Chilean Bombshell

Yesterday’s announcement in Chile of indictments against individuals linked to the Pinochet dictatorship for poisoning former president Eduardo Frei is an 8.0 earthquake in that seismically challenged country in the midst of its presidential elections.

Forensic investigators found traces of thalium and mustard gas in the remains of the popular Christian Democratic president who preceded Salvador Allende. I’m too far away in time and distance to have a feel for the impact, but it is remarkable to open the electronic front page of the profoundly reactionary El Mercurio to see what that Pinochet-boosting sheet has to say for itself.

El Mercurio predated Fox News, but then again the neoliberal Pinochet predated Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both of whom took a leaf out of his book. We ignore the lessons of that southern laboratory at our peril.

Frei was a key figure in the middle ground of Chilean politics during the polarization of the Allende-Pinochet years. After early support of the military takeover, he turned against Pinochet and was the natural figurehead of the burgeoning opposition.

Apparently, that was enough to get the late dictator working on ways to eliminate him. The details to come will no doubt be extremely juicy.

But back to the reactions: today’s Mercurio ignores the Frei assassination story completely and headlines a minor, self-generated story about the similar positions of the Socialist presidential candidate and the miniscule Chilean Communist Party on the issue of Pinochet’s 1981 auto-amnesty.

That’s typical mercurial guilt-by-association calculated to reinforce its ruling elite audience’s demented anti-marxist paranoia.

The equivalent here would be Beck and O’Reilly reacting to the news that George Bush and Osama bin Laden were pen pals with a feature on ACORN.

And indeed, Mercurio has a nice front-pager about Chilean magicians—presumably including those on its own staff who can make the biggest story of the decade disappear from its pages.

Now that we have Fox, we can see how a shamelessly crude propaganda organ backed with enough cash can position itself within a society and make itself indispensable, just like El Mercurio did, despite thumbing its nose at any semblance of respect for facts. Through its steady diet of smug indifference to anything outside its Weltanschauung, it pounds a discourse into the consciousness of the populace, much like the thugs in Orwell’s 1984.

Thus the cliché about our evolution into a third-world country has its application in the mediatic sphere as well.