Chile was never the same after the coup d’état that deposed President Allende, organized from Washington, in one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of Latin America, both for its internal impact and international influence. A stable democracy, which had resisted the caudillisms of other South American countries, then lived under a fierce dictatorship that still leaves marks of a different nature in the country today, capable of leading to radical temptations.
The relevance of this 1973 episode is not only related to the result of this Sunday’s Chilean presidential elections, but above all with the Trump Administration’s intentions to resume military interventions in Latin American countries, such as Venezuela, again with the aim of promoting regime change.
I don’t have particular sympathy for the Maduro Government, but I think this is a problem that is up to them to solve and not their neighbor to the North. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Hugo Chávez’s popularity, only partially transferred to Maduro, was not born out of nowhere. As a Latin American diplomat explained to me one day, extreme poverty was immense and social inequalities too stark at that time, without anyone externally having bothered about it. Chávez gave homes to many people who had never dreamed of anything like it.
When I participated in an EU Election Observation Mission in Venezuela in 2021, I was able to see some of the neighborhoods he built in Caracas. I also heard Venezuelan civil society organizations defend participation in the elections as a way of expressing their protest, criticizing some European positions in the opposite direction. They also maintained that they were the victims of US sanctions, rather than the elite close to the regime.
It is true that the opposition’s means in electoral campaigns were very different from those of the regime and there were many people disqualified without justification. There may also have been fraud in the count in the last presidential elections (not so much in the ones we observed, where the opposition parties even had more votes). But how many non-democratic regimes far worse than Venezuela’s are there around the world, without the threat of being invaded by the USA, starting with China, where the fentanyl that enters the USA through the Mexican border is said to come from?
In addition to violating international law, reducing the space for multilateral negotiations and running the risk of not achieving concrete results in the political transition, you never know how a possible North American intervention will end and what marks it will leave for the future. We’ve seen many that ended badly around the world and, therefore, it’s best not to repeat them. Latin America has its troubled history, its culture is so rich, its people are so diverse. It deserves consideration and respect, whether we are closer or further away from the political parties that govern the different countries that make it up. In any case, it cannot be treated again like a Washington farm, in a warmed-over version of the “Monroe doctrine”, with a bad memory.
Former Member of the European Parliament