First we marched for Chile. Now it’s Palestine
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER recalls the anger and heartbreak over the 1973 coup in Chile, with its torture and massacres, which we now relive with the horrors carried out by Israel in Gaza – and also through our solidarity
THE first time I marched through London to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza last January, along with half a million people, I found myself walking beneath the banner of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).
It felt like a strange, if rather unwelcome, homecoming. Fifty-one years ago I joined the Chile Solidarity Campaign during my first weeks at university.
On September 11 of that year, 1973, a US-orchestrated military coup ousted Chile’s democratically elected socialist government and its popular president, Salvador Allende, who died during the attack on the presidential palace.
More from this author
After 46,000 dead and countless more from disease and starvation, Palestinians can celebrate a truce, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER, yet even as the Democrat and Republican leaders scramble to take credit, Israel continues killing
At the same time as they rushed to fight to save areas that were not their own, a bipartisan crackdown on immigration and a savage new law threatens the mass detention and deportation of Latin migrants, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
…but whether globally or locally, each of us can take steps to achieve peace, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The veteran ocean defender, a founding member of both Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace, is under arrest in Greenland and faces extradition to Japan for protecting whales — but the world outcry isn’t there, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Similar stories
Chilean resistance activist SERGIO VASQUEZ addressed a gathering unveiling a plaque in the city of Sheffield marking the 51st anniversary of the 1973 fascist coup in Chile on Saturday — we reprint his powerful speech here
NAYARA BATSCHKE writes on the history of the famous Chilean club and its fans’ solidarity with the Palestinians
Co-curator TOM WHITE introduces a father-and-son exhibition of photography documenting the experience and political engagement of Chilean exiles
Kate Clark remembers a lawyer, exiled after the military overthrow of left-wing president Allende, who later helped to prosecute scores of the military coup-plotters and was instrumental in forming a new generation of human rights lawyers in the country in the ’90s