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5. Transnational Concepts, Local Contexts: Solidarity at the Grassroots in Pinochet’s Chile
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1 2 0 Solidarity at the Grassroots in Pinochet’s Chile Alison J. Bruey In the Chile of dictator Augusto Pinochet, the concept and practice of solidarity offered an alternative type of citizenship in poor and working-class urban communities torn apart by repression, fear, and economic misery. Solidarity offered a sense of dignity and belonging in a dictatorial regime that was actively marginalizing entire sectors of the population . The propagation of the concept of solidarity was especially prominent in the underground organizing networks that crisscrossed Santiago’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, or poblaciones, which bore the brunt of repression and economic crisis from 1973 to 1990. Solidarity was first advanced most forcefully by the Catholic Church and the left, both of which straddled the international/domestic divide and operated transnational networks that were key to their ability to continue functioning in Chile after the military coup. Solidarity, solidaridad, as an organizing concept and strategy under the dictatorship , was not spontaneous or “natural”: it was developed, taught, learned, and actively constructed in poblaciones during the mid-1970s. It coexisted and intersected with but did not originate primarily in internationalist solidarity Transnational Concepts, Local Contexts 5 Tr a n s n a t i o n a l C o n c e p t s , L o c a l C o n t e x t s 1 2 1 movements or the left, the sectors that have received the most attention in studies of Latin American solidarity during this period.1 In Chile, its strength derived from its roots in leftist and Catholic historical legacies that intertwined in popular-sector political culture. In the Chilean context, the concept of “solidarity ” cannot be understood without taking into account both its Catholic and its leftist antecedents: it was the product of dynamic interaction between the two. In poblaciones, solidaridad became a central principle for the organizing work that united disparate social and political sectors and established a foundation for grassroots opposition to the regime. Marching in Solidarity On Good Friday 1980, a mass procession of pobladores (residents of poblaciones ), Catholic clergy, and nuns marched to the General Cemetery’s Patio 29, where the Pinochet regime was rumored to have buried assassinated political prisoners in anonymous graves.2 The marchers enacted the traditional Vía Crucis (Stations of the Cross) en route to the cemetery. While the Vía Crucis was a traditional Catholic holy week activity, this one raised the authorities ’ ire because the marchers’ banners targeted the dictatorship and its policies. The pobladores carried banners announcing, “Thou shall not kill!,” “Cain, what have you done with your brother?,” and “All that you have done unto the poor you have done unto me.”3 The banners reproduced biblical verse and rhetoric from the Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979) Latin American Bishops’ Conferences. Eyewitnesses reported that marchers chanted, “The pueblo whimpers in pain, come and save us” and “Justice, Truth, and Liberty: Presente!”4 The banners presented only religious themes, but, if the eyewitness report is correct, the chants included leftist refrains. Whether religious or secular, the marchers’ messages appealed to humanistic ideals using internationally recognized values, religious texts, and symbolic figures, including the recently assassinated Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero. Thus, they appropriated symbolism that sidestepped and, in theory, transcended the military regime’s definitions of appropriate social and political expression.5 The denunciations reflect an alternative vision of society in which the state did not kill and in which the poor were not oppressed and marginalized. They also placed God, Jesus, and the Catholic Church on the side of the pueblo—and suggested that divine punishment would fall upon the state as it had upon Cain for murdering Abel (“Cain, what have you done with your brother?”). Thus, the protesters addressed the military rulers with language taken directly from the [3.81.30.41] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:43 GMT) 1 2 2 A l i s o n J . B r u e y Bible and the Catholic Church, both of which were traditionally accorded a moral and spiritual authority transcending that of any temporal nation-state. In doing so, the marchers placed themselves within another realm of human belonging, of “citizenship,” that superseded the Chilean nation-state, placed pobladores on a level equal to that of the country’s rulers, and challenged the dictatorship’s repressive practices. The marchers levied a trenchant critique of the political situation, the economic model, and related structures of...