Remarkably, it has been overlooked in the commemoration of the half century of the unfortunate destruction of our democracy that not only a 17-year terrorist dictatorship was installed, but also its long-term design has been fully successful to this day. . In effect, it is forgotten that the extremely neoliberal model of society that the dictatorship violently imposed was later legitimized, consolidated and peacefully deepened in the “30 years”. A model concentrating wealth in large economic groups, fundamentally financial, extractivists and controllers of the education, health and welfare systems; supported by the State; and with popular sectors and media atomized and without any real power.
As the prominent leader of the RN, Andrés Allamand, well reminded many years ago, Pinochet provided the neoliberal right with “the unrestricted exercise of political power necessary to materialize the transformations. More than once in the penetrating cold of Chicago, the industrious students who dreamed of changing the face of Chile must have racked their brains over a single question: Will someone who endorses this project ever win the presidency? Now they didn’t have that problem” (the desert crossing; Edit. Aguilar, 1999; p. 156).
And as Edgardo Boeninger, the main ideologue of the “transition” crudely recognized, the leadership of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia reached a “convergence” with right-wing economic thought in the late 1980s, “convergence that politically the opposition conglomerate was not in a position to recognize” (Democracy in Chile. lessons for governance; Edit. Andres Bello, 1997; p. 369). This Copernican and underhanded ideological turn of the Concertación leadership allows us to understand political behaviors that we would otherwise see as self-destructive follies. Especially, the virtual gift that the Concertación made to the right of the parliamentary majority that the original Constitution of 1980 augured for the future government of Aylwin; and the policies of economic suffocation with which the Concertación governments exterminated from 1990 on the numerous center-left print media that had emerged in the 1980s.
Indeed, the first of these was done through the Constitutional Reform agreed in 1989 between Pinochet, the Concertación and the right, in which one of them (there were 54 reforms) quorums for the approval of laws were modified ordinary in such a way as to prevent the future government (of the Concertación) from being able to count on it. And the second was carried out fundamentally through a silent discrimination of state advertising against the center-left print media that had emerged in the fight against the dictatorship. Historical complaints (not denied) of this systematic discrimination have been made by numerous journalists, academics, and directors of affected media outlets, among them the National Journalism Prize winners Juan Pablo Cárdenas, Patricia Verdugo, and Faride Zerán.
With the first, the Concertación governments were empowered to plausibly maintain that they were not complying with their reform programs because they did not have the parliamentary majorities to do so. And with the second, they ensured that public opinion would never find out the bottom of all this and that opposition to the concertationist governments would not arise from a real center-left. This also resulted in all the key political and economic decisions of the post-dictatorship being adopted by consensus between the right and the Concertación without much scandal, starting with the ominous and unknown constitutional agreement of 1989…
By Felipe Portales
