A Boots-on-the-Ground Report I moved to Santiago, Chile during the Obama years: 2012, to be exact. I believed, as did many others, that the real financial reckoning was still to come, that race relations would worsen (bullseye there and then some!!), and that other countries were better prospects as havens for individual freedoms than a U.S. in decline. While we looked at several places (New Zealand, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama), we kept returning to Chile because of the first world infrastructure of its major cities, its gringo-friendliness, its strong economy, and its political stability. I promoted Chile as such. (Go here and here; be amused.)
Libertarians in particular were soon investing in a planned community, Galt’s Gulch Chile, buying tracts of land to be developed. The first sign that GGC had gone off the rails was here. To this day I am grateful I got cold feet and refused to involve myself with what was either a scam from the get-go or the misguided idealism of the clueless. Whatever the original intent, the Libs couldn’t keep it from turning into a scam when one of their own turned out to be a grade-A sociopath. (Uh, anarchists: nuisance though it is, and full of scammers in its own right, we kinda need at least limited government as our only means of dealing with “private” scam artists and preventing as many disputes as possible from turning into shooting matches.)
That whistle was blown in 2014, on a project that was not possible to begin with, because even the Chile of 2014 was not a “free market” society. And from the look of things now, Chile was never as it appeared. The country is a place of phenomenal beauty, with an abundance of natural resources. It is also a place of breathtakingly inefficient bureaucracy sandbagging all its institutions. This last would have driven me back to the States just in time for the start of the Trump era except for one thing: I’d met the woman who became my wife. That means a lot! It kept me here …
Now it’s 2021 and for over a year we’ve had the disquieting sense of having become nonconsenting participants in a nationwide laboratory experiment.
Perhaps the real experiment began decades before, in the 1970s, when the Chicago Boys were green-lighted by the Pinochet dictatorship to set up their proposed economic paradise built on the principles of Friedmania, otherwise known as neoliberalism.
This, over the years that ensued especially after Pinochet stepped down, created the “Chilean miracle” that enticed my Libertarian friends and me. Now the question is embarrassingly obvious: were we really so stupid and naïve that we couldn’t distinguish libertarianism from neoliberalism? Or were we just blinded by the natural beauty we saw here, plus the fact that majority of Chileans are genuinely nice people?
When I finally swallowed the red pill regarding Chile and woke up in the Atacama Desert of the Real, what I saw was just another vassal state of GloboCorp — albeit a stunningly successful one!
Who or what is GloboCorp? Is there really such an entity? You’re kidding me, right? GloboCorp (short for globalist corporatism, for anyone who’s spent the last 50 years in a cave) consists of the 300 – 400 extended families who run the world. The ownership class, in other words, owning/controlling well over half the world’s wealth, beginning with leviathan investment banks and central banks; the CIA, other spook agencies; defense contractors and the war machine generally; “think tanks” such as the Atlantic Council, the Trilateral Commission, etc.; corporate media; Big Pharma, Big Tech. Then there are the several thousand administrators and technocrats under those top families, with thousands more functionaries including bought political classes, Ivy League academics, and presstitutes as Paul Craig Roberts calls them. GloboCorp’s hubs are in obvious places: Wall Street, Tel Aviv, the City of London, Basel and Davos, Brussels, Dubai, Singapore, Silicon Valley, probably Beijing, etc. I could name names, but it would take too long. Many are obvious. So I’ll just say, Yes, Thomas Dalton, there is a disproportionately large number of Jews in GloboCorp’s upper echelons and leave it at that for now.
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Now, though — understatement of this article — we have a major problem on our hands: the so-called pandemic. The timing of this catastrophe ought to be of great interest to everyone: it hit after (1) multiple efforts to dislodge Donald Trump by GloboCorp lackeys in Congress and U.S. intel agencies went down in flames; (2) we red-pilled types increased in numbers and influence all over the world; therefore (3) “populist” leaders and movements were rising in stature despite fierce opposition from “official” political classes, academic “experts,” and presstitutes, all of whose credibility had fallen like boulders off steep cliffs (unsurprising since they never told the truth about anything).
The long and short of it: a dozen or so GloboCorp families own Chile lock, stock, and barrel, and have at least since the Pinochet era. There was pushback here, as there was elsewhere. Covid-19(84) came here as it did elsewhere, and for more than a year now, this country of just over 19 million has been descending into a totalitarian hellscape.
Moreover, one of the world’s most aggressive mass vaccination campaigns began here shortly after the start of this year. As of April 21, around 13 million Chileans had gotten the jab (while the rate varies with availability, somewhere around 135,000 are jabbed per day). The most interesting fact about Chile now is the explosion of new cases of Covid. We’re talking in the 6,000 – 7,000 range per day, and between 100 and 150 deaths per day attributed to Covid.
These were blamed initially on people mixing and mingling carelessly, maskless, during vacations, as February — mid-summer in Chile — is the traditional vacation month. But it’s late April now, and thousands of new cases are still coming apace. With that earlier narrative straining credibility, authorities blame “clandestine parties” of mask-free young people not observing “social distancing guidelines.” (Just to note, in the past year I’ve seen a grand total of five people outdoors mask free, including an afternoon my wife and I spent at the beach with dozens of people around us.)
What no one is saying is that this “new wave” of cases and deaths is consistent with what has happened everywhere that has launched mass campaigns jabbing its people with experimental mRNA vaccines. The State of Michigan is an example, with its Democrat governor-dictator Gretchen Whitmer. The state has a high vax rate, and an overwhelmed medical system on the verge of collapse.
Much of Chile had been in various degrees of lockdown for a year. The Sebastian Piñera regime, trying to appear on top of things in the wake of the unrest that began in October 2019 (more on this below), instituted ways to lock down even harder, working through the country’s health department and mass media. Yes, chilluns, we have our very own minor-league Tony Fauci. His name is Enrique Paris, and he directs the Minsterio de Salud de Chile (MINSAL), a cabinet-level office in the Chilean government.
The harder lockdown that began on April 1 has made international travel (hardly straightforward since this began) a nightmare even for citizens and foreign residents. If you’re not in either group and insane enough to want to come here, forget it. You’re not getting in. Any citizen(s) or resident(s) coming in is/are forcibly quarantined for five days in a hotel at his/her/their expense even with a negative (notoriously unreliable) PCR test, then given another (unreliable) PCR test at the end of the five days. This is a strong disincentive from traveling internationally, which is the point, I think. GloboCorp doesn’t want us peasants moving around freely like so many of us have in the roaring 2000s!
We (wife and I) had plans to leave Chile permanently last year, but the combination of contractual requirements to vacate our condo as of such- and-such a day coupled with the closed borders of our target nation derailed our plans (the health ministry there had also drank the Kool- aide). We ended up with my wife’s mother and sister until we could line up another place and figure our next move. Some friends tell me we should have taken the riots of 2019 as our cue: it was time to leave. Mea culpa.
When those began, Piñera declared an Estado de Emergencia (State of Emergency) which included toque de quedas (curfews). What the regime learned: curfews enforced with threats of jail time kept peasants as well as hooligans off the streets.
When Covid came, curfews became semi-permanent. The recent mania escalated our status to an Estado de Catástrofe (State of Catastrophe).
Author and financial advisor Simon Black, who has a residence here, took this announcement as his cue to be on the next flight out (he went to Mexico).
For it compels the question: if existing measures all fail (because their premises are false), is the next step Estado de Sitio (State of Siege), which would basically involve full-blown military junta-style martial law?
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If you are in Chile, here is what you go through to go anywhere:
You obtain a permiso off a carabinero (police) website. Print it or save it in your phone. It lists your name, Chilean ID number (foreigners with permanent residency can use a passport number), age, address and comuna, and destination(s). You get two per week. Up until recently you were allowed three hours out per permiso, which means you had six hours of free movement per week to get groceries, do your banking, go to a government office, etc. (these being “essential” operations open for business). Thanks to maximum capacity rules and the above-mentioned inefficiency, you could easily spend the bulk of your free time standing in line outdoors.
Security personnel of robotic demeanor guard entrances and inspect your permiso. They then direct you to a device to take your temperature: the sort of contraption that could easily transition to something able to read an implanted chip. Most folks would never notice the difference.
At the start of this month, free time per permiso was lowered to two hours. I can’t help but wonder if someone was trying to find out how much these people would put up with. Would a reduction in outdoor free time by a third arouse resistance? Nope. I’ve heard barely a proletarian whimper! (Oh, you are allowed walks outdoors from 6 – 9 am.)
How much will Chileans put up with? Some “guidelines” are patently absurd, with no legitimate scientific backing whatever. My wife and I encountered one just this morning as I write this: a three-person limit max on large mall elevators. We had gotten on, and an elderly couple was behind us. I thought: why not? I beckoned them to go ahead and get on. They started to. An enforcer (more on them below, too) appeared instantly and barked, “!Sólo tres personnes!” (“Three persons only!”)
I said gruffly, “¡Esto es estúpido!” (“This is stupid!”)
The enforcer looked at me in shock. Clearly she’d heard no one say anything against these stupid rules before. But being a gringo from a culture that values freedom and frowns on mindless compliance, I was not going to stand there and say nothing!
But welcome to Chile, where checkpoints have now been established at toll booths on “private” highways (of which — thanks to neoliberal pseudo-privatization — there are many) so carabineros can see “Your papers please!” I was in one of these, and the traffic-back-up was a sight to behold!
(Lockdowns are logistically impossible in a first world society for reasons anyone with a functioning brain ought to be able to discern: people need to obtain food or have it delivered, which means workers need to be in stores to supply it; medical centers and government offices need to be in operation; people have health and other emergencies; water mains break and need immediate repair; the enforcers themselves have to be out and about. This is not to mention the well- documented spikes in domestic violence, other crimes, substance abuse, depression, and suicide.)
The rules keep changing, of course, in a fashion recalling the dystopian novel Brazil (1985). This creates a nightmare for those of us who try to plan in advance, including still strategizing to leave the country with our belongings which in my case include a substantial library. Constantly changing rules cause confusion and lead to paralysis. Again, I am sure this is the intent.
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