It's been too damn long since I last updated this thing. I wrote a quick recap of my trip from Santiago back to Reno, and since then it's almost like there's no reason to update it anymore. Just as I was hoping, my Reno life has formed a quick routine of school and work and cooking potatoes that will make the time pass quickly so my flight to Santiago on December the 28th will be here before I know it.
So why update now?
Well, Reno time is 11:16 at night. It's also September the 11th. Of course, the September the 11th that first comes to mind for me happened in 1973, not two years ago. On the day of 9-11-73, the Chilean military overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and instituted a military dictatorship that lasted 17 years and murdered over 3000 people with thousands more tortured with enough electroshock to give them nightmares for the rest of their lives. They believed in a Chile with judicial, economic, and social equality, and for this they were sought out, tortured, and murdered by those who would do and did anything to defend the social inequality that benefitted them.
During the past couple days I've been doing research for a guest commentary I'm going to write for the Reno News and Review and I've come to learn just how involved the CIA and the US government was in the coup that toppled the goddamn best and most respected democracy in Latin America. I've been reading about Orlando Letelier, the Chilean exile who was murdered by a car bomb on Embassy Row on September 21, 1976 by Orlando Bosch, the fascist Cuban exile and Michael Townley, the CIA agent and member of the Chilean secret police called the DINA along with other members of the Chilean military government. It becomes absolutely ridiculous to read about the involvement of George Bush and Henry "Dr. Death" Kissinger in the military government, and it also becomes understandable why so much of the world hates the united states for the economic and military imperialism it has voluntary involved itself in during the past 100 years since the annexing of Puerto Rico all the way through Iraq. My next project is a death talley for Kissinger: I'm stating here and now that I believe that Henry Kissinger is responsible for more deaths that Adolf Hitler. I start thinking about all he's caused in Chile, East Timor, Cambodia, Vietnam, and many other places and I start to feel so fucking embarrased to be from this country and so fucking angry about all I have to deal with while I travel, being called a gringo and being hated because of what the US government has caused to all the countries that I've visited. I wish I was in Cancun with Dan and Aaron, fucking shit up and screaming my lungs out against the neoliberal globalization that's preparing to fuck Chile over all over again in it's new free trade agreement with the US. I wish I was back in Chile in the streets running and chanting and screaming for the judiciary to try the motherfuckers responsible for so many dead Chileans. And one that I had a hard time admitting until today, I wish that I was at Dawson Island in Tierra del Fuego where Orlando Letelier and other Chilean political prisoners were brutally tortured, standing over two tables, in one where General Augusto Pinochet is tied up and other where Dr. Henry Kissinger is tied up, watching as each is electrocuted and smokes and screams and howling shrieks and the same writhing pain as all the victims for whose torture and death they are responsible come from their bodies as they fry.
Don't get frightened. This vision isn't going anywhere. Pinochet had a brief ceremony this morning in which once again he was honored for his role in "saving" Chile from the communists, and Dr. Death Kissinger currently runs a business consulting firm that charges 25,000 dollars per meeting. There were ceremonies as well for all the murdered Chileans, but in many cases the families of the victims still don't know where the fuck their loved ones are because the Chilean military has successfully made itself immune to having to admit to the locations of the bodies it's strewn all over the Atacama Desert, the southern Lakes region, and right into the Pacific ocean. How can anyone not see anything wrong with that? Larry Rohter's article from a few days ago in the New York Times is just one of many bullshit articles trying to justify the military coup by pointing out how bad Allende was running the government. These articles and books like to point out the economic turmoil of Allende's administration, but they always seem to forget about how the truckers unions were bribed by ITT Technologies and the CIA to go on strike and how the supermarket owners were paid to withhold food from the shelves of their stores until the food miraculously appeared literally the day after the coup, when the military government was now in place. 1975 Senate hearings uncovered that the CIA was given 11 million dollars to "disrupt" Allende's presidency, not to mention the 2.7 million dollars they received before he was elected to sway the vote to their conservative champion Alessandri. Nobody was ever murdered by Allende's administration; General Schneider, the head of the armed forces, was murdered in Santiago by a fascist general who received a payment directly from Kissinger in an action that went straight over the head of the US Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, therefore that can hardly be blamed on Allende.
Currently in my Social Theories course we're studying the trend of reactionary groups that stomp out revolutionary groups that threaten their social and economic standing, such as the Zapatistas, the Sandanistas, the Unidad Popular, the Cuban Revolution, East Timor independence, and every other democratic and worker oriented group over the past 400 years. That's why they're called Reactionaries, because they react to these types of "threats." It's amazing what some will do in the name of their personal interests.
Okay, this update has gotten long enough. It's been good though, it's helped me to vent some steam about imperialism and republicans and reactionaries and a bunch of other things that are wrong with the world today. Through it all, the song "Pints Of Guinness Make You Strong" by Against Me! runs through my head, and I dream of the days when I'm hurling bricks through the windows of the World Bank and IMF offices, shouting cries of liberation that will never be silenced as long as we never give up.