Confronting Authoritarian Legacies and Creating Resistance: Anarchist Organizing in Re-Democratizing Chile

Abstract

This thesis explores the resurgence of anarchism in the current context of Santiago through the use of ethnographic work. Research focuses on anarchism among university students and anarchists that did not grow up in the dictatorship, but either during or after the establishment of democracy. I argue that in conjunction with reflecting a larger trend of increased popularity of anarchism worldwide, anarchists in Santiago also are positioned to make a specific critique of authoritarianism and the continuities of state oppression between dictatorship and democracy. Interviews with anarchists from varied backgrounds and perspectives on anarchism provided an array of differing views on pertinent social and political concerns, but the common threads woven through contemporary anarchism in Santiago are formative experiences within the context of an emerging democracy that has fallen short of reinvigorating many Chileans with faith in the state. Anarchism provides a meaningful critique of the state as an institution that upholds oppression, regardless of who controls it. This provides a framework to understand the continuities anarchists view between Chilean dictatorship and Chilean democracy. Of particular note in this work is the use of the anti-terrorist law by the state to imprison anarchists. The law was passed under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to prosecute political dissidents, and has been expanded upon after the shift to democracy in 1990. The use of the anti-terrorism law is of interest in this work both because it is a direct legal continuation of the practices of state repression from the dictatorship, and because its use against anarchists seems to have given credence to anarchist claims about the function of the state independent of what its current articulation may be. By analyzing the politicization of anarchists, their critiques of the current state of politics, and state use of the anti-terrorist law a more thorough understanding of political repression, the contradictions of democracy, and contemporary Latin American resistance movements can be attained.