Sitting at the counter in his daughter’s grocery store in central Santiago, Hugo Toro recalled his relief when the Chilean army overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973 and installed right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet.
“A lot of people wanted [the coup] That’s going to happen,” said Toro, who remembers standing in long lines for food as stores emptied due to the economic devastation caused by Allende’s policies. “People shouted ‘coward’ at soldiers on the street for not intervening.”
Ahead of the 50th anniversary of September 11, Chile’s left-wing President Gabriel Boric had hoped for a moment of unity. He called on the parties to sign a joint statement condemning the coup and committing to democracy – what he called a “reasonable and minimal consensus”.
His efforts have largely failed, exacerbating both the country’s extreme polarization and political paralysis. Right-wing and left-wing leaders traded for months during this dark period in Chile’s history.
According to research firm Mori, some 36 percent of Chileans now say the military was right to act, up from 16 percent in 2013. And while few defend the abuses of Pinochet’s regime, which killed at least 3,196 people and more than a thousands of torture centers, conservative politicians increasingly claim that the coup was necessary to prevent Chile from becoming a Cuba-style dictatorship.
Last week, Chile’s right-wing Vamos coalition presented its own statement, committing to democracy but describing the coup as “the culmination” of a process of “democratic collapse.”
“They are all food departments that have been around for fifty years,” says Toro. “It will never end.”
The impasse reflects a broader political stagnation. The rise of far-left and far-right forces over the past decade, along with disruptive mass protests in 2019 known as the “social explosion,” have divided lawmakers.
The Congress, divided among 22 parties, has struggled to implement reforms to address the inequality and inadequate public services that led to the unrest. The Chilean economy is expected to grow by just 0.2 percent in 2023, which is the second weakest growth in Latin America after Argentina.
“We are in a state of paralysis,” said Marta Lagos, director of pollster Latinobaómetro. “People are deeply unhappy.”
It stands in stark contrast to the political climate from the end of the Pinochet regime in 1990 until around 2010, when a succession of center-left governments ruled Chile. They tacitly agreed not to dramatically change Pinochet’s economic model, which prioritized privatized services and an investor-friendly constitution that guarantees property rights.
In return, the right cooperated in a very gradual expansion of the state through social reforms. The Chilean economy grew much faster than the regional average, and millions of people escaped poverty.
Jose Miguel Insulza, a senator for the center-left Socialist Party and minister in several of those governments, said they did not go far enough to tackle inequality.
“But today neither the left nor the right seem interested in making long-term deals,” he said, adding that the left-wing coalition is “led by young people who came to power by challenging the conciliatory nature of the old governments.” set”.
Insulza said the lack of compromise could permanently damage Chile’s export-led economy. “The world loves Chile for one simple reason: that it is credible and predictable. The day it is no longer predictable, it loses a lot.”
Meanwhile, facing a growing challenge from far-right Republicans, Chile Vamos appears reluctant to make concessions to a government they see as weak. Approval ratings for Boric, who was sworn in 18 months ago, have fallen below 30 percent, reflecting Chile’s worst crime wave in three decades, a stalled economy and a faltering project to rewrite the constitution.
His unwieldy coalition, which stretches from the center-left to the Communist Party, lacks a majority in Congress. That has paralyzed two key pillars of Boric’s agenda: a plan to put part of the pension system into state hands, and an increase in Chilean taxes, among the lowest in the OECD, to finance social programs.
Guillermo Ramírez, leader of the right-wing Unión Democrática Independiente in the lower house, said Boric pursued “very maximalist reforms” during his first year in office. While he was optimistic that Congress would pass limited pension reform, a UDI tax increase remains off the table.
The anniversary of the coup has driven political polarization to theatrical extremes. In August, after communists called on lawmakers to condemn a 1973 congressional statement criticizing Allende that the left said had given the military the green light to intervene, right-wing lawmakers led by Ramírez voted to pass it to the chamber before to read.
It’s a depressing sight, said former general Ricardo Martínez Menanteau, who led the Chilean army until 2022. “We saw fifty years ago what happens when politicians go to extremes and cannot compromise.”
Boric has struggled to unite politicians. In July, he bowed to pressure to fire Patricio Fernández, an adviser to the statement, after the writer said historians “can continue to debate why [the coup] happened.” For the far-left flank of the coalition, it felt too much like a justification of the coup.
When a former soldier committed suicide in August following his conviction for the extrajudicial killing of musician Victor Jara shortly after the coup, Boric shocked even his left-wing coalition partners when he said some were “dying in a cowardly way not to see justice.” .
“If Boric continues to speak from a position of moral superiority and asks the rest of us to fall in line with his understanding of history, it will be impossible to move forward,” said Rojo Edwards, a Republican senator.
Carmen Hertz, a communist lawmaker who led efforts to oust Fernández, rejected the idea that the coup could be seen as anything other than a crime against humanity. “It’s like saying there are different perspectives on the Holocaust,” Hertz said.
Fernández, sitting in his cluttered home in Santiago, said politicians had missed “the point” of the anniversary. “The discussion shouldn’t be: ‘who do I like better, Pinochet or Allende?’ That’s a twisted way to look at this,” he said. “This was a trauma, a horror.”
He and Boric wanted to “end this polarization” and “focus on finding lessons from the past on how to protect our democracy in the future,” he added. “But we couldn’t do it. Maybe it will happen during the 51st anniversary.”