They ask for a state funeral: he won’t get it. He was
the boss of the state repression, which even today has
gone unpunished, despite the nationwide clamor for a
judgment on the crimes of his dictatorship: the
assassination, the disappearances, the torture and
exile. He was also the servant of the capitalist
class, safeguarding another kind of impunity, the
bosses’ license to exploit, impunity for their
neoliberal ideology with which they converted
education, health care, and housing into market
commodities. He liquidated the unions, and deepened
the exploitation in the workplaces.

He died with impunity. He was not called to account
for his crimes, for he was protected by an open
secret, the pact between those false friends of the
people, the Concertación ¹The Chilean popular front, including the Socialist
Party whose Michelle Bachelet is the president of
Chile., and the Pinochetists
ensconced in the army, the business owners, sections
of the state institutions, and certain mass media
outlets. Despite a few brave lawyers and judges,
Pinochetists share the judicial system with the
Concertación, and all kinds of Pinochetist groups and
circles are beginning to emerge into the light of day.
The right wing, who lined up to pay their respects to
Pinochet in his final illness, also shielded him, with
the legislators of the UDI and the RN ²The Independent Democratic Union (UDI) and the
National Renewal Party (RN), two far-right parties,
form the “Alliance for Chile” coalition. showering
with praises the man whose dictatorship was such a
fertile breeding ground for reaction.

He died with impunity. But the moral condemnation of
millions who rejected and still reject his
dictatorship was expressed by the outpouring in the
streets to commemorate the struggle which persists in
the living memory of an entire people, even more than
thirty years after that bloody day in 1973³September 11, 1973: General Augusto Pinochet led a
military coup with the full support of the United
States government, unleashing a reign of
counterrevolutionary terror.. The
political judgment for his crimes was lacking. We of
Class against Class have always insisted on the
necessity of a mass political action that would serve
as the working people’s political judgment on that
tyrant. The Communist Party’s policy of limiting
itself solely to legal actions in this
Concertaciónist-Pinochetist judicial system, has not
allowed this to happen.

His death does not mark the end of Pinochetism, a
social formation that unites the beneficiaries of the
privatizations who have enriched themselves in all
kinds of ways, including fraud, with sectors of the
poor people who have been victimized by the politics
of the capitalist class, both before and after the
coup. Rising to the top of this social formation are
circles and cliques of the cadres of the conspiracy
against the workers and the people, which today
appears to be seeking to revive a reactionary
political movement under different names. This will go
on producing a metamorphosis, the progressive
transformation of the Pinochetist – anti-Pinochetist
conflict into a conflict between the exploitative
interests of the bosses that Pinochetism defends by
means of open confrontation, and the rights and
justified interests of the working class and all the
poor people.

His death does not mark the end of Pinochetism. People
are declaring themselves admirers of his work. Some
more shamefully than others, they declare themselves
his admirers, his followers, his heirs. They must pay
for his entire legacy. The indictment for the crimes
of Pinochet’s dictatorship, which the human rights
organizations have upheld valiantly and tirelessly for
years, against his civilian and military
collaborators, does not expire with the death of their
leader.

For this reason his death constitutes a sort of
milestone in this process which is still continuing.
It was a spontaneous explosion of liberation from
years of horror and death for a great majority, from
every unbearable day that the leading figure of the
years of terror survived, alive and free. His death
gives greater momentum for the struggle against the
dictatorship’s impunity, which still continues, to
break out into a struggle against the unlimited
impunity for the bosses which the dictatorship secured
for them.

Everyone to Plaza Italia: December 10, 2006 at 7 PM

*Translation by Working Class Emancipation