Utopia On The Horizon: On Activism and Exceptionalism in the 21st Century
In which I (finally) write about myself
It is a truth universally acknowledged that political struggle of the leftist variety is best expressed in a Romance language. For example, el pueblo unido, jamás será vencido will always inspire more passion and action than “the people, united, will never be defeated.” Lyricism falters, if not fails outright, when English is used to demand radical and revolutionary change, and perhaps, for this reason, among many others, the American left has never achieved the prominence and relevance of its international peers. Leftist agitation, as expressed in English, sounds corny and hackneyed, a Google translation that fails to grasp the essential, the beautiful.
The beauty and poetry of these words and phrases was what first drew me to the worlds and concepts they represented. It was 2010 and I was finishing my last year of high school. We were coasting on autopilot in the United States that had elected Barack Obama as its first Black president, still largely high on post-Cold War peace and stability, the bounty that the end of history had brought. The previous administration, and all of its misdeeds, was but a brief interruption, an exception, a momentary glitch in the magnificent system of American democracy. “Of course our country has done terrible things,” well-meaning liberals and most progressives would say. “But that was all in the past. Look at how far we’ve come.” But Allende! But Arbenz! But Goulart! I’d respond, and get only vague disinterest in return. For them, Obama was the revolution, the first and only successful one of any century.
Now, a little over a decade later, the wrongdoings of the United States both at home and abroad are common knowledge, regularly discussed and disseminated among liberals and progressives alike. Radicalization and polarization have skyrocketed on both sides of the American political spectrum. Conservatives and the far-right relativize and at times, embrace figures like former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whom they credit with bringing order and modern capitalism to Chile, and joke about how they, too, wish they could throw their own political opponents into the sea from Puma helicopters. For their part, liberals and the left now echo Chile’s current demands for a radically egalitarian and more just society, and the end of neoliberalism as we know it. Perhaps the United States is not the City upon a Hill we all once believed it was. Perhaps the United States is more like its unruly backyard than anyone could have imagined.
But back then, I had to go in search of activism and the left, of la militancia and its corresponding militantes. I knew there were places south of the equator where the spirit of ‘68 lived on, and I promised myself that soon, I would find them, that I would find myself in the heart of la lucha del pueblo.
In 2011, I had just finished my first year of college and Chilean students had taken to the streets demanding free and quality higher education for all. I was trying to decide where I’d study abroad during my third year and these students—this movement—had made the decision for me. I didn’t care that the ongoing strikes and occupations would mean that I wouldn’t be studying much while studying abroad. In fact, I hoped they would continue until my arrival and last throughout my time in Chile. The strikes and occupations would be a priceless learning experience in and of themselves, something no amount of classroom time could replicate. It would be a yearlong activist vacation, an exhilarating departure from the mundane, insular reality of my small liberal arts school.
The faces of the movement were young and glamorous in that revolutionary way, but at the same time approachable, familiar. Giorgio Jackson of the Catholic University could be any guy on campus back in the States, but Camila Vallejo of the University of Chile was the real star. The activists of the ‘60s and ‘70s may have wanted to be like Che Guevara, but I wanted to be like Camila. And like Che’s, hers was a face to be printed on t-shirts, splashed on the covers of newspapers and magazines across the world.
I arrived in Chile a year later, intent not just on witnessing history in the making, but also on atoning for my country’s sins. As any good leftist already knows, on September 11, 1973, Salvador Allende, Chile’s president who promised a uniquely democratic and nonviolent path to socialism, was overthrown in a violent military coup. Allende died as Air Force planes bombed the presidential palace in Santiago; the original myth went that he was killed in the attack, but later forensic evidence showed that he had shot himself. A military junta, led by Commander-in-Chief of the Army General Augusto Pinochet, took control. Chile’s “Democratic Way to Socialism” was dead, replaced by seventeen years of institutionalized torture and murder, along with novel experiments in economic restructuring that would spread northward a decade later with the rise of Reaganism in the US and Thatcherism in the UK.
The involvement of the United States in Allende’s overthrow is infamous and universal knowledge among the Chilean and wider Latin American left, and as left as I considered myself, I remained an estadounidense first and foremost. My blue passport, with its pages emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes and cartoonish headshots of bald eagles, was a liability, proof of the Original Sin of being Born In The USA.
But I fancied myself an atypical norteamericana. I didn’t come to Chile out of some vague desire to “learn about the culture” of a foreign country I knew little to nothing about. I knew all about Chile, about Allende and Pinochet, about the coup, about the dictatorship, about the pending debts of its democratic transition. I came to Chile to support the students, to march and occupy in solidarity, to contribute to the fight against Pinochet’s legacy. I wasn’t like the rest. I was different.
My Spanish markedly improved as I began to attend protests and demonstrations, always against the advice of the US State Department and the university’s international students office. The study part of study abroad soon became obsolete. My classes—all with local students—were canceled for weeks at a time, with no clear idea of when or if they’d resume. I used this extended and seemingly never-ending vacation to practice true cultural immersion, immersion into the activist culture that impacted the experience of every foreign exchange student in Chile at that time. I excitedly told everyone I met that I’d come to Chile specifically for the student movement, that I was a good gringa, that I hated US imperialism just as much as they did, that I hated what my country had done to theirs. That I hated my country, period.
But what I didn’t realize, or perhaps refused to realize, was that I would remain indelibly estadounidense, forever a norteamericana. Chileans didn’t want to talk about Pinochet and the student movement all the time, not even the leftist ones, and I was the odd one out for wanting to do so. The fantasy of me marching and chanting and occupying universities alongside Chilean students as something other than a novelty to be trotted out and paraded around like a sideshow circus act, was just that. I had boxed myself into an identity of my own construction with no way out. My Original Sin remained un-absolvable.
Perhaps I possess a masochistic streak that makes me actively seek out places where Americans are, at best, considered uncultured rubes, and at worst, active agents of Empire. Or perhaps, to paraphrase Einstein (allegedly), I was insane in the sense that I continued doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Either way, I wanted a post-graduate do-over in neighboring Argentina. Perhaps I’d finally find what I was looking for.
I’d turned down opportunities to apply for US-government sponsored grants for work and travel like the Fulbright program, believing that doing so would make me nothing more than an imperialist stooge. I didn’t need the State Department’s dirty money. I’d remain pure, uncompromised. And I’d attempt once more to erase the stigma that accompanied my citizenship.
Argentine disdain for the States is more cultural than political, though the cultural and the political often intersect in the activist circles I sought to become a part of. It is appropriately French-like—Argentina, long suffering from an identity crisis of its own, has historically looked more to Europe than its hemispheric neighbors. Yanquis, as we are known in Argentina, are ignorant, uncouth, and utterly lacking the sophistication, real or perceived, of Western Europeans. A country that constantly sought to be something it wasn’t and a girl who did the same. Argentina and I were a match made in heaven.
In Buenos Aires, I was finally able to study abroad. I enrolled in a master’s program and engaged with the theories of Bourdieu and the work of Malinowski as I shed what was left of the Chilean accent I’d picked up, replacing it with a rioplatense one I still retain. When, early on, it came time for me to choose a thesis topic, I realized that I could marry academia with my enduring desire for acceptance by the local university leftist cool kids. Under the guise of research, I would, at last, find my people, become the activist I always wished I could be.
Like Chile, Argentina, too, experienced a military coup and period of dictatorship, though US involvement was less overt and the deposed president, María Estela “Isabel” Martínez de Perón—populist leader Juan Domingo Perón’s second wife who ran the country with her own Rasputin-like advisor, José López Rega—a far less sympathetic figure than the stoic, socialist Allende. Though shorter in duration—the so-called “National Reorganization Process” lasted only 7 years in comparison to Pinochet’s 17 years in power—Argentina’s military dictatorship was brutally efficient and largely successful in its scorched-earth campaign against the remnants of the armed left along with any and all “subversive” elements within Argentine society. The Argentine military’s definition of “subversive” was one that encompassed countless categories of people that soon filled the ranks of the disappeared, many of whose remains sit at the bottom of the Río de la Plata.
The US integrated the Argentine regime into Operation Condor, a transnational network of South American military dictatorships that sought to annihilate the left across the continent. And the Argentine left, in all its diverse and conflicting forms, never forgets this fact. As I attempted once more, this time in the name of ethnography and fieldwork, to become the activist I wanted to be, I was jokingly asked, more than once, if I was really an undercover CIA agent sent to infiltrate and report on Latin American left-wing student groups. “If I was really CIA,” I’d respond. “Then I wouldn’t be struggling to pay rent and feed myself.” We’d all laugh, and then another activist would joke that it was more likely that a rival student group was being bankrolled by the CIA. I was a good yanqui, they assured me. One of the few, the proud.
But whatever existed of that mythical year of ‘68 among the students of Buenos Aires was purely aesthetic. I soon learned, much later than I should have, that these Latin American leftists were more like the apolitical or liberal yanquis we both looked down on. We did community service—paired, of course, with poetic rhetoric about how this was but one step on the road to revolution—we partied together until seven or eight in the morning in true Argentine style, we bonded over our mutual enjoyment of Netflix series like the then-popular House of Cards. When I helped them supervise voting in the annual student government elections, I felt as if I was supervising an election anywhere, save for the occasional reports of fistfights over poster placement in the hallways.
Despite all of this, I was never able to find true belonging; I was always a curiosity, never a compañera. Perhaps it was the ostensible academic aim of my quest, or perhaps, by this point, I’d gained enough self-awareness to realize that this extended activist roleplay of mine was just that, a way to feel good, a way to feel different. A way to feel exceptional and part of something much bigger than myself, a search for meaning in a world that felt lacking. More than anything, it was a fantasy, the same one as before, an extended vacation from what the future held, a way to delay what would inevitably become the beginning of the rest of my life.
Crippling guilt when faced with the horrific actions of the US government is a common feeling among Americans drawn to the struggles of our southern neighbors. It has led many of us to immerse ourselves in Latin American progressive politics and try to become agents of change, righting our wrongs, past and present, in whichever way we could. Some of the best-known stories of American atonement south of the Equator have ended in tragedy, like that of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi in Chile after the coup, immortalized by Costa Gavras in his 1982 film Missing. Others, like that of Lori Berenson, an American woman imprisoned in Peru in the 1990s on terrorism charges for helping a leftist urban guerrilla group, have ended in scandal and sensationalism.
But in our desire to atone for the kind of exceptionalism that has resulted in thousands of deaths and millions more shattered lives, we often end up falling victim to an inverse exceptionalism, an anti-exceptionalism. American Anti-Exceptionalism is American Exceptionalism’s edgy cousin. Instead of viewing the United States as a uniquely great nation preordained to lead the Free World, American Anti-Exceptionalism views the US as a uniquely evil nation, unmatched in its depravity and the brutality it inflicts on both its own citizens and innocents across the world. It would take at least another essay to properly deconstruct the faulty logic that underpins American Anti-Exceptionalism, but like any black-and-white worldview, it kills nuance and flattens the complex forces of geopolitics and history. And American Anti-Exceptionalism, taken to its logical extreme, can lead one down some unsavory paths; better to become a complacent liberal than a ghoulish contrarian. But are those really the only options?
In the throes of my own American Anti-Exceptionalism, I believed I was an exceptional American. The exception to all the stereotypes about Americans, that we were ignorant, that we were inconsiderate and egocentric, that we spoke Spanish with a grating, gringo accent.
But Americans, like any other national group, aren’t a monolith. Nixon and Kissinger may have given the green light to Latin American militaries and their civilian collaborators to crush the left by any means possible, but others, like Patricia Derian, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs under Jimmy Carter, and Robert C. Hill, who served as US ambassador in Argentina during the late 1970s, used their positions from within the US government to expose human rights abuses committed by ostensible anti-communist allies. Americans can be Nixons, Kissingers and Reagans, or Derians, Hills, and Hormans. Americans can be exceptional—exceptionally brave, exceptionally principled—without all the accompanying self-hatred that consumes you and leaves you utterly hopeless and isolated, like I eventually found myself, and like I hope to never find myself again.
This is a story that begins and ends with Chile. In October of 2019, on the heels of mass demonstrations sparked by a slight increase in public transport fares in the capital city of Santiago, the country exploded in a way that shocked those who had once believed it to be an example—of good governance, of a strong economy, of every other positive political science buzzword—for all of Latin America. The myth of Chile’s own exceptionalism had gone up in flames, literal and figurative. As a popular hashtag at the time read, #ChileSeDesperto. Chile woke up.
But Chile’s awakening came as no surprise to me, nor did the subsequent election of former student leader Gabriel Boric as president. A decade on, many familiar faces from the student movement now occupy Chile’s hallowed halls of power, including those of Jackson and Vallejo. But how did the students, and Chile, get to this point? How did Latin America’s greatest stable exception become the chaotic continental rule?
This estallido social, or social explosion, was the result of decades of institutional neglect on the part of political and economic elites on both sides of the ideological spectrum who allowed the painful, systemic wounds of the dictatorship to fester while continuing to believe in Chile’s exceptionalism. The transition from military to civilian rule still left the Armed Forces with a disordinate amount of power and influence—Pinochet himself was designated a “Senator for Life.” As we are seeing now in the United States, the trappings and practice of liberal democracy can only do so much in a country that struggles, if not refuses, to confront the myths of its own exceptionalism, and repair its damaged core.
Boric’s opponent in the run-off election he won by over ten points was José Antonio Kast, an unabashed Pinochet apologist and far-right figurehead. This led some international observers to lament the “terrible” choice Chileans had to make between the far-right and a “far-left” that was supposedly just as bad. But Boric has proven himself an exception to all conventional wisdom concerning the contemporary Latin American left. On a continent where kneejerk anti-Americanism, however well-founded, leads many on the left to blindly support leaders like Vladimir Putin, Boric has been outspoken and consistent in his support for Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion.
Many have drawn the inevitable comparisons between Boric and Allende; both are men of the left, both were tasked with governing a deeply—and often violently—polarized country. But the old Cold War binaries are long dead and Boric belongs to the type of left that has no desire to resurrect them, a pioneering left that seeks to forge new paths and face contemporary challenges with new solutions. A type of left that remembers the past while keeping its focus on the future. A type of left that American leftists and the growing class of liberals deeply concerned with the US’s systemic issues and accompanying rise of the far-right should perhaps look to for inspiration. No matter if Boric’s presidency ends in disappointment, Chile’s awakening from its decades-long complacent slumber can and should provide a rough blueprint for social change in the United States. Perhaps Americans, myself included, would do well to quit wallowing in self-hatred and guilt and instead, stop to smell the roses now blooming in our backyard.