1st Evade Chile 2019 Communiqué: On Piñera’s crumbs

A communiqué from Chile sent to us by comrades there on Oct. 29th, 2019. The translation is their own, but we edited a bit.

THE RIGHT TO LIVE IS NOT BEGGED FOR, IT IS TAKEN!

While drinking tea with a group of old fascists ladies, the fifth biggest Chilean millionaire thief (with a fortune of US$2.8 million), [the Chilean president] Piñera, gives us his paternal after-dinner sermon:

“Yesterday, I announced that we are in full swing with a process of normalization to confront the emergency situation that we have experienced and known in recent days. This is due not to the peaceful demonstrations of people, it is due to the action of small, organized, violent groups, which have caused a gigantic damage (…) this is against them, not against humble people, or peaceful people, or people who want to protest or manifest their discontent. Therefore, in order to quickly and successfully implement this process of normalization, which means reducing and lifting curfews and lifting the state of emergency, we need to achieve the safeguarding of public order, the protection of people security, the respect of human rights and also to ensure the freedom and the right of people to mobilize, to go to work, to go toschool, to make their lives worthwhile. (…) In order to achieve all of this our government will continue fighting, with all the instruments that democracy bestows us —the legitimate instruments of democracy —, these groups of violent people that with total bad will have caused so much damage to so many Chileans and so many of them humble people.”

We reply to him: the tradition of the oppressed tell us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

“Hasta que vivir valga la pena” 1 has been one of the mottos of this spontaneous movement. First, the obvious: living now is not worthwhile. Some proofs: 50% of the 11,000 people who retired this August did so with $48,000 clpas pension; 11 million Chileans live in debt; Chile has the second highest rate of teenage suicide in the OECD after North Korea; more than 50% of the country earns less than $350,000 clp per month [the poverty line in Chile is fixed by the State institutions at $420,000 clp], etc. But then, the underlying logic of such a slogan points to the vital fact that we all suffer as a result of the dictatorship of money: the commodification of all spheres of life. This is what the capitalist progress produces and it is the real state of emergency. It is sad that life is not worth living, but it is sadder that it must be worth –and the sadness– to want to live it.

The shameless mafioso Piñera assures us that he is protecting us against “the brutal violence, unleashed delinquency and massive destruction,” but for that he would have to remove himself from office, since nobody forgets, for example, his embezzlement of the Talca Bank during 1980s – when Piñera, with a debt of more than 200 million dollars associated to bank loans to phantom companies related to him, fled for 24 days – or his 30 years of tax evasion in one of his properties in Lago Caburga that popular wisdom tells us would cover more than 83,000school subway tickets.
The fact that the traditional media and politicians treat insurgents as criminals demonstrates the vulnerability of capitalism, which tell us ad nauseum that we must return to the normality that brought us here.
Since democracy from its origins has been based on the oppression of enslaved groups, Piñera is not wrong when he says he is using “the instruments that democracy bestows us” to silence the life impulse that is manifesting. Against democratic totalitarianism we affirm:

FREEDOM IS THE FREEDOM TO BRING DOWN ANY TYRANT!

• 1the content of this saying is “Until living is worthwhile” but the sentence literally says “Until living is worth the sadness”