Chile: The Strange Case of the Persecution of Daniel Jadue

Vijay Prashad

Chile's "Big Pharma" oligopoly sees itself threatened by Jadue's network of "People's pharmacies".

Daniel Jadue (left), the former mayor of Recoleta (a part of Santiago, Chile), opens the door to his modest home. It is late in the evening. He is as hospitable as ever, despite the fact that he looks tired after his 91 days in captivity at the Capitán Yáber prison annex. He tries to order us sushi but then decides to serve us some grape leaves and other assorted Arab treats that are resonant of his Palestinian background. His living room, where we are sitting, is decorated with emblems of the Palestinian struggle, of memories of the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973), and of a range of figures of the Latin American left.

Protest calling for the release of Daniel Jadue. Photo: Jadue Libre campaign

It was September 4, so we had a moment to reflect that this was the day that Allende’s coalition won the election of 1970. It was a sober 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 he 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 such as the Upanishads.” I imagine Daniel in his cell reflecting on the old Sanskrit line, Sarve jana sukhino bhavantu, or “Let the people of the world be happy.”

Preventative detention

On June 3, Judge Paulina Moya ruled that Jadue should be held in preventative detention for 120 days because of allegations of his role in what has been called the “People’s Pharmacy Case” (Caso Farmacias Populares). The authorities in Chile began to investigate this case three years ago in 2021 based on a complaint made by the company Best Quality Products, which said that it had provided medical supplies to the Chilean Association of Municipalities with Popular Pharmacies (Achifarp). Best Quality said it had been paid part of the money it was owed and there was a million dollars in arrears. After a series of appeals to the courts by both sides, Best Quality decided to resume supplies because—as its lawyer Mario Vargas said in 2022—“We all recognize the social role that popular pharmacies have played.”

When Daniel Jadue appeared before Judge Molina in 2024 (a year after the prosecutor 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 continued that included him, in which the state prosecutor scrutinized records for tax fraud, bribery, and misuse of his mayoral office. Judge Moya said that Jadue’s “freedom is dangerous for the security of society” not because there was proof that he had committed a crime but because if he had been guilty then as mayor he might continue to commit such crimes. Jadue responded on X that he was being judged for his role as mayor and chair of Achifarp and not for any personal corruption (“there is not a penny in my pocket”). Yet, despite this limited accusation against him, the Court sentenced him to the maximum possible period in preventative detention.

People before profit

Daniel Jadue won the election to become Recoleta’s mayor first in 2012 and then won re-election three times. When he ran in the primary during the presidential campaign in 2021, he secured 40 percent of the vote. The faith of the public in Jadue comes from his promise to revive public services in Chile and from his actions during his mayoralty 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. It has made immense profits from the provision of these services. As an example, three pharmaceutical providers (Cruz Verde, Salcobrand, and Farmacias Ahumada) control almost all of the supply of medicines into the privately controlled pharmacy network in the country. They have frequently been fined for collusion and price fixing. The result of the latter is inflation in prices for basic drugs that eats into the budgets of the masses. A promise to reverse that situation faces a challenge from the pharmaceutical lobby and raises the hopes of people who would like to see better control of prices. The Pharma lobby had stifled any political challenge until Jadue came along in 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 stopped a contract with the private Servitrans company for cleaning services and set up Jatu Newen, a cooperative of cleaners. Two years later, the municipality set up a “People’s Real Estate Agency,” which planned to settle 38 working-class families in a building with three-bedroom apartments and then to expand the project gradually to end homelessness in Recoleta. Against the tide of private universities, the municipality created the Open University of Recoleta in 2018 to make education available to the very poorest students. Lastly, in 2015, the municipality set up a popular pharmacy—named after a pharmacy student and communist militant Ricardo Silva Soto who had been killed by the dictatorship in 1987 in Recoleta—to provide reasonably priced drugs. This pharmacy project expanded to include opticians and then to include a bookstore and a music store. The popular library is named after Pedro Lemebel, the gay Communist writer who died in 2015. The entire project in Recoleta was premised on putting people before the profit motive.

Jadue decided to run for president in 2021 so that 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 meeting the desires of large sections of Chile’s people who did not want to continue with a policy framework that rewards large private corporations and imposes austerity on working people. “This is my hope,” Jadue told me in 2021. “The aspirations of the people of Chile can be met. We have shown that in a small-scale way in Recoleta. It was in Chile that neoliberalism was born. We must bury it in Chile.”

Punished for disobedience

“I am being punished not for any crime that I committed,” Jadue told me on September 4, 2024. “I am being punished for being disobedient, for being against the neoliberal consensus in Chile.” The key issue here is the pharmacy project. After the Ricardo Silva Soto pharmacy opened, the idea of popular pharmacies spread across Chile. Now, about 190 municipalities have some form of a popular pharmacy. The association Achifarp that Jadue led for a time is the outcome of the spread of these popular pharmacies. The existence of this process put pressure not only on Chile’s wide spectrum of social democrats but also on the hard right. Then-president Sebastián Piñera, for instance, had to allow Drug Law 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 allow people to compare drug prices. A new dynamic had appeared 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 no relation but is also a Communist Party member). Since he was no longer mayor, the basis for Jadue’s preventative detention ended. Judge Paula Brito, therefore, accepted the defense appeal for Jadue, and he was moved to house arrest. But she did not stop there. She chastised the authorities for taking the extreme step of incarcerating him for 91 days (a strange decision by the authorities since Jadue had collaborated with the prosecutor in good faith from the beginning of the case).

The case is not over. “I want to fight the case,” Jadue told me. “I will be vindicated. The project of popular pharmacies will be vindicated. We will not allow them to punish us because we disobeyed the neoliberal consensus.”

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books the director ofTricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the author of over 20 books.

Source: Peoples Dispatch