In Chile, Even Water Is Privatized. The New Constitution Would Change That.

[OfTheCross]

IN 1980, the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet replaced Chile’s constitution with a new charter employing the principles of famed American free-market economist Milton Friedman. Forty years later the dictatorship is gone, but the constitution — and a key provision called the National Water Code that privatized Chile’s vast natural water supply — is still in effect.

Following an uprising in 2019 that drew millions to protest across the country, and against the backdrop of a 15-year drought that has left over half of the country in an official water emergency, a popularly elected body has been tasked with rewriting the constitution from scratch.

With only a year to draw up the document, they must attempt to rectify the consequences of the lingering dictatorship policies and the devastating water code in their new draft.

The short film “Hasta la última gota,” or “Until the Last Drop,” follows the fight for water in Petorca province, the epicenter of Chile’s mega-drought, the economic center of Chile’s agricultural zone, and a hotly contested area within the constitutional debate.

 

[Eternal Tecate]

Chile is a nazi/neoliberal/ Chicago school bellcow. Of course everything is privatized.

 

[Jmare007]

I hope we actually change this current constitution though, shyt has become a Brexit/Trump campaign and it wouldn't be shocking if if the majority rejects the new text

Thing is, this time around voting is mandatory (it has been voluntary for close to 16 years) so there's close to 7 million people that haven't voted in the last few elections that literally no one knows what the fukk their inclinations are.

So here we are, hoping for the best but preparing for the worst

 

[Jmare007]

Chile is a nazi/neoliberal/ Chicago school bellcow. Of course everything is privatized.

Nazi?

 

[nyknick]

Nazi?

Gabriel Boric's presidential opponent Jose Antonio Kast comes from a Nazi family with positions high up in the Pinochet government. Jose Antonio is a Pinochet apologist and promised to pardon military regime that was disappearing people if he won.

Kast’s family has deep ties to the dictatorship. His father, Michael Kast, was a lieutenant in the Nazi army before fleeing to Chile and raising sons who shared his far-right politics. One son, Miguel Kast, was appointed by Pinochet to be minister of labor and then president of the central bank. He was one of the so-called Chicago Boys, a collection of young economists trained by Milton Friedman, set loose on Chile to launch a neoliberal experiment that saw social spending slashed and wealth funneled upward to the very rich. Christian Kast, according to journalist Javier Rebolledo’s book “A La Sombra De Los Cuervos,” was linked to peasant massacres under Pinochet, and José Antonio Kast campaigned against the the plebiscite that rewrote the Chilean Constitution and paved the way for Pinochet’s removal. “I’m not a pinochetista, but I value everything he did,” Kast has said, adding that the dictatorship “laid the foundations of modernity.”

Christian Kast, José Antonio’s older brother, was alleged to have been present at the site of “los crímenes de Paine,” a series of mass killings that began in September 1973, shortly after Pinochet’s forces toppled Allende’s government, and were still being prosecuted last year. In his official police statement, a survivor identified then-17-year-old Christian Kast among a group of the regime’s allies present while the military police were beating a group of civilian farmers. In 2008, a lawyer argued that because of his age at the time of the events, Kast should undergo a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he could be held accountable. The evaluation was never completed, and Christian Kast was never found guilty of involvement. The survivor told Rebolledo in 2015 that he could no longer remember clearly if Kast was there.

Marco Rubio Met With Far-Right Chilean Candidate Tied to Military Dictatorship

José Antonio Kast’s father was in the Nazi army. Kast often speaks fondly of Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet.

theintercept.com

Pinochet also used Colonia Dignidad, a Nazi enclave in Chile, to torture and kill people.

Chile’s newspapers frequently reported on the rumors surrounding Colonia Dignidad: that its leader, Paul Schäfer, who had a glass eye, was a pedophile who had escaped the German postwar authorities to become a successful “collectivist” entrepreneur (Colonia Dignidad was at times described as a kibbutz); that during Pinochet’s dictatorship, especially in the ’70s, the colony had served as an extermination camp where the regime’s political prisoners were “disappeared,” meaning they were imprisoned, tortured using Nazi techniques, and killed; and that the colonists, only a few of whom were in the know, buried the victims on their own land, albeit not in the communal cemetery so as not to “contaminate” the Aryan purity of those interred there.


With Chile’s return to democracy in 1990, all of these speculations proved to be well-founded. If Latin America’s celebrated magic realism is a literary style in which the unbelievable becomes mundane, Colonia Dignidad is Exhibit A—except that, in this case, the unbelievable was tragically real. In Bolaño’s novel, the suggestion is made that Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, and many other notorious Nazis and other fascists who had escaped from Europe by taking “the ratlines” to South America actually hid in Colonia Renacer. Nobody would be surprised if one or more did the same in Colonia Dignidad. Now a six-part Netflix documentary, A Sinister Sect: Colonia Dignidad, offers an opportunity to look at its history with critical acumen. The series opens up a fresh line of inquiry not only into Latin America as an immigrant destination (in the US media, it is frequently portrayed as the reverse) but also for the role it played as a safe haven for European criminals, Nazi and otherwise, after the Second World War.

The Dark History of Colonia Dignidad

The Netflix series A Sinister Sect examines not only the history of a German community led by a Nazi in Chile but also the relationship between Latin American governments and the far right.

www.thenation.com

 

[Jmare007]

Gabriel Boric's presidential opponent Jose Antonio Kast comes from a Nazi family with positions high up in the Pinochet government. Jose Antonio is a Pinochet apologist and promised to pardon military regime that was disappearing people if he won.




Pinochet also used Colonia Dignidad, a Nazi enclave in Chile, to torture and kill people.

Breh, I was born here I know all this shyt. We are not a nazi country. Pinochet copied and pasted most of his fukked up shyt from Franco to be honest.

 

[88m3]

cool

 

[Jmare007]

And sure enough, we lost...and BADLY

I guess this is what Brexit felt like.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

And sure enough, we lost...and BADLY

I guess this is what Brexit felt like.

That was quick??!

 

[Jmare007]

That was quick??!

The institution in charge of elections is one of the best in the world, we always get results incredibly quick. And in an elections with just 2 choices, it's even quicker.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

 

[FAH1223]