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Chile: Shattering the Neoliberal Spell Joy and Desire Against Economic Obedience

 
Kopia Av Cv 1974 19d Trafalgar Sq 03 Min

John Dugger, Chile Vencerá, Trafalgar Square, London, 1974.

A work dedicated to joy is not apolitical because it wants to make people feel the urgency of the present, which is the urgency of revolution.

–Cecilia Vicuña1

The social unrest that flared up in Chile in October 2019 severely rattled the social and economic frameworks that were developed in Latin America during the previous decade. The election of right-wing governments in countries such as Argentina (Mauricio Macri in 2015), Peru (Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2016), Honduras (Juan Orlando Hernández in 2017), Chile (Sebastián Piñera in 2017), Colombia (Iván Duque in 2018), and Brazil (Jair Bolsonaro in 2018), and the overthrow of democratically elected governments by parliamentary coups in Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012), and Brazil (2016), signaled the ebb of the

‘Pink Tide’ and the return of the neoliberal model accompanied by ultraconservative views and religious discourse. As the bewitching promise of neoliberalism has spread, however, it has been met with fierce resistance in some places; the recent uprising in Chile sent a powerful social, creative, and artistic message to the rest of Latin America.

For many years, neoliberalism’s champions have pointed to Chile’s apparent financial growth as proof that true societal improvement can only be achieved by a free market economy, lowered public expenditures, and State support of the private sector. But that false narrative of a calm, prosperous nation began to fall apart on October 14, 2019, in Santiago, when hundreds of students balked at the new metro fare, which had been increased by 30 pesos (US$ 0.03) five days earlier. Public outrage erupted in a country where wages are among the lowest in the region, and the cost of food, medicine, and education is among the highest. Over the course of the next few days the turmoil escalated and led to street battles with the police, looting, arson, and riots. On October 20 a frightened president Sebastián Piñera appeared on national television to announce that: “We are at war with a powerful, ruthless enemy,” seeking to condemn the material damages and, most of all, downplay the legitimacy of the citizens’ demands.

A state of emergency was declared, and a curfew imposed in most state capitals. The military was authorized to use violence—which included human rights violations—against any uprisings or cases of civil disobedience. This decision spoke volumes, given that the ‘state of exception’ had been widely used during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1989). Many student, worker, and feminist associations had criticized the country’s economic policies during the previous two decades, but such high levels of public dissatisfaction had not been seen in Chile since the 1980s. Everything finally collapsed in the country that most financial analysts had viewed as an oasis of safety and stability, one of the West’s first laboratories for neoliberal experiments.

Though the effects, modus operandi, and limits of neoliberalism have expanded in myriad ways in recent decades, they always seem to be under the protection of the allied forces of finance and (neo)fascism. They were further refined in Latin America following the military coup d’état in Chile (September 11, 1973) that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, thus dashing revolutionary hopes spawned by the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The coup reflected the fear among the ruling classes that the winds of emancipation blowing through Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s—bringing guerrilla uprisings, peasant movements, anti-colonial discourses, and feminist revolts—might further decimate the economic and political power long held by the region’s oligarchs.

The Chilean dictatorship’s goal was to reimpose the biopolitical structure once used to control human bodies that had begun to slip from the oligarchy’s grip in the twentieth century–a system of exploitation, developed on haciendas and coffee plantations, that was derived from slavery and inspired by European colonial companies operating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The reorganization of the methods used for domination led to the development of a two-stage program: one stage delivered a shock by unleashing the free market economic model; the other involved an elaborate necropolitical initiative that launched a low-intensity war waged by foreign interests in cahoots with the military leadership of the Southern Cone countries (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia). That initiative, created in 1975 and dubbed Operation Condor, was responsible for covert actions and executions designed to eliminate social organizations, labor organizers, journalists, students, leftist activists, guerrilla fighters and their families; it represented the institutionalization of State terrorism through the murder and disappearance of tens of thousands of opponents over the course of a decade or so.2

The politics of economic obedience and military control were thus an updated version of the legacy of imperial and colonial systems for the accumulation of capital based on extractive logics (the exploitation of people and natural resources). In the last few decades, the neoliberal paradigm has developed sophisticated methods for inserting itself into the social fabric and influencing even the most intimate areas of people’s lives. Neoliberalism is clearly not just a financial narrative; it is deeply embedded in the State machine and directly impacts feelings and social and emotional practices.

Ever since the neoliberal promise was introduced in Chile, many artists and activists have taken a critical approach to this concept of life based on consumption and accumulation. For some of them, the dictatorship was more than just an interruption of the democratic process; it represented the expropriation of joy and of the desire for social change. It involved the violent imposition of a docile lifestyle and an economic narrative on the population.

Kopia Av Cv 1974 04a Portrait London Show 74 (1) Min

Cecilia Vicuña at her installation A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance, 1974, Meeting Place, London.

A Healing Aspect

A few months after the military coup, Cecilia Vicuña, David Medalla, John Dugger, and Guy Brett were in London, where they created Artists for Democracy. The group took part in the demonstration jointly organized by the United British Labour Movement and the Chilean Solidarity Campaign, in Trafalgar Square and, at one defining moment, unfurled a huge piece of fabric

emblazoned with the message Chile vencerá [Chile Will Overcome], a work by Dugger inspired by Vicuña’s account of the violent overthrow of the Allende government. Artists for Democracy had already proposed the international “Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile” (October 1974) in solidarity with people fighting for freedom all over the world. The festival was a success thanks to hundreds of volunteers and artists who came together to speak out against the dictatorship.

Vicuña had just created a series of works called precarious that were designed to make strong statements on behalf of the political and creative resistance. Under the title A Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance (1973–1974), some of them were presented at the festival, where they contributed to the global spirit of anti-imperialist struggles. Vicuña’s precarios are small, delicate sculptures made of bits of wood, rocks, feathers, pieces of string, fabric, and discarded vegetable and mineral debris that she found on the street. Their material form evokes sacred offerings and the remains of native peoples, indigenous settlements, and Andean wak’as (sanctuaries, idols, temples, and graves).3 The pieces in her installation underscored the medicinal, healing, and shamanic aspects of art, whose function is neither to colonize nor to possess but to foster change in structures both microscopic (invisible phenomena) and macroscopic (perceptible physical experiences). She describes her precarious in eloquent terms: “Politically, they stand for socialism; magically, they help the liberation struggle; and aesthetically they are as beautiful as they can be to comfort the soul and give strength."4

Vicuña Sangre Min

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