Chile - Italy

World Citizen
by Vicente Taquias Vergara
photo by Roberto Gimmi

From the political and social activism in post-'68 Chile stadium in Santiago, where he was locked up with thousands of other political opponents of Pinochet (September 1973), political engagement in Italy, a land of exile for him but also of struggle. The testimony of "Urban", Chilean anarchist.

 

TTestify about my experiences and struggles that I have seen participatory and protagonist, paying a heavy price in terms of repression and exile, just because I'm a libertarian activist. I continued the struggle in keeping with my basic ideas on the side of workers. Immigrants and the rights that are universal for all of us as the right to home, to work in an environment environmentally sound and for the right of self-management and people for a better life and a cleaner world . Mine is a particular story. I was born in Santiago, Chile, as we all know the early 70's Salvador Allende in Chile ruled that he had forged a coalition of center-left parties that had won the elections with a program that that time appeared to the West and to Latin America as a revolutionary event. Jumped on the wagon Popular Unity everyone in the West, the forces of the left and intelligentia that their carelessness that characterizes them did not take into account that this political process was the result of years of struggle of the masses of workers and the people and all the dispossessed peasants and that after the Mapuche people had helped to win the election. But the project of the people for more than 50 years, ie from the 20 years he developed his own theory was born from the bottom of the libertarian syndicalism with everything included on the claim prepared by the slum dwellers, peasants from the Mapuche was on self and the end of Capital and capitalists who until then had made the most of the population and all the natural resources of the Chilean territory. The right-wing governments, the fascist empire in North America until then had seen these people and this territory as something from which they could do whatever they wanted. In the 70's I was part of an anarcho-syndicalist trade union federation that was the leather workers, we were the zapateros, we had the shoes and worked in factories in conditions of super exploitation. Many of us have started working soon and 14/15 years we had become laborers, workers who took knowledge of the future that awaited them black. Before the 70's I was very libertarian as a trade unionist committed to the fight we had carried forward to win better living conditions for workers and society in general.

Vicente Taquias Vergara, called Urbano

Despite repression

All this was very difficult because as everyone knows the capital has never given respite to workers nor to us libertarians who proposed a different system. How do I start and how we wanted the real exchange self-management of all inputs for factory workers, for the peasants for the young and for the Mapuche people. You can imagine the repression against us by the state, Marxists and all those who wanted to make reforms such as the Popular Unity government that basically changed everything not to change anything. I was also actively involved with the right to housing. In Chile in the year 60/70 there was no policy of building housing for workers.
At that time, Santiago had been a stream of immigration of poor peasants from the countryside in the south and the Mapuche territory. They moved to the capital to find work and improve conditions of life, but governments as usual did not give anything and were not entitled to anything so they were forced to live in camps on the outskirts of Santiago with no facilities, no water, no light without health care assistance, no schooling. Thousands of children died from malnutrition and lack of assistance. I and other workers born in the occupied areas we have taken the trouble to go and talk to them by suggesting the only feasible way out of poverty and degradation that was the organization and the occupation of land where to build houses, schools and the general hospital. This movement despite the repression and the hundreds of victims managed with the struggles very hard to conquer the land and build neighborhoods that have grown as Santiago population. The workers, slum dwellers, farmers and Mapuche were the protagonists of a new era where the social changes they saw in the front row with the fixed idea of fighting against the state, against the bosses and against capital in order to change the conditions of life and work. We had no more fear of repression or state. When she got the Popular Unity Party in the 70's his reform agenda had nothing revolutionary. This government lasted 1000 days and President Allende was assassinated by the military led by the genocidal Pinochet. This part is a part of history throughout the West and the world was sold as a democratic socialist, but all of them intellectuals and left-wing parties of Europe have been very careful to conceal and mystify the real story, what really happened in that period in Chile: For the first time the workers had taken over the factories and had put in self-management and the farmers had occupied the land and put in self-management. The Mapuche people had recovered part of their territory driving out the landlords. We the workers, young people and students had participated actively in the fight for these people colonized and oppressed by the Chilean State that he never wanted to be recognized as a race.
During the period of the Allende government I have been very busy fighting the black market. The Popular Unity coalition had made significant pay increases to reduce poverty. Everything was trivialized by the right wing and by the owners and the United States at all costs trying to overthrow the government, hiding the goods, destroying food or throwing them into the rivers making them rot. The landowners brought the animals (especially cows) in Argentina across the border also destroying farm machinery and then accused the government of not being able to govern. We have proposed the occupation and management of all the food and we have brought under control by forming grassroots organizations in neighborhoods.

Ponti

The coup, what a blow!

The main role was run by women and work women, they were the only ones who understood the needs of families, of children, of workers and society in general at that time was going through a very difficult time (the right to exist). The Popular Unity with the means available to us we found against them, because in their reform agenda it was not expected and was not a part that the people go by a route not established by them but created from the fruit of years of work, sometimes sacrifice paid by imprisonment, repression, and the lives of many libertarians who had sown the self-management within the people of workers and the dispossessed. The government sent the police to repress the struggles we did because the people had gone to the left of the government and the coalition that supported it. The reaction of U.S. imperialism and the army after the 1000 days after the Popular Unity and self-government of the people hit the Mapuche farmers and workers with a coup. All people who had struggled to forever change his life coming out of the system of exploitation and oppression imposed was found crushed and trampled worse than before. In this clash of 11/9/73 we found that the parties and the leftist government had abandoned the people to their fate did not want to distribute the weapons to defend ourselves. We found we were unarmed despite the barricades in a few days the soldiers were seized by installing concentration camps everywhere in Santiago. All our future and our battles have gone up in smoke! We all fought with means that we were certainly not many, more or less possessed of guns, of course it was not enough to stop the army navy and military that had massive war equipment. For this reason, we were defeated. On September 27, 1973 I was captured and taken to a concentration camp of the aviation Guatemala district with 32 other comrades which by the way the neighborhood had been built in the early 70s for the military aviation consists of 540 houses and us on the 4/9/70 we occupied the same day that Allende won the election. Few of us have lost those houses, only the most militant trade-offs including myself.
I was a prisoner for three days in aviation and we have been tortured to tell us the names of our companions outside and of course we did not say anything. They decided to shoot me and another companion, libertarian shoemaker, us against the wall and fired blanks but but we have not folded. They have taken all 32 prisoners of the district Guatemala and we were loaded onto trucks and taken away, we thought that we would be killed and we would be thrown in the outskirts of the capital, since in those days there were killing of hundreds and thousands of people who were thrown in mass graves in the countryside. Instead we were brought in the National Stadium, here we have two long rows of soldiers in one right and one left (in Chile is called callejon hoscuro). We had to pass within this team where we ere all beaten and hard to get to the end with your legs. We were massacred, unfortunately we got what expected us. For 12 days we have been tortured with electric current put into the body even in the genitals, mock executions and unimaginable though by all means let us down and get the information but failed, none of us have worked 32 born in us even deeper anger against them and the only thing we thought was to get out alive from hell to reorganize the resistance. I left the National Stadium on 14/10/73 that day in a street in downtown Santiago my brother was murdered, in a bus stop where he was with a dozen people. The dictator Pinochet had banned the gathering of people, then fired on the group that was not doing anything just waiting for the bus. I was forced to go underground, despite the deaths and comrades murdered and imprisoned those who still thought they could organize the resistance and this time not for a social revolution, but for our survival. After 1 year I and other friends we knew that it was impossible for our company because we were wanted anywhere, so we decided to go in exile, but did not know quite where to go. At the end of September the 1974 we occupied the Italian Embassy. It was not an easy task, because we had to bring with us women and children and relatives of the companions who were in concentration camps and those who did not know what had happened. The fact of being illegal immigrants and do not leave anything behind us that could help the military in order to prevent them from taking women and children and torture them in front of the family to get them to talk, so we took away a lot of people to safety . By the accounts there had been very few fellow libertarians left.

Pareto	Montechiaro

My father had discussed Carrara

Once in Rome we had to think how to live, where to go and how to reorganize and find a job mainly because we were not immigrants but political activists and we had never lived by their wits, but always in our work. In Rome I had to organize the committee works Chilean Exiles because before we had arrived just after 11 / 9 / 73 the political representatives of the Popular Unity, which had monopolized the representation of a resistance that they hadn’t done and then the agreements were made between the Italian state and them, for us that we were not part of their organization and against which we brought forward a very strong criticism, accusations that have been the cause of their defeat and they were not up to responding to coup and the military, because the September 11, we said we arm ourselves since we were 3 million and a half of organized workers and soldiers were only 80 thousand in the navy, army and aviation. The political responsibility for this disaster was their and that they had no right to stay in Rome to represent anything. Our reasoning has created several problems, so we are being accused of criminal offenders and does not represent anything on this Italian government followed hem. To have political asylum as I said, I had to organize the committee Chilean Exiles workers in the game because he was able to have or not have the right to political asylum. Eventually we checked we had this award you could choose where to go, the socialists have gone to Milan, Communists to the Emilia Romagna and I, who was a particular person (for them), I chose Carrara to the astonishment of all. For me it was essential for my survival and my family.
My father told me about Carrara and Barcelona with great sadness but with great libertarian pride, I say: There you'll find mates and the people who will understand you! My father was the founder of the anarcho-syndicalist union of leather in the year 1930). I knew I had arrived at Carrara to get started, I was just 30 years old, I bring a lot of anger, I wanted to participate in the fights with Italians because now I realized that it would be difficult for me to return to Chile, so I downloaded all my experience here and my theoretical and political baggage. I met many friends in Carrara, excellent people, I met the anarchist partisans Belgrado Petrini, Sergio Ravenna, Giovanni Zava, Giovanni Mariga (of Padua) Umberto Marnocchi, Gogliardo Fiaschi and Alfonso Nicolazzi and the family of Alfonso Failla, great companions and friends. This has enriched me in my beliefs and the power of libertarian ideas because many of these fellows with their contribution and sacrifice did nothing but make me understand that to run a libertarian project you know when you start but only with the strength of you will understand when they have paid in Chile and Italy and the world those libertarians that have not surrendered to the barbarity of capitalism and totalitarianism. For me it was a new situation and we discovered as we say "our country is the whole world." I inserted easily and I fought together with fellow local battles which they did. In these struggles, I always gave my best in my personal contribution to the environment. Those battles that lasted 12 years. I had entered without permission of citizenship to anyone, I was moving well enough on the ground, constantly traveling all over Italy to denounce the crimes that were committed against the people of Chile by Pinochet.
At Massa Carrara against Montedison 12 years of hard struggle, Acna of Cencio; for several years off from Carrara to support the comrades of Alessandria in the fight against Acna of Cencio. Meanwhile, we won against Montedison in Carrara, but being a worker the employers for this fight did not give me more work rated as one of the blame for the closure of the factory of death. "Then I moved to Piedmont. For all the things that have happened, many political exiles and the militancy of each of us, we had to deal with our friends that we have brought with us which were not equal, they were not willing to make sacrifices to a militant who was more sacrifice, so I separated because as we all know not everything lasts forever and can not make compromises with their own ideas.
I arrived in Alexandria alone with several processes against me. There I reassembled a new family, I found a partner with whom to share sacrifices and still hopes for a better world. Left Carrara I kept fighting Acna in Cencio, even that one ended with a our victory, and whatever they say the Greens and environmentalists, in the year 80/90 the only death factories were shut down by fighting from the bottom with the common people and the anarchists.

My commitment now: to plant trees

In Alessandria I engaged in the fight for immigrants with my partner and I have spent so much effort to create the association of immigrants and the Province of Alessandria, where we won several times with our struggle for basic demands such as the right to the table , to public housing, a dormitory for who had no home, renewal of stay permits for 4 years (in 1992) without any documentation and we won everything going down to the streets to demonstrate, so basically I have continued to do the same things I did in Chile with the workers, peasants and the Mapuche. I was one of the first in 1998 to launch a major battle against the dictator Pinochet arrested in London on 16/10/1998. I was the first political refugee worker (victim of the dictatorship and so did my family) to file a formal complaint to the prosecutor in Milan. This allowed me to maintain the absolute level of a campaign that lasted 16 months and for which I was forced to leave my job. The parties of the left and the intelligentsia did not approve of my position on comparisons of the genocide, as a libertarian I was able to pierce the screen and earn the first pages of all newspapers nationally and internationally, as an anarchist so I could carry on a campaign against Pinochet and there was no one in Italy who could stop me. For me it was a great satisfaction, because I am a worker and because I had to compare with the Italian left, with newspapers and the media, without ever losing sight that I am a libertarian. In 2007 they gave me Italian citizenship I had been denied (by compagnero President Giorgio Napolitano) then Interior Minister of Prodi's first government by whom I had been declared dangerous to public order and state security. I have been so many times tried for environmental campaigns, but I've always been acquitted. I expected that my application for citizenship was accepted, finally I got it recognized in 2007 after 32 years of living in Italy. Only with my tenacity I have always delivered results, which gave me reason why I have never bent, and because the citizenship law was waiting for me.

Today for me, in 2011, I cannot claim to be Italian and I have nothing to thank anyone. My commitment today is to the memory of our fallen comrades and disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship for which we carry out a project known around the world called "ECOMEMORIA" planting of trees devoted to their memory. There are now seven years and this allows us to open the debate of what happened in Chile, who are responsible for the genocide and those that from 90 to today, called the center-left governments have done nothing to give justice to the fallen , the killed, the missing and their families. From 1990 to present the so-called center-left has ruled with the constitution of Pinochet, has not changed anything, all laws of the genocide are still in force. Neoliberalism is the line with the line which governs the laws of Chile Today, terrorism and state security are applied against the Mapuche people, against the workers and students. The society is entirely privatized, schools, health care there are not even collective work agreements, the multinationals plunder the land and its natural resources with the consent of the government. Today after 20 years the right has been in power again, but for me it is as if the dictatorship lasted 37 years nothing has changed. I do not feel Chilean, let alone an Italian citizen. I'm 65 years old and I have always considered myself a citizen of the world, our country is the whole world and where will be needed we will be present. With our ideas, our contribution and our sacrifice we have already put in account and that weighs on us and the claim vigorously, a leading libertarian worker proudly libertarian ideas and not afraid to advertise them to the whole world!