Country: Chile
Director: Patricio Guzmán
Time: 1 hour and 23 minutes
Where Can I Get It: In select theaters and Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: Protest movements, repressive legacies, mass politics
On 6 October 2019, Chilean high school students began coordinated fare evasions in Santiago metro stations in response to 4% fare hikes. On that same day, the country’s right-wing president, Sebastián Piñera (net worth: ~$2.7 billion), declared Chile an “oasis” amidst Latin America’s turbulent states in a televised speech. By 18 October, mass protests had begun to rock Chile. In particular, price increases for a public service primarily used by the country’s less well-off crystallized frustration with a political system seemingly designed to entrench inequalities and reward political parties (and various cronies)—between 2006 and 2022 the country had only two presidents who alternated periods in office across four elections. Protestors soon occupied Santiago’s Plaza Baquedano, turning the square into a center of operations. Colloquially renamed Plaza de la Dignidad, the space housed a life-size statue of General Baquedano, a 19th-century military leader who, as a young officer, had “pacified” Araucanian tribes in the country’s south before spearheading northern campaigns against Bolivia and Peru. (The statue would later be removed by the military for its own protection.)
Galvanized by growing income inequality, poor treatment of the country’s indigenous peoples, miserly public pensions for the elderly, pervasive misogyny, and increasing indebtedness resulting from high education and medical costs, the opposition movement (which became known as the estallido or “outburst”) eschewed hierarchical forms of organization in favor of mass demonstrations against the country’s political order. On October 25, 1.2 million people took to the streets in opposition to “social inequality”—a strategically broad designation encapsulating the country’s many perceived ills. It was the largest protest the country had ever seen.
Chile’s current constitution dates from a (neither free, nor fair) 1980 referendum held under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Following the 1973 coup that ousted the democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende, Pinochet led a military government that would become infamous for its human rights abuses. In the face of flagging support from erstwhile allies like the United States and a 1988 national plebiscite on his rule, Pinochet would step down from his role as President in 1990. (The 1988 vote has been dramatized beautifully in the previously discussed 2012 film No.) This fairly peaceful transition to civilian rule came at the cost of accountability for the systematic disappearances, torture, and unlawful imprisonment of political dissidents under the military dictatorship. After the implementation of civilian government, Pinochet would remain Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army until 1998. The Constitution promulgated at the height of his powers would continue to be the country’s legal bedrock. In a landmark 2013 case brought by the British-based human rights legal organization Redress, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Americas’ highest human rights court—Chile is a member—chided Chile for persistent delays into criminal investigations and “upheld the right to justice and to reparation for exiled torture survivors from the Pinochet-era,” ordering the country to undertake and finalize a long stalled criminal investigation into torture under the regime. (There were an estimated 38,000 survivors of torture during the Pinochet regime.) In spite of this ruling, as well as an earlier Truth and Reconciliation Report, Chilean politicians have shown little appetite for prosecuting individuals responsible for past human rights abuses.
Under the terms of Chile’s constitution, the executive has significant power to employ the military to quell domestic disturbances. In response to the unfurling protests, the state’s response came quick and harsh. To quote the Chilean writer and novelist Ariel Dorfman at length,
“[As hostilities escalated,] the police committed human rights violations on a scale not seen since the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990): thousands of arrests, indiscriminate beatings, rapes in police stations, unrestricted use of toxic water cannons intentionally aimed at the eyes of demonstrators. In response, the most enraged protesters built barricades and torched buses, metro stations, and big chain supermarkets. As Chile’s major cities descended into a maelstrom, [Chilean President] Piñera gave yet more proof of how badly he was misreading the country’s mood. Slandering the demands of protesters for a just and fair society as an attempt to turn Chile into Venezuela, and declaring that this was a war against a powerful enemy sustained by forces from abroad, the president decreed a state of emergency and ordered the military to enforce a curfew.”
Clashes continued throughout 2019 and into 2020. In April 2020, 78% of voters supported a national referendum to change the constitution. In the following month, 155 delegates from around Chile (average age of 45; mandated gender parity) were elected to write a new constitution. Amidst this fervent, Chile elected Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old progressive politician and former student activist, to be the country’s president in 2021, itself part of Latin America’s resurgent “Pink Tide,” which has seen the election of left-leaning presidents across the continent, including Lula in Brazil, Xiomara Castro in Honduras, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Pedro Castillo in Peru.1 Finalized in 2022, Chile’s new draft constitution emerged one of the most progressive draft organic laws in the world. Among other features, it allowed for pluri-nationality, mandated universal healthcare, offered greater autonomy to indigenous groups, imposed strict regulation on mining, and granted rights to nature and animals.
At this point, the movement stalled. Polls indicated that Chilean voters saw the proposed constitution as a dramatic overreach. In September 2022, voters overwhelmingly voted against ratification 62 to 38 percent. (If you’re interested, you can read a bit here, here, and here on why analysts believe the constitution failed to win majority support.) Boric’s approval began to fall amidst rising crime and inflation. This year, a second constituent assembly was elected to draft another constitution. The new Chilean Constitutional Council features a plurality of members from the country’s far-right Republic Party, who ran on a platform of using Pinochet’s constitution as a starting point for changes. Chileans will vote on it in December. Where exactly this leaves the initial protest movement remains a matter of debate both inside and outside the country, but the future seems less promising than it did twelve months ago.
This is an extremely long introduction to Patricio Guzmán’s fascinating documentary My Imaginary Country, which catalogs Chile’s 2019-2021 protest movement. Throughout the film, Guzmán augments footage from various protests with a series of sit-down interviews featuring (exclusively female) protestors, academics, medical personnel, and journalists in order to explore the individuals who felt compelled to make their voices heard, offering ample opportunity for various strands of Chilean society to articulate their frustrations and future aspirations. The documentary remains intensely sympathetic to the protestors, as well as shocked by the state’s militarized responses. If it has little interest in a blow-by-blow political account examining the protests’ underlying causes or the organizational strategies employed to promote both a national referendum and constitutional convention, it nevertheless explores with clarity the motivations that drove everyday Chileans onto streets and seeks to understand why, in their own words, they returned day after day.
Over the course of the film, Guzmán’s captures the immediacy and intensity of street battles and brings into focus the frisson, thrill, and camaraderie generated by collective action, employing beautiful still black-and-white photography as a contrast with protest footage in order to draw out the estadillo’s monumentality—in effect replacing the compromised heroes of yesteryear (Baquedano) with contemporary figures. Indeed, My Imaginary Country remains a film with a keen sense of visual metaphor. Its opening shots feature protestors throwing large rocks against the ground in order to break them into stones. These stones are then passed forwards towards the protests’ “frontlines” to be deployed as projectiles against the Chilean military. This is the organized destruction of a state edifice inherited (and quite literally built) under a repressive political regime whose contours structure Chile to this day.
One reason for my horrendously long introduction is that the movie itself provides less context for outsiders than typical documentary fare. (The film clearly conceives of its primary audiences as Chileans already familiar with the thrust of recent events and thus assumes knowledge on the part of its viewer, including a familiarity with the politics of both Allende and Pinochet.) The work also ends prior to the new constitution’s final drafting and rejection. As such, it remains less a narrative work of political analysis in the style of Petra Costa’s moving examination of Brazilian politics in Edge of Democracy (2019), than a sort of political ethnography focused on those who took to Santiago’s streets and, in particular, the women who led the (often women-led) protests. On one level, this makes it difficult to understand the ways in which the country’s new constitution (and progressive electoral shift) has seemingly sputtered over the past year—one hopes for a follow-up in the style of Guzmán’s three-part The Battle of Chile (1975-1979). With the estadillo’s achievements in flux, the film’s title ends up serving as a knowing note of caution. This is an affecting work about political potentialities, which may not always encompass immediate political possibilities. Nonetheless, Guzmán has crafted a visual celebration of women who have taken enormous risks to bring about positive change, no matter how slow and unsatisfactory. These individuals deserve our admiration and attention.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Patricio Guzmán — The Battle of Chile (1975-1979)
Patricio Guzmán — Nostalgia For The Light (2010)
In December 2022, Castillo was removed from office after trying to dissolve parliament.