Meet the Communists Who Now Govern Chile

On the Ho Chi Minh Trail, by Sherry Buchanan (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, Illinois, 2021)

The U.S. war on Vietnam is one of the most popularly and publicly criticized U.S. wars in the West—perhaps only now being superseded by the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Many filmmakers took their shot at a “critical” portrayal of the imperialist conflict—Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” Oliver Stone’s “Platoon,” Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and so on. Though, the context behind the conflict, what happened during the war, its repercussions, and—most importantly—the Vietnamese people’s perspective all still remain widely misunderstood, misinterpreted, and vastly oversimplified in the minds of the majority of those who live in the belly of the beast (the U.S. empire).

This was the deficit which author Sherry Buchanan purported to, in part, address in her book, On the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The cover insert of the book explains:

“Buchanan reveals the stories of the women who defended the Trail against the sustained American bombing campaign—the most ferocious in modern warfare—and of the artists who drew them. She focuses on what life was really like for the women and men under fire, bringing a unique perspective to the history of the Vietnam War.” 

The prospect of approaching the conflict from an art-centered perspective with a focus on the women who were absolutely vital to the trail—and, as such, the triumph of the revolution—was welcome, refreshing and exciting. However, throughout the book the author demonstrates her inability to remove her red-, white- and blue-colored glasses as well as a clear lack of understanding peoples’ liberation movements that struggle against imperialism, ultimately leaving the reader with an experience that is more trite than enlightening. 

Buchanan’s book follows the author as she re-traces the trail—known locally as the Trường Sơn Road—from the north to south. The country was split in half during the war, with the north pumping out Vietnamese communist guerilla fighters and the south occupied by the U.S. military. Along the way, she visits historic sites and conducts interviews. Beginning in Hanoi, the author looks to loosely follow the trail as history unfolded. She visits Hòa Bình province, where revolutionaries trained before setting off on the trail, and the site of the infamous U.S. Marine Corps base at Khe Sanh. She takes us through the country of Laos, where the Trail Command had been headquartered during the Tết Offensive, and winds up in Ho Chi Minh City—the current name of Saigon, the former capital of the U.S.-backed puppet state, South Vietnam. Interviews with artists who traveled the trail as cultural troops for the People’s Army provide some fascinating anecdotes about life on the trail. Former combatants and youth volunteers shared stories of how they struggled against occupation and a bombing campaign that dwarfed the campaigns of the allies in WWII combined. During this war, 3 million people died. Most were Vietnamese, while only 58,000 were U.S. military personnel.

Despite the author’s ignorance, which prevented any contextualization of her interviews, their impact is nonetheless profound. By the end of the book, the collective commitment the Vietnamese people had to their revolutionary struggle is unquestionable. Almost every exchange Buchanan and her companions had with non-Westerners on their journey both underscored this theme and humanized the war. This is what—intentionally or not—the author successfully conveys in her book. 

Each chapter is dedicated to one of several locations she visited. In an introduction and at the beginning of every chapter, Buchanan provides brief historical context about these sites, which includes explaining the events in the war that involved them. She’s eager to be critical of the United States here, offering statistics and figures that easily show the grotesque violence the empire unleashed during the war. The author even goes as far as questioning official U.S. government statistics and countered with the Vietnamese state’s data. (p. 165) However, this is where Buchanan’s book falls into the banal trap of performative criticism. Reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s TV series, “Untold History of the United States” (2012-13), providing facts and statistics that counter the imperial narrative (while important) do not nearly equate to an anti-imperialist analysis. While Buchanan is critical of the war, she is not critical of U.S. imperialism or, by extension, the question of national self-determination, which was at the core of the conflict covered in her book.

Buchanan wastes no time making her position clear in the first chapter. She includes a long, melodramatic interview with an actor who had joined the National Liberation Front (or Việt Cộng). But decades after the country reunited as one Vietnam, that person is critical of the revolution. The author is sure to include a tirade that frames China as an enemy of the Vietnamese people, standing in opposition to the United States’ “rule of law” and “freedom.” (p. 47) She continues this Cold War-era hysteria by leveling stereotypical anti-communist criticisms against the current communist-run Vietnamese state—authoritarianism, repression, corruption. But where is the “unique perspective” described on the cover flap? Buchanan provides no context, no opposing arguments, no critical thinking. She continues this theme of intentional ignorance throughout the rest of the book. In chapter 2, when visiting the Temple of Lady Triệu, she questions whether the revolution was feminist. (p. 67) This despite quoting Ho Chi Minh’s thoughts on the oppression of women under colonialism and Buchanan noting that the Women’s Union funds the feminist temple. Interestingly, the author fails to ask any of the Vietnamese women she interviewed about the feminist character of the revolution, nor makes any attempt to answer with statistics. In fact, the performative question in and of itself displays her ignorance about the goals of the revolution and the subject she claims to cover in the book. 

Buchanan doesn’t stop at feigned ignorance. She actively stokes the racist, anti-communist fires within the Western psyche. In this way, the author completely fails the people whose perspective she claimed to value. Throughout the chapters, she does not shy away from throwing unsubstantiated claims of despotism or repression at the Vietnamese state. Yet, she spends no energy or effort speaking to the gains of the revolution. It’s as if Buchanan is uninterested in the obstacles that the people—including women—overcame to rebuild after the war or what the state has been able to provide its citizens. This is an excusable error for a book that claims to portray the experiences of the women who fought and defended the Ho Chi Minh trail. The author underlines her imperialist opinion of Vietnamese feminism with the usual Red Scare trimmings. She puts “liberated” in quotation marks when referring to territory from which the People’s Army and Việt Cộng expelled the imperialists, uses the term “indoctrinated” when referring to those who fought for the north, and even quotes a deacon who complains church land was “stolen by the locals” following the triumph of the revolution. (p. 208) In fact, in the final chapter, the author almost unconsciously praises what she perceives as capitalism creeping into the country, salivating over the presence of restaurants that serve $200 meals (p. 233) and designer stores (p. 246). If only Buchanan could see her own internalized indoctrination here, celebrating inaccessibility while belittling a popular guerilla movement which resisted the most violent war machine ever created. 

Toward the conclusion of the book, as Buchanan enters Ho Chi Minh City, she intensifies her hollow attacks on the Vietnamese state. She devotes a large portion of the final chapter to another sensationalized scene when they visit two cemeteries—one for soldiers who fought for the revolution and one for those who fought for imperialist interests. Rather than contemplate the complex legacy of a Cold War-era invasion that divided a people or the violent colonialism that made the long war for liberation a necessity, she simplistically insinuates the state is vengeful and petty. Perhaps the most telling interaction Buchanan records in the book, though, is an unplanned encounter with a U.S. veteran who fought for the empire. Again here, the author fails to seek a “unique perspective.” Instead, she glorifies the invader, who claims he “worked with fighter pilots to help them do what they could to not injure civilians” (p. 220), and empathizes with his crocodile tears about being called a “baby killer” upon his return to the United States. Buchanan feigns pushback against his unproven claims that “the government (of Vietnam) treated [the highland indigenous peoples] terribly, cutting off women’s breasts and men’s achilles tendons,” and that “when [he] got to Vietnam [he] was told (reviewer’s italics) that the Việt Cộng came into villages and routinely killed a baby or a child to terrorize the people.” (p. 221) In the epilogue, she returns to this interaction by honoring the “courage” it took for this vet to return to the country to “do something (reviewer’s italics).” (p. 249)

Sherry Buchanan’s On the Ho Chi Minh Trail, while exciting in its proclaimed focus, is yet another example of the pitfalls of liberalism. The author’s misconception that criticizing a few isolated events equates to a “unique,” let alone anti-imperialist, perspective leads the book to speak more to the depressing ignorance of so-called progressives in the West than to the experiences of Vietnamese women during the war. While many of the anecdotes conveyed in the book humanized the war in a way that was certainly refreshing, Buchanan’s displaced patriotism undermines any meaningful significance. Despite her supposedly critical view of the war, the author ultimately served to defend pillars that uphold U.S. imperialism. If anything, what the book highlights for the reader is the importance of understanding what anti-imperialism means. Without it, criticisms of the West coming from liberals essentially equate to nothing more than white saviorism. The only allyship from the West of any value is true, revolutionary solidarity—solidarity that rejects Western capitalist assumptions of supremacy and stands firm in its defense of all anti-imperialist movements. 

Nick Flores is a co-founder of and organizer with Bushwick, Brooklyn-based G-REBLS, a grassroots organization as well as a member organization of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Solidarity Network. Nick holds a double-major bachelor’s degree in history and Latin American studies.

Editor’s Note: The following opinion was originally published in Black Agenda Report.

It is an exhilarating time for the “leftists” of the Americas. This past week, at the 77th meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, leader after Latin American leader made grand statements against U.S. and Western imperialism, the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, the violations of human rights, and the West’s assault on the sovereignty of smaller nations. Colombia’s brand-new president, Gustavo Petro, made an impassioned plea against the genocidal “War on Drugs.” Cuba’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla, rejected the attacks on the sovereignty of China and Russia. Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Faría railed against the Western sanctions against Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran and Russia. Honduran President Xiomara Castro demanded that the United States stop its attempts at destabilizing her country and strongly pushed against Western policies of intervention in the region. Nicaragua’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Denis Ronaldo Moncada Colindres, made perhaps the most explosive claims when he stated :

“The assault, the robbery, the disgraceful abominable depredation, the looting and the genocides unleashed by the colonialists and imperialists of the Earth, are the real crimes and they are the real criminals against humanity, and we denounce this… It’s time to say enough to hypocritical imperialism that politicizes, falsifies and denigrates the very human rights which they themselves violate and deny on a daily basis.”

Most of these leaders spoke to the urgent question of Cuba, calling for the lifting of the economic blockade against the country and for Cuba’s removal from the U.S.-created list of countries that supposedly “sponsor terrorism.”

Yet, for all the eloquent denunciations of imperialism and the impassioned defenses of Latin American and Caribbean sovereignty and independence, one country was conspicuously avoided: Haiti. Not a single one of these countries applied their critiques of imperialism to Haiti. Sure, Cuba and Venezuela mentioned Haiti. Cuba’s representative called for reparations for the Caribbean for slavery, said that humanity owed a debt to the Haitian revolution, and stressed that Haiti needed international support “through a special contribution for its reconstruction and development.” Venezuela’s representative name-dropped Haiti within a list of countries, which have suffered bloodshed from “imperialism and supremacism.”

Beyond the casual mentions, the hollow rhetorics, and the empty invocations, there were no concrete critiques of the current imperial machinations in Haiti—of Haiti’s complete loss of sovereignty through the ongoing destruction of the Haitian state apparatus, of the current occupation of the country by the Western-led Core Group, and of the repression (and violent misrepresentation) of the Haitian people as they have taken to the streets to demand their sovereignty and call for an end to foreign intervention. Instead, the extension and intensification of foreign intervention appears to be the strategic end goal of not only the usual suspects of the West, but our supposed Leftist allies in the Americas.

One has to ask: Do the leaders of the region even know what has been going on in Haiti? Surely they know about the 2004 U.S./Canada/France-led coup d’etat against Haiti’s democratically elected president, and the Chapter 7 deployment of a United Nations occupation force (euphemistically known as a “peacekeeping” force). Indeed, it was Lula’s Brazil that led the military wing of that occupation that brought nothing but violence and devastation to Haitian peoples. Brazil’s active participation in that occupation led to the migration of thousands of Haitian workers to Brazil, where they provided cheap labor to build the infrastructure for the Olympics and World Cup. The savage racism experienced by Haitian migrants in Brazil, combined with the disappearance of work, led them to flee overland through Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border in search of asylum.

The leaders of the Americas must also know about the Core Group—the self-selected, unelected group of foreigners, with representatives from the European Union, the United States, Brazil, Canada, that was created during the early months of the occupation. The Core Group continues to control Haiti’s internal political affairs. They certainly know that the UN still occupies Haiti; after all, it is the left’s “anti-imperialist” darling, Andrés Manual López Obrador (AMLO), who is serving, along with the United States, as “co-penholder” and writing the UN Security Council’s imperial policies on Haiti. Similar to Brazil, will Mexico’s bid to play power-broker in the region come at the expense of Haitian people and Haiti’s sovereignty?

AMLO must know what he’s doing. After all, even as it gets celebrated for its “leftist” credentials, the Mexican government continues to collude with the U.S. Border Patrol to militarize its southern border against migrants, and enforce the U.S. “Remain in Mexico” policy. Meanwhile, Haitian and other Black migrants continue to suffer racist abuse in Mexico.

It is not lost on me that there is a deep-seated, racist view of Haiti as exceptional—and therefore exceptionally difficult to engage. The constant refrain from anti-imperialist groupings in the West is that Haiti is so “complex” and its sociopolitical terrain so difficult that there’s no way to truly understand what’s going on there. During a recent webinar against U.S. imperialism in Latin America, I brought up the current UN/US occupation in Haiti, only to have the host soberly agree with me that this was, indeed, an important problem to engage, but that, perhaps, Haiti needed a separate webinar. Many webinars later, discussion of Haiti’s destruction by a brutal Western imperialism, continues to get short shrift.

While we celebrate the rise of another “Pink Tide” in Latin America, the emergence of a truly multipolar world, with new economic and political alignments, it seems clear that Haiti will continue to be on the outside of “leftist” imaginations—beyond, of course, the non-specific words of “solidarity” thrown its way.

In a discussion on Twitter about the ways that Haiti appears— and dismissed—in global discourses, a colleague, Vik Sohonie lamented , “Haiti is unfortunately where all good will, solidarity, and Third Worldism goes to die… The ‘international community’ that occupies it, as you know, is Nepali, Brazilian. You get looked at funny elsewhere in the Carib if you compliment Haiti. It’s astonishing.” He’s not wrong. One of the reasons that the brutal UN military occupation of Haiti could fly under the radar was because it was populated by a multi-national and multi-racial military and civilian force. The United States admitted as much, as revealed in the Wikileaks files. Former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson lauded the occupation force (MINUSTAH) as a cheap source of U.S. power in Haiti, as it is made up of a multinational coalition of Western and non-Western forces, including countries ranging from Benin and Kenya to Brazil and Ecuador, who seem all bent on using Haiti as their training ground.

Why is it so easy for these nonwhite and oppressed nations to come and serve U.S. and Western imperial interests in Haiti? Could it be that they, too, have imbibed the dehumanized and, frankly, racist views about Haitian people? Is Haiti’s Blackness seen as the root cause of its problems and struggles—even by many Black people? One would think so if one reviewed the recent actions of the leaders of CARICOM who, also, deploy the dehumanizing language and white supremacist assumptions about Haiti that is the foundation of Western imperialist actions in the country.

This wasn’t always the case, of course. Back in 2004, under the leadership of PJ Patterson, CARICOM at least spoke up against the U.S./France/Canada coup d’etat against elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide (and this was despite his often problematic public positions against him). Jamaica was even threatened with sanctions—by the Bush administration’s Condoleeza Rice—if it attempted to provide Aristide asylum. The other bold voice was Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who railed against the coup and later provided direct support to Haiti’s masses through the PetroCaribe fuel subsidies.

Where are those voices now?

Perhaps if people in the region saw Haiti less as an abstraction and more as a place with real humans, citizens of the world, with the same claims to rights and livelihood, confronting a white supremacist imperialism, they would recognize the current denial of its sovereignty. Until that time, the Leftists of the Americas are betraying a people that have given so much to the struggles for sovereignty and independence in the region.

Jemima Pierre is an editor and contributor to Black Agenda Report, the Haiti/Americas Co-Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace, and a Black Studies and anthropology professor at UCLA.

In a stunning election that was centuries in the making, a 58-year-old Mapuche academic named Elisa Loncón took the helm of a strategic political body in Chile.

Loncón won the presidency of an assembly that will oversee the writing of a new constitution, delivering a sucker punch to the South American country’s socially conservative political establishment.

“This convention I will be presiding over will transform Chile into an intercultural Chile that does not violate the rights of women, the rights of caregivers,” Loncón said in her electrifying acceptance speech on July 4. “…Into a Chile that takes care of Mother Earth, that keeps its waters clean against all domination. A very special greeting for the Mapuche lamgnen [sisters] in Wallmapu [Araucania]. This dream is our ancestors’ dream.”

Having garnered 96 out of 155 votes, she will be tasked with overseeing the formulation of a new framework that will replace the one enacted by U.S.-backed dictator General Augusto Pinochet in 1980, after the Chilean Junta (army, police, navy and air force) violently seized control of Chile in 1973 during a coup aided by the United States.

Despite Chile’s reputation as a politically stable country, tensions have been brewing since the start of the transition to democracy that commenced in 1990, after General Pinochet lost a referendum in 1988. Despite promises to right the wrongs of the regime, successive governments over the last 30 years have neither tackled lingering impunity nor reformed the economy. Extreme neoliberal policy enshrined in the constitution has led to the increase in social and economic disparity over the last three decades, with social apartheid becoming a symbol of Pinochet’s toxic legacy. A Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) of 46 makes Chile one of the most unequal countries in the developed world, with the privatization of education and healthcare contributing to the gulf between the wealthy upper classes and the rest of Chilean society. Currently, the income gap stands at 65 percent, much higher than the Organization for Economic and Cooperation Development average. State pensions typically pay around $150 per month and an average wage of around $500 per month.

Powered by the People

On October 18, 2019, a simple student protest against a metro fare hike ignited a mass movement. Ordinary Chileans, exasperated with soaring inequalities, took to the streets in the millions across the country to demand social change. Central to protesters’ demands was the implementation of a new constitution guaranteeing freedoms and rights for the many, instead of for self-serving elites, who have benefited from decades of uninterrupted political power and the fruits of economic success.

During the onslaught of the protests, it’s estimated that hundreds suffered eye injuries at the hands of police. Student Gustavo Gatica, who was blinded at one of the protests, came to symbolize the dignified struggle for social justice. The threat of violence and imprisonment did nothing to deter a new generation of Chileans that felt they had little to lose but their dignity. Finally, in March 2020, President Sebastián Piñera conceded defeat and held a referendum on writing a new constitution. On October 25, 2020, Chileans—famous for their voter apathy—voted overwhelmingly in favor (78 percent). The conservative right’s dominance was set to crumble.

The Loncón Effect

The heralding of a new constitution kickstarted a series of blows to a fat-cat political establishment so enmeshed, that the right and left merged into an indistinguishable and hyper-privileged political class, of which Chilean congress members earn $23,000 per month. 

Of the 155 members of the constitutional assembly, traditional parties across the political spectrum won only 38 seats. A marked shift to the left began to unfold. For the first time in 51 years, a truly representative body was elected, in which feminists, environmentalists, Indigenous people and grassroots working-class activists won an opportunity to shape Chile’s future. The election of Mapuche academic Elisa Loncón has been the icing on the cake.

A highly regarded linguist and Mapuche activist, Loncón has an impressive academic career that includes a degree in English at the University of La Frontera in Chile, and postgraduate studies at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague in the Netherlands, at the University of Regina (Canada) and at the UAM Iztapalapa in Mexico City. She has a Ph.D. from Leiden University in the Netherlands and a doctorate in literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. No mean feat for a woman born into poverty and social marginalization. Mapuche cultural resistance continues to thrive despite 500 years of systematic marginalization and discrimination.

The Mapuche make up around 12 percent of Chile’s 18.95 million people, although a significant portion of Chileans identify as Mestizos, those with mixed Indigenous and European heritage. 

The quest for Mapuche autonomy and the right to live on ancestral lands, despite being enshrined in Chilean and international law, have been denied because the Southern territories are rich with natural resources and had been sold to local tycoons and multinationals. All attempts to recover ancestral lands are punishable under the 1984 terror act Pinochet enacted. As a result, hundreds of Mapuche community leaders are languishing in the prisons of Temuco, Angol and Lautaro.

A tradition of resistance flows through Loncón’s veins. Her father was active in land recuperation efforts during socialist President Salvador Allende’s administration and her great grandfather fought against colonial invasion during the 1800s.

The Unstoppable Rise of the Left

The election of Loncón is not the only nail in the establishment’s coffin. Communist economist Iraci Hassler, 30, was elected mayor of Santiago in May 2021 and communist politician Daniel Jadue, mayor of Recoleta, who created a “people’s pharmacy,” is a strong contender to win the presidency in the November elections.

Chile’s path to transformation can be directly attributed to grassroots organizing and relentless demands for fundamental change. Perhaps, after having endured a brutal dictatorship, 30 years of empty promises, nepotism and fierce austerity, the deadwood can finally be cut away and an inclusive people’s democracy will finally emerge from the rubble.

Carole Concha Bell is an Anglo-Chilean writer and Ph.D. student at King’s College London.