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00:00:01
The other 9/11
70 Plays5 years ago
Ricardo Acuna and Sandra Azocar visit the pod to tell their stories of the CIA-backed coup by brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet--the other 9/11. The one that America did.
Further reading:
CIA still refuses to reveal everything it knows about Pinochet coup in Chile
Canada’s support for the right wing coup in Chile
Allende’s last words to the people of Chile
Documenting U.S. Role in Democracy’s Fall and Dictator’s Rise in Chile
Declassified American intelligence documents on American involvement in Chilean coup
Chile dictatorship victim toll bumped to 40,018
How the Chilean coup forever changed Canada's refugee policies
The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful TollPinochet forced to mount coup, Klein says
Recommended
Transcript
Fundraising Efforts and Support
00:00:12
Speaker
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00:01:21
Speaker
This is a conflict between the civil rights of corporations and national governments. This is a interference between the fundamental and political decisions.
00:01:37
Speaker
economic, and military for global organizations that are not dependent on the state. And when some of these activities do not respond, they don't want to go to parliament, they want to go to an institution representative of collective interests. In a way, this is all about the political politics of the state.
The Chilean Coup of 1973
00:02:08
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're back here in our basement here in Treaty 6 territory, and today we're talking about September 11th. Now, most folks who aren't leftists immediately think of the American 9-11, the one in New York. Twin Towers, Crashing Plains, Osama Bin Laden. But there was a Chilean 9-11 46 years ago.
00:02:30
Speaker
In 1973, a violent US backed coup took out essentially the democratically elected leader of Chile, Salvador Allende. He was an elected socialist and an ardent Marxist. And a military dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was installed as the military dictator of that country where he reigned for 17 years.
00:02:52
Speaker
And over his 17-year reign, more than 3,000 people were murdered or disappeared. More than 37,000 other Chileans were either tortured or imprisoned. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans fled the country out of fear for their safety. And to talk about this, and both its relevance in today's politics as well as to Alberta's politics, we have Sandra Azakar and Ricardo Acuna, two folks who experienced this firsthand.
00:03:19
Speaker
Sandra spent decades as a worker in the child welfare world and was a vice president with the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees before joining the Friends of Medicare as their executive director. And Friends of Medicare actually, just a quick side note, rocks and has been fighting for stronger public health care for 40 years since their 40 year anniversary this year. That's correct. Thank you.
00:03:36
Speaker
And Ricardo Acuna is the executive director of the Parkland Institute, a very much needed bastion of kind of left wing research and thought here in the conservative hellscape that is Alberta, though, I mean, you're going to break in. It's not left wing, right? Oh no, we're left wing. Okay. Okay. We don't apologize for that. Um, it is an independent thing that works out of the faculty of arts out at the university of Alberta. And we're extremely grateful to have Sandra and Ricardo here in studio. Thank you for having us.
00:04:03
Speaker
So I'd love to get a sense of, specifically your Sandra, because Ricardo from what I understand, you're, you're about four when your family came over, but specifically for me, Sandra, I'd love to get a sense of like pre September 11th, 1973 Chile and what it was like under Allende.
00:04:19
Speaker
I can definitely talk about that from an eight-year-old perspective. I think for us, life was a very good life. My dad worked very hard to make sure that his children would not lack for anything. He had been orphaned quite young in his life and so he knew what that meant and he worked very hard to make sure that we had everything.
00:04:46
Speaker
that we needed and wanted. So for us, life was just like any other, you know, I guess it was good. We had parents, we had good education, we had healthcare, we had absolutely everything that a child would need to live a good life.
Allende's Legacy and Reforms
00:05:07
Speaker
And a lot of that was brought in by Allende. When he was elected in 1970, he brought in a much stronger social safety net. He made healthcare much more widely available. Can you talk about Allende's legacy as leader, even just in the three years he was around?
00:05:22
Speaker
In a lot of ways, you've covered one of the biggest changes that he didn't make was making healthcare universal, improving the child mortality rates and definitely having a healthcare system that was responsive to the needs of
00:05:38
Speaker
of everyone, not just those that could afford it. When it came to education too, he brought back public education and made it very strong. He almost wiped out illiteracy in Chile. And so the social network that we were able to reclaim in less than three years was
00:05:58
Speaker
exponential and so much better. It made life so much better for so many people that up to that point had faced incredible amount of inequality and injustice. We had the highest rate of unemployment in Latin America. Poverty was all over the place. And I think it was it was the people that wanted to see that change that rose and and got Allende elected to begin with.
00:06:21
Speaker
It's worth pointing out, too, that in 1970, yeah, the economy was in a lot of trouble in Chile. And people were having trouble finding work and feeding themselves. But at the same time, Chile had one of the strongest already educational systems in particular in South America. And again, this election and policies just made it that much stronger and much more universal. And elimination of fees and the universal access to things like education and post-secondary
00:06:51
Speaker
And I think it's worth talking about I end days legacy, not only as leader, but as a political figure, even on the global stage, right? Like he was a fervent socialist, an avid socialist, one who believed in Marxism. And so I have some, I have a quote further on that we can get into here, but, but it's, he was, but he was an elected official. He wasn't some radical. He wasn't a Marxist Leninist. He didn't believe in this, you know, political revolutionary Vanguard that would overtake it. He was trying to do it sweetie pie, right? He was, this was through electoral politics and elections.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, he identified, I mean, he used the expression the Chilean path to revolution, right? I mean, this was his expression that this was very clearly something different. The ends were still the same, right? The ends were still worker cooperatives, worker control of workplaces, worker ownership of the means of production, right? But the means were different than anything that had been tried before and he was very clear on that.
00:07:45
Speaker
It was the first time that actually working class was able to participate and impact change in Chile. And that's a huge difference in terms of what we're able to do to impact change even now when it comes to understanding the struggle in terms of a working class lens.
00:08:04
Speaker
And I think, I mean, in doing the research for this episode, I just have to point out that Salvador Allende fucking slaps. When you look at his entire career as a politician, he got elected in his 30s or something, quite young. And he was anti-Nazi from the 30s when he was just a young deputy. He was sending letters to Hitler and Germany denouncing Kristallnacht when he was elected and what he was fighting for was things like land reform.
00:08:32
Speaker
redistributed huge amounts of land to folks, right? He nationalized foreign owned firms, specifically the copper industry, right? Which is particularly one of the big reasons why United States and kind of international capital and American capital freaked out so much when he was elected. Again, we talked about already, healthcare and education systems became far more robust. And this is in the context of Chile too, which is somewhat removed from the like Cadeo style kind of
00:08:57
Speaker
politics you'd see in other South American countries. This was a stable democracy and this is why I think he believed that there could be this peaceful transition to a socialist state, right?
00:09:08
Speaker
That's correct. I think in a lot of ways, you know, we've done so much to vilify the word socialism, but in the Chilean context and for at least me, what that word means is just a way of getting to a more just and equal society. And Allende was an example of how that could have been done within the electorate system, within that democracy that up until time, up until 1973, Chile enjoyed, it was over 160 some years.
00:09:38
Speaker
of uninterrupted
US Interference in Chile
00:09:40
Speaker
democratically elected governments. It's worth pointing out too that, yes, he was a socialist and he espoused those ideals and he lived by them. But the coalition that got him elected was a broad coalition ranging from far left revolutionary parties right up to parties that were just barely on the left of centre. And they all agreed with him being a presidential candidate and supported him and worked their asses off to get him elected.
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, doing the reading on this, it was like everyone from the communists to the Social Democrats was a part of that electoral coalition, right? And it's a really interesting historical, you know, thing to go back and look at how we actually won that election. I mean, I think it's also worth throwing out some Mayande quotes here, because again, he fucking rules. As for the bourgeois state, at the present moment, we are seeking to overcome it, to overthrow it. Our objective is total scientific Marxist socialism.
00:10:35
Speaker
That's from 1970 conversations with Andy by Reggie de Bray This other one I think is worth bringing up as well We already had success in creating a democratic national government that is revolutionary and popular That is how socialism begins not with decrees And to go and they think this is this is a real model for how we can like actually talk about you know a politics that we do want right and
00:11:01
Speaker
Definitely. I mean, nothing more can be added to those quotes in terms of how we can change the system that oppresses so many and only benefits such a few, right? And we're living that now. I mean, we haven't learned anything from history since that time when it comes to current day politics, not only in the United States, but what we see in Latin America, right? Yeah, there was no equivocating.
00:11:27
Speaker
There was no, well, you know, politically we can only get this far, right? Or yes, you know, ideally we'd like a worker state, but politically it's not practical to go that far. There was no equivocating at all. It was this is where we're going and this is the path for getting there.
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, like you do need to have a clear political project that you're working towards, right? And I feel people on the left that we do struggle with that these days. I also think, I think we have to bring up, it's impossible to talk about this without bringing it up, just the extravagant extent to which the American empire was interfering in Chile, both prior to Ayanday's election, after Ayanday's election,
00:12:04
Speaker
And then also, of course, during the coup and during Pinochet's regime, right? Like, again, this is a democratically elected leader of a country that is tens of thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C. And because he was an actual socialist, the United States decided, well, actually, we've got to fuck him up.
00:12:23
Speaker
And I think this quote from kind of Henry Kissinger kind of lays out the United States' approach to Chile and Chile and foreign relations. I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people. That's Henry Kissinger in 1971.
00:12:41
Speaker
That interference was long standing as well. And it was long standing throughout the Americas. I mean, even under Kennedy, who's broadly seen now as this champion of democracy and human rights, there was interference. And it was anti-communist interference. There was concern about if one Latin American state outside of Cuba succeeds,
00:13:01
Speaker
in installing a socialist or communist government, then they will all topple, right? The domino effect. So Kennedy took a different approach, but through American foundation, through working with labor unions, through largely working with Christian Democrats and nonprofits, tried to take the edge off the kind of growing revolutionary sentiments. And this happened in Chile. And there were organizations like the Ford Foundation, who were incredibly active in Chile in the 60s, right?
00:13:31
Speaker
We're kind of complicit in supporting that American infrastructure that eventually threw a young day over.
00:13:38
Speaker
You know, it's sickening to think that economic interests always prevail over human rights, over the rights of people to self-govern no matter what continent we're talking about. And the Americans definitely had a lot of business interests in Chile at that point. So when Ayanda started in this path of nationalizing industries like the copper industry and the telephone industry,
00:14:03
Speaker
And it was all those things that the Americans saw as a threat, not so much just the ideals behind what the UN government stood for, but it was also those business interests that they were trying to protect.
00:14:18
Speaker
And even in the historical context, when opponents, when our ideological and political opponents bring up, oh, we don't have an example of a successful socialist state. Like when you consider the billions of dollars and how much time and attention was paid to ensuring that that outcome never actually happened all over the world. I mean, you can't, it didn't happen in a vacuum, right?
00:14:39
Speaker
And, and then, I mean, it's, it's, when we talk about the Chilean, um, medalline and Chilean affairs by the Americans, I think we've got, we've got to start with El Mercurio, the staunchly right-wing newspaper that was, I forget the name of the owner, but essentially was turned into an agent of the CIA and American interests all throughout the sixties and really during Allende's political career, right?
00:15:02
Speaker
Yeah, not to get too modern day on you, but think about post-media standing up and saying, hey, we can help run the war room. We can become an agent of the provincial government in disseminating propaganda. This is what Elmer Curio did back then with the US government and said, hey, we can become an agent of the US government to help disseminate propaganda. And it worked.
00:15:28
Speaker
I mean, this is a declassified U.S. Senate file that you can go find online. $1.5 million was spent in support of El Mercurio, the country's largest and most important channel for anti- Allende propaganda. According to the CIA documents, these efforts played a significant role in setting the stage for the military coup of September 11, 1973.
00:15:46
Speaker
And like, this is just one of the most obvious examples was this staunchly right-wing newspaper, but it was everywhere. It was private capital, it was foundations. As we'll learn, it was the Catholic universities and their association with the University of Chicago. This was an on-purpose effort to undermine a popular socialist leader, right?
00:16:05
Speaker
Like I said, history repeats itself. You make people angry and then people want change, right? So I don't think that a mode of operand that has changed at all when it comes to undermining anything that's public.
00:16:21
Speaker
you know such as health care what do you do you undermine public health care you make people angry and then you didn't you introduce privatization as the only option to fix it so it goes on i mean and that's exactly what they did in chili they made everybody angry they created that narrative of scarcity they created those needs that may or may not have been there if people hadn't been hoarding the food in warehouses
00:16:45
Speaker
You know so again people were it was a way of creating instability in the country that only serve to confuse people and get people angry and divide people in terms of where they wanted to be right.
00:17:01
Speaker
It was very much Nixon and Kissinger with the support from the mining corporations, PepsiCo, oddly, and a number of other large multinational corporations that vowed and drew up a plan for, in their words, making the Chilean economy scream.
00:17:19
Speaker
Right? And they did it. Yeah. And when you look at the economic warfare that was essentially put in place by the US intelligence agencies, yes, like there was the trucking strike, which was a huge, huge thing from what I understand. It was 45 days long, essentially brought the economy to a halt, all funded by the CIA. Yep.
00:17:42
Speaker
You know, we've got an international telephone and telegraph, a company that still exists, a key figure in fighting Allende, both politically as well as destabilizing Chile after Allende won. You know, we've got infiltration of almost every member of the Popular Unity Coalition by the CIA. One third of all the US embassy staff in Chile were CIA agents.
00:18:10
Speaker
You know this this was a very on-purpose project of the United States and We've got a start now. We start moving and talking about the coup and September 11th 1973 But but it didn't happen in a vacuum it wasn't just a bunch of generals sitting around saying we've got to get rid of this guy there was a
00:18:31
Speaker
resources and money and intelligence and a huge apparatus and machine to put this thing into motion, right? It was a huge long game too. Pinochet was at the time third or fourth in command. He wasn't at the top. They went through three other military leaders in Chile to say, well, do you lead the coup? When they said no, they mysteriously died. Cars exploding. One of them got shot in Buenos Aires, right? They mysteriously died until Pinochet was at the top. And then all of a sudden they found one that said, yes, like this was years in the making.
Personal Stories of the Coup's Impact
00:19:02
Speaker
So where were you on September 11th, 1973, Sandra? I was actually getting my skirt on to go to school. I used to go to school in the afternoons, and my brother went to school in the morning. So I was getting my skirt on when the first few bombs started exploding in a radio station that was about two or three blocks away from my houses. And I think in a lot of ways,
00:19:32
Speaker
When you look at what happened in 9-11 at about 8 o'clock in the morning when the first tower started to explode, I brought back that fear that I felt as a kid when I was getting dressed to go to school.
00:19:47
Speaker
I had never felt that kind of fear before, but it brought everything back. I think in a lot of ways that's when you knew for a fact that somehow your world was going to change forever and it felt like a dark moment.
00:20:03
Speaker
Because you knew that something was terribly wrong and that something was just not okay with the world that you're gonna have after that day so i remember my mom she's very scared cuz my brother was in school and she couldn't get to him so we were left with a neighbor while my mom went.
00:20:22
Speaker
you know, running to see if she could pick up my brother. But the bombs were going off and there was military people, you know, all over the place. And so we were left in the house. My mom came back with my brother and then all of a sudden we had no lights. We were the only house in the block actually that had no lights.
00:20:43
Speaker
you know, no water, no nothing because there it's different than here. But yeah, and we never knew where my dad was for a couple of days after that. So then the neighbor came and said, your dad, you know, your husband was arrested. He was picked up for at his workplace for opposing the government or resisting the coup. And so he's been taken to the Chile Stadium
00:21:14
Speaker
And then that's when our nightmare began in terms of trying to locate my dad and seeing where he was because we didn't get to see him till much later on. From the Chilean stadium, he was transferred to another soccer stadium where they basically kept thousands of people. And from that place, he was taken to a concentration camp in the north of Chile called Chacabuco.
00:21:38
Speaker
where he spent quite a few months almost a year and then he wasn't released till the next year in April of next year. So all that time it was a world that we didn't know. You know my mom had to sell our furniture, we had to get rid of absolutely everything because she had never worked so
00:21:57
Speaker
In a lot of ways, we ended up having to make do with whatever my mom could bring in, which meant that we had to have the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner almost every day, which is really no food.
00:22:13
Speaker
you know, family would kind of keep away from you because, you know, they didn't want to be associated with somebody who was already in the concentration camp. So it was, you relied on neighbors, you relied on friends, you relied on everybody to come together and try to help each other. And it was a scary time as a kid. You knew that things were bad. We looked for my dad all over. I was,
00:22:38
Speaker
kind of a child that like to misbehave. So in a lot of ways, what my mom did in order to protect herself and keep sanity, I guess, was she had to always have a kid with her because then you would disappear if you didn't, right? And so- Well, this is in the context of, I assume you knew people or you had friends whose parents knew people who were disappearing in the context of this. You didn't know if your dad was alive or not?
00:23:03
Speaker
My mom worked through a church. The church became organized and getting people reconnected and finding out where people were. But there was weeks on end where you didn't know where your loved one was or whether or not they were alive or not because you would hear.
00:23:22
Speaker
I always remember there was one time when we were playing out on the streets and we see one of our many uncles, it was a neighbor that was coming back and he had disappeared as well, but he was walking very slowly so we all run to him and then you kind of take a step back as a kid because you realize how beaten up he was, right? And you know that he had been released from wherever the heck he was at.
00:23:46
Speaker
You become exposed to a lot of things that kids should not have to be exposed to, and it's not a good time to be a kid anywhere when you have to deal with that kind of reality.
00:23:58
Speaker
Your parents got picked up too, right? Yeah, my dad. My dad was an engineer. And again, at the time of the coup, I was three years old. And my dad was an engineer and he was working out of town because one of the things Allende was doing was electrifying rural communities. So my dad was working in a community outside of Santiago, helping set up the electrical grid and all of that. And that's where he was, where he got arrested and taken. Also from there, driven into the national stadium.
00:24:28
Speaker
where he was held for a while. At every one of those steps, people got arrested. Where they got arrested, they were shot on site. Others got moved on to the next level. They went to the national stadium. Again, many of them were tortured. Most of them were tortured. Many of them were shot at the stadium. And then he got taken up to the concentration camp in the north. Our fathers were actually in the same concentration camp.
00:24:51
Speaker
in the north of Chile. He was there, it was about just over a year from the time he got arrested to the time he got taken home and it's very much
00:25:01
Speaker
The same story, right? I mean, my mother talks about going to the cathedral in downtown Santiago to kind of talk to folks there about, you know, the fact that my dad wasn't around. She didn't know where he was and trying to connect with him. And what they would do is the military police, the Chilean national police force is militarized and they would stand on the steps of the cathedral
00:25:25
Speaker
and taunt and harass and threaten women as they went in. And if the women responded or did anything, they'd get grabbed and taken away and arrested as well, right? So it was like every step of the way, every day, hundreds of women would line up outside the national stadium trying to get somebody to pass a note inside or to find out who's inside.
00:25:47
Speaker
every night just before curfew families would spread out all over the city because what they would do is they would release prisoners a minute before curfew and then shoot them say you know they were violating curfew so people would stand up go to the outskirts of the city to see if they could pick up somebody they knew
Pinochet's Regime Brutality
00:26:05
Speaker
or find somebody they knew who was being released before curfew so there was like all of this just horrific horrific reality happening at the time
00:26:14
Speaker
Most houses had book burnings at night because you had to burn everything that was remotely associated with you being involved in any kind of political activity. So, book burning, no, you know, documentation burning, everything was happening at night because that's the only time that you could get away from by doing that right.
00:26:34
Speaker
So it was a regime that was so brutal that they were making you burn your own books. This wasn't some type of performative ritual. No, no, they would storm houses. They would storm houses in the middle of the night, make everybody stand outside at gunpoint while they rifled through it. If they found a plant flit, a brochure, a book, any kind of what they considered political propaganda or political symbol, even, they would take whoever was in the house and arrest them.
00:26:59
Speaker
And this is all done in the name of fighting communism, essentially. This was the stated political goal of Pinochet and his American backers. And this brutality of this regime is notable. It's given us language that, you know, that we have here in English, right? Like helicopter rides, you know, Pinochet has become famous for this of taking people out on a helicopter and only the actual soldiers coming back or even disappearing people. That term comes from Chile as well, right?
00:27:29
Speaker
And not only was it brutal in its violence and the repression that the Chilean people suffered under Pinochet, but Chile was also this huge economic experiment, right? And Pinochet didn't really have much interest in learning how to run a country, wasn't interested in the political or the economic side of it. He essentially farmed that out.
00:27:50
Speaker
to Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago, and a relationship that the University of Chicago had been developing with certain right-wing Catholic universities in Chile for some time, right? Can you talk about this, Ricardo? Yeah, I mean, it was, you know, Friedman had developed a new kind of set of ideas around economic policies that countries could follow to get themselves out of poverty and, you know,
00:28:15
Speaker
the trickle-down kind of theory of radical neoliberal economics was Friedman's policy, but he didn't have anywhere to implement it.
00:28:24
Speaker
because these were some very radical policies that involved complete gutting of any kinds of regulations, complete gutting of any kind of public and social services, right? No minimum wage laws, no worker protections, none of that, like just extreme let the market rule and the market will take care of everybody. So they'd been working with economics departments in countries throughout South America
00:28:51
Speaker
And to kind of talk about how great it would be if these South American countries could implement these policies to help them get out of poverty, then Friedman would have his test case. So the strong military machine that just kind of quelled any kind of opposition and created this perfect petri dish for just broad scale human experimentation.
00:29:13
Speaker
Yeah, like economics is a social science. You can't run actual experiments for the most part. You're looking at data, you're trying to draw conclusions from these data sources. But you're right, it was a Petri dish. It was an opportunity to run an economic experiment at a scale that no one had ever seen before. And it was also fundamentally brutal, right? We're talking about shredding public healthcare, shredding public education.
00:29:37
Speaker
essentially making private capital have just as much rights as the people who lived and worked in Chile, right? And it is a set of economic ideas that has failed everywhere that it's been implemented. I mean, particularly in Chile, you can look at the data and look at the retrospectives and the damage that it was done to the economy and the people of Chile is extremely obvious, but somehow these ideas continue to persist.
00:30:05
Speaker
What I think is in Chile, apart from being a petri dish to this economic model that we know for a fact where trickle down economics doesn't work, it doesn't address any equality where right now almost all our resources are owned by foreign
00:30:21
Speaker
corporations, what they managed to do to make sure that this continued was to erase a collective memory of what actually happened in Chile. My son's generation, for example, had never heard of what happened in Chile. They took it out of the education system. They'd completely erased
00:30:42
Speaker
that dark chapter in our history. And so it was only been recently since people have been more in a position or even have had the will to kind of remember what happened. I went back not too long ago and I got to visit the Human Rights Museum that was just open in Santiago. And it's kind of hard to see your life reflected in a museum.
00:31:09
Speaker
because all of a sudden it became a reality, whereas before nobody could speak of it, or a lot of people decided that it hadn't actually happened.
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, it is. I mean, the fact that this just happened in 1973 is, I mean, you're still alive. I mean, people who were rounded up and tortured by the Pinochet regime are getting pensions from the government. And there's an actual like process for this, right? This is something that is, this is not some, this is like the, not the 1920s, the Marines invading Haiti or whatever. This is, this is like living memory.
00:31:45
Speaker
And one that is, again, fundamentally brutal in not only its violence, but its economic violence, right? And then the efforts that were done to implement a regime that no one voted for, and that was fundamentally brutal and against the wishes of the people who lived there.
00:32:02
Speaker
And, and when we talk about American empire, this is, this is one of the like most brutal kind of recent examples that you can bring up. Right. And, and, and this isn't again, some far away bit of history. This is right now, this is your parents. This is you were eight. Like it was truly some horrific evil shit that happened in this, in this country. And, and then as a result, there was hundreds of thousands of refugees. Yeah.
00:32:32
Speaker
And I think talking about the process of how you and your families came here is an incredibly important part of this story.
Refugee Experience to Canada
00:32:38
Speaker
You said your families, your dads, both your dads were in the same concentration camp. Did you not learn that until you were all the way back here in Emmettson or over here? They didn't know each other before then. They met each other in the concentration camp.
00:32:52
Speaker
Yep, and I think in terms of how my family came here, my dad was released from the concentration camp back to the stadium and from that place he was released. He was in our house for about a month and a half.
00:33:10
Speaker
unable to basically leave the house because there was still that political oppression that was happening. And so through the UN, he was taken to Argentina to a refugee holding place. And we joined him afterwards in Argentina a couple of months later. And again, that was another place that was going through incredible political turmoil at the time.
00:33:40
Speaker
the AAA, the Argentina anti-communist agency that made a lot of people disappear. So, you know, we had people in the refugee camp from Argentina, from Uruguay, and from Chile. And so there was not just Chileans in that place, but a lot of people that were escaping or trying to flee the same kind of violence that was happening in their country.
00:34:05
Speaker
So you and your family are at a refugee camp in Argentina. Eventually, you get sponsored to Canada. Do you pick? How does it work? So the UN, again, we become refugees. So you apply for refugee status. And every time that we did that, we lived in a refugee place that was about 100 kilometers away from Buenos Aires. So every time we had to go to an embassy to ask if they would take us, again,
00:34:32
Speaker
our uncles would borrow kids so that they wouldn't disappear. We'd go to different embassies and pretend that we were kids, even though we were. And my dad got accepted under the UN Refugee Program to quite a few countries and he chose Canada because he felt that Canada was closer to Chile.
00:34:57
Speaker
For my parents, my mother, while my dad was still in the camp, had made contact with a priest through the church, through this whole church process, who had helped her start talking to three different embassies. And when my dad came out and they decided that it was not safe to stay in Chile, they completed the application to Canada, Mexico, and Sweden. And the Canadian application was the one that came out first.
00:35:26
Speaker
They had no idea what they were coming to, no idea what to expect, wound up in Edmonton because of my father's background in the trades as an engineer working in electricity. And because the oil sands were being developed here, they said Edmonton is where we need electricians, so off you go, right? And that's it, like sight unseen, without a clue.
00:35:48
Speaker
Edmonton is where we need labor at that point because that was what it was all about, right? It was not about where you needed to go. It was where they needed you. And post 1973 coup, there was also like an international civil society left wing reaction to the coup, right? And they were, were trying to find places for these refugees to go. Were you, did those folks, were they involved in your process at all or, or how did that work out?
00:36:13
Speaker
I think we learned about those folks later on and the amount of public pressure that it took to be put onto the government of the day to take us as refugees. And I think, you know, anytime that you hear, oh, these refugees are just
00:36:31
Speaker
a problem. I think we, at least I see myself reflected in the unwanted group because at some point we were also unwanted here and it took a lot of public pressure for us to be able to come.
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah, and some of those groups were quite active in working on ongoing solidarity with Chile after we were here, helping us organize events, helping us stay in touch with each other. The one that comes to mind in particular is the Wordsworth Irvine Socialist Fellowship that was quite involved in pressuring the Canadian government to accept Chilean political exiles, but then also working with Chileans here to help us continue solidarity work back home.
00:37:15
Speaker
Yeah, like in doing the research for this episode, I found out that Canada was pretty much shamed into taking the 7,000 refugees that they took, you know, out of hundreds of thousands. It's not like they took the lion's share or anything, but that there was a leaked diplomatic cable that ended up calling the people who were being rounded up, arrested, and killed by the Pinochet regime as the leftist riffraff of Latin America.
00:37:36
Speaker
And it was some low level diplomatic staffer who ended up making that public and that that along with the civil society push was enough shame for the government of Canada actually accept refugees. They took you, they didn't take you because they wanted you, but they took you. And then the government of Canada continued to support the Pinochet regime after they, even after taking 7,000 Chilean refugees, right?
00:38:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that that's why a lot of people didn't understand why we were constantly protesting and holding rallies within the chilling community. Almost all our speeches were in Spanish, but our signs were shaming the Canadian government for supporting Pinochet and everybody thought we were kind of
00:38:18
Speaker
What the heck are these people doing? When they're here, they're safe, get over it kind of attitude. And so that never stops. But we were quite active in trying to call attention to the role that the Canadian government was actually playing in supporting the Chilean dictatorship.
00:38:36
Speaker
At one point years ago, we were kids. We occupied what was then the passport office in the Royal Bank Building downtown. This was before Canada Place. And we occupied the passport office because news came out that the Canadian government was selling paramilitary equipment that the Pinochet regime was using to suppress protest marches and democracy in Chile.
00:38:58
Speaker
So you can still see pictures of the police arresting young kids and removing- Removing us from the passport office. Well, if you have those pictures, then we'll put them in the show notes. I mean, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was fundamentally hostile to the Allende government. He refused to visit. He cut off aid to the government when it was in power. Canada was one of the first countries to actually officially recognize the Pinochet regime in Chile, right? Like three weeks after the coup or something, like a blatantly illegal military coup.
00:39:26
Speaker
Canadian banks left Chile after Allende was victorious in the election. Canada joined the US in voting to cut off all money from the IMF in 1972. These are not the actions of a government that was... What's the right word? On the right side of history.
00:39:47
Speaker
Yeah. Like they essentially helped Pinochet consolidate his power and enabled his brutal and bloody dictatorship to continue to exist. And, and again, this is all, you know, 40 some year old history now, but you, you folks are here, you're a living testament to the brutality of this regime and this, and our, our Canadian government doesn't deserve really too much credit at
Critique of Canada's Role
00:40:09
Speaker
all. And because they were forced to take you, right?
00:40:14
Speaker
And I also think the local political angle is one that's extremely relevant now, right? And we've kind of danced around it on the edges of this conversation, but I think it's worthwhile getting into this now. You know, Naomi Klein wrote a book, The Shock Doctrine. It kind of talked about the Chilean experience. Kenny, Jason Kenny has been very upfront about his plans for the Alberta economy. What's going to happen once they drop their first budget? What's going to happen when they drop their second budget?
00:40:41
Speaker
Do you see the similarities there between what Jason Kenney is talking about and what Chile experienced under Milton Friedman?
00:40:47
Speaker
In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein talks about that need to have some kind of shock, some kind of crisis that enables those in power to create that petri dish. In Alberta, we saw that in 1993, and the crisis was this manufactured debt crisis. There's this over the top, oh, we're in debt, we're in debt. We've got to cut spending. And that kind of opens Albertans up at that point to being receptive to
00:41:16
Speaker
this ridiculous neoliberal privatize and sell things off approach, right? So that we kind of did it to ourselves without the military interference. And we're getting that again, even if you read, you know, the government's blue ribbon panel, right? You hear that same language that, oh, we're in crisis, right? We're in crisis, Alberta's in trouble, we need to deal with this now, right? It's that same kind of trying to create a crisis moment
00:41:44
Speaker
that enables the implementation of what Naomi Klein calls the shock doctrine. And it also adds to the narrative of, and we need to act now swiftly and strong, right? Because if we don't, then things are not going to change. We need to save everybody from this economic crisis and budget and deficits and so forth.
00:42:02
Speaker
So, you know, the history repeats itself no matter where you're at. And I think for me, it's a huge turn off in terms of having heard that so many times. And yet there is no political will to actually improve what we currently have in place.
00:42:20
Speaker
Yeah, you can see the echoes of what happening in Chile now, especially, and it's especially ridiculous and it's incumbent on us to point it out because Alberta's economic situation is fine, right? Like in the context of like every other province, most North Americans of national jurisdictions,
00:42:39
Speaker
Like we could probably raise taxes a bit and we'd be in better shape, but like even now bone stock however many years of like relatively tepid economic growth We're cool. Yep And so this crisis must be created and it must be repeated over and over and over again to justify the fact that like Oh, yeah, like little Timmy's not gonna have a public school anymore He's not gonna get a lunch anymore or we're gonna
00:43:01
Speaker
You're not going to be able to get income support to go to post-secondary or pick your poison when it comes to austerity. And add to that the narrative of enemies and we're under attack and our economy is under attack from external enemies and we have internal enemies who want to destroy our economy and want to destroy our way of life. All of those narratives, they sound so familiar. They just echo with that entire history.
00:43:28
Speaker
It's about taking away the responsibility of the collective and leaving it into the individualism. And that's what this whole fight is all about. I can't afford this. Or if I want to spend my money on health care, why should I care what happens to people that can't afford it? To me, it's somewhat mean-spirited.
00:43:52
Speaker
you know, we understand as a definition of being Canadian is when we don't take care of each other. We live in a society, right? We live in a society that wants to take care of its kids, that wants to take care of its old people, that wants to take care of the people who can't work. And reducing this and atomizing us to these kind of individual base economic units is the point, right? And capitalism does require enemies, right? You know, the contradictions inherent within capitalism means that things are going to get worse for people.
00:44:20
Speaker
And instead of blaming it on capitalism, they've got to find external enemy A. In Chile, it was communists in Canada. It's foreign-funded radicals or environmentalists, whatever it would pick your poison, right? This is a feature, not a bug, of a capitalist, you know, patriarchal settler colonial state, is that you do have to find these enemies.
00:44:42
Speaker
And it does feed, I mean, it feeds on itself and it creates that, you know, that individualist narrative where if I find out that, you know, a public sector worker makes more money than I do, my solution is not to argue, why am I making so little? My solution is to complain about the public sector worker making too much, right? Which just seems completely backward to me.
00:45:04
Speaker
Yeah, it is messed up. And I think we have one last thing to talk about in the context of Alberta's political history and entanglement with Chile, and that is Ralph Klein.
00:45:17
Speaker
Ralph Klein said some pretty stupid and shitty things about Chile when he was premier. Why don't you walk us through the kind of like first one and then we'll, it was a cascading series of shittiness, but go on. What kicked it all off was that the opposition and the legislature had proposed a private members bill to introduce public auto insurance in Alberta.
00:45:42
Speaker
And Ralph Klein responded in debate on this saying, public auto insurance, that's the kind of thing that the Marxist tried to introduce in Chile. And it was a complete disaster. I know this because I wrote a paper on it.
00:45:59
Speaker
because he was getting his high school diploma through Athabasca at the time. And it just kind of rolled out there from there. And he also said that Pinochet was forced to mount a coup, right? Because the communists had taken over. He was forced to mount a coup because communism was his argument, right? And then that, I mean, I don't imagine the Chilean community appreciated that
00:46:20
Speaker
No, no, we had massive rallies and he was supposed, I don't even remember, I don't think he ever apologized, but that was our call for him to apologize to the Chilean community that had been subjected to the brutality and the torture and the imprisonment and the ultimate exile of all of us.
00:46:41
Speaker
But in that moment it became quite clear, I wrote an op-ed that kind of went national at the time and it became quite clear how many people across this country actually hold that view that somehow Pinochet was entitled because he had to stop socialism, right? And that was, I think the first time I, on a personal level, really saw the degree to which that view existed in Canada.
00:47:06
Speaker
But then on the other side of the coin too, it was good to see how many people actually didn't know our story, didn't know the human side of what Pinochet had actually caused. And so it allowed us to have that bigger conversation in society to say, you meet a lot of people here in Canada that have very different pre-migratory experiences.
00:47:33
Speaker
right, or that have had very different kind of exposures to different political realities before coming to Canada. And so I guess at the end, it was a conversation about humans. It was about a conversation about the suffering of people and how it's experienced at the same level, no matter what.
00:47:55
Speaker
And then, of course, it was revealed that the paper that Ralph Klein had worked on had been completely plagiarized. Yes, that is just the fucking capper to this one, which is just that Ralph Klein is too- He was young back then. He's too fucking dumb to write his own essay on Chile. And that he, have you read it? I mean, the way that his plagiarism worked is that he would just like have a bunch of writing and then he would have parentheses and then he would have internet.
00:48:22
Speaker
In parentheses, there's no way to know how, there was no actual quoting within the context. Anyways, hilarious. And that kept the story in the news for quite a while, right? Because there was an investigation into his plagiarism. The education minister tried to essentially bully the university presidents into doing public relations. They did, they released a statement saying, yes, saying, commending the premier for seeking to, for being involved in lifelong education and wanting to further himself, right?
00:48:52
Speaker
And our institutions were so cowardly they were unable to hold the premier accountable even for this extremely obvious fuck up. And it really is kind of emblematic of just how messed up Alberta is. I do have a special gift for one of you.
00:49:08
Speaker
Um, you can do with this as you will, but I did make a trip to the library at the legislature. And I have here Ralph Klein's plagiarized essay. Oh geez. That's fantastic. I ended up, you know, sharing the Chilean media. So you can burn that and you can do with it what you want. Um, but I don't need it anymore. And, um, and I'm happy to again, give it up in the, in the service of this podcast.
00:49:33
Speaker
We can also put it into, we have all our history archived at this moment in the Alberta archives. So we will definitely add this to our history here in Canada. There we go. So I just have one last question for you before we kind of move on to the end of your show, end of our show here. How will you celebrate when Henry Kissinger finally dies? Um,
00:49:58
Speaker
You know, I'm not sure when Pinochet finally died. There was this weird moment of part of you wants to celebrate, but part of it, like for our parents, all of that comes rushing back as well, right? So you kind of raise a glass to survival, I think is the way you do that, you know?
00:50:18
Speaker
I mean, there's no love loss there whatsoever. And you don't speak ill if the death doesn't apply to guys like Kissinger or to Pinochet. I mean, I hope to hell they never rest in peace. But again, it's like Ricardo said, it's like the unfair end to crappy lives, of crappy people.
00:50:43
Speaker
Okay, so maybe a more hopeful question to end it on rather than toasting the death of your enemies is how do we do an I end day here in Canada? And how do we build an unapologetically socialist politics out here in this country, in this province?
00:50:57
Speaker
For me, I'm going to speak first. I think what we need to do is actually have a better understanding of what the word socialism is and how it actually applies to today's narrative and world. I think in a lot of ways, like I said before, we've vilified the meaning of that word. I think we've come to a point where it's going to be civil society and grassroots groups that actually change the way that politics are done.
00:51:24
Speaker
And that's my hope. I don't have very much hope on electoral politics, to be honest with you. I just think that it's going to be the people that make a difference in what kind of a world we have. It worked in 1973 when it was finally an opportunity for the working class to actually participate actively. And I think it will work in the same way in Alberta when we have
00:51:47
Speaker
groups that have identified their area of strength and will work together so that we can make this society an Alberta better province. We need to stop equivocating on our ideals. Stop not using words like socialist but start actually talking about what they mean. We need to talk about our history and not work towards the possible but work towards the ideal.
00:52:15
Speaker
And the more that we re-embrace that language, the more that we don't equivocate about it. Look at examples like AOC or, you know, even if you will, Bernie Sanders, who reclaimed a lot of that language and reclaimed a lot of that energy. I think it becomes possible again. You know, I think we always get accused of being dreamers. And I say, yeah, we dream of a better world, but we dream with our eyes open and our feet firmly planted on the ground because we know that a world can be better.
00:52:45
Speaker
that we have the ability to make this world work for absolutely everybody not just a few. That's a fantastic place to leave off this conversation thanks so much Sandra thanks so much Ricardo. As we wrap up here Sandra what's the best place to find you online how can people support friends of Medicare do you have some deets.
00:53:05
Speaker
Yeah, we have actually an event coming up pretty quick here that will celebrate 40 years of our existence. It's on September 26th. If you're interested in attending, go to www.friendsofmedicare.org and you'll find all the information there. You know, sign on to our Facebook. Follow us on Twitter and make sure that you add your voice. The more that we have voices to amplify our message about the importance of public health care in this province, the more support we will have out there.
00:53:33
Speaker
ParklandInstitute.ca. We've also got some events coming up at the end of the month. We are hosting the Edmonton and Calgary Stops on the book launch of Martin Lukasz's book, The Trudeau Formula. Future guest on progress opportunities. Well, there you go. So Saturday the 28th in Edmonton, Sunday the 29th in Calgary, go to ParklandInstitute.ca and check those out. And we have just released an alternative to the Blue Ribbon Panel report here in Alberta doing a genuine
00:54:00
Speaker
analysis of our finances that actually considers both sides of the ledger. That's also up on our website right now at parklandinstitute.ca. Fantastic so much. And yes, I'm very grateful to have Sandra and Ricardo here on the extra parliamentary left here in Alberta, alongside Progress Alberta. If you like this show, please tell your friends about it. Please go ahead and leave reviews, post it, share it. I think this has been a really fantastic episode. And so especially on the anniversary of September 11th, please go out there
00:54:28
Speaker
We are also in the middle of a fundraising drive. We are looking for 200 patrons, 200 people who can kick in at least $5 a month. So if that's something that you can do and you are interested and you want to keep this podcast going, go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons. Also, if you have any thoughts, notes, comments, hate mail, things that you think I need to hear, I'm on Twitter at Duncan Kinney and you can also reach me on email at DuncanK at progressalberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Fami Communist for the amazing theme and goodbye.