Writer: Benjamin Rukwengye. PHOTO/FILE.
It is the night of October 5, 1988. The murderous Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet is frantic. He has lost a referendum and must step down, bring the curtain down on nearly two decades of the most repressive and violent regimes in modern history.
He had come to power through a military coup in 1973 and immediately gone on a killing spree, to ostensibly eliminate his opposition. Over that period, his secret police, DINA, had been deployed to make massive arrests of opposition politicians, sympathisers, their families, and whoever dared the general.
Many were summarily shot and killed. Many others carted off to secret prisons where they were tortured and later killed. Others buried in mass graves. Hundreds of others dumped in rivers and lakes – never to be found. About 2 percent of Chileans escaped to exile – but the DINA often tracked them there and assassinated them too.Pinochet had gotten away with it because he had the backing of international powers. They often bailed him out when he needed it and almost always turned a blind eye to the gross human rights abuses under him. But it soon got to a point where his excesses couldn’t be ignored anymore.
It didn’t help that he had exported his terror to the streets of Washington DC, Rome, and nearly everywhere in South America. The Catholic Church petitioned the Vatican and even the Pope spoke out against the situation. A couple of Western governments got stern and issued warnings. The populace got restless. The opposition got emboldened.
Desperate to show that he was still in charge, the general called a referendum – even if had no intention of respecting the results. The people had a choice to give him another eight years or vote for multipartyism.Of course, he had no intentions of holding a free and fair election or respecting the results unless they were in his favour. Ergo, he deployed his secret police and the army to act. However, he had grossly underestimated how much the people wanted him gone.
Their resolve, resilience and pain threshold had inadvertently been built by the same methods meant to repress them. There was nothing he could do to break them. So, on election day, they showed up in droves and an overwhelming 60 percent voted to boot him. The margin was too wide to rig. He needed to find another way if he was going to overturn it. It is the night October 5.
That evening of the election day. General Pinochet has summoned his generals because he has another ace up his sleeve. He orders to them to deploy troops around the capital and the other cities. The DINA is ordered to get to work but this time, to cause chaos. Dress up in plain clothes, assault civilians, torch businesses, vandalize government offices and security installations.
This should create enough anarchy to warrant the nullification of the results and under the guise of needing to restore order. But then, something extraordinary happens. First, the Air Force commander speaks up and says he will not obey the order because it goes against the will of the people. Emboldened, everyone else pretty much says, “Mister President, you lost the election. The game is over. Accept the results.”
And so, Pinochet reluctantly accepts the results and eventually leaves power. So, who won the by-election in Kawempe? Under the circumstances not even the declared victor can tell for sure how many votes he got. Yet in many ways, the bloody contest was the clearest sign that even in the face of violence, bribery, and intimidation, high voter turnout might just be the magic bullet.
Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless
Minds.
