Burning churches; soccer fans murdered as they leave National Stadium, once Chile’s largest concentration camp and site of unpunished massacres. Everything has been seen because of social media. Without it, these acts, too, would have remained unpunished.
To understand the moral, ethical and spiritual damage being done to the country as illustrated by recent events, we have to return to history, scrutinizing those who formed the country after its struggle for independence, and remembering the heroic resistance of its original peoples.
Greed and land seizure arrived with the advent of Spanish colonization and continued with the “Pacification of Araucanía” that the new inhabitants of the land waged, snatching territory not only from the Spanish crown but—always—from its original dwellers.
Death and destruction have formed the legacy of the Spanish occupation, an occupation sustained by the newly created creoles and mestizos of the upper class. Forts and churches represented the constructed symbols of their new architecture.
Towns, cities and places of worship were in this way built, and a new society launched. Always brutally unjust, dominated by religious symbols and with the military in the lead, its legality established and validated throughout history by the politicians on duty at any given point in time.
The struggle for equity and social equilibrium have borne witness to great massacres, and those who pay are always the same: the oppressed and vulnerable, used to suffering unbearable pain in their souls.
The destruction, violence and looting we see today are directly linked to the process by which this society of political betrayals and executions developed. We can’t deny history, and it is painful to see culturally significant churches burn in Chiloé, or to witness the vandalism of parishes in major cities across Chile. But they must be seen as offenses against the most obvious representations of the Christian faith and the communities who are its followers. The images are painful, even for those of us who do not practice any given religion.
Chile is a country with a very old disease: a spiritual sickness; a moral sickness; an ethical sickness; one that infects all of us and expresses itself in the violent acts of this crossroads of which we are all eyewitnesses.
But we also need to look through the eyes of the souls of those who have lost their ability to see the light due to the violence unleashed by the government.
All this is much more than a political crisis; it is a crisis of the contents of the soul and the heart of the nation.
Nothing surprises us anymore, and this is a symbol of the infection we suffer: what is being burned are irreplaceable values, history, soul: that is the greatest damage caused by what is lost when a church in Chiloé is set ablaze. The flames that consume it and reduce it to ashes don’t illumine anything anymore. They just bring more darkness.
We hope that the political and economic elites who control everyone’s common territory understand that the fire cannot be quenched with violence and that the practically unpunished crime at the gates of the National Stadium after a sports event – and the brutal injury of a young fan by a police vehicle – can’t remain without consequence, whoever may have fired the institutional weapon of execution.
Both the burning churches and the murder of that young fan are acts of extreme violence that testify to an immense discontent. Of great size and of great age.
The soul of the nation will heal when a common meeting place is found where all of us can participate in the process of giving birth to a solution to the issues of inequity and social justice.
Only then can it come to pass that the burning of a church, the blinding of innocent citizens, or the murder of national sports fans – fans of the club most representative of the country—do not remain unpunished.
Perhaps only then might we become sensitized and, we may hope, rediscover the poetry of a new constitution. One that shelters all of us, guarantees our peaceful coexistence, and returns us to the heart and soul of this nation.