By Vijay PrasadNO world explorerwith translation in Opera Magazine
Daniel Jadue, the former mayor of Recoleta (a part of Santiago, Chile), opens the door to his modest home. It is late at night. He is friendlier than ever, though he seems tired after 91 days in the Capitán Yáber auxiliary prison. He tries to order sushi, but then settles for serving us grape leaves and a variety of other Arab dishes that refer to his Palestinian roots. His living room, where we are sitting, is decorated with symbols of the Palestinian struggle, with images of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970-1973) and with a series of figures from the Latin American left.
It was September 4th, so we had a moment to reflect on the fact that this was the day Allende’s coalition won the 1970 elections. It was a significant moment. Much had changed in Chile since that day, with the long dictatorship (1973-1990) led by General Augusto Pinochet defining much of the country’s culture. Jadue was happy to be home despite being under house arrest. “What did I do in prison?” he asked rhetorically in response to my question. “I read, I read a lot of ancient Indian books, like the Upanishads.” I imagined Daniel in his cell pondering the ancient Sanskrit phrase, Sarve Jana Sukhino Bhavantuor “May the people of the world be happy”.
Preventive detention
On June 3, Judge Paulina Moya ruled that Jadue should be detained preventively for 120 days for his alleged role in the so-called “Popular Farmácias Case”. Chilean authorities began investigating the case three years ago, in 2021, based on a complaint made by the company Best Quality Products, which said it had supplied medical supplies to the Municipal Association with Chilean Popular Pharmacies (Achifarp). Best Quality said it had received part of its debt and had a million dollars outstanding. After a series of court appeals by both parties, Best Quality decided to resume supplies because, as its lawyer Mario Vargas said in 2022, “we all recognize the social role that popular pharmacies play”.
When Daniel Jadue appeared before Judge Molina in 2024 (a year after prosecutors filed charges against him), she sentenced him to prison not because he had been found guilty of any crime. He was in prison because of an ongoing investigation into his record of tax fraud, bribery and abuse of office as mayor. Judge Molina said that Jadue’s “freedom is a danger to public safety,” not because there was evidence that he had committed a crime, but because with he is guilty, as mayor he it can continued to commit such crimes. Jadue responded in X that he was being tried for his role as mayor and president of Achifarp and not for personal corruption (“there was not a penny in my pocket”). However, despite the limited charges against him, the Court imposed the maximum possible sentence of pre-trial detention.
People on top of profits
Daniel Jadue first won the mayoral election in Recoleta in 2012, and was re-elected three times. When he ran in the 2021 presidential primary, he won 40% of the vote. Public trust in Jadue stems from his promise to revitalize Chile’s public services and his actions as mayor. Since the coup against Allende in 1973, Chile has been a laboratory for neoliberal policies, with the private sector taking over public responsibilities, from education to health. The sector has profited greatly from the provision of these services. For example, three pharmaceutical suppliers (Cruz Verde, Salcobrand and Farmacias Ahumada) control almost the entire supply of medicines to the country’s privately controlled pharmacy network. They are often fined for collusion and price fixing. The result is inflation in the prices of basic medicines that eat into people’s pockets. Promises to reverse this situation have been met with resistance from the pharmaceutical lobby and the growing public expectation of better price controls. The pharmaceutical lobby had largely suppressed any political confrontation until Jadue’s arrival in Recoleta.
When I first interviewed Jadue in 2021, he told me how he decided to create a network of small institutions to kick-start the Recoleta experience. In 2016, the city government terminated its contract with the private company Servitrans for cleaning services and founded Jatu Newen, a cleaning cooperative. Two years later, the city government created the “Popular Real Estate Agency,” which planned to house 38 working-class families in a building with three-bedroom apartments and then gradually expand the project to end homelessness in Recoleta. Against the tide of private universities, the city government founded the Open University of Recoleta in 2018 to provide education for the poorest students. Finally, in 2015, the city council founded the Popular Pharmacy—named after pharmacy student and communist activist Ricardo Silva Soto, who was assassinated by the dictatorship in 1987 in Recoleta—to provide medicines at reasonable prices. The pharmacy project expanded to include an optician and later a bookstore and a music store. This popular library is named after Pedro Lemebel, a gay communist writer who died in 2015. All of the projects carried out in Recoleta are based on putting human interests before profits.
Jadue decided to run for president in 2021 to try to combine the utopian energy of the popular uprisings of 2011 and 2019 for better public services and a different Chile with the actual practice of Recoleta. The experiment carried out in Recoleta, in other words, offers a real possibility of fulfilling the wishes of a large part of the Chilean people, who do not want to continue with a political structure that rewards large private companies and imposes austerity on workers. “That is my hope,” Jadue told me in 2021. “The aspirations of the Chilean people can be fulfilled. We showed this on a small scale in Recoleta. It was in Chile that neoliberalism was born. We must bury it in Chile.”
Punished for disobedience
“I was not punished for any crime I had committed,” Jadue told me on September 4, 2024. “I was punished for disobedience, for going against the neoliberal consensus in Chile.” The fundamental issue here is the design of pharmacies. After the opening of Ricardo Silva Soto’s pharmacy, the idea of popular pharmacies spread throughout Chile. Today, some 190 cities have some type of popular pharmacy. The Achifarp association, which Jadue once led, was a result of the spread of popular pharmacies. This process has put pressure not only on the broad social democratic spectrum in Chile, but also on the traditional right. The then president, Sebastián Piñera, for example, had to allow the drafting and approval of the Second Drug Law, which would begin to regulate the big pharmaceutical industry, and he opened a website in 2018 (Tu Farmacia) that allowed the public to compare drug prices. A new dynamic had emerged in Chile. It was this dynamic that fueled the campaign against Jadue.
During his detention, Jadue was removed from his position as mayor (his replacement was Fares Jadue, who was not related to him but was also a member of the Communist Party). Since he was no longer mayor, the basis for Jadue’s preventive detention was lost. Judge Paula Brito therefore accepted Jadue’s defense request, and he was transferred to house arrest. But she did not stop there. She reprimanded the authorities for taking the extreme step of imprisoning him for 91 days (a strange decision by the authorities, since Jadue had cooperated with the prosecutor in good faith since the beginning of the case).
The case is not over. “I want to fight the process,” Jadue told me. “I will take revenge. The popular pharmacy project will be maintained. We will not let them punish us because we did not comply with the neoliberal consensus.”
Opera Magazine
Revista Opera is an independent publication founded on April 11, 2012, with the aim of producing counter-hegemonic and popular journalism, which highlights issues that are truly relevant today from a critical point of view.
