Patrici Patricio Guzman's Chile, Obstinate Memory

Unlike any other Latin American country, since the nineteenth century, Chile has had a traditional electoral democracy. With its socialist revolutionary leader, Salvador Allende, creating the electoral coalition called “Popular Unity,” Allende won the 1970 presidential election of Chile. His presidency produced a radicalization among workers, but later his controlled insurrection was defeated by the uncontrollable revolution started by Chilean citizens. The military later overthrew Allende in 1973 and Augusto Pinochet assumed power. Patricio Guzman, a Chilean film director made a film of the depiction of student's reactions to his screening of The Battle of Chile, a documentary called Chile, Obstinate Memory. Even after decades of this regime, the student movement in Chile is going steady and this film compares and contrasts with it in various factors.

Patricio Guzman’s Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), is a film about the Chilean student's reaction to his screening of The Battle of Chile.

The Battle of Chile, is another documentary by Guzman which depicts the accounts of the last ten months of the Popular Unity government, ending with the September 11th, 1973 coup d’etat. Guzman first screened this film in England, and after twenty years of it being filmed, he returned to Chile to screen it for the first time. In this film, he captured the encounter of the trapped memories that The Battle of Chile left on its living characters and the documented events that it seized. In Chile, Obstinate Memory, the viewers are watching The Battle of Chile and they are a new generation of Chileans. This generation of Chileans can barely remember the revolution and the coup. They are capable of reflecting on their experiences of watching the film after so many years have passed from the overthrow of

Allende.
Guzman shows this film to different groups of students, including private and public university students and high school students. Their responses are very diverse, some more emotional than others, but they all give away the outcome that in the past few decades, there has been no memory of the destruction of the government for those who were young or not yet born at the time of the military coup. The high school students have difficulty understanding the ethical problems shown in the film, they can not comprehend how the military regime and the Popular Unity can commit such moral injustices such as attacks on private property. In addition, the group of students from the private university of Chile, give a more critical response to The Battle of Chile. They all tended to imitate the “criticisms of the Allende government advanced by the neoliberal technocrats of the military regime (Godoy-Anativia).” On the other hand, the group of students from the public university, have a more emotional response to the film. It makes various students burst out in tears and it “violently breaks open the traumas of an unconfronted past and the devastating oblivion of the present (Godoy-Anativia).”
Chile, Obstinate Memory generates a powerful strain between the generation who lived through the beginning and violent ending of the Popular Unity movement, and the younger generation who since they were born have been told that defeat of this movement was imperative in order to save Chile from communism. The students’ powerful reactions discloses their upmost desire for the truth about their country’s past. One can easily tell that all three groups of students are especially confused because what they thought to be true, was not. The tyrannized senses that the nation was going through is shown through the students. They are viewing the past of Chile while they are the the future of Chile.
After Salvador Allende was overthrown, Pinochet took power. His “neoliberal dream was that the free market would optimize education and wean educational institutions off state support. Military “rectors” were appointed to the universities and charged with purging them of dissenting faculty and students. Over time, funding for public education was systematically slashed in order to create an educational vacuum that could be filled by private enterprise (Loofbourow).” Pinochet viewed education as a benefit not as a requirement for citizens. He thought that “secondary and university education should be regarded as atypical and even luxurious”, “and those who enjoy [secondary or higher education] must earn it with effort and pay for it” or compensate the “national community” in some other way (Loofbourow).” This brings us back to more recent Chilean history, when in 2006, student movements began.
It is said that Chile has one of the most expensive higher education systems in the world. The students goal is to get rid of the voucher system and to form public education. The slogan of the movement “No to Profit” is intentionally targeting the “private universities and banks profiting from high interest rates and exorbitant surcharges on risk-free government-backed student loans, but it also bluntly rejects the intensely neoliberal foundation on which Chilean society is based (Loofbourow).” The Chilean constitution states that it is illegal for universities to earn profits, yet the law has shown no restriction of this in action. In 2011, if the two key protagonists named Joaquín Lavín and Camila Vallejo, would not have rose up to fight for the cause, this issue would have most likely been disregarded.
Lavin, then Chile’s Minister of Education, suggested that Chile’s student movement had transformed into a “political movement.” He said this because there was some discussion about removing a part of Pinochet’s 1980 constitution, and ideas of renationalizing Chile’s copper industry. Vallejo, president of Chile’s largest student federation, the Chilean Federation of Students, responded to Lavin’s statement by saying, “yes, the movement was clearly political. We are struggling to create a better educational system and we are thinking about the development of the country. Whenever the interests of the general public and not private interests are being defended, it’s always a political move (Frens-String).” For Chile, the unexpected expansion of political awareness amongst economic success is a difficult thing to understand.
Camila Vallejo and several others competed for their congressional seats. Their intentions for Chile are to bring back the Communist Party into the coalition since its creation. “The coalition has been rebranded as Chile’s “New Majority,” and the Communist Party had been active on the campaign trail with Michelle Bachelet, who returned to Chile in early 2013, and, in June, became the coalition’s presidential candidate with a resounding primary victory (Frens-String).” She is still Chile’s president up to date. The reality that when the Popular Unity government was formed and elected in 1970 embodied the climax of a historical cycle that began way before that is a note that people will not always know what is the best lasting strategy in countries. As history shows, Chile’s political class, in the past and currently, has to move through and never slow down.
In Guzman’s Chile, Obstinate Memory we see the audience of students learn the harsh truth about their country’s past which was hidden from them. With the current student movements we see the publics attitude against privatized education in Chile. In both the documentary and the students movement in Chile, one can see what decades of privatized education pulls off. Especially when it is supported by a dictatorship competent of applying a free market that would probably be constricted if it where in a less strict environment. In both accounts, we can see Chile’s youth coming forward, grasping reality, and wanting to change the future. Because Chile has had various internal conflicts, they have kept the country from progressing and developing into full bloom.