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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
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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.
It was the angriest and most heartbroken I had ever felt in my young life. Those emotions were further inflamed as details emerged about the barbaric round-up and torture of Allende’s supporters and others caught in the mayhem of the fascist takeover, masterminded by US president Richard Nixon’s war-criminal-in-chief, Henry Kissinger.
At least, it was the angriest and most heartbroken I had felt until October 7 2023, when Israel launched its vengeful and now endless assault against Palestinian civilians following the horrendous attack by Hamas that left 1,200 Israelis dead and 251 taken hostage.
That’s what I expressed to the young man carrying the PSC banner that sunny, brisk January afternoon, even though he wasn’t even born at the time of the Chile coup. I was filled with rage and despair that our governments were once again complicit in the massacre of innocents.
Just as British warplanes were used to strafe Santiago’s presidential palace, so once again, Britain and especially the US government are actively arming and aiding unimaginable atrocities in Gaza.
Except this time, we don’t need to imagine it, we can see it every day in the footage from Gaza and the West Bank, filmed by courageous journalists and civilians. In addition to the bombings, the shootings and the forced starvation, we now know that many Palestinians have been captured and tortured by the Israeli military in much the same way as ordinary Chileans were almost half a century ago.
Although some images were smuggled out of Santiago’s sports stadium where many were rounded up and murdered — including the socialist folk singer and national treasure Victor Jara — it took years to learn the full extent of the Chilean junta’s brutality under its despicable leader, General Augusto Pinochet.
At my university, we heard from Victor’s widow, Joan Jara, and tortured British nun, Sheila Cassidy. The Stepney Poets came, as did the Jamaican poet and author Andrew Salkey, who had written so eloquently about Cuba’s socialist revolution.
Cassidy’s testimony was particularly searing. At 18, I had never even begun to imagine that anyone could inflict vaginal electric shocks on another human being. It stunned me to my core. But since then we’ve seen Abu Ghraib. And now Gaza and the dehumanising torture and rape of Palestinian men, women and even young girls.
While covering Jeremy Corbyn’s election campaign this July, I was moved by the opportunity to meet the Chilean couple, Cristina Godoy-Navarrete and Pablo Navarrete. Cristina had spoken at a Corbyn rally, expressing sadness at the way today’s refugees to Britain were treated compared to the warm welcome she had received.
When we talked afterwards, I learned that Cristina had been imprisoned with Sheila Cassidy and endured the same torture. And yet her demeanour was full of warmth. She and Pablo tried to thank me for my work with Chile Solidarity and I tried quickly to stop them and thank them instead for their extraordinary courage and resilience.
Both are featured in an excellent short film produced by Double Down News and viewable on YouTube called The Other 9/11: How to Make a Nation Scream, which looks back at the 1973 coup, who was responsible and what has happened in the country since. It is an important record but also has lessons for the present.
Today, a new president for the people, Gabriel Boric, is again attempting to bring back to Chile what Allende attempted and what Corbyn describes in the film as “a society of social justice for the good of all the community.” The Palestinians of Gaza, if they survive Israel’s genocide against them, will be hoping for a similar chance.
Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.
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