The return of the vampires to Chile

A couple of years ago, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín premiered The CountA film that portrayed, in a farcical or grotesque tone, the dictator Augusto Pinochet as an aging vampire who hovered over the country in his general's cape. He also squeezed the hearts of his victims and, with their blood, made smoothies that gave him the vigor necessary to carry out his nocturnal flights. The film's metaphor was obvious, but nevertheless, or perhaps precisely because of that, it worked powerfully: after all, Pinochet—like other dictators, from Franco to Putin, and any others you can think of—did indeed possess a certain vampiric appearance. And his regime, which ravaged Chile between 1973 and 1990, was indeed a bath of blood and squeezed hearts. And broken, and drowned, and shot, and tortured.

Chile has gone from prideting itself on being one of the most progressive countries in the Southern Cone to plunging back into Pinochetism with the undeniable victory of the far-right José Antonio Kast in Sunday's elections, just thirty-five years apart. It was also a country that subjected Pinochet's military dictatorship to a lengthy legal process, with accusations of torture, terrorism, and genocide against Pinochet himself and his military junta, including commanders like Merino, Leigh, and Mendoza. After the assault on the La Moneda Palace that ended with the suicide of President Salvador Allende, the military junta usurped power and ruled through the constant violation of human rights and the thorough plundering of public funds. The trial against Pinochet unfolded between Chile, the United Kingdom, and Spain, with the providential intervention of Baltasar Garzón (who was later removed from the judiciary, coincidentally, when he attempted to open a similar case against the crimes of the Franco regime). It lasted until 2006, with a bittersweet ending: the dictator had certainly been accused and prosecuted for his crimes, but he managed to evade responsibility and died of old age, at ninety-one, in a hospital bed in Santiago, Chile.

Pinochet fell from power due to the results of the 1988 plebiscite, which he hoped would provide permanence and stability to his government, but which he lost. Between 2020 and 2022, Chile underwent a constitutional process that sought to definitively bury the Pinochet-era Constitution and create a new one, which the left aspired to be groundbreaking in many ways. The process failed, resulting in strong polarization, which many now point to as the main cause of Kast's victory and the far right. Pablo Larraín was fourteen years old when Pinochet lost power, and in The Count He wondered about the reasons for the persistence of Pinochetism, a dark shadow that had loomed over all of Chile for the last three and a half decades, until it returned to power. The vampire metaphor, as we've already mentioned, was obvious. The parallels with Spanish politics, to a certain extent, were also clear.