuche leaders languish in Chile’s prisons on one or more charges, with some facing decades of incarceration. In a clear act of political persecution, the notorious State Security Law (LSE) has been used to arrest the Mapuche leader of the Arauco-Malleco Coordinating Committee (CAM), Hector Llaitul, on the grounds that his political speeches constituted “crimes of incitement and apology for violence.”
Minister of the Interior and Public Security Carolina Tohá from the social democratic Party for Democracy has spearheaded this security agenda. Tohá was one of the four candidates in the ruling coalition’s presidential primaries for the November elections. During the primary debate she made the following chilling declaration about her priorities if elected:
I am going to ask parliament for special powers to deploy military personnel in areas experiencing critical violence without having to declare a state of emergency through a decree with the force of law. Chile needs a FIRM HAND to make difficult decisions, and I have it.
There is little to differentiate between her statement and the fascistic writings of Carl Schmitt on the states of exception or the actions of Javier Milei in Argentina or Donald Trump in the United States. Toha lost the primaries to the Communist Party candidate, Jeanette Jara, Boric’s Labor Minister, who is equally committed to continuing his legacy.