[ad_1]
In one of his most famous stories, Jorge Luis Borges narrates the discovery of el Aleph: the point that contains all the points. A hole that allows the universe to be observed simultaneously from all possible angles. In a sense, the historical events that the country has experienced in the last year could resemble that singularity, thinks analyst Max Colodro. “The past, present and future reunited in a foundational trance, where the ghosts of history would also settle accounts again,” he writes.
Sociologist and Doctor of Philosophy, the columnist of Third publish the essay Chile Indócil: traces of a historical confrontation (Tajamar Editores). Written before October 18, the book is an attempt by the author to understand the political polarization that the country has experienced in the last decade. A policy of confrontations that buried the agreements and that in his book leads him to ask himself: “Are we a country condemned to confrontation, hatred and resentment?”
Reactivated in recent years, divisions have haunted the country since the 1960s, says Colodro. “What we have lived through since the 1960s is a dispute to impose political models and ideological models on each other without any capacity to look and build consensus to achieve coexistence and see the country as a common project,” he says.
In this light, the 1990s and the politics of the agreements were an exception, forced by historical conditions. A dynamic that accumulated tensions and that fractured the night that Sebastián Piñera reached his first presidency. “The radical moment is 2010, when the alternation in power takes place, and what revives then is the distance of the center-left with respect to the country that was built on the basis of forced consensus and above all on an institutional framework and an economic model imposed for a dictatorship. That disaffection is what leads from the Concertación to the New Majority ”.
You maintain that the plebiscite of 1988 contains a failure of the center-left. In what way was it a failure?
The plebiscite of 88 has a double dimension. It is indeed an electoral and political triumph over Pinochet. But it is a failure in my opinion because what the center-left sought, from the Christian Democrats to the Communist Party, especially in the 1980s with the start of the mobilizations, was to overthrow the dictatorship. Ultimately that did not occur because the opposition did not have the strength or the ability to overthrow the regime. We then had to accept the rules of the game to participate in the logic of the plebiscite and that meant accepting an agreed transition, accepting appointed senators, immovable commanders-in-chief, accepting that Pinochet would play a central role for 8 years as commander-in-chief of the Army and that in the year 98 he was going to take office as senator for life; if he did not continue as a senator later, it was thanks to the courts in London and Spain and not to what we did in Chile. The center-left had to accept painful conditions, and those frustrations are what emerged with great force in 2010, when it discovers that this country that it has administered and built for 20 years ends up making it possible for the supporters of the dictatorship to win elections in a democracy with a majority absolute. And that emotional, traumatic blow explains a good part of the tension of the last decade in Chile.
Denying the transition is not denying your past?
The center-left began a self-demolition in 2010. When the defeat occurs, the center-left looks back and says this country is more the heritage of this inherited model than something of its own, and that is the reason why this demolition is carried out, to the logic of the backhoe, and it is which generates a very strong polarization. And it also generates a paradox: today it is the right that defends the country from the 1990s onwards, instead of being the country defended by those who achieved the end of the military regime and the beginning of the transition; They do not see this country as their own, they see it as an imposed country.
But the project re-elaborated by the center-left leads to a new government of the right.
As of 2010, what is being sought is to rebuild a new political project, he joins the Communist Party, which was an opponent of the Concertación, and his incorporation is very important. You come to the government, but the mistake made by the New Majority is to make reforms that hit the ethos of that emerging middle class that had grown in the 20 years of the Concertación very hard.
Was the social explosion the opportunity that the left needed?
What the outburst does is reinstate with force and re-legitimize the discourse of the left. The left was tremendously effective in giving an interpretation to the phenomenon of the explosion where the axis is placed on the need for a new Constitution. The great achievement of the center-left is to have convinced the majority of Chileans that a good part of the solution to their problems goes through constitutional change, and that this is closely linked to the change in the economic model. And his second great achievement is to start the demolition of the AFP system. The Constitution is being demolished through the constituent process and now the economic model shooting at the backbone that is the pension system.
The center-left has become polarized and the actors that today emerge as viable, Daniel Jadue, Pamela Jiles, are the expression of a very confrontational Chile ”.
Do not the figures of Approve, supported by a vast majority, relativize the idea of the polarized country?
What is expressed in the October 25 result is a deep social and cultural division, and brutal levels of segregation. But the polarization is explained not only by the position that the overwhelming majority of Chileans come to acquire in the face of the plebiscite, but it is also explained by the fact that Chilean society drags a fundamental disagreement on how these last 30 years are valued. Polarization is also evidenced in the weakening of the political forces of the center, there is practically no political center in Chile. The center-left has been polarizing and the actors that today emerge as viable, Daniel Jadue, Pamela Jiles, are the expression of a very confrontational Chile. And on the other hand, the right does not have the capacity to show a vision of a country that achieves minimum degrees of consensus.
The new Constitution closes a cycle: will it allow one of the ghosts of our past to be exorcised?
The constituent process is a tremendous opportunity. But it is a challenge: are we going to be able as a society, and especially the political actors, to take advantage of the Convention to seek agreements in good will and good faith or is it going to be a space where both will try to impose hegemonies, defeat the adversary, neutralize opinions of those who think differently? Signs such as what we have seen in recent days, the attempt by a part of the left led by the Communist Party to ignore one of the key agreements of November 15, which was the quorum of the 2/3, reveals that there are sectors who do not see this process as a space for the construction of agreements but for the imposition of hegemonies.
Will the violence disappear?
Unfortunately the violence will not disappear and it will accompany the constituent process, and for a clear reason: the violence is prior to October. All the violence associated with the student movement, the violence in the National Institute, in the INBA, is an expression that there is a sector of society that looks at violence in a different way from how it is seen in a democratic system. It is the main political problem of Chilean society: that there is a large sector, particularly in the younger generations, that values and legitimizes violence as a means to achieve ends, and the rest of society have not been able to show that violence Violence by definition is beyond the limits of the democratic system.
Are there political sectors interested in violence?
There are sectors that are betting that the constituent process is not a space to build agreements and generate new frustrations, and from them to re-legitimize the use of violence to impose political scenarios. It is a real threat to the constituent process and it is already doing so with a sector that is ignoring the agreement.
What sectors are interested in maintaining the violence?
Violence continues to be legitimate for important sectors of the left, including the Communist Party and some actors of the Broad Front, who do not conceive the possibility of building a Constitution in conjunction with the right.
How do you see the rest of the center-left?
After having abjured what was the Chile of the Concertación, it was left without any space of legitimacy and it is very difficult for the moderate center-left to be relegitimized in its differences with the radical left. If you have already added to that diagnosis that it was not 30 pesos but 30 years, I see it difficult for you to become a legitimate alternative. That is the reason because the alternatives that are installed are from the Communist Party or the Broad Front.
And on the other side of the road, Joaquín Lavín …
There you have a more pragmatic right, some will say populist like the one represented by Joaquín Lavín, who saw a tremendous possibility of advancing and growing in what was the world of the Concertación, and that is why he poses as a social democrat: what he wants is convince and co-opt what was the moderate left.
It would be a paradox for Lavín to capitalize on this process.
It is a possibility, and it would be a great paradox if Joaquín Lavín ends up being the one who heads a project of changes towards a more inclusive Chile.
The current crisis is restoring prominence to the State. Wouldn’t this be the time for a center-left political project?
What the center-left has to do is think of a political alternative for this context and not continue to believe that it can be reversed and returned to a 20th century context, because that context is not going to return. One of the problems of the Chilean center-left is that when it looks at the crisis of capitalism and the crisis in the country, it now tends to think of the recipes of the 60s and 70s, and not of recipes that have to do with today’s world. .
“The other model” was his last elaboration.
The idea of making corrections to the model was part of an attempt. But that other model meant going back to logics very similar to the 60s and 70s. And I think it responded to something very present: the illusion that the conditions were in place for the center-left, the generation defeated by the Coup d’état and the generation defeated of the 80, can have revenge today. The temptation of revenge can hurt the country and the left itself.
Does the left lack connection to today’s world?
It lacks connection with a globalized world where nation states are experiencing deep crises, pressured by economic and cultural globalization. The State will play a relevant role in promoting economic recovery, but that has always happened after each crisis of globalized capitalism. And as the market engines are reactivated, the State is giving up space, and that is going to happen again now. The great mistake of the left is that it fails to understand that crises do not threaten the existence of capitalism, because capitalism feeds and is invigorated by these crises. That Marx understood very well 200 years ago.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/copesa/PCMZIPGZBZENRFEHRF7XLNPWFU.png)
