Spanish Version: https://www.microtopia.org/carta-de-un-gringo-al-pueblo-chileno-sobre-kast-boric-y-constituyente
Good evening my name is Alexander Hagen I am the husband of Marcela. who left Chile in 1981 roughly, to come to the United States due to the terrible economic conditions in Chile as well as her boss pursuing her at Lan Chile, a man from DINA named XXXXXX LXXXXX. A man from an organization of terror who is wealthy and happy and unpunished as many criminals in Chile are. Of course by 1981 Dina was renamed CNI but changing the name changed little about this organization of terror to repress the people of Chile.
As an outsider from the United States I encountered a wonderful country full of wonderful people I traveled from Arica to Puerta Montt On five different trips or six different trips. we have been married for 27 years. but I learned gradually, about the favoritism towards light skinned and light eyed people, the aversion to indigenous people, the aversion to people that are dark skinned or short. and gradually I saw that the Spanish invasion of the 1500s was still going on but the people were still being subjugated by a small aristocracy or oligarchy. there is enormous amounts of injustice in the United States but we reserve our worst injustices to the developing world. and in fact at times shamefully the American people turn a blind eye towards the cruelty and murder we conduct in the developing world, because Americans believe this is how their standard of living is maintained. bring us the resources and don't tell us how you got them.
My wife's family is divided: her mother's family largely supported Pinochet and her father's family supported Salvador Allende. and I will say that at dinner parties and cocktail parties protesting the savagery and cruelty of the Pinochet regime even in the most indirect manner could result in outbursts and anger from the men at these parties. They didn't even want to hear any criticism. and they believed a number of falsehoods. First of all "Plan Zeta". just recently a naval officer came to our house from Chile and told me that the coup was justified because Salvador Allende was planning to execute the entire Chilean army. Now fortunately I know a professor educated at Stanford University who was in the Unidad Popular government, and as a result he himself was mentioned in the "plan Zeta". He was accused of having machine guns in his office. Now I have worked with this gentleman who I have asked to help as an advisor to my company and the idea of his possessing machine guns is completely ridiculous. so these poor right wing bastards actually believe the lies that were used to destroy their country by our Central Intelligence Agency, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and a little known man named David Attlee Phillips. it was a "chaos" they told me. But that chaos did not come out of a vacuum. every trucker in Chile was paid hundreds of U.S. dollars weekly to sabotage the economy. I have friends who can personally attest having witnessed these payments to sabotage the economy. the first year of the Unidad Popular government the economy actually grew even though The US had it under sanction.
I highly recommend you read two books: First "Allende’s Chile: An Inside View", and second "The Condor Years". Operation Condor or plan Condor was planned and orchestrated with the technical assistance by the United States and it's covert operations department such as the Central Intelligence Agency.
Plan Condor ended up imprisoning and torturing almost half a million people in Uruguay Brazil Chile and Argentina. Those who fled Chile or one of these other countries to one of these other countries were simply travelling within a prison. Over 50,000 labor organizers and working class movements were tortured to death, thrown out of helicopters to their deaths.
And the Chileans still live in fear of their military and they live in fear of US military. but I I feel that I can assure Chileans that if Gabriel Boric is elected president we are in a different age now and that the United States will not conduct such severe operations. and with the fall of Nixon and Kissinger The US bit off more than it had thought it would chew. The US got more from than it bargained for. The US ended up distancing itself from Pinochet.
And the ghost of Pinochet still rules Chile. the constitution was imposed on Chile by Augusto Pinochet. the armed forces and carabineros have blinded several 100 Chileans. Chile's security forces have been caught sabotaging businesses and buses for reasons that I do not understand but to create provocations. to create a chaos so that the population will demand security. in general right wing intelligence agencies and militaries do not have a lot of imagination other than for torture techniques. they will use the same techniques they used in the past over and over. to create a climate of fear where the population demands that they be repressed so they can feel safety. but as many patriots have said "he who trades his liberty for security will get neither".
Now the reason that I am speaking to you tonight is that all of Marcela's friends and relatives appear to be demoralized by the election results, so let us examine them.
To me as an outsider the fact that Gabriel Boric received 26% of the vote and Jose Antonio Kast received 28% of the vote would not be bad news. we know the entire media is for Kast. and I want to advise you Chileans to be very careful about CNN Chile. CNN is owned by AT&T. AT&T is one of the companies that surveilled us that spied on us in the United States that spied on its own citizens above and beyond what the CIA and FBI requested they went above and beyond to spy on us. they own CNN and it is now turned out that they actually invested in a right wing network called oan an extreme right wing network that on the same day that CNN is attempting to seem like a reasonable center network supportive of Biden and antagonized against trump at the same very time AT&T's OANN was promoting every sort of virulent false information campaign to support Trump. AT&T should be shut down and certainly has no business in the news industry.
Then there is the issue of the Congress; of the Diputado’s and the Senate. if you can demand a recount that would be very helpful because you do not want to have a 50/50 Senate. but my own analysis of the change in the composition of the Diputados is that we are doing fine.
So keep your eyes on the prize as we say in the civil rights movement in the United States.
You have achieved something remarkable to be able to have a constitutional convention. in the United states people would be terrified of a constitutional convention with the current political makeup of the country where small conservative states essentially hold us hostage.
but I am seeing the composition of the Asamblea Constituyente and you have the power in your hands!
Sometime in the early part of 2022 a plebiscite will be conducted. If the constitution is drawn up in such a way that the Senate and Diputado's rules of election change this will be a very short lived government regardless, and in particular the Senate. the Chilean Senate appears to me not to be one person one vote.
In the Senate for each 100,000 votes the right wing parties received one senator. Chile podemos received 1,400,000 votes. they received 12 Senate seats. However AR. APRUEBO DIGNIDAD required 227,000 votes for each senator even worse than the disproportionate representation in the United States Senate. Here in the United states we have 50 Republican senators who effectively represents 140 million of our population and we have 50 democratic senators who represent 180 million people! This is because very small states with only a few people in them have the same number of senators as states like California and New York whose economies would be in the top ten countries in the world by themselves. This is not democracy. but the word democracy does not occur in the United States Constitution The United States Constitution is about liberty. the liberty of rich men to keep their private property. So if the people of Chile do not lose their nerve, they have the fascists in checkmate. the members of the constitutional assembly have been selected. the right was utterly crushed. these are the people who will form the rules for the new Chile. and you will lose if you don't organize. Everybody must put aside their hobbies their fun maybe even their jobs. The young, the unemployed and the retired need to get involved. it has been 50 years since thousands of Chileans were tortured and murdered and the psychology of the country was traumatized by A US invasion, a silent invasion in that all the henchmen looked Chilean. how the US could find somebody as cruel and psychotic as Augusto Pinochet. well this is what happens when you summon the devil. it's not the devil you wanted, but no one in the US Republican Party and very few in the Democratic Party cared.
I will show you a map of the world, Chile will have the distinction of being one of the few countries that will have completely recovered from a US reshaping of its psychology. And for those of you Chileans who do prefer blonde blue eyed people wealthy on there fondos, and in their fancy neighborhoods. you must realize in the world things are changing. That indigenous cultures are being rediscovered. you should read the book "The dawn of everything", to realize we don't have to live in these rigid class structures we don't have to live with values of materialism driven by our own inferiority complexes injected into us by right wing and business forces. a content people may not have a lot of material needs; they have their families, the places they go on their vacations, and their homes, their food, their books, their computers, their medicine, their education. a content citizenry could lead a consumerist neoliberal economy into a recession. but when we rethink society we don't need to have all of our citizens frantically working around the clock and consuming as fast as they can we have to rethink how we want to live.
So Chilenos organize! Be aware that all of the media in 1973 was completely full of terror and false lies about the Sovietization of Chile when in reality what was going on was an independence of Chile from a 500 year reign of terror perpetrated by the Spaniards first on the Native American population and then second on their own mestizos.
What is beauty? Are the false and real blondes of Vitacura beauty? Or is it really a certain ugliness. People who actually derive their self esteem from the fact that the majority of the other brothers and sisters are poorer than them less white than them. is the short squat Mapuche ugly? Or do we see a certain dignity and beauty in their resistance after so many years of abuse and dispossession? I see this racism in everyone I meet in Chile. even the most progressive and pro working class people it has been embedded into their consciousness.
So what does it mean to organize? First volunteer for the Gabriel Boric campaign. Make sure that there are exit polls and poll observers at every polling station in country. give as much money as you can to boost support for the new constitution and to support Gabriel Boric.
If you are a Chilean living outside of Chile then you must make sure you are registered to vote as soon as possible there may not even be time the election is on December 19th call tomorrow your consulate. https://www.votoenelexterior.cl/votoenelexterior/preguntas-frecuentes
And if you are a decent and enlightened conservative understand that Pinochet was as Mr Sichel says "worse than Hitler". This is because Hitler at least stated that he cared for Germans. Pinochet showed his utter contempt for Chileans. And that the constitutional assembly is one part of erasing this foreign intervention in your internal affairs. Another part is to reach out to your family and friends in the armed forces and make sure they understand how evil the Pinochet regime was, how it traumatized the Chilean psychology. o\One key problem that happened to Salvador Allende was that the enlisted troops we're separated from the people, they were removed from their families, they were isolated as much as possible to prevent any sympathy. Pinochet followed Hitler's playbook. Hitler said
Be Harsh!
Act brutally!
Close your hearts to pity!
Destroying a man is right!
You have struggled for 50 years to achieve a society where the people control their government and you have that chance right now in the next nine months. you must put as much energy in the next nine months to ensuring the constitutional process and successfully. guarding the rights to a basic social safety net such as retirement medical care and education and care for the environment, basic things. in my opinion as well to start a process in Latin America of demilitarization. The militaries of Latin America have only been used to oppress their own peoples. The idea of a war between Brazil and Argentina or Chile and Bolivia is almost absurd. But to greatly reduce the size of these militaries in Latin America it must be proportionate or ideally should be proportionate. But if the other countries will not reduce their militaries in a joint planning to transfer money from militaries into the economy of life rather than economy of death rather than being soldiers to be architects engineers doctors Craftsman musicians, Chile can still reduce the danger of the armed forces repressing the people.
Our conservative Republican president Dwight Eisenhower spoke about how every soldier is taking food out of the mouths of the people. The Chilean military is culpable, it is a sick culture, and must be radically transformed to not be a weapon of oppression of the old Latifundistas and the 400 richest families, but instead represent the great mass of the people, the students, the workers, the unemployed, the elderly, and the Native American.
So to conclude in the analysis of the election of this night we achieved our objectives with the one tear that by two percentage points Mr Kast has been portrayed as having more momentum. but it has been stated that although Kast would lead in this first election. when he has to face Boric head to head he will lose! Drive home the fact that reasonable conservatives consider Pinochet an absolutely despicable human being and that this man Mr Kast supports one of the worst monsters in human history. That Mr Kast wants to build a great ditch to Bolivia. This isn't just about immigrants, it is also a hostility towards Bolivia because Bolivia now has a government that is kind to its indigenous people. I could be mistaken but why doesn't he build a great border wall with Argentina or Peru? Regardless of Mr Kasts motivations in his insane plan to build a ditch along the border of Bolivia, we also must consider the fact that his father was a National Socialist from Germany. my father's wife had family that served in the Nazi army. but she has repudiated Nazism she is not a Nazi! If your father is a Nazi and you think a monster like Pinochet is a great guy then that makes you a Nazi basically. this is straight out of colonia dignidad. And for those of you who might be worried about US intervention in Chile, The US will not encourage the Chilean military to intervene. Our current administration is focused on China and Russia. they will accept democratic socialist governments in Latin America. Unfortunately Obama was key in removing Lula da Silva, but he expected a moderate conservative to emerge not a nightmare like Bolsonaro. the liberal interventionists in the United States are going to have their hands full. As long as Chile continues to have strong ties with the United states in trade and technology do not fear our government's intervention in your affairs. What the United States will do because our executive branch doesn't entirely control the intelligence agencies or big business is they will create organizations like CNN Chile who on the surface seem reasonable but there was an article written by CNN entitled "Make Chile Great Again" (https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/20/americas/chile-election-kast-boric-intl-latam/index.html) and interviewing some random Chilean. Of course one could pick any of 1,000,000 stories to run, people who were happy to vote for the left, but they picked as their sample a person supposedly on the left who said they were 100% voting for this Pinochet loving son of a Nazi. and instead of describing the problematic Nazi background of the Kast family they described him as "of German heritage". it was what we call in the United states a hit piece. So do be prepared for an avalanche of negative press. Communication is essential. WhatsApp was used to elect Bolsonaro using false stories that the Labour Party in Brazil was giving penis shaped drinking vessels to small children. They targeted poor women in the northeast of Brazil and it worked. And as I said the military and intelligence covert operations are usually equipped with a very limited imagination and reuse the same play books they used in the past. In the 1960s they described socialists and working class movements as an attack on the family. Of course extreme inequality is the greatest attack on families and that is what people get when they allow big business to run their countries. But the US media is not going to wholeheartedly support Kast. The New York Times wrote an article that was fairly balanced that if I read it knowing nothing else would lead me to vote for Boric over Kast. so don't be too afraid of the United states but do keep an eye on it.
And for those who might say Gabriel Boric is inexperienced, Gabriel Boricis not corrupt, and he's not stupid. That's all he needs to be. There are plenty of people this time around surrounding him; economists, social scientists, who can supply the experience he lacks. There is also an old Japanese saying from Musashi the swordsman, the greatest swordsman of Japan. that one year with proper attention and care in a trade or craft is worth 10 years of repetitive activity.
Finally what I'm really trying to say here is that Chileans are always criticizing themselves and seem to think too little of themselves Chileans are remarkable people. You've done a remarkable thing by getting the opportunity to rewrite your constitution nonviolently without a bloody revolution. This is remarkable. and you haven't been taught your true history. did you know that Pedro de Valdivia had his head cut off by his retainer Lautaro? Have you studied the Araucania? Did you know that there were bronze smelting works in the area that is now around Vina Del Mar? That they were indeed aspects of high civilization in Chile prior to the Spanish conquest? Here in the United states too, we have not been taught our real history. do you know of Irribaren? How many countries with a population of 15 million or so produced great poets such as Neruda and Mistral, or produced the musical traditions of Chile? I have worked with engineers from around the world and there are some exceptional engineers in Chile. it just makes me sick when I hear Chileans running themselves down. you had to face the amassed wrath and strength of the greatest superpower in the world. This low self esteem that I detect in Chile was not there in 1971 it is entirely a product of the US destruction of Chile. so don't buy into it!
Viva Chile!
Adelante Companeros!
References
Allende’s Chile: An Inside View by Edward Boorstein https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212425.Allende_s_Chile
The Condor Years: https://www.amazon.com/Condor-Years-Pinochet-Terrorism-Continents/dp/1565849779
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDO28CPAPuM