I will walk the streets again
in what was bloodied Santiago,
and in a beautiful liberated square
I will stop to weep for the absent.
I will come back from the burning desert
and come out of the woods and the lakes
and I will evoke, on a mountain in Santiago,
my brothers and sisters who died before.
I, united to those who do much and little,
to those who want a free country,
will fire the first bullets
sooner rather than later, without rest.
The books will come back, the songs
which murderers’ hands burned.
My people will be reborn from their ruin
and pay back their faults to the traitors.
A boy will play on a tree-lined street
and sing to his new friends,
and this song will be the song of the soil
to a life cut short in La Moneda.
I will walk the streets again
in what was bloodied Santiago,
and in a beautiful liberated square
I will stop to weep for the absent.
40 years ago today, 9-11 came to Chile with gunshots and a roar of jets over the presidential palace, La Moneda. The coup was launched from Viña del Mar, on the coast, with CIA and US military “assistance” to the fascist troops of Pinochet. But really, it was Pinochet and Co. helping the US in the end, using Chile as a laboratory for libertarian cuckoo economics enforced by fascism.
The idea that libertarianism is actually a form of fascism may be anathema to those who still naïvely and quaintly assume that it’s all about personal and economic freedom, but the facts are that Chile was on a true course toward freedom under the democratic socialist, Salvador Allende (the “life cut short in La Moneda”), and certain powers-that-be (and still are) in the United States of Amnesia couldn’t have that. There was dire talk of “ruin”, and of course, Milton Freedman’s “Chicago Boys” were only too happy to ruin the Chilean economy ahead of the coup — and destroy it utterly thereafter. THEY reduced it to the irreparable state it is still in today. Chileans cannot forget 9-11, because that is the day their democracy died, and they have yet to get it — and their sovereignty — all the way back.
If you wonder why the OTHER 9-11, the one the US is commemorating today, happened…this might just be a clue. It’s the imperialism, stupid. Other countries want to be free to make their own decisions, and other people deeply resent it when US-trained “experts” parachute in to fuck it all up on them. The OTHER 9-11, the one that happened in 2001, is the blowback from US interference in Afghanistan and the Middle East. What’s truly insane is that it’s still being used to justify wars in countries that have nothing to do with that day at all; the latest to get blamed is Syria, which is still on the warmongers’ radar. After all, there is still that arch-capitalist military-industrial complex to feed. And fascism is nothing but capitalism minus gloves…
It’s just like some people have never learned the lessons of history, isn’t it?
