Chile: Chilean workers change the political map

She was the daughter of a loyalist Air Force General who served under deposed Socialist President Allende and who was tortured to death by the dictatorship. She herself served time in one of Pinochet’s jails.

People were hopeful, optimistic even. She said her new government would break with the crude neoliberalism of the previous governments but without following the populist path of Morales and Chavez to the north.

Rather, policies “promoting economic growth and stability” must continue, but they should be complemented with measures designed to promote greater equality among Chileans through social and labour policies directed at the poorest sectors of society.

Above all, Bachelet promised a new style of “participatory government”, divorced from the businessmen, military chiefs and priests who had long wielded de facto power in Chile. Her government would be “closer to the citizens” who had chosen her as their president.

Nothing of the sort has happened. President Bachelet has made only cosmetic changes in social, educational, economic and labour policies and she has remained firmly within the framework of the free-market model inherited from the military. Why?

She may have illustrious ancestors but she was a leader of the Socialist Party of Chile, which like sister bourgeois workers’ parties in Europe, was happy to embrace neoliberal policies and globalisation. She may have tasted Pinochet’s repressive whip when young, but Bachelet spent a year at Fort McNair in the US, where she took a course in “internal war” doctrine and counter-insurgency strategies.

Unlike her father who started out with the intention of radical reform even if it meant confronting US power, Bachelet followed, in her own words, a path of “convergence with the hegemonic power”.

Before she become president, Bachelet served as Minister of Health for two years, overseeing no improvements in the decaying public health system, taking no significant measures for the 50% of the Chilean population who could not afford private health insurance, and making no effort to improve the failed private pension system, once declared by Washington as the “model” for the world.

During Bachelet’s time as Defence Minister, Chile’s military spending reached new heights: per capita military spending easily exceeded that of every government in Latin America. By spending billions of dollars on a new fleet of fighter planes, helicopters, warships and a satellite spy system, Chile aimed at “converging” with the US in policing the turbulent Andean countries.

Bachelet was the US’s most vocal supporter of sending a military expeditionary force to Haiti to relieve US military forces after they ousted President Aristide. Over 400 heavily armed Chilean soldiers patrolled the slum streets of Port-au-Prince in support of the US imposed puppet regime, and later as president she renewed her commitment to remain in Haiti. Bachelet has welcomed every chance to engage in military exercises with the US.

All the post-Pinochet “Concertación” governments since 1990 have maintained continuity with the state model inherited from the military regime, a model which meant subordinating social programmes to the imperatives of the market. These Concertación governments have been incapable of countering the widening chasm between rich and poor that the neoliberal economic model itself generates.

In this model, the state assumes responsibility for ensuring the subsistence of the poorest by providing them with some subsidies, but it renounces one of the principal social functions of any decent socialist government, of eradicating or, at least, massively reducing poverty and inequality.

During the period of transition from Pinochet in the early 1990s, the Chilean popular movement demobilised and moderated its goals and strategies. The most important factors contributing to this process were the fear of a “return to 1973” and a military dictatorship.

There was a powerful urge towards reconciliation and the creation of a stable political order, and above all a desire to avoid a repetition of the events that led to the 1973 coup, an outlook that was instilled by the reformist leaders of the Concertación.

On coming to power, Bachelet gave the post of Minister of Economics to Andres Velasco, very well known for his links with US companies and entrepreneurs and the founder and leader of neoliberal think tank, Expansiva. She appointed Andres Zaldivars, one of the men who plotted Allende’s fall, to the Ministry of the Interior.

Her government has continued to spend lavishly on the armed forces. She has boosted the personnel and equipment available to the police to repress the struggles of workers, students and the Mapuche people. The turning point in popular feeling against the Bachelet government was when more than 600,000 secondary school students occupied their schools – the “Penguin” uprising of April-June 2006.

With this mobilisation, the political map of Chile changed. A new generation, the “sons of democracy” as they called themselves, came onto the political scene. At first lulled by promises, they have grown cynical of the Concertación’s actions. No longer content with the odd concession, they attack the fundamental principles of neoliberal policies, and the invasion of education by profit-making businesses.

Following the example of the students, increasing numbers of people in Chile are getting fed up with Bachelet. Life has not improved for the mass of workers and their families. Casual labour, mounting personal debt, low wages and now, rising inflation are making people angry.

Pro-big business commentators speak at length about economic growth while keeping quiet about environmental destruction, the growing gap between rich and poor (the top 20% of income earners control 60% of Chilean GDP), and the worsening quality of public services, education, healthcare and housing.

More than the half of Chilean workers are working part-time, casual and often at weekends to make ends meet; to escape collective bargaining, companies have outsourced work to sub-contractors or created phantom companies. People working alongside one another can find themselves technically employed by a different company. And of course, the Chilean labour code prohibits collective negotiations over working conditions relating to the workers of two or more different companies.

In these circumstances, having joint trade union negotiations or action by workers employed by a subcontractor is practically illegal. This leads to the situation where work colleagues employed by a subcontractor earn less and work in worse conditions than workers employed by the parent company. This is the reason why the subcontracted workers in the copper industry have been on almost permanent mobilisation and strikes over the last two years.

The timber workers from Arauco, the miners, the agricultural and food processing workers, the bus drivers, the fishermen, teachers, civil servants, local government and health workers, bank employees, the Mapuche struggling to recuperate their ancestral lands that have been fraudulently seized from them – these are just some of those taking direct action in the last two years.

The uprising of the students, the reviving of the workers’ movement and the effects of oil and food price rises on the popular mood, have brought tensions within and between the government parties to a head.

Today for the first time, Chile’s powerful political coalition, Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concertación), will submit two separate lists of candidates for the upcoming municipal elections to be held in October.

This decision follows an effort by Bachelet, along with former Presidents Patricio Aylwin, Ricardo Lagos, and Eduardo Frei, failed to convince two of the Concertación’s main parties — the Partido Radical Social Demócrata (PRSD) and the Partido por la Democracia (PPD), to maintain a unified list.

Hit with allegations of corruption and mismanagement of public funds, the Concertación – which has won every presidential election following Chile’s return to democracy in 1990 – appears to be at its weakest in two decades.

Chile’s incomparable recent economic performance, based as it is on labour flexibility and low wages, has produced an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” complacency among most of Chile’s political leaders. But now the workers and students rightly demand that the huge revenues pouring in from agriculture, timber, fish, wine, meat, poultry and mineral exports, should be invested in education, housing, health and social services.

But the government decides to invest the profits in US Treasury Bonds to keep US interest rates (and hence the US dollar) as high as possible. This keeps the value of the Chilean peso as low as possible and thus provides a massive boost to Chilean exports.

With such a recipe, it is unclear where Bachelet’s proposed “Growth with Equity” is supposed to come from. As one Socialist Party economist recently put it:

“The intellectual who proposes redistributive policies is treated as if he were antiquated and obsessed, proposing policies that failed in the past. The idea now is we have to privatise everything, we have to stimulate private enterprise, and hopefully we will all be entrepreneurs!”

Neoliberal ideology has become so pervasive, even among part of the left, that major reforms to the free-market model are automatically rejected as “populist” and inflationary.

The mobilisations of the last two years show very clearly that a new generation is emerging that is not scarred by the historic defeat of 1973 when the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende was bloodily overthrown. Today the workers, the youth, the women – all are on the move and rebuilding the trade union and workers’ organisations.

They are increasingly turning their back on the establishment parties and expressing distrust in the reformist political parties. As proof of this, 68% of people aged between 18 and 24-year-olds have refused even to sign up to the electoral register.

New perspectives have opened up. The last two years showed the potential for the building of militant, independent rank and file trade union tendencies, and for the construction of a new Marxist workers’ party with a socialist revolutionary programme. The labour movement and the poor people are learning in struggle that there are collective solutions based on the power from below that can and will put an end to the misery brought about by this neoliberal regime.

Wed 03, December 2008 @ 17:18