Ideas - How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Augusto Pinochet's Chile

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Augusto Pinochet became Chile's leader after a bloody, U.S.-supported coup killed socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973. He defended the coup. But as he attempted to control the narrative, stories of violence were already casting a shadow over his new regime. As we continue our series on authoritarianism, host Nahlah Ayed and panelists explore Pinochet’s popularity with centre-right Western leaders, the referendum that removed him from power, and the story of his eventual arrest and trial.Listen to other episodes in this series:How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Benito Mussolini's ItalyHow to Defeat Authoritarianism | Idi Amin's UgandaGuests on this podcast:Carolina Echeverría is a Chilean-Canadian artist, author and cultural mediator whose work explores memory, migration and belonging.Teresa Macías is a professor in the school of social work at York University. Her expertise is on the enduring legacies of human rights violations from the Pinochet dictatorship.Kevin Coleman is an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto.

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, the show where Canada's top comedic arguers argue over bottom-of-mind topics. This week's episode is full of dry humor as we ponder is a clothesline superior to an electric dryer. Our comedians aren't afraid to put everything on the line in this one, and we hope it all comes out in the wash. So don't miss this week's episode of the debaters wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Would you ask this gentleman why he has? has to leave Chile. Welcome to ideas.

I'm Nala Ayyed. By the persecution. Alimenta by the military government. In December 1973, CBC reporter Bill Boyd filed this from a refugee center, just outside of Santiago, Chile. What country does he want to go to? Any country that accept to receive him.

Just three months earlier, Chile had been thrown into a state of terror. When a U.S.-backed military committee, or junta, killed the socialist president Salvador Allende and put General Augusto Pinochet in charge, Pinochet himself defended the coup. The Allende government was leading this country into economic and social. chaos. But as Pinochet attempted to control the narrative, stories of violence were already casting a shadow over his new regime. There have been all kinds of rumors abroad and charges in the foreign press. They make us laugh. They say that there are thousands of dead, hundreds of people arrested, that rivers of blood run in the streets. Pinochet's dictatorial rule in Chile lasted for two

decades. During that time, thousands of people were imprisoned, tortured, and executed. The tragedy is that while Chile may look normal on the surface, the hunter knows that if it relaxes its grip, there could very well be civil war. Welcome to the third in our five-part series, How to Defeat Authoritarianism, recorded at the Stratford Festival in summer 2006. Each on-stage discussion explores the rise and fall of an authoritarian regime from recent history. Our goal is to identify the key stages of their dismantling and the conditions that ultimately led to their collapse. Authoritarianism relies on individualizing and isolating us, but we do have the capacity to come together. In this panel discussion, we ask what we can learn from the

dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Without further ado, it's my very great pleasure to once again welcome to the stage. Nala Ayad. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I want to begin with a common question to all three of you. Really just asking you to describe a moment, a picture, an image, when the idea of Pinochet's fall became possible to imagine. I think it's important to recognize that there were strategies to end the dictatorship.

from the very beginning. Teresa Macias is a professor in the School of Social Work at York University. Her expertise is on the enduring legacies of human rights violations from the Pinochet dictatorship. But for me, as a young woman, in November 1983,

the secret police arrested two siblings, Gallo and Maria Candelaria Azevedo and their father searched for them for many days. when he didn't find an answer, he walked out onto the plaza and set himself on fire. And his last words were, please return your children to me. And I think that was for me the moment when I think he reverted the calculus of the regime. Because we rely so much on protecting our own lives.

And when you put your life on the line and you're willing to lose your life, I think it creates a movement. And I think that's what he did. created a movement. And I think he created a conditions by which many people came alive. So by giving his life, he was defending or demanding life for the country's children, including his own. Thank you for that, a very stark moment. Carolina, what comes to your mind? That's exactly what I was going to mention when Sebastian Sedeo set himself on fire. Carolina Echeverea is a Chilean Canadian artist, author and cultural mediator whose work explores

memory, migration, and belonging. I'm someone who likes to always look for the silver lining and hope. So I want to finish your story by saying that the story ends up that his children were liberated and his daughter did manage to go and see him before he passed away to say, Dad, I'm alive. And so that's for me a very important fact. And in a happier note, when I felt that there was hope was when I was finally free from school and university.

And we had our first punk rock music group called it. The Los Pricioneros, the prisoners. And it empowered us because they said the words that we needed to hear. The people like my generation, that we were very young when the dictatorship started. But now we were empowered. We were 18 and over. So we were supposed to come and do something. And they gave us that validation, that empowerment of saying we were the voice of the 80s

and we were going to start the new battle. So I remember that's the moment that I felt now we're going to go forward. There's no more just taking it in. A very hopeful moment. Thank you. Kevin, what's one image of a crack that made it possible to imagine that authoritarianism can be defeated in Chile? For me, I would actually go back much further than Teresa and Carolina went back to November, 1975. Kevin Coleman is an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto.

So just two years after the dictatorship had come to power, there's this extraordinary confrontation between two very powerful figures in Chilean society. One is a civilian. He's in rabid anti-communist. He's a far-right Catholic, a big admirer of Franco. His name was Jaime Guzman. And he's sort of the lead ideologue for the dictatorship. And then on the other side, there's a cardinal, an archbishop of Santiago, Raul Silva Enriquez. And what happens is there's a shootout between the secret police, the Dina, the Director of National Intelligence, and these far-left rebels in the Mir. And some of the rebels are injured, and they seek refuge in the parishes of a couple of priests, a Holy Cross priest named Herardo Wellen and in a parish of Jesuits. And these priests know that if they turn these fugitives over to the state, they will be tortured and killed. And so what they do is they smuggle them into embassies.

and they're eventually ferried out through the Vatican Embassy and through another Latin American embassy and the state responds with fury. They arrest the priest, Therard de Wellen, there's a British nurse, they arrest her torture her. The British embassy pulls out its ambassador. And then Jaime Guzman, who's this very charismatic guy, he sort of presents himself as a man of the people.

He's a referee on weekends, a sportsman, good-looking, white, you know, very light-skinned guy, et cetera. He's on TV and he's denouncing the church hierarchy for collaborating with terrorists and subversives. Now, this is a church that when Pinochet takes power, kind of blesses the coup. But that's not what they did in 1975 because they had been cleaning up the bodies from the streets. And the cardinal gets on the next day, issues a very powerful statement that effectively says that this guy who considers himself the consummate Catholic will be excommunicated because he's cross the lines of the church.

And for me, that's a moment when, no, they don't reverse the dictatorship, but they drew a red line and said we have certain juridical, pastoral, autonomy, and try crossing us. What a powerful moment. Before we talk about the actual regime of Pinochet

and what it was like to live under it, I want to sort of explore the ground in which it took root. Going back to 1970, when socialist politician Salvador Ayende was elected president, setting Chile on a new path by igniting people's hope, imagination, but his election was also met with fear and anger, both at home and abroad. And, Teresa, I thought maybe I could start with you to tell us,

what do you think made IANDA so threatening to the right in Chile? I think he came into power with this idea of social transformation. He wanted to nationalize private enterprises, land reform, He came with a very broad program of social change. And he had a very powerful popular support, the poor, the unions, the people who had been the same franchise forever, all of the sudden fell themselves on power. And I think this was very threatening to international interests,

who were invested in the Chilean economy, but also Chile was still an oligarchy. There was still a country of landowner. in which landowners pretty much did not only own the land, but the people who live on the land. And there was still this kind of vestiges of Spanish colonialism in which people were considered property in many ways. So I think that was a very serious threat to those interests.

Chile is still a country, and I think in many ways still is, a country in which your last name determined where you belong, you know, the elites were in power. But also, and I think it was those groups and those circles that began to distribute this information, misinformation about what really was going to happen. I remember, you know, I was very young at the time of the coup. I was eight years old.

But I remember, you know, people talking about, you know, they're going to steal the children and take them to Russia and turn them into Russia and spy. or agents or whatever. So there was all these fears that were circulating, both in the, obviously in the elite, but also among the people in general. And I think that was one of the reasons why he was so threatening to certain circles in the... Because he was a socialist. He was a socialist. Agenda was the first democratically elected socialist government with a strong socialist agenda, with strong links to, at that time, the Soviet Union.

So this is the Cold War, international. this was like we were going to be the next Cuba. There was the international discourses around what an elected socialist government would do. That was possible. Carolina, what do you remember?

What are your recollections of how people viewed that regime and why people thought there would change was necessary? Well, I think that what I ended abroad, I would define with a very poetic line, it was a revolution with stars, because people

don't need only to feed with bread for the body. You need to feed your soul. And Allende was feeding the soul of the people. That's what made him so dangerous because he was offering something that was awakening not only the poor, but also the young. Because let's

not forget that this was a social revolution that was peaceful and that engaged a lot of young people from all the spectrums of the country, not just the poor or that's engaged. It was also waking up something on the kids of the

upper class. So that made him even more dangerous. And also, Allende had something fantastic, which is that he presented the plan that he had for the new Chile through the arts. So it was in the hands of the poets, of the artists, of the musicians. So it was something that was felt. We could feel the dream. Even though my parents were a right-wing family, I remember my father was a banker, and we traveled a lot, so I was living in the north. And I would see from my window, as a young nine-year-old, the miners coming with the yellow helmets, with their beautiful, pancartas, you know, the beautiful signs and things. Yeah, the banners were gorgeous. Everything was beautiful. There was color everywhere. There were murals being painted. People were singing.

There was a vibrant energy that was taking place that was undeniable. So he was seen as dangerous for being hopeful effectively, but also because of his politics. And he was seen that way also outside of Chile. And specifically the United States, which of course was subsequently become involved in a coup against him. Absolutely. And so the role of the United States, in this is decisive. The United States starts blocking Allende, beginning in 1964. And why? Just to we get that bit.

It's because, yes, the Cuba thing, but they called it La Villa Chilean, and it was a democratic path to socialism. And that was what the United States couldn't tolerate, because it could infect other countries in Europe and other places, that they can see that there's a democratic, constitutional path toward a radical transformation of society to create more equal social relations. And the U.S. saw that as a huge threat, and they begin funding the Christian Democratic Party to blunt the force in the popularity of the socialist and other left parties in Chile. And so when Ayende is elected with the 36% plurality in 1970, there's a meeting of Richard Nixon,

in the Oval Office. It's a 10-minute meeting, and he's got his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, he's got the director of the CIA Helms and his head of the Justice Department, etc. And Nixon famously tells, basically, we've got to save Chile, we've got to stop Allende. You have $10 million right now, and there's more to come if you need it. Don't let him get sworn in in seven weeks. And, quote, we're going to make a year. We're going to make a year. We're going to make the economy scream. And so Chile had this democratic tradition and reputation for adhering to the Constitution. And so the CIA literally put in place the next day, a two-track policy. The first track was undermine Ayende politically through propaganda, et cetera. The second track was

militarily. And the military track was to block the generals that were loyal to the elected government and to the constitution. And so they begin funding and they try two times to kill the main general, René Schneider, who was loyal to the Constitution. On the third time, they send in a diplomatic pouch a bunch of high power weapons. They get five guys. They stop General Schneider on the road, sledgehammer through the back window, three bullets at point blank range. And he was the general loyal to the Constitution. He was sort of the firewall. And they kill him before Allende even takes office. But what's the response? The next. day. They didn't have runoff elections in Chile at the time, so the legislative assembly had to

certify, they had to vote. Well, even the Christian Democrats who had opposed Allende, they all, you listen to the audio of it, it's Allende. It galvanes. Ayende. And they all vote for Allende. And he's sworn in because they want to protect their constitutional tradition. Very pivotal moment that kind of looks stark when you look at it three years later, when Pino Chay becomes the chief of the army and very shortly afterwards seizes power in a military coup. Exactly what was hoped for in that office that you talked about. So the next morning, after the coup happens, tens of thousands of I-N-Day supporters are rounded up and move to the national stadium and some like singer Victor Jada were tortured and killed right

there on the spot. And so back to Teresa, from your vantage point. How did that very brutal, very sudden takeover change everyday life? Well, I have to say I was eight years old at the time of the group. And at that age you experienced things from a very small, limited perspective. You had a child. But I remember clearly, you know, we went to bed the night before, and the next morning somehow I woke up sleeping on the floor

and the mattresses on our beds were kind of stent. ending as a barricade. Because we lived, I mean, I come from very poor background. We lived in the Poblaciones Cayampa, which were the shanty towns, the equivalent of the shanty towns. And our houses were made out of flimsy wood board. So there was nothing to protect us. But protect you from gunfire? Protected from the gunfire. So I think that is for me the memory that I have. But I also, you know, remember the neighbors talking about, you know, who had not come back home, who was, who were still missing or people who were trapped in their job places, in their workplaces, in the factories,

because they basically put us all on a 24-hour curfew. So you hear, as a child, you hear those stories. But also, over the years, you begin to hear the stories of, we live very close to the Rio Mappocho, which is the river that crosses Santiago. You begin to hear neighbors talking about, you know, rescuing by, from the river and bury them in secret so to make sure that, you know, somebody will remember them. So those are the things that are, I think as a child, those are the things that you remember.

And how that became part of kind of the day-to-day story, how violence becomes part of your story in a way that you would not imagine, that it becomes part of what we talk about on a day-to-day basis, what is talk about in, you know, Obertina or things like that. Caroline, I pick up from there, and if you don't mind, address that exact point, just how it is that control is implemented on everyday life. Well, first of all, I don't know if I could just make a small difference of your experience. Teresa is like, for me, I was nine, but my father had to take back the bank because we were living in the north.

And at the time of the coup d'etat, we were visiting our grandmother that was like 20 hours away from the north. and the coup d'et that happens and my father receives a call that he has to take over the bank immediately and we all have to travel. So I just remember the visual of me taking a trip with my family by car from the north of, you know, Chile is very long.

So we're going 20 hours, 24 hours, in a car leaking out all this beautiful country and the return trip is in a country that is empty. That is we are the only car driving on this highway for 20-something hours with every time stopping us at checkpoints with machine guns at the window.

So I remember the feeling of what happened in this return trip and coming back home and seeing the door open of our neighbors were gone, they disappeared, and going back to school and my principal was not there and half my class was missing and then a deep sense of injustice came to why them and not me and that is what created the break within my family. I couldn't handle the injustice. Why were we so privileged and all these people where were they?

I think as a child, the biggest change for me is that we could be watching television I would be watching Bewitched in Spanish and all of the sudden there would be like a trumpet sounds and the Altissimo General

of the Republic Cesar Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and it was like we just imagine that it was going to be like a Roman circus and he could cut Bewitched and appear in our TVs

and he can just tell with a horrible voice he had a horrible voice a terrible diction terrible Spanish to say what to say that they had just discovered more terrorists and they would do-da-da-da-da,

and they killed all these terrorists, and they would show us the same video of these guns and machines and bombs they had found somewhere. And would you keep watching? But you had no choice. It was every... What could you do? The voice was on the radios,

you could change channels and the voice was everywhere. And also you must remember that Chile at that time had probably three television channels and they started at 12 noon and they'd finished by 10 p.m. So it's like, there were not many choices. Pretty easy to control. Yeah.

control the media. And one was Catholic and one was national. And I really appreciate your story like what you told us, Kevin, about what happened with Cardinal Silvanrique, because as a young activist in Chile, my biggest disappointment was the Catholic Church. Because we were all waiting for the Pope to come and put Pinochet in his place. And he came and gave him communion. And that was the moment that I just, that was it.

So, I mean, there are so many strands there of how Pinochet controlled society and controlled the way people thought. So whether it's via the church or through broadcasts or the fear that's instilled in society, Kevin, maybe you could talk about that envelope of disinformation that people were living in day and day out and what that did to kind of entrench the idea that there was no other way than Pinochet's. Yeah, yeah. So I think for me they wound together three very important elements. The first was extreme. violence, right away, a kind of law-making violence to erase what had come before and start fresh to rebuild the social order that they envisioned. The second is through the economy. They had

radical free market ideas, and they were ready before they even took power. And the third is through the law. And so on the night of September 11, 1973, Jaime Guzman and his team is in the office of the owner of El Mercurio, a far right newspaper, and they're running the mimograph machine all through the night. There's still gunfire in the streets of Santiago, but these guys, what are they doing? They're printing a 500-page blueprint for the economy, how they are going to undo all of Allende's economic policies and how they're going to remake the Chilean economy along the lines of these radical free market ideas. They get the named Chicago boys

because most of these people had done their undergraduate degree in economics at the Catholic University of Chile, and then they did a postgraduate degree at the University of Chicago. They studied with Milton Friedman and other famous economists of that day. And then they go back to Chile,

and they have enormous cachet in that world. So they were ready. And they deliver, it's called Eladrillo, the brick, this 500-page volume, bright and early the next day to all the generals. So that's the economic side. The violence side is immediately, they're scooping people up off the streets, they're taking them to the national stadium. You mentioned from Victor Hara. They take many others. They round up to Americans famously, Charles Horman and Frank Tarugi, and many others. But then Pinochet is not happy with how slow the military tribunals are because they're still kind of

following the law, right? They're still kind of saying, oh, that guy, he did nothing. He can go, and he's frustrated. So he sends out this general, Ariano Stark, and this guy goes to all the garrisons up and down the country, this 3,000-mile strip of land. And he pulls people out of their cells with some of his underlings, shoots them. And now these are people that had turned themselves into the police. Like, these were law-abiding Chileans who were like, yeah, I'm a member of the socialist party, but I didn't do anything, and I believe in the rule of law. So I'm here. You said, turn yourself in. And these guys are summarily shot. But what does that do? It teaches a lesson to everybody in Chile that we get to decide who lives and dies. And it sort of binds the military together.

Those who still want to follow the law, they find themselves dead, right? And then they're in a sort of blood pact. Okay, we're all complicit in this. And then I can talk about the law later, but the law is another crucial element of the regime, and one way to explain why it lasts 17 years. I think we also need to remember that Milton Friedman made a trip to Chile a couple of years after the coup. And he's actually made this statement that Chile is the perfect place to implement his economic policies because it is a capture population.

It is a population where there is no resistant possible, so this is the experiment. And the policies are what? Neoliberal? the privatization of health care, privatization of pension plans, the privatization of education. And you begin by also eliminating,

firing, sending into exile, assassinating intellectuals, and completely reshaping the education system. I mean, I did a degree in economics before I came to Canada, and you couldn't teach Marx, and how do you teach economics if you don't cannot teach Marx? Even if you were against Marxism,

Marx provided the foundation. It's a petri dish, essentially. That's what it is. And I think Milton Freeman, that was his statement. It's like, Chile is the place where this experiment can have place. I mean, it's recognized all over the world that Chile was the lab for this extreme neoliberal policies.

And it is true. I have to tell you, my brothers are those people that study at the university at the Chicago boys and my father. That was a family of bankers. But it was most shocking for me was the immediacy, because they were ready, of course, It's like they privatized the water. In Chile, water is private.

It's not a human right, even today. And the system is still in place. And the families that own the water, because they bought the rivers and they bought all the water, and they're planting avocados today. And they live entire cities with no water. So I just want to show how long we're still having the effects of that legal change on our constitution. And also how they, how they, control the people by the installation of new concepts of evil, politicians, communist, socialist,

so they call it the left-handers, left-handers. It's like there's this whole thing that starts to fall in the way that is creating a new order. And I'm sad to say that it continues. I actually I want to hear more about that if you don't mind. Just this process with which people's minds were actually reshaped the way they thought about certain concepts. Could you talk about how, could you explain how it is that that is undertaken and how successful it is? I think that the language of cancer, which is something that you brought up earlier, is a very powerful metaphor, narrative, that somehow there is this communist cancer among us and we need to stop it from spreading and you need to, you know, denounce your neighbor if they are, if they have communist ideas,

which communist ideas can be anything. There wasn't really a clear, a clear, definition of what makes a communist. There's anyone who in some way has a different way of thinking or a critique of the can become. And the people buy in. And people buy in, neighbors buy in, you know, they denounce their neighbors. But it's

also, I think it becomes also in smaller ways. I mean, they outlaw long hair, right? Because they was associated with the hippies. You know, so those, like the way in which their body gets disciplined in such insidious.

At the same time, there's curfew. So there's order. All the middle class loves the order because the kids are at home. They cannot go to party. So it's the enabling of a system by our little petty bourgeois needs. So I would like to also make sure that we take some responsibility for that.

And I think that the fear stays with you, but you're not so aware. And I find that probably the way to fight it is by connecting. It's by not isolating. Fighting isolation, and you can start connect with other people, and then you know that we were not going to be overcome.

We nodded briefly to kind of the role of the so-called silent masses or the silent middle class. And I'm wondering if we could explain a bit more or expand a bit more about how that might have played out in Chile. Can we start with Kevin and then work around? Sure, sure. Society does get reformatted. What you can see, say, and do in particular places, changes.

Like if you're at a cafe, what you can say if you can't. Families get divided. But how does that affect their ability to act to collective? I think one way is that people are sort of ghettoized. Communities are ghettoized. So if you're a Chilean and you're from the upper class, whatever, you can sort of go along and not even recognize it. Now, if you're from a community that's being affected by it or if you're just a curious person, you are having a very different conversation around the kitchen table about the political murder, the disappearances, state terror, etc. I want to add something. I think that what they did is that it was, what the secret is, is to put people against each other. Because we were so afraid of the people denouncing each other that you have to stop talking.

You don't know who is the enemy, who isn't. As a university student, I know that there were students that were not real students, and they were pretending to be students. They were army people, they were secret police, and they were there, and they would denounce you. You were constantly being listened to. You were constantly being... So you grew up with an incredible mistrust of the other,

because you don't really know who's going to give you away, who's a real person who's really for the government or isn't. And that is something that stays with you for a long time. But I also think, I agree, but I think also Chile became a big panopticum. You didn't need to be observed to believe that you're being observed. And I think that was the brilliance, if we can call it that of the regime, is that you create a climate in which we all believe we are being watched, even if we are not.

Kevin, just a quick comment on, we were talking about who is complicit. We were talking about the middle classes. But also, can we talk about internationally who might have been complicit in allowing the kind of regime that was ruling in Chile to do whatever they want effectively and to rule with an iron fist? Who makes this possible? Well, the United States during the three years Allende was in power, how much did the elected government get from the IMF, the world, Bank and the international development banks in credit, a sum total of like zero dollars. Okay. As soon as the coup happens, the U.S. turns on the spigot, and millions of dollars in credit

are flowing to Chile. That's one really important way. The U.S. says to its corporations, okay, now you've got to invest in Chile, et cetera. And it wasn't just the U.S. It wasn't just the United States, right. Canadian mining companies, et cetera. Yes, absolutely. Arms from Canada.

And arms. Canada was arming Pinotche until the amazing Canadian ambassador, I think it was in the embassy, traveling his own dime to Canada to tell the government it's actually pretty bad we need to help. I mean, Canada was not considering this such a big deal. Yeah, and the Pinotche regime is getting help from the Brazilian dictatorship. They're lending support to the military governments in El Salvador. So there are important transnational ties on both sides, on the side of solidarity and on the side of authority. and on the side of authoritarianism.

A powerful reminder that solidarity can run both against authoritarianism and among authoritarianes. You're listening to a panel discussion about the regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. It's the third in a five-part series called How to Defeatheat authoritarianism, recorded at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. What if I told you that most of history, underwear wasn't remotely close to the underwear you're wearing right now.

Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of the Your Dead to Me podcast, and we're back with a brand new season. And if you're a fan of fashion trends of the past, you'll love our newest episode on the history of underwear. We explore how our underwear has changed throughout history and whether TV depictions of Regency-era ladies in their lacy underwear are truly accurate. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. While in power, Augusto Pinochet banned all political parties, dissolved the country's Congress, and scrapped its constitution. His iron-fisted rule lasted from 1973 until 1998, when he held a plebiscite in an effort to gain eight more years of power.

Instead, a resounding majority of Chileans voted him out of office, prompting a presidential election the following year. Hennaro Arrigada was the vice president. of the Christian Democratic Alliance, which claimed victory over Pinochet on December 14, 1989. By 1983, that struggle was visible on the streets as mass protests began to break out across the country.

But resistance to Pinochet had been percolating for a decade. I asked each of the panelists to describe the earliest forms of resistance in Pinochet's Chile. Here's Teresa Massia, of York University. Well, I think that there was resistance from the very beginning. I think that many of the people

active in the political parties who went into exile from the very beginning began to try to shape some form of resistance. We have the Comite Propas, which is the precursor to the Vicaria of Solidarity, which is the church ran vicarate

in which people were, you know, going there for protection and people were negotiating in asylums for people who were being persecuted. There were the mothers and daughters of the detained disappear who started very, very early already denouncing the disappear of their loved ones. So I think that is important to recognize that those things were happening early on. And also the arts.

I remember my first activist action was as a 10-year-old being at the bank downstairs. We live in the bank. and having an entire army doing La Parada Militar, which was that they all stand there with their army, totally Nazi-like. And they're all standing there for a firm, and they don't move. And with my little mirror,

I took a little mirror and I started putting it in the eyes of the Army people. I mean, I know it's a small action, but it's civil disobedience. I think that we have to embrace, I raise my children saying, please, whenever I tell you to do something, you have the right to tell me no mom,

and my daughter still never does dishes. But the point is that they're in power with being civil, the disobedience matters. You've got to instill that in your children. And the arts, as I was at the Faculty of Art and Design, we had a newspaper that was done with serigraphy. I was the salesperson because nobody would think I would be selling newspapers in my neighborhood. But the point is that there was newspapers. There was La Guillaecomun, the common pot, and all the people that were hungry. So there were many actions of people that were taking.

But my favorite ones was the art piguera, the tapestries, that were promoted by Pinotche's wife, and all these women were making these beautiful tapestries. that were like supposed to be done in the Cs, the Cs, the centers of mothers, and at the end, they get exported. So I saw them for the first time in California, at age 17, as an exchange student, because they smuggled them thanks to the Vigaria la Solidarity,

the ones that were made, where they were saying, where is my husband, where is my child, all the things with messages were, so they were being put under the pretty ones with its landscapes. And then in California, they took them, and they made a whole exhibition. And I saw what was happening in those tapestry.

So there are people, the wives that were still looking for their husbands and their sons to come back, they were putting all this on this tapetry set up as Art De Bovaro is made with scraps and stances. So it's very accessible. So there were many, many circumstances that people were resisting and I think that especially in the arts, because the junta were very ignorant people. They don't read it and they didn't read it. I mean, Finanche never read a book, although he claims that he did write a few. And I did check them out and please don't even read them.

But the point was that we could get away with metaphor. There was a lot of metaphor that in the songs. I remember the guy who sung the festival of vinea that year. He was talking about students who disappeared, a cafe for Platon. But because he used Plato, they never caught on. It's extraordinary. So there was a double job going on of all the things that we could get over. And the humor, we had the humor of saying, you know what,

you guys never even know what we're laughing at. And the final revenge that I would like, I always mention these to people so we feel some joy, is that memory is what gives you the final word. And how is Pinotche remembered today? I don't care. I know people love. But the man has no monument. He could not be buried in Chile.

Allende has a beautiful, people go. They put flowers. Allende is in the memory of the people. Pinotche doesn't have a place where people can go because the Sqla Militar did not want it because they were afraid of people going to do vandalism. So the ashes are in some relatives' house and he has no place to be remembered as a dead person.

which I find it a great success story. Just very quickly, religious processions were another way that the regime couldn't really control what they were doing. And so from the shanty towns, you know, 5,000 people gather and they walk to a mass grave. And what are they carrying? Because there's extreme censorship? Well, they're carrying quotes from the Bible. And like, if you start to think about what's in the Bible, some of it can be pretty incriminating, right?

And pretty on the nose against dictators. And so, and there's these police walking along at the procession, just reading verses from the Bible to report on these people. Anyway, the, and the Vicarate of Solidarity, another form of resistance. I mean, they're putting in 5,400 habeas corpus petitions. All but 10 are rejected. But that sort of documenting of the truth day after day, doggedly by these lawyers, eventually pays off. And it's the documentary foundation for the truth and reconciliation process that comes later, which is not perfect,

but at least there's some return to truth and what happened, and there's a record of it. I want to turn to those months and years when the regime starts to feel some pressure from people, both at home and abroad. In 1983, mass protests start across the country. Teresa, what is it that made that moment, such an important moment, in the story of Pinochet? Well, I think there was resistance all along, but in 1983, I think people, particularly the unions, they begin to organize and become a vocal opposition denouncer of what was going on. And there is this social, explosion and there is the call for national strikes and, you know, and it begins more, but it begins

to build and it builds exponentially. And the regime obviously responds with violence. There is a resurgence of killing, of torture, of disappearance. The government begins, reopens some of the concentration comes, like Bisawa, for instance, and begins to actively and very publicly reprimally. opposition. Now, I think it's important also to recognize that there was a strong presence of international humanitarian organizations. There was a very strong popular education movement that had been already working in Chile. I was part of some of that through popular education movements in the shanty towns. So there was already a busing going around. And it becomes loud in 1983. I think a big part of it is in response to the referendum in the 1980

constitution where obviously is very controlled. It's not really free, it's not really a free vote. So I think there is a reaction to that. There is also, and I think this is important to mention, while you're right there was a strong financial support from international lending institutions in the U.S., that money doesn't trickle down to the poor. And there is extreme poverty. So there is the solidarity among the poor that really reflects the way in which the economic policies of the regime are impacting the people who are more in need. In 1988, under growing pressure from the international community, Pinochet held a referendum. It was intended to give him another eight years in power, but instead the no side prevailed. There was never a guarantee that Pinochet would

honor the outcome. So, Kevin, I'm wondering if you could explain how it was that you think that, how is it that he actually did step down? Absolutely. So part of this has to do with the continuity that Teresa, I think, is establishing. The legacy of authoritarianism, and and how the Pinochet regime lost legitimacy. And so part of it is an economic collapse in 1982, where they lose more than 14% of GDP overnight. This radical free market, Chicago boys, people, are suddenly nationalizing the banks,

something Iyende could have never done, but they're bailing out, you know, the banks, et cetera. So they lost legitimacy, people, 30% on employment, et cetera. But the plebiscite comes around because they have, had built the legal architecture that Jaime Guzman that I opened with, he writes the 1980 Constitution. In the 1980 Constitution, it bans the left parties, it explicitly bans them by name, and it also bans them by sort of ideology, anything that could be Marxist. So it installs a kind of architecture that is still in place, but that Constitution also ensured that there

would be another plebiscite in eight years. And there's a certain opening after the economic collapse of 82 and the protests of 83, 84, and the parties get to suddenly organize. And there's a debate. Like, should we participate? This is a rig game. Pinochet controls the state. He controls the media.

He has people painting over our graffiti. He's only given us 15 minutes a night for advertising. But they manage, 17 political parties managed to get together and form a coalition, concertation, and they do it under this banner of joy. Joy, in these 15 minutes, they have these amazing commercials. They're a bit problematic because they're erasing the legacy of the regime, the human rights abuses, et cetera, but they're talking about joy is coming to Chile. They're so effective.

They're so effective. And you've got men singing, women singing, and then there's this chorus of people saying, we're all going to say no. We're all going to say no. And they say no. Because they were offering a start, Kevin, I'm sorry, offering aligria. They were offering joy.

So people could wrap their heads around the idea of joy. Yes. Exactly. And then just to very quickly, just to finish, Pinochet doesn't want to accept the results on that night. You know, he's telling the police to kind of open up the streets, et cetera, and not, and his general say, wait, you agreed to follow this constitution, and they don't obey his orders. And fine. Like two in the morning, he's like, all right, do whatever you guys want.

And they declare on national television. The No one. Don't forget that the detail of General Mathé was the one that went on the news saying that before Pinochet said anything, that the elections were resolved. Yes. But can I say something about the No campaign? And I think this is something very telling and something that we don't always recognize. The flavor, the tone of the campaign for No is builds on the neoliberal capitalist narrative and discourses. It's about, you know, individual citizens.

and actually the person who organized he was a publicist, the person who coordinated the whole thing was a publicist who had done campaigns, at campaigns for Coca-Cola so they had that flavor, right? It had that kind of feeling. You know, there is a very good film that you can watch, that it's called Actually No.

And you can really see how that campaign builds on a regime that the military leadership has put in place. And the people, the people in the campaign were the people from my faculty, the people that created the newspaper, the Spirit de la Epoca, I couldn't believe when I was seen from Canada that they were all behind all of this. And I'm happy to report that years later,

there was a recognition at the Museo Contemporano in Chile for the people of the newspaper, and I was invited, it was beautiful. So it was a positive thing. And I just would like to type one little thing that why it worked. It's the same way that in Canada, I don't know more started, because indigenous people put their digital,

differences aside for a common goal. And I think that the biggest problem in activism is that fallacy that people think that the idea is that we all need to agree on something. And that's what stops actual action changing things, because we will never agree with anything. So we need to accept that we would always disagree. But as long as we collaborate, we can create change and we can figure out how we're going to agree later. But I think that in Chile, that moment, happened, all those political parties of the concertation at the time had the same thing that I don't know more did, which is that indigenous people put their differences aside for the love of our collective home. But in Chile, it was the idea that we're not going to agree.

Just just collaborate. Thank you for sharing that, Cardena, because the whole exercise here is for us to collect knowledge and lessons that could possibly apply as we contemplate today's situations. I want to go back to that image, Teresa, that you painted at the big, actually both of you at the beginning of the father who basically self-emolates to save his children and the children of Chile. I wonder all these years later

whether you think that the fight against Pinochet and his ideology was ultimately successful. That's a difficult question and I have to say is a question that my son asked me a few years ago. We were sitting at a coffee shop

and having breakfast and he said, ma'am, do you think you win? Did you win? Did you think you win? Did you think you won? Yeah. And I actually have to say that I don't think we did. I think that there are many positive things, that there are many moments of joy and transformation that have happened.

I think one of the things that Chile has is that there is still that fire sometimes, that lights once in a while, and there is huge protests, and people protest on the street, and there is upheaval. But I believe. that many of the changes, the transformation that were put in place by the dictatorship, they remain. There is an incredible amount of social inequality in Chile. Poverty is rampant. And there is still this idea that you can be part of the middle class. If you just have a card, if you just buy the latest telephone or whatever, that there is somehow a way to climb, but it's always precarious.

And we still have a private healthcare system, a privatized education system. The enclaves, the authoritarian enclaves left by the dictatorship, remain in place. Now, I do believe that there is a great amount of memory work in Chile, people who, you know, monuments and museums that are attempting to maintain memory alive. but I also believe that the major transformation of the regime has never been dismantled. Carolina and then captain. I think that we lost a battle. We did not lose the war.

I think I'm happy. I don't feel like if we failed, I did not fail because at 61 years old, I am at the right side of history, and that's something I'm proud of. A lot of people in my family are not so proud of, so I can live with that. And I think it's important for any country, forget Chile, because Chile is the same as every other country in many ways, this autocratic thing that's happening. And it's happening right now more rapidly than ever before.

And it's that we need to do a mea-culpah of where there were mistakes done. Otherwise, we're going to continue repeating them. So, of course, the left did make a great mistake, of the constant division of trying to find agreements where that was not going to happen, and it weakened the spirit of the people that was pushing for this change. We have to admit that what happened to a lot of people after when they became exiled, the

forgetting of the people. I went to Chile to make a big, I went to the Monnet. I had an actual meeting there when Baudits was president to talk about the invisibility of the Canadian-Chilean community that has been fighting for 50. All those people are older now and they'll continue. All they do is fight for Chile

and they have never been given that validation. Kevin? I think that just to build on what today's and Carolina were saying, I think that part of the institutions were Chilean political scientists have a term called authoritarian enclaves.

And basically what Jaime Guzman and the other writers of the Constitution did was, and these are their own words, they were creating a protected and authoritarian democracy, right? And so these authoritarian enclaves survive all of the

transition to democracy. And so what happens? The democratic consensus, that emerges after the transition is built on the certain marginalization of the left parties that were prescribed. And what then happens, like, how do you create a transformational project after that with these structural conditions in place? And in the left, you know, occasionally turns to armed insurrection, which just sort of feeds the anti-communist fervor even further. at the same time sort of this question of memory that Carolina raised

and Teresa as well I think it's really important there's a great Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzman I was watching last night one of his films he's called obstinate memory and he goes back to Chile and he's playing

there's this scene where he gets the he hires a marching band to play the Unidad Populars thing through the streets of Santiago and people haven't heard this in like 20 some odd years and you can see the faces of the spectators they're like like what how like they don't know what to think and some people are clapping and some people are fearful but there's a sort of relationship between memory and forgetting that is still very uncomfortable I'm going to do one quick round with you literally a one line answer and then we'll get

to these of what you think what one lesson that we can learn from from that period from Pinochet's period in thinking about authoritarianism today. So we'll start with Kevin and we'll work backwards. One lesson. Fractricide is possible. Okay. Carolina and then Teresa. Colonization, it's still on.

And you can call it whatever word you want. The dictatorship is still the vestiges of colonization and people not knowing who they are. It's a country with indigenous people, a huge, much people that want to be either indigenous or white, and then the Europeans were still wanting to be Europeans. So that's what I would say. All right.

Teresa? One sentence. Yes. I think that totalitarianism is very insidious and we need to be watchful. Thank you. Thank you all. Please join me in thanking our wonderful panel today. Kevin, Teresa, and Carolina.

Thank you very, very much. Thank you. Thank you. Very much. That was the conclusion to the third in our five-part series on how to defeat authoritarianism. This series is produced by Pauline Holesworth. Editing by Annie Bender. Thank you to our guests. Teresa Macias, a professor in the School of Social Work at York University. Carolina Echeveria, a Chilean Canadian artist, author and cultural mediator, and Kevin Coleman, an associate

professor of history at the University of Toronto. Thanks also to the staff at the Stratford Festival and to John Scaife at the CBC Radio Archives. Technical production, Harper-Charlton and Danielle Duval. Lisa Ayuso is Ideas web producer. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.