Truckers: the old tricks do not change

This year, in October, it will be 50 years since the truckers’ strike in 1972. Then, the National Confederation of Truck Owners, led by the far-right León Vilarín, began an indefinite national strike from the 9th of the aforementioned month. The strike had the monetary support of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that at that time was absolutely determined to bring down the Popular Unity government, headed by Salvador Allende. It was a mission that had the full support and more than that, initiative, of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. At the same time, it also provided financial resources to El Mercurio.
There is a document declassified by the CIA in later years, which indicates that both events were framed in the so-called “September Plan. This document indicates in one of its parts, that the financing is aimed at promoting “trade union movements of bosses and the civil resistance of the bourgeoisie”. It is rare for a document produced by the CIA to use categories of Marxist connotation such as “bourgeoisie”. Anyway, a detail.
The action of the truckers was answered by the government, which described the strike as “political, illegal and seditious”, proceeding to the imprisonment of leaders of the truckers. The replica of these did not wait and on October 12 the union proceeded to block roads and highways, exacerbating the shortage of food and supplies that existed at that time, caused by the concerted action of businessmen, politicians, right-wing extremist movements such as Patria y Libertad and the US government. The rest of the story is known and would lead less than a year later to the coup that overthrew the constitutional government.
Since then, and with some frequency, the union of truckers and transporters has continued to resort to the strategy of strikes, but preferably to that of road blockades, preventing the free movement of people and goods.
In August 2020, in the middle of the Piñera II administration, the truckers’ union carried out a strike demanding laws that, according to them, would benefit the country’s security. Unemployment is carried out at the most critical point of the pandemic, with quarantines included. Because on the 27th of that month, I had to travel by land from Santiago to southern Chile, I was an eyewitness to how Route 5, the backbone of transport, was interrupted almost entirely, but particularly in the areas where the employer and political right is traditionally strong: Los Angeles, Collipulli, Temuco. Countless machines, trucks and trailers obstructed traffic in a thuggish manner and with impunity. The security forces, Carabineros de Chile, are absent. In the few points where there was a police presence, there was a quasi-camaraderie and complicity between truck drivers and carabineros.  Perhaps if this relationship was forged in the years of the aforementioned strike of October 1972. Who financed the strike in August and September 2020, less than two years ago?
Just as the strike to which I refer in the previous paragraph was “justified” in the lack of security on the southern roads, the demonstrations of these days in the north of Chile, again with road blockades and no attempt by the authority to restore circulation, is justified in the death of a truck driver, allegedly at the hands of irregular immigrants. But the attitude of thuggery and impunity with which the guild acts is the same as always. Taking advantage of unfortunate circumstances allows the guild, once again, to act with the utmost contempt for the rights of others. Recall that, in addition to the events described above, there are others, such as that of August 2015 during the Bachetet II administration, when truckers allowed themselves to interrupt much of the vehicular flow of Santiago, taking a caravan of burned trucks to the very gates of La Moneda.
Thus, President Boric, in addition to the challenges already known, in the fields of foreign policy, employment, pandemic and others, will also have to deal with a guild that has already become accustomed to impunity and the instrumentalization of causes to achieve its own ends that, everything indicates, transcend, today as yesterday, the merely union.

Original source in Spanish