CHILE: What has gender to do with the Pinochet military coup?
Letter to The Guardian
What has gender
to do with the Pinochet military coup?
Coming back to Oxford
via the A 40 last week I saw a figher-bomber Hawker Hunter on display on the
roof of Vanguard Self Storage. Although
they had displayed this plane in the past, it had been replaced at times by
washing machines, fridges, a replica of the Big Ben and many other household
items. Yet, the Hawker Hunter has been put back on their roof. While the coach passengers were oblivious of
my thoughts and reflections after seeing the Hawker Hunter on top of a
building, for me it was highly significant.
What a coincidence! Forty years ago in Chile, the 11th September 1973,
planes similar to this one on display, had violently bombarded the Moneda Palace
during a brutal show of modern war
armament and an aggressive militarised masculinity. The bombardment of the government Palace by the Hawker Hunters made world news.
The purpose was to show the world that
the armed forces had overthrown the government of president Salvador Allende
and its “Marxist-Leninist regime”. It is now well documented that this
insurrection inaugurated seventeen years of dictatorship, state terrorism, gross
violation of human rights, and a neoliberal economic system. The idea behind
the Hawker Hunter’s bombardment was to create a scenario of a ‘state of
internal war’ against an internal ‘enemy’. The final goal was a refoundation of
Chilean society.
With the marking of the 40th anniversary of the
coup this year, a myriad of TV programs, discussion panels, declarations, events,
films, documentaries, interviews, articles, and so on, both in Chile and
abroad, have been revealing the real truth of what happened during and after
the bombardment. Those of us who have been the victims of direct or indirect repression,
already knew fully well about the practices of the Pinochet regime. For those
who doubted about what went on during those seventeen years, these images and
words have unveiled a cruel truth and historical silence.
However, what impels me to write these words is not the
popularity of the Hawker Hunter fighter planes. It is my astonishment at the total
absence of the role of Right-wing women organised in Poder Femenino as generators of the military coup. In a Cold War
scenario, the usual generators cited are US involvement, the Chilean Navy, the polarisation of Chilean society and of
course, the Allende’s Popular Unity government itself. As James R. Whelan in
his insulting Out of the Ashes said ‘it
was the Chilean women who provided the gun powder for the revolution’.
Right-wing women’s powerful ‘direct actions’ and articulation of gender ideology in their
political and ideological favour were key to pressure for military action.
Equally to British and American women who shamed men for failing to combat
during World War I by giving them white feathers, Chilean Right-wing women used
similar gender strategies to shame ‘cowardly’ men.
A few examples come to mind. On 21st August 1973,
they carried out a shaming protest against the then army commander-in-chief and
Defense Minister General Carlos Prats. He was deeply humiliated by a
demonstration of three hundred officers and generals’ wives who gathered
outside his residence taunting him a coward and demanding his resignation for
being unable to restore order in the country. They threw corn in front of his
home and taunted him and other constitutionalist military men for being “chickens”.
Right-wing women used any resort possible. Their most famous
direct action was the “March of the
Empty Pots” in December 1971. In their roles as virtuous housewives, mothers,
and wives (though most had maids and nannies), they marched through the streets
of Santiago
banging pots and pans to protest against food shortages.
Poetry was another valuable tool to demonstrate their
discontent and opposition to the Allende government. Margaret Power showed how Nina
Donoso, an anti-Allende poet vividly depicted their call to incite military men
into fighting against Allende’s Popular Unity government. In her poem “Beating
on the Barracks Doors” Donoso begs for military action:“We beat on the barracks
doors weeping, we call on the sailors, we beg the soldiers, the Air Force, all
those born here, God! enough of this disgrace!”
In their opposition, Right-wing women became inspirers of
‘male glory’. In his A Journey Through
Life. Memoirs of a Soldier, Pinochet wrote: “women had instinctively
realised the danger which threatened their homes, their children and their
husbands and acted with exemplary and moving courage”. In these women’s view,
soldiers were heroes not murderers. The armed forces would be the guarantors of
their threatened families. But, what about the ‘other’ women whose family lives
were destroyed by imprisonment, torture, execution, disappearance, exile, restrictions
to return and redundancy of their family members? The response was either merciless
indifference or incitement.
In this manner, Right-wing women were crucial to the
refoundation of a stronger nationalist Chilean society. When Pinochet called
for patriotic sacrifices for la Patria,
Right-wing women responded with fervour to his call. For example, to make
public their identification with the recuperated Patria and loyalty to him they keenly donated their most precious
jewellery for National Reconstruction, in exchange for a symbolic copper ring
that they would wear ‘as long as Pinochet lasts’.
Women also became key political actors ensuring the
ideological continuity of the regime and their Historical National Project in a ‘non partisan’ military Chile. In some
ways, the gendered nature of the military government in Chile resembled
that of the Nazi regime. While military men and their associates preached hate
of communism stressing the threat it posed to destroy the morality of la Patria, women’s participation in the
military regime created an unreal gloss of ‘idealism’, society’s stability,
virtuous family and motherhood.
Today when we are still remembering the “Other 9/11” in Chile, we must
not forget that not only men participated in the making of the military coup
and its projection into a repressive seventeen year long dictatorship. Women
were as important as the military men despite the fact that it was men who were
the pilots of the Hawker Hunters that bombarded the Moneda Palace
where Allende’s life and political project of social justice ended.
Dr Helia López Zarzosa
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