The Scottish newspaper ‘The National’ reports on a new documentary about a decision by four Rolls Royce workers at the companies East Kilbride plant who organised a boycott of spare parts to the Chilean Air Force after the coup that brought Pinochet to power.
The film highlights that the embargoed parts that were held at the plant for four years were possibly eventually delivered in exchange for political prisoners.
It also highlights that workers following new legislation introduced after 1979 are now precluded from such actions of solidarity.
I met Chilean communists and socialists at a conference in Tripoli, Libya in the early 1990s asked about the Pinochet era from which the country had recently emerged they said it was a dark period an era of terror. Even then they were wary and had travelled clandestinely as although Pinochet had stood down and democracy returned he was still symbolic head of the armed forces until 1998.
Perhaps actions like that of the Scottish workers cast some light into that ‘dark period’ either way it was so significant that records on the era as the documentary records are closed for at least another twenty years
Here’s the link:
http://www.thenational.scot/…/16062448.The_East_Kilbride_f…/
Image: The legitimate President Allende before the coup under attack by Chilean Air Force Hunter jets just before his death. The Scottish workers subsequently boycotted engine spares for the aircraft.
Bernard Moffatt
pp Celtic League
03/03/18
