The women quilting around a large table at the Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared banter quietly about mundane topics – an upcoming holiday, a child’s antics – as they wield their needles and scissors.
But when the conversation turns to United States military intervention in Venezuela, a distant South American neighbor, the tone sharpens.
“The United States of Trump is putting its eagle’s talons into another country that dares do things it doesn’t like,” says Claudia Lara, stitching a brightly colored panel depicting a street protest. “We in Chile know about those talons. It was the CIA and the U.S. military that took away our democracy and gave us a dictatorship.”
Why We Wrote This
The United States backed a military coup in Chile in 1973, ushering in nearly two decades of dictatorship. How Chileans individually experienced that period influences how they see U.S. military strikes in Venezuelan waters today.
She is referring to the 1973 military coup that toppled the democratically elected Socialist President Salvador Allende with the covert guidance of the CIA and U.S. military assistance. The coup resulted in Mr. Allende’s assassination in the presidential palace, and plunged Chile into almost 17 years of military dictatorship.
Today, there is news of U.S. military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats off the coast of Venezuela, and President Donald Trump’s authorization of the CIA to carry out operations inside Venezuela. Here in Chile, memories of the U.S.-engineered dictatorship are fresh enough that these developments are producing intense – and sharply disparate – reactions.
Across the region, similar debates are taking place. For more than 100 years, the U.S. was ever-present in Latin American affairs – often behind the scenes. And in countries where Washington intervened militarily – not just Chile, but in Argentina, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and others – knock-on effects sometimes lasted generations.
But there is widespread disdain for Venezuela’s regime – and especially for authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro’s economic incompetence and restriction of democratic rights that have have sent millions of refugees into neighboring countries. That has left many people across the Americas deeply torn.
Roughly 50% of Latin Americans say they support U.S. intervention in Venezuela, according to an early November regional poll by Brazilian group AtlasIntel. But only 41% of respondents think intervention by the Trump administration would restore democracy there.
“Throughout Latin America, few would shed tears to see Maduro and his cronies swept out of power,” says Cynthia Arnson, a Latin America expert currently teaching at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota.
On the other hand, she adds, “there’s not a great deal of appetite for regime change through military intervention. That brings up all sorts of ghosts from the past.”
Maybe ‘just this once’?
In Chile, most on the political left feel U.S. actions today represent an imperialist approach that has no place in the 21st century. Although few sympathize with Mr. Maduro, they oppose the United States carrying out regime change.
But among conservatives and older, well-off Chileans, opinions are often colored by the memory of an intervention they say saved the country from a socialist revolution, replacing it with a stable dictatorship that brought decades of prosperity.
“That intervention was necessary,” says Hugo Ortega, a retired Air Force staff sergeant who keeps a photo of former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet on the wall of his home in a working-class southern Santiago. “The U.S. could do the same in Venezuela, reestablishing order and helping Venezuelans take back their democracy like a big brother helping a smaller sibling.”
Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor
The idea of U.S. intervention is complicated by the wave of Venezuelans arriving in search of security and stability in recent years. Today there are about 800,000 Venezuelan immigrants in Chile – a proportion of the population that analyst Jorge Heine notes would be the equivalent of some 14 million Venezuelans landing in the United States.
Here, Venezuelans were initially received with sympathy, viewed among conservatives as political refugees from a communist dictatorship. But more recently, Venezuelan immigrants have been blamed for a rise in organized crime and gang violence.
For the women quilting at the Families of the Detained-Disappeared, the newcomers are mostly right-wing zealots who speak admiringly of Gen. Pinochet’s “hard hand.”
“They tell us we should be glad we had a coup that saved us from socialism,” says Ana Delgado.
Ms. Lara, whose father disappeared under Gen. Pinochet, says Venezuelans make light of the trauma many experienced under military dictatorship. “They belittle our experience,” she says.
Among Chilean young people, not yet born when Washington assisted Gen. Pinochet’s coup, the question of U.S. intervention in Venezuela elicits ambiguity.
Savka Segvich, a first-year political science major at Diego Portales University in Santiago, says she and her friends often discuss these issues with students from Venezuela. One friend told her, “Well maybe it’s OK just this once,” she says, of U.S. intervention.
Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor
Wrapping up an outdoor concert in Santiago’s Villa Francia district – a neighborhood synonymous with the repression of the Pinochet years – folk singer Charles Labra says the possible U.S. intervention in Venezuela has taken him back to his youth.
“I was 23 when the Pinochet police grabbed me and my brother, held us for a frightening period, and then released us with a warning to stop singing our songs,” he says. He believes the Trump administration’s talk of intervention is a distraction from “what they’re really after” – oil.
A few blocks away, Mr. Ortega, the retired Air Force veteran, says he remembers being a teenager and seeing food shortages and long lines for gas during the nearly three years that socialist President Allende was in power.
“Then Pinochet acted with the help of the U.S. to put an end to the chaos,” he says.
“If a friend comes to help you restore order to your house,” says Mr. Ortega. “I think that’s a good thing.”
