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 11^th 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 40^th 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 21^st 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