The Strange Case of the Persecution of Daniel Jadue

By Vijay Prashad

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Tuesday. September 10, 2024: Daniel Jadue, the former mayor of Recoleta, a part of Santiago, Chile, opens the door of his modest home. It is late in the evening. He is as welcoming as ever, despite the fact that he looks tired after 91 days in captivity in the Capitán Yáber prison annex. He tries to order us sushi, but then decides to serve us some grape leaves and various other Arabic foods that echo his Palestinian background. His living room, where we sit, is decorated with emblems of the Palestinian struggle, mementos of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970-1973) and a variety of figures from the Latin American left.

It was September 4, so we had a moment to reflect that this was the day Allende’s coalition won the elections of 1970. It was a sobering moment. Much has changed in Chile since that day, with a long dictatorship (1973-1990) led by General Augusto Pinochet defining much of the country’s culture. Jadue is happy to be home, even though she is under house arrest. “What did I do in prison?” he asks rhetorically in response to my question. “I read, I read a lot of books from ancient India like the Upanishads.” I imagine Daniel in his cell reflecting on the old Sanskrit line, Sarve jana sukhino bhavantuor “Let the people of the world be happy.”

Preventive detention

On June 3, Judge Paulina Moya ruled that Jadue must be held in custody for 120 days over allegations of his role in what has been dubbed the “Caso Farmacias Populares”. Authorities in Chile began investigating the case three years ago in 2021 based on a complaint made by the company Best Quality Products, which said it had provided medical supplies to the Chilean Association of Municipalities with Popular Pharmacies (Achifarp). Best Quality said it had been paid some of the money it was owed and was $1 million in debt. After a series of court appeals from both sides, Best Quality decided to resume supplies because – as its lawyer Mario Vargas said in 2022 – “We all recognize the social role that well-known pharmacies have played”.

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 had to go to prison because an investigation involving him was still ongoing, in which the state prosecutor looked into the records of tax fraud, bribery and abuse of his office as chairman. Judge Moya said Jadue’s “freedom is dangerous to the safety of society” not because there was evidence that he had committed a crime, but because whether he had been guilty then as mayor can continue to commit such crimes. Jadue replied in X that he was being tried for his role as mayor and chairman of Achifarp and not for any personal corruption (“I don’t have a penny in my pocket”). However, despite this limited charge against him, the Court sentenced him to the maximum possible amount of detention.

People before profit

Daniel Jadue first won election to become Recoleta’s mayor in 2012 and has since won re-election three times. When he ran in the primaries during the presidential campaign in 2021, he secured 40 percent of the vote. The public’s trust in Jadue comes from his promise to revive public services in Chile and his actions as mayor to do just that. Since the coup against Allende in 1973, Chile has been a laboratory for neoliberal policies, with the private sector able to absorb public functions from education to health care. She has made tremendous profits from providing these services. As an example, three pharmaceutical providers (Cruz Verde, Salcobrand and Farmacias Ahumada) control almost the entire drug supply in the network of privately controlled pharmacies in the country. They have often been fined for collusion and price fixing. The result of the latter is the inflation of the prices of basic medicines, which eats into the budgets of the masses. A promise to change this situation faces a challenge from the pharmaceutical lobby and raises the hopes of people who want to see better price controls. The Pharma lobby had stifled any political challenge until Jadue came to Recoleta.

When I first interviewed Jadue in 2021, he told me how he decided to build a network of small-scale institutions to start an experiment in Recoleta. In 2016, the city terminated a contract with private company Servitrans for cleaning services and set up Jatu Newen, a cleaners’ cooperative. Two years later, the municipality set up a “People’s Real Estate Agency”, which planned to house 38 working-class families in a three-bedroom apartment building and then expand the project gradually to end the homeless in Recoleta. Despite the wave of private universities, the municipality created the Open University of Recoleta in 2018 to make education available to very poor students. Most recently, in 2015, the municipality created a popular pharmacy – named after a pharmacy student and communist militant Ricardo Silva Soto, who was killed by the dictatorship in 1987 in Recoleta – to offer drugs at reasonable prices. This pharmacy project expanded to include opticians and then to include a bookstore and a music store. The public library is named after Pedro Lemebel, the gay communist writer who died in 2015. The whole project in Recoleta was about putting people before the profit motive.

Jadue decided to run for president in 2021 so he could try to combine the utopian energy of the popular uprisings of 2011 and 2019 for better public services and a different Chile with the concrete practices of Recoleta. The Recoleta experiment, in other words, provided the actual possibility of fulfilling the wishes of large sections of the Chilean people who did not want to continue with a political framework that rewards large private corporations and imposes austerity measures on working people. “This is my hope,” Jadue told me in 2021. “The aspirations of the people of Chile can be fulfilled. We showed that in a small way in Recoleta. It was in Chile that neoliberalism was born. We have to bury it in Chile.”

Punished for disobedience

“I’m not being punished for any crime I committed,” Jadue told me on September 4, 2024. “I’m being punished for being disobedient, for being against the neoliberal consensus in Chile.” The main issue here is the pharmacy project. After the Ricardo Silva Soto pharmacy opened, the idea of ​​popular pharmacies spread throughout Chile. Now, about 190 municipalities have some form of a folk pharmacy. The Achifarp association that Jadue led for a time is the result of the spread of these popular pharmacies. The existence of this process exerted pressure not only on the broad spectrum of Chile’s social democrats, but also on the hard right. Then-President Sebastián Piñera, for example, had to allow the Law on Medicines II to be drafted and moved through the legislature that would begin to regulate Big Pharma, and he inaugurated a website in 2018 (Tu Farmacia) that would allowed people to compare drug prices. A new dynamic had emerged in Chile. It is this dynamic that provoked the campaign against Jadue.

During his time in custody, Jadue was removed from his post as mayor (his replacement is Fares Jadue, who is unrelated but also a member of the Communist Party). Since he was no longer mayor, the basis for Jadue’s preventive detention ended. Therefore, Judge Paula Brito accepted the defense appeal for Jadue and he was transferred to house arrest. But she didn’t stop there. She chided the authorities for taking the extreme step of jailing him for 91 days (a strange decision by the authorities since Jadue had cooperated with the prosecutor in good faith from the beginning of the case).

The matter is not over. “I want to fight the case,” Jadue told me. “I will be excused. The project of popular pharmacies will be justified. We will not allow them to punish us for disobeying the neoliberal consensus.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was produced by Globetrotter. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a fellow writer and chief correspondent at the Globetrotter. He is editor of LeftWord Books and director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including Darkest Nations and Poorest Nations. His recent books are War Makes Us Human: Lessons from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) Retreat: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power.

Source: Globetrotters