Santiago, Chile — Three aspects of Chile’s presidential election of December 2021 are relevant to the United States. In previous articles on The New American, we considered the mistakes made by the groups supporting José Antonio Kast, the Christian and patriotic candidate in the election, and the main goals of President-elect Gabriel Boric, as outlined in his campaign promises and by his supporters on the far left, for when he is inaugurated president on March 11. Today, we turn our attention to the third and last aspect — what patriotic Chileans need to do in the current situation, and the obstacles they face.
The communists’ goals in Chile, dealt with in the previous article, include the destruction of the family, the lack of legal protection for private property, the destruction of agriculture, and the seizing of all political power by the communists through the Constitutional Convention. Such plans, along with the slow invasion of drug-dealing gangs and foreign military operatives, will cause the dissolution of the country. Chileans must resist this movement whose final result will make their country disappear as an effective power from the Choir of Nations. However, there are difficulties in this.
To illustrate this, let’s compare the current Chilean situation with the analogous situation of Venezuela in the year 2000, as this comparison will suggest action for not only Chileans, but also the American people. In 2000, Venezuela had a strong resistance movement, based on the workers unions, professional associations (the Bar Association, the colleges of physicians and engineers, and so on), universities and schools, the public oil company (PDVSA), and so forth. In Chile, all these institutions (with the exception of the Bar Association) are in revolutionary hands. The student movements are the most painful, because in the last ten years they have marched and demonstrated in order to suppress even university autonomy. They appear to understand very little and just follow the stream set in motion by the revolutionary elites and mainstream media.
Moreover, Venezuela still had some independent TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers. In Chile today, most media outlets are revolutionary, with the exception, perhaps, of some radio stations outside the capital. Only internet outlets have some independent thought, and through them Kast and his followers were able to shape their movement. Those outlets, however, are more and more controlled, especially because Chileans are addicted to the revolutionary ones, such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube.
The only visible civilian structure in place is the Chilean Republican Party, but that structure is going through a severe crisis due both to the interference of other parties referred to by Chileans as “the right,” and to José Antonio Kast’s defeat in the runoff election.
There are, however, some seeds around which resistance could start. One of them is the union of the truckers, which is very independent and has been forced to fight, weapons in hand, against the terrorist, communist, and pseudo-aboriginal groups in the Araucanía. Another seed is the mass of proprietors who have suffered incendiary attacks of the terrorists in that same region.
The majority of the military, both active and retired, are not with Boric and the revolution. They are infiltrated, as is everything else in Chile (including the Church), but it seems they will not be easily manageable by the communists. This is an advantage that the current Chilean situation has over Venezuela in 2000. However, the political landscape today is thoroughly different from that of Chile in 1973, when the military freed this country from communist destruction. There were then important civilian institutions, including the Congress, that asked the military to intervene. Besides this, as far as we can see, the CIA today seems to be in favor of Marxist revolution worldwide, so it will not work against Boric as it did against Allende in the context of the Cold War. China, moreover, already has deep control of key Chilean infrastructure. Thus, for example, State Grid International Development Limited (SGID), controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, bought the company that provides electricity to Valparaíso, the city where the main body of the Navy is located, and the Navy is the most unmanageable force for Boric. On top of this, all but a small percentage of the Armed Forces have been vaccinated with Pfizer’s vaccines. What effect that will have on the security of Chile, no one can say.
Another consideration that should not be overlooked is that the current president, Sebastián Piñera, has signed some commitments with the Argentinian government that compromise Chilean sovereignty over some regions in the Antarctic and on the oceans. One person who has played an important role in these negotiations is none other than Fernando Atria’s wife, Ximena Fuentes, director of DIFROL (the National Department of State Borders and Boundaries) in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That is to say, the spouse of one of the most dangerous members of the Constitutional Convention is the author of those documents. This could mean that the communists will try to instigate a war between Argentina and Chile, so that the main obstacle to the revolution, the Chilean Navy, could be severely weakened.
One last piece of information regarding the military front: Boric has announced that his minister of defense will be Maya Fernández Allende, Salvador Allende’s granddaughter. She is half-Cuban, lived on that island for 21 years, and is the daughter of a Cuban intelligence agent who was the true representative of Fidel Castro in Chile during Salvador Allende’s rule. This is a daring move. I suspect the communists are exploring how much the military are willing to bear with patience through their attachment to the “established institutions,” and will push until they find effective resistance. If there is no effective resistance, Fernández Allende will enter that office in March and will then be in a position to weaken any military resistance — or even to precipitate an eventual war with Argentina.
The main problem for a Chilean resistance movement then, in my opinion, is that most Chileans are blind to the danger into which they have fallen. They act as if they have no idea of even the existence of fifth-generation wars or of infiltration. Despite the Venezuelan experience and warnings of the massive number of Venezuelan refugees, Chileans think that they are immune to the virus of communist genocide and destruction. Will they wake up before it is too late?
Devastatingly, perhaps not — it might already be too late for Chile. However, the people of the United States may draw important lessons from the Chilean experience. Marxists are deadly, and they care nothing about the well-being of the people, truth, decency, or any law (juridical, moral, religious, or any other). They are following the same path in the United States as they are in Chile. Will the American people rise to the occasion and prevent the ruin of their country? I hope so, because otherwise the whole realm formed by the influence of Western Christianity will be devastated, relentlessly and without mercy.
Dr. Carlos Casanova is a Professor of Law at the Pontifical University of Chile in Santiago. He has taught philosophy and law at other universities in Chile, as well as universities in the United States and Venezuela.
