Letter from John Wake, Harlow Labour member
Yesterday, September 11, was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of President Salvador Allende in a military coup in the Republic of Chile.
The coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Allende brought to power the regime of General Pinochet, which was responsible for murdering 3,000 political opponents, torturing 40,000, engaging in widespread sexual abuse of political opponents, forcing 200,000 people (2% of the population) into exile, and a policy of child abduction.
Below is a link to a video of the full meeting of Harlow District Council last year, at which it was agreed to remove the name of Allende from Fifth Avenue. The “opposition” Labour councillors endorsed the decision of the Conservative majority that the memory of Allende should be “disappeared”, like the corpses of the trades unionists buried in the Atacama Desert by the Chilean military forces.
The “debate” on the removing the name of Allende begins 46 minutes from the start of the video. At 52 minutes 30 seconds, the Chair states that “I am not hearing any voices of dissent”, and thus there is no formal vote on this piece of historical denialism.
The predominant trend in the modern Conservative Party likes the fact that Pinochet pioneered the neo-liberal monetarist policies that Thatcher adopted in less extreme form. It was only under the iron heel of military rule that such policies could be fully applied. The slump and mass unemployment caused by the Thatcher regime in Britain in the early 1980s pales into insignificance in comparison to the impoverishment of the Chilean working class by Pinochet.
Infant mortality in Chile, which had reduced significantly during Allende’s Presidency, increased by 18% during the first year of the military government. The economy contracted by an unprecedented 12.9% in one year and the annual rate of inflation topped 500%.
Before the coup, unemployment in Chile was 3.1%, one of the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. By July 1976 approximately a quarter of the population had no income at all, and depended on food and clothing distributed by humanitarian organisations. It was estimated that by the end of 1975, the real income of the poorest urban workers had declined to one-third of what it was in 1972.
It is a disgrace that Harlow’s Labour councillors – Labour councillors – aligned themselves with the Thatcherite right-wing of the Conservative Party last year as it spat on the memory of those who suffered under 17 years of Pinochet’s brutal rule.
