Screening: “The Chicago Conspiracy”

Crisis Mirror has a pleasure to invite you to the screening of The Chicago Conspiracy, a documentary by Subversive Action Films, on the 11th of September – that is, on the day that marks the 41st anniversary of the Pinochet led coup d’état in Chile. The screening takes place in Støberiet (Blågårdsplads 5) starting at 20.00.

The documentary explores the era of the Pinochet dictatorship and its legacy by connecting struggles against the Pinochet regime to conflicts in post-dictatorship Chile. It tells, among other things, the stories of combatant youth who were murdered in the 1980s by Pinochet’s police, of the students who are fighting neoliberal educational law decades later, and of the Mapuche people who have resisted the occupiers of their land from the Spanish conquerors to the Chilean state and to the multinational companies.

The name of the documentary refers to a group of Chilean economists, “the Chicago Boys”, who got their training under free market gurus Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger in the University of Chicago and who after the coup attained control of the economic policies of Chile. Joined together, the Iron Fist and the Invisible Hand gave a bloodbath to democratic organizing and privatized nearly every aspect of the society, turning Chile into a first nation-scale laboratory for neoliberalism.

This transformation left indelible traces in the Chilean society, but it also contributed to setting in motion chains of development that through the following decades have had global impact. Maybe less often in uniform, but still authoritarian in principle, the neoliberal rule has resulted in appropriating public property, rupturing communities and destroying livelihoods from the regimes of Thatcher and Reagan to the Structural Adjustment Programs of the international financial institutions and from the mortal transition in post-Soviet Russia to the current Euro crisis that is also creeping in places towards an economic genocide. This makes the Chilean experiment, but also the struggles against it, part of our history too.

 

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECfjBKmTg0Q

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