For Mario Saavedra, a painter from Valparaíso, and Nina Avellaneda, a writer from Limache, Chileans that life gave me

Samuel Cortes Hamdan

0. A threat to the popular will

In the first half of January 2023, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies approved that the legislative branch should determine the 24 members of a commission of experts in charge of drafting a new constitution for the South American country: twelve contributed by the deputies and twelve more by the senators. 

And, as we know, the devil is in the details of the popular pulse: "to be elected as a member of this commission (...) the candidates must have a university degree or academic degree of at least eight semesters in duration and must prove professional, technical and/or academic experience of no less than ten years," specifies the legislative press office.

Leave it to a commission of specialists The opportunity to draft a new Magna Carta to replace the one imposed by Augusto Pinochet during the dictatorship is a particularly cruel and particularly indolent betrayal in the face of the popular demands expressed throughout Chile during the social uprising that began in October 2019 and led to a first draft, which was already rejected in a plebiscite in September 2022. 

In addition to singing in popular, spontaneous, overflowing, acoustic unisons, “El baile de los que sobran”, that social anthem by Los Prisioneros, the protesters of the social outbreak made a specific slogan one of the most lucid axes of their demand: “It's not 30 pesos, it's 30 years,” they said on the banks of the Mapocho River or collapsing the normality of the Alameda, in Arica or in Magallanes. In this way, they clearly underlined that the hooded and dissatisfied people were not rising up against a specific policy limited to the Santiago metro, promoted by the then president Sebastián Piñera —a multimillionaire businessman, by the way—, but against the crime of imposing neoliberalism in Chile through a violent, arbitrary mutilation of democracy and a persistent, systematic spread of pedagogical terror, deliberately dissuasive, and encrypted in the form of forced disappearances, torture and executions perpetrated by the police and military forces of Pinochet during the years of his self-imposed mandate.

It is not 30 pesos, it is 30 years of wild privatization, institutional neglect, prolonged racism that becomes a presidential and governmental program, persistent foolishness, which coagulates into an underlined inequality in which multimillionaires govern, pontificate and decide while young people have to go out to the streets to demand an opportunity for free access to education. 

Among many other factors, the social explosion was particularly beautiful for its political eloquence, which was not limited to demanding the democratization of the military culture of the Carabineros Corps or to problematizing La Moneda, but rather was dreamed of in the ambitious appetite to reconfigure the national agreement towards a balanced future between the diverse identities that, recognized by the elites or not, make up the Chilean face, the blood of that country in the corner of the world. 

It is in this dynamic context that the list of academic requirements to belong to the committee of experts is particularly offensive (Expert Commission in the specific institutional terms of the legislature), since the problem of access to formal education in Chile is such that even the current president, Gabriel Boric, emerged from the political movement that demanded the democratization of university studies. 

However, now in the parliamentarians' determination towards the new constituent process, the implicitly classist, specifically isolating, exclusive declaration that university students are the only consciences suitable to understand what future the Chilean constitutional framework deserves jumps out. This is a frontal attack against the balancing appetite from which the social explosion sought the unacceptable, inconceivable ambition that everyone should speak in the constitution, not only those who benefit from the structural disadvantage.

Another important detail of the new constituent probability is that —whoever these experts are validated as such by traditional politics in a country of wild, self-deprecating inequalities, as the novel exhibits— the stone guests by Jorge Edwards or the movie Tony Manero, by Pablo Larraín— the approved law that authorizes the new process frames the participants to subscribe to certain principles, some reasonable like equality before the law and others rather elitist, crafty, confirmed in the benefit of the same old strata, or outright with tendencies towards segregationist racism.

In the first case, that of elitism, the Chamber of Deputies specifies that the new constitution will be obliged to respect “the right to property in its various manifestations”: as if no social transformation would have to violate the ode to private property that Pablo Neruda never wrote but Cristián Warnken dared to outline in an opinion column, entitled “House of the soul” and published on December 29, 2022 —to make matters worse— in the newspaper The Mercury, Pinochet accomplice. 

In the second case, that of segregation, the legislature promises that “the constitution will enshrine that terrorism, in any of its forms, is essentially contrary to human rights,” in a specific context in which the fight for Mapuche dignity has been systemically disqualified as terrorism both by Piñera’s right and by President Boric’s own government, in addition to being a recurring argument against social dissent, for example, in neighboring Peru, currently the protagonist of its own social explosion and witness to its own criminalization of protest in disproportionate terms. 

In other words, traditional politics in this new process of the Chilean constitution will reserve the right to distort and disqualify the indigenous protest in any way while ensuring that its elaboration remains exclusively in the hands of institutionalized intellectuals. 

The current Chilean constituent opportunity, thus, is below the playful imagination of its people - in the belief that the game, elastic, always exceeds to propose, like someone who invites to join the dance of those who are left over -: an underlined community of poets from whose tradition, suggestive of opportunities towards new social achievements, I want to highlight three specific moments. 

At a time when top-level thought wants to suspend it, the demand for justice articulated from the imagination at its inception becomes more necessary. 

And in the search for possibilities, poetry—diverse in forms and deposits, such as films, songs, journalistic chronicles or novels—always advances invitations to reconfiguration, to the dismantling of the obsessions of power, and stammers its tenderness against the convenient declaration, self-proclaimed by the dominant force, that its route is the only persuasive one, the merely possible one, in a frank invitation to resign oneself to pragmatics. 

Another South American philosopher, Enrique Dussel, says that emancipation involves breaking away from the imaginary mandate of power: “Liberation is possible only when one has the courage to be an atheist of the empire, of the center, thus facing the risk of suffering from its Power, its economic boycotts, its armies and its master agents of corruption, murder, torture and violence.” 

The accumulated truth of the verses of our continent in resistance says that to declare the dismantling of the system of harassment is to begin to crack it, as for centuries it has been written against the normality installed by dispossession.

I. Hero's Shame

I always like to return to a splendid novel by the poet Enrique Lihn —awarded at the time by the Casa de las Américas in Cuba—: Batman in Chile, published in Buenos Aires by the legendary Ediciones de La Flor —none other than Mafalda's publishing house— just a few months before the coup d'état carried out on September 11, 1973. 

The work, a brave and burlesque pastiche infused with the language of comics and structured around absurd caricatures, represents a symbolic revenge against the triumphant story of the United States in the Latin American region - that which José Martí saw fit to call Our America.

Banned de facto by circumstances, republished in Chile no earlier than 2008, 35 years after the coup, the book is a materially unobtainable work that we would do well to make available for the playful and literary review of our Latin American memory, but the issue I want to highlight is the dynamics of its proposals. 

It has two subtitles: The twilight of an idol or Alone against the red desert, and narrates the journey of a bat man sent to Chile by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the beginning of the 1970s with a substantial mission: to dismantle the advance of the Popular Unity and the democratic government of President Salvador Allende.

Lihn's story immediately begins a litany of absurdities: a specialized policeman with incomparable technical advantages, the Batman of the author of the tune of the poor spheres is rather a pasty conscience early assaulted by the contradiction: accustomed to contributing with rapid efficiency to the crushing of banana republic dictatorships, in South America his ideological drive to shackle communism wherever it exists and his institutional responsibility to respect the rule of law come into conflict, since it happens that he recognizes that Allende's government did not arrive at La Moneda imposed by bearded revolutionaries with rifles on their shoulders and open hostilities before the White House, but rather was configured triumphant by the electoral route perhaps even under the recognition of the Organization of American States (OAS), a neighbor more than geographical of the bat. 

"Who is it?" the first administrator of foreign capital, the right-hand man of the Great Neighbor in his fight against international communism and the economic inspiration of the Conservative Revolution clandestinely organized to bring peace to a country divided by the legal result of the last elections that had handed power to the minority, that is, to the people, became impatient.

"Batman," was the terse reply. 

When poets become novelists, they can tend to enrich the space of enunciation with the florid richness of the proposal. Lihn's sensitivity calculated from fiction what would become tragedy in the reality of tortured flesh: effectively, faced with the advance of the distributive democracy of the benefits of copper, Washington displayed its discontent against the ugly will of the Chilean people to determine itself, with tenacity in the threat of disfiguring it. 

But, faced with the disproportion of forces, Lihn also confirmed the destabilizing, rebellious faculty of laughter: his Batman dissolves into humiliation and incompetence, disarticulated by the dynamism of an evidence that he does not understand, that overwhelms him until it stuns him and renders him obsolete despite the high technology of his antigravity belt: suffocated by the clarity of Latin Americans choosing themselves towards the capacity for the future. 

It is there, in the mockery, in the spitting in the face of power, where the writer operates the delight of symbolic revenge - the pleasure of imaginative vindication - against imperialism. 

In its shadow, I dare to think that it is in literature, in cinema, in the imagination, in its opportunity for sensitivity and dialogue, in the persistent and warm anonymous conversation, in the horizontal discourse, in the surviving, invisible and elusive daily dynamic, where both the affections, doormats in themselves, and the figurations on the way to a more balanced society, less transfixed by boots, survived, despite the general's determination to impose a way of life crossed by the cry of fear and by the custom of concrete, arbitrary, unpunished repressions, apparently at first glance unappealable. 

II. A chance in failure

Twenty-five years after the publication of Batman in ChileAnother Chilean writer, Ariel Dorfman, would accompany, through poetic, journalistic, narrative and testimonial denunciation, one of the most relevant moments in the recent history of the South American country: the arrest of the dictator Pinochet, executed in 1998 by Scotland Yard in London, as a result of an arrest warrant issued by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón.

Published from the Spanish office of the publishing house Siglo XXI, also located in the Copilco neighborhood of Mexico City, in 2002 Dorfman gave the audience a chronicle that accompanies those months of Chilean social life and that essentially draws an arc that goes from hope and enthusiasm to nuanced resignation, after months and months of uncertainty, appeals, rage articulated by groups of victims of the dictatorship, and the fatigue of what is usually referred to as the eyes of the world Afterwards—the soldier slipped away from a trial in Europe for crimes against humanity to land back in Santiago de Chile and, after alleging deplorable health conditions that seriously affected his conscience and his perception of the present, memory and reality, he stood up from his wheelchair to hug the military commanders who greeted him with applause upon his return to his homeland.

The work intertwines the author's intimate pain with the intimate, nightmarish pains of Chileans at home and abroad, sometimes grouped on the British island to attack the dictator by banging pots and pans or chanting slogans, enthusiastic, confused, eager, in search of interpretations for television, radio, and public conversation. A book that collects the memories of those enraged by the brutality of the imposition, whose trace brings together victims of Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet alike, in the same enduring feeling of grievance.

Pinochet died without being prosecuted, much less tried, in 2006. And yet, despite the concrete fading of the opportunity opened up in London at the end of the 20th century, it cannot be said that in his book, entitled Beyond fear: the long farewell to Pinochet, Dorfman gave in to despair. 

On the one hand, the book is a timely, collected, affectionate, photographed eulogy in favour of the victims' persistent struggle to achieve justice, who did not give up their cry even after a relentless persecution that eliminated opponents of the regime in Washington, Buenos Aires or the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The author recognises, by listening to it, narrating it, and portraying it, the persistent will and resistance of those harassed by the military boot and the secret police. 

Among the most eloquent life figures in the work is that of the Catalan Joan Garcés, for example, who worked as a political advisor to Allende during the three years of his government. “And, when the Spanish embassy managed to get Garcés out of the country a few days later, at the moment when his plane was saying goodbye to that land that had attempted a bloodless revolution, he swore that he would not forget his dead President or the other victims of the coup,” a promise of such eloquence that it led the lawyer to create the Salvador Allende Foundation, according to Dorfman, and to persist in researching routes so that foreign dictators could be judged by the Spanish judiciary.

“And when it became clear that the new rulers of newly democratized Chile were incapable of bringing Pinochet to trial, the relatives of those executed and disappeared sought help from someone who had already spent many hours of his life listening to their stories and pains, meticulously recording their accusations – that is, they turned to Joan Garcés.”

Despite the outcome of the events, in Beyond fear Dorfman refuses to frame the development of Pinochet's arrest as a disappointment, I said, even though Chile broke its international promise to try the dictator itself, after appealing the proceedings opened in London on the grounds that it constituted a threat to its legal sovereignty. 

Instead, the writer states that, with its drawbacks, its accidents, its setbacks and its frank setbacks, the process against the dictator, although inconclusive, opens up guidelines of opportunity for the citizen, political and legal struggle, to prevent the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, in Sarajevo or in Santiago, from going unpunished throughout the world, from sleeping peacefully behind their structural support of elitist benefits to protect the elites, in accordance with the criteria of class struggle, and from taking refuge in the institutional passivity imposed by themselves with blood within their own borders. 

“That is my prediction,” notes the author of To read Donald Duck"that the despots of today or perhaps of tomorrow will look into the broken mirror that [Slobodan] Milosevic offers them, that they will recognize themselves in the murderous and besieged eyes of Pinochet to see, once and for all, what their destiny will be on this earth."

Something then, he ponders, was advanced by the political imaginations of that Chile at the end of the century that wanted to see the person responsible for so much pain forced to confront his victims: they consolidated a subtle but eloquent scratch, a discomfort that patents the dynamism of living memory, a dignified annoyance articulated in complaints that would continue to ferment until it sprouted again, 21 years after the arrest of the dictator in London, in the social outbreak of 2019. 

III. Continue imagining an imaginary country

Finally, in the face of this process of threat to the political imagination of Chileans that is experienced in the delivery of the elaboration of the Magna Carta to a committee of university students, I want to think, precisely, about My imaginary country, a documentary film by Patricio Guzmán that collects the voices —all of the interviewees are women, by the way— of the various protagonists who took to the streets of Chile to advance the dream. 

The documentary filmmaker, trained with the Frenchman Chris Marker, essentially makes a transversal journey through the social protagonists of the outbreak that led to the configuration of a constituent assembly under the leadership of the Mapuche linguist Elisa Loncón, also interviewed on camera among the members of the Las Tesis collective; a chess player, Damaris Abarca, who will become a member of the first constituent process; a woman on the front line in the daily confrontation in the streets with the police; political scientists who speculate about the roots and possibilities of the social outbreak; a brigade member of the medical teams attending to protesters; a victim of an eye injury, among other voices.

It is precisely this chess player who anticipates what we are now experiencing. Released in May 2022, within the framework of the Cannes Film Festival, two months after Boric took office and only four before the rejection victory in the exit plebiscite on the proposed constitution prepared under Loncón's direction, in the film this constituent speculates that the worst scenario for the social outbreak as a whole is precisely what Chile experienced in September 2022: that the initiative would be withdrawn.

“And what is the most dangerous thing that could happen now?” asks Guzmán, and Abarca warns of a campaign of discredit against the constitutional text that he helped to draft, a narrative that would promote the victory of the rejection. “If we were left with the dictator’s constitution, for me that would be something terrible, that could happen to us and I think it is the most serious thing that could happen.” 

A dire prediction that would come true.

The movie is called My imaginary country because Guzmán confesses that even before his generation —more or less that of Enrique Lihn, precisely, who crushed Batman with a Latin American ax blow, in tune with the mandate of dance by fair inversion of the world that poetry ventures— imagined He imagined Chile as having potential and freedom, and he endowed it with an enthusiastic assumption of possibilities to better plan it, to avoid conflagrations, torture, mass arrests, and the proliferation of dictatorial authoritarianism. “I like to believe that the dream will come true and that the country we imagine will become real.”

“Everything tells me that we have reached the end of an era, I feel that new times are beginning,” Guzmán shares in a voiceover towards the end of the film, in which he frames the stones with which citizens confronted Piñera's security forces: the stones of a new home, the documentary maker tells them.

After framing Boric in his rise as president of Chile and going through the different focuses from which the people rose up against Piñera and against thirty years of neoliberalism, Guzmán invites us to enjoy the reserved possibility that the country is once again configuring its imaginary dignity, its modeling first in the ideas of what will have to be concretized in the flesh, in social facts, in concrete historical events, as they allow us to see eloquent details of the lived process, such as the transformation of Plaza Baquedano or Plaza Italia into the Plaza de la Dignidad, the neuralgic point of the protests of October 2019. 

 “I begin to see a new imaginary country.” 

And yet, as Batman in Chile and to Beyond fear, also to My imaginary country It is threatened by the real harshness of the status quo sought, defended by the elites. The current problem of violence against the transformative intentions of the social outbreak was raised better than anyone by the Plurinational Cycling Revolution movement: “We will continue in the streets with the hope of changing everything because nothing has been won yet,” they declared in a protest around La Moneda at the end of 2022. 

The enthusiasm is counterpointed by the protection of conventional profit, which is poorly distributed.

The suggestive force of the poets represents the utopia of a world that, in the imaginary balance of the discourse, in the eloquent claim of the enunciation, defeated the bat imperialism and forced Pinochet to answer for his crimes, and yet it is still pending to achieve the consolidation of its figurative dignity; or to convert, as far as possible, into a concrete channel of transit what was imagined from the poetic proposal. From the political imagination that helps to detach oneself from the obsession of power.
The problem is given: President Boric will not object to the new constitutional process, institutional politicians will not allow those educated in other models of knowledge to sit at the table to think about what Chile can be like and how it could enunciate its new political wills. Faced with this threatening scenario, it will have to be the Chilean people, once again enriched by the source of their shared imaginations gathered over the decades in which a grievance persisted, who will transcend the difficulty of those accustomed to exercising the mandate, and configure the dynamics capable of tearing apart the CIA envoy to remind him of his subordinate place before the passage of history, which, as has been said before and better, is a matter in the hands of the people, hands as real as they are imaginary.

Batman, according to the voice of a novelist broadcast half a century ago, “already suspected that in this last corner of the world his brilliant career was going to suffer a serious setback for some reason difficult to pinpoint for a superman of action like him.”

References

Ariel Dorfmann. Beyond fear: the long farewell to Pinochet. Madrid: Siglo XXI de España Editores. 2002. 202 pages.

Enrique Dussel. Philosophy of liberation. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Second reprint. 2018. 298 pages.

Enrique Lihn. Batman in Chile: either The twilight of an idol or Alone against the red desert. Buenos Aires: La Flor Editions. 1973. 134 pages.

Patrick Guzman. My imaginary country. 2022. Atacama Productions, Arte France Cinéma, Market Chile. 83 minutes.

Samuel Cortés Hamdan is a Mexican journalist born in 1988. With a degree in literature from UNAM, he has written commentaries, notes and chronicles on cinema, books, politics and other topics, in spaces such as the Centro de Cultura Digital, the Revista de la Universidad, Sputnik News or Reforma. He co-founded the cultural magazine Altura destadas with colleagues from the school. Instagram, Twitter and TikTok: @cilantrus

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