Thread by @mariliacout

1/ "At least 15 people have been killed in protests over inequality in the worst violence the country has seen in decades." - I'm writing this thread as I fish links and try to make sense of this to non-Latinamericans.

aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/c…

2/ It's not really about bus fares. And we should watch very carefully because it was *exactly* over protests about bus fares in Brazil that the RW capitalized unrest and discontent and rise to power

nytimes.com/2019/10/22/opi…

3/ If you read the @nytimes article above, pay attention to the expression "capitalist oasis". Economic grown in developing countries is not such a piece-of-cake to understand. It's a very bumpy road.

4/ There will be bad decisions and steps back on the way and that's when the opportunistic RW grabs power. #Piñera is announcing urgent measures - too little, too late.

euronews.com/2019/10/21/fir…

5/ As we say in Brazil, "we've seen this movie before": Pinera is showing the world the ties with Pinochet's murderous dictatorship that he never severed: these are the people now in charge of "controlling the protests".

jacobinmag.com/2019/10/chile-…

6/ Let's understand what Pinera's rise to Chile's presidency means in the context of a continent that suffered under decades of murderous far-right military dictatorships: he was elected in 1917, a year before Bolsonaro was elected in Brazil.

7/ Both men are succeeding what you, Americans, would call "socialist" administrations (it's the wrong expression: they are left-leaning social democrats elected on progressive platforms based on wealth redistribution strictly within the market-economy parameters).

8/ Both RW administrations - now a trend in Latin America - are parasitizing a long period of economic growth led by these center-left administrations which, no doubt, made mistakes. Nobody denies it.

irishtimes.com/news/world/rig…

9/ But policy mistakes are not fixed by destroying 30 years of slow but steady progress with the "Destroyers of Worlds". Using an American aphorism, this is exactly "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".

10/ This is not a bad overview of the 1917 Chile presidential elections:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Chil…

11/ Let me start the contextualization of this (now continental) crisis with a Spanish saying: "Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos" (foster crows and they will pluck your eyes - disclaimer: this is a proverb. I love corvids).

12/ There is a lesson to be learned when a continent painfully re-established democracy after USA-sponsored RW military dictatorships, all of which imposed through Coups over democratically elected presidencies. It needs to keep the RW under control and it needs to NEVER FORGET.

13/ Please download the dossiers above: they offer evidence about how the USA sponsored the Coups that turned a whole continent into a cemetery of human rights (hey, Americans, does foreign interference look good to you? It doesn't, for us)

pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d5b7/692f88e60…

14/ Pinochet's economic policy was possible because there was no opposition to the atrocious attacks on workers' rights: among dead, "missing" (euphemism) and exiled, over 200,000 Chileans were not there to speak.

15/ Indicators were cute and the "new growth" of Chile's economy was celebrated. Another lesson for you, Americans: growth without regulations to keep inequality under control is a disaster waiting to happen. Wealth redistribution must be a foundation of any country's economy.

16/ As are a National Public Health System, Public Education and lots of other things sacrificed by "austerity policies". So there you are: you are watching what happens when "cute economic indicators" are achieved by the sacrifice of economic equality.

17/ I leave you with a song by one of my favorite poets and song writers: Victor Jara, murdered in the early days of the Pinochet dictatorship. I used to listen to this in bad cassette tapes with my friends, very quietly and in terror. It gave us hope.

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