Taking Note
MO
CHILE'S TOLERANCE OF INTOLERANCE On the night of May 31, about 15 people, masked and wearing all black, stormed into a packed club in Valparaiso, Chile, El Dique, where several antifascist...
...That the media became concentrated in the hands of the right during the dictatorship, and that many security force operatives remain in positions of authority after the dictatorship, only partly explains why Neonazi groups seemingly operate with impunity...
...The El Dique assault also came in a context of growing hate crimes and racist grafitti against Peruvian immigrants in Santiago...
...They exploded one of the Molotovs in an attempt to bum the club, but one of the clubgoers managed to douse the fire with beer...
...Three of the injured were hospitalized with head injuries...
...Leal is pushing for a constitutional reform that condemns xenophobia and any type of discrimination in Chilean society...
...The police arrived within minutes, only to give the owner of the club a ticket for disturbing the peace...
...the most serious was a fractured skull...
...Curasbdn's warning was proven shockingly precise on June 20 when Chile's most vocal Nazi group, Fatherland New Society (PNS), which is collecting signatures to become a political party and diffuses its messages via internet broadcasts, issued its own press release...
...This is not the first time that fascist groups have made an appearance on the Chilean political scene...
...The El Dique attack also hauntingly brings to mind another crime in Valparaiso: On September 4, 1998, 20 homosexuals were killed in a fire at a gay disco, La Divine...
...Prompted by the El Dique attack and the denunciation by Curasbdn, congressmen from the governing Concertaci6n coalition have spoken out against the growing violence against Peruvians, homosexuals, Mapuches and anti-fascists...
...Fatherland and Liberty, with their twisted swastika insignia, openly used tactics reminiscent of SS repression against supporters of elected Socialist President Salvador Allende...
...A well-known example of this is the case of Paul Schiffer, alleged pedophile and sinister leader of Dignity Colony, one of the most notorious of the torture and death camps, who, evading 27 charges of child sex abuse, continues to enjoy his freedom...
...The attackers were gone in less than five minutes, leaving some 50 people injured...
...The press did not report the crime until Curasbdn, one of the bands that performed that night, issued a press release on June 7, declaring that a group calling itself the Hammer of the South, from the nearby suburb Villa Alemana, had claimed responsibility for the attack via emails to the band's website...
...The police concluded that the fire was caused by a short circuit and the courts closed the case without a thorough investigation...
...They detained the organizers of the concert...
...Nazism exists in our country and is protected in an alarming way," their message ended...
...The comparison to German Nazi operations grows even more horrifying when considering torture survivors' testimonies about their experience in the Chilean dictatorship's concentration camps...
...Congressman Antonio Leal told terra.cl on June 13 that Nazi propaganda has existed in Chile for decades and that "some ideologues of this movement...were linked to the National Directorate of Intelligence (DINA) during the military government...
...PNS intended to differentiate themselves from what they consider fake Nazi skinhead groups, which they said "clearly have nothing to do with the discipline, spirit and order, or cultural, ideological and intellectual formation of the best political troops in history, the SS...
...Wielding baseball bats, knives, switchblades, pipes, and Molotov cocktails, they fired blanks into the crowd and began beating and knifing anyone who tried to escape...
...A right-wing group later claimed responsibility for the crime...
...And Juan Bustos presented a bill to Congress on June 27 for the creation of a coordinating body for anti-Nazi groups...
...The attack itself suggests that hyper-nationalist, xenophobic and authoritarian attitudes are deeply embedded in certain sectors of Chilean society...
...Curasb6n denounced the police, the media, and the authorities for contributing to a climate of disinformation and impunity that legitimated Neonazi groups...
...And today, Chile's judicial system is straining to bring justice in countless cases of human rights violations that are blanketed by impunity...
...CHILE'S TOLERANCE OF INTOLERANCE On the night of May 31, about 15 people, masked and wearing all black, stormed into a packed club in Valparaiso, Chile, El Dique, where several antifascist rock groups were playing...
...they issued no warrant nor did they begin an investigation, despite having driven some of the victims to the hospital and seen the seriousness of their injuries...
...The lack of an immediate response condemning this crime on the part of the police and the media is representative of a tolerance of intolerance that has been emblematic of Chile since the days of the dictatorship...
...Santiago city councilman Ricardo Zdfiiga told electronic news site PrimeraLinea.cl he suspects a group called Nationalist Union is responsible for the racist slogans...
...While these are necessary measures, they face a tolerance of intolerance that has proved to be a powerful and selfpropagating phenomena-powerful enough to have survived the dictatorship that long protected it...
Vol. 36 • July 2002 • No. 1
