“There is no water in the desert. And the camels don’t want to go any further. I don’t have the strength to crawl anymore. I want to drink so badly.” – sang the Polish band Bajm in 1982. The song then had a clearly political meaning: the desert was a metaphor for the country under the regime and the water, the missing freedom. At some point in the song a conductor appears, drinking old wine and holding a whip. The image seems even more current now, in reference to the fierce neoliberalism that was born in Chile and served as an example for many countries, including Poland after 1989. The first time I heard about Chile and Augusto Pinochet as an authority for Polish politicians was when in 1999 I watched a famous Polish TV program “Tok Szok”. The presenters – Jacek Żakowski and Piotr Najsztub interviewed the editor-in-chief of the Życie newspaper – Tomasz Wołek and a deputy Michał Kamiński who together with another deputy – Marek Jurek (absent from the TV program) gave Augusto Pinochet, who had been arrested in the UK, a gorget with an image of the Holy Mary. First they explained their motives: as Marek Jurek had stated earlier, they wanted to decorate Pinochet as the one who “saved Chile from the fate of communist Cuba and we should be grateful for that […] – he said. The presenters then invited Chilean exile Mario Galdamez, who wept in the studio as he recalled how Pinochet’s officials tortured him by placing electrodes on his genitals.
The whole review was published in the AICA e-mag in English and in the Artishock magazine in Spanish.
Malgorzata Kazmierczak 
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