Chile on the Road to NAFTA, Accompanied by the National Police Band

Martha Rosler

Chile on the Road to NAFTA, Accompanied by the National Police Band, 1997

Artwork text

Twenty-five years after the fascists seized power (1973), Chile is celebrated as an economic miracle on its way to inclusion in the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the face of the recent history of political repression, however, skepticism arises: What would lead the U.S. to seek to include this nation, located at the very bottom of South America, in this pact? In this “music video” the police band plays a medley of European and American tunes: Danube waltzes, music from operettas, and the film music to Star Wars. A blind singer in a lonely stretch of shuttered shops, far away from the tourist audience, sings a melancholy song of lost love, and an indigenous group plays Andean pan pipes for the audience of local residents. Again and again images of a lonesome calm along the highways to Chile are inserted: the emblem of economic and political hegemony, a gigantic fist thrusting up from the ground, reaching out for the ubiquitous can of Coca Cola. The video ends with scenes of people looking for names on the memorial for the victims of the military coup of 11 September 1973, and a child surreptitiously stroking a glittering sign advertising Coca Cola at Santiago airport. (Sabine Breitwieser/Martha Rosler)