La Esmeralda, the Chilean navy’s tall ship, sailed into Victoria yesterday despite protests that its presence here is an affront to the unknown numbers of men and women taken aboard her, during Augusto Pinochet’s rule of terror, to be tortured and in some cases killed by his fascist thugs. The current government in Chile has never acknowledged properly the role La Esmeralda played in the vicious oppression of the Pinochet regime, nor has it apologized to the victims or their surviving family members. Today, down at Ogden Point, a group of Victorians determined they would not let the occasion of the visit go unobserved. Marking the Torture Ship’s stay in Victoria. And, Victorian activist Zach Braciszewicz was at the demo. Zach is a buddhist practitioner on a hunger strike in protest because, as he put it; “I got tired of the state of resource distribution, and how everything is organized into private profits. All we see are the same politicians making the same cuts to the same programs, and this isn’t just Victoria or Canada-wide — this is global.”
Click here for more information about La Esmeralda, photos from the demonstration available here.
thank you taking the time to speak to me. I think it’s important to remember the Pinochet regime was one of the early experiments in the kind of neoliberal economic policies that have been used to flay the population of BC for many years now with cuts, union busting, and overall political thuggery. anyone walking onto that ship with their blinders on, doesn’t know where they are, or where they came from.