State Tyrants “We work in the Dark, to serve the Light. We are Assassins.”O. Bowden

                             The other Chile 

 By Federico Galende: Chile was visited a couple of times by the rest of the region, in different seasons of history, like a curious archipelago from which unforeseeable experiments sprung up from time to time. First it was the famous "democratic road to socialism", tested inside a dense and heterogeneous utiopian laboratory; later, with less dreamlike intentions, that dark alchemy, that of neoliberalism and cultural genocide in the era of state terrorism and for those who can save themselves, established by the whip of the market. They were very opposed experiments, touched by powers that perfectly handled the art of turning the tortillas. 

And apparently things continue, since this Sunday night we fell asleep in a country and woke up, the next day, in another that we hardly recognized. It is true, there were signs, traces, antecedents, but no one managed to imagine what would occur: the most forceful desconfiguration of an abject political system that was more than fifty years old. 

 The evidence had to do with a town that first appeared in 2006, dressed in the uniforms of unruly schoolchildren, followed in 2011 with the struggles of the students, erupted in October 2019 and was consumed as a more than reliable insinuation during the pandemic, with a people who turned out en masses to vote for a new constitution. The right read these hints in the key of a revolt of ants, tantrums of disaffected discontents that at most tickled a battleship formed by the large financial corporations, the concentration of the hegemonic media and the favor and pardons of the judiciary. In a rush of optimism, Minister Jaime Bellolio even allowed himself this verdict: "We are going to win three to zero." 

    
Piñera  Assassin

He thought that by giving injections, taking mad dogs out onto the streets and raffling off hunger bonuses, the task was accomplished. Everything else (a government that reached 4 percent approval, a president who declared war on his people, who sent a parliamentary law to the constitutional court to stop the desperate withdrawal of funds from the AFPs and who refused, being himself a millionaire, to tax the super-rich) it seemed to him that it was a detail, and that with reaching a third of approval they had a free chip to abort any reform to the Constitution and continue to maintain the one that they themselves had implemented under the protection of genocide.

 They did not understand what was coming, partly because of the discreet and secretive responses of a frightened, unprotected and unarmed people. And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, everything was blown to pieces: the cenacles of the right, a corrupted political class, a New Majority that had come to power promising to manage finance capital better than the capitalists themselves, and the agreements intracupulares and the palaces of the parties and the blackmailers of always. The right did not reach a third, and against all odds the constituent process was left in the hands of those to whom it belonged: indigenous peoples, feminists who encouraged a performative revolution, students who did not rest, tired pensioners, independents , the anyone. A heterogeneous corpus whose disjointed knots allowed it to subtract itself from the visibility of the representation to deliver its unexpected and anonymous blow.

                                     Assassin State

 The Broad Front was resurrected (hastily presumed dead), the Communist Party appeared (ignored and marginalized without explanation by all-labor parties), and the independents were swept away. Where yesterday - and for decades - there was a right-wing mayor, there is now a communist mayor. It is not the only one, and it is nothing less than another communist who, along with sweeping in Recoleta, appears today as the candidate with the most chances for the presidency, one who will have to sit with Gabriel Boric - and no longer with the old Weberian cabal who, as Christians or Socialists, moderated everything - to plan the fine paths of the country that has just been born. 

 All this responds to the irruption of politics in its highest sense: that of the beings that autonomously define the ways of being together. That way it is a people, because the towns are not a fused unit, they are not an identity; they are the maximum distance that the things that want to be in common can support. This people, in particular, suffered a lot, suffered enormously, enough - Nietzsche would say - to end up being such a beautiful and unexpected group today. A message for the struggle of the poor Palestinians, today savagely beaten, and for all those who continue to dream of not having to cross stony joints when it comes to changing things. * 

Doctor of Philosophy, researcher, professor at the University of Chile