My first reaction to the racist explosion in Venezuela was to recall the comparably violent opposition to Salvador Allende that I had witnessed in Chile some 30 years earlier, in the early 1970s, though I had not paid particular attention to its racist colouring at the time. The verbal battering to which Allende was subjected by the Chilean oligarchy, and by newspapers like El Mercurio, had seemed more understandable. A revolutionary experiment was clearly underway, and the privileged classes were right to recognise it as such. In the context of a class war, the urbane Doctor Allende was correctly perceived as a class traitor. Soon verbal violence tipped into counter-revolutionary insurrection, and the thin veneer of civilised behaviour that had covered the raw conflicts within Chilean society over many decades was stripped away and revealed as a fraud, a phenomenon visible even before the arrival of General Pinochet in 1973.
Yet Allende’s real and unforgivable crime in the eyes of the white settler elite had been to mobilise the rotos – the patronising and semi-affectionate, semi-derisory, name given to Chile’s rural and urban poor. The indigenous origins of the rotos were obvious to anyone who had ever been present at street demonstrations by Allende’s Popular Unity coalition. Were they to have been dressed in Indian clothes, rather than in blue jeans and T-shirts, their affinity with their indigenous neighbours would at once have become apparent. The same could have been said about the ‘cabezas negras’ that came out to support Juan Perón in Argentina at the same time.
