Patricio Guzmán, the celebrated Chilean documentarian, has passed away at 85. The obituaries will flow, eulogizing his unflinching lens on the Pinochet coup and the brutal aftermath. And rightly so, in a way; any artist who dedicates their life to exposing the raw, ugly truth of state-sponsored violence deserves a nod. But let’s be honest: while Guzmán skillfully captured the *symptoms* of a diseased political system, the underlying malady—the absolute, unchecked power of the state—remains as virulent as ever, ready to fester in any country, under any banner.
Guzmán spent decades chronicling the terror unleashed by Augusto Pinochet, the military strongman who seized control from Salvador Allende in 1973. His films, like "The Battle of Chile," are powerful, visceral reminders of what happens when the machinery of government turns on its own people. Thousands disappeared, tortured, murdered—all in the name of "order" or "saving the nation" or whatever convenient platitude autocrats whisper while signing death warrants. It’s a stark lesson, one that too many still refuse to learn: when the state can do anything, it eventually will.
The irony, of course, is that Guzmán’s work, while exposing the horrors of one flavor of authoritarianism, often gets co-opted into a simplistic narrative. Pinochet was bad, Allende was good. Or vice-versa, depending on your preferred flavor of central planning. But for anyone who truly values individual freedom, the lesson isn't about which strongman is worse, or which ideology holds the monopoly on virtue. The lesson is that *any* strongman, *any* centralized power structure that believes it has the right to dictate how people live, work, and speak, is a ticking time bomb.
What Guzmán’s films inadvertently highlight is the sheer audacity of governments—whether they’re draped in socialist red or military drab—to demand absolute obedience. They demand permission for everything: to build, to innovate, to dissent. And when that permission isn't granted, or when dissent becomes too loud, the state inevitably flexes its muscles. Pinochet’s Chile was an extreme, horrifying example, but the fundamental impulse isn't unique to military juntas. It’s the same impulse that drives regulators to strangle nascent industries, that empowers bureaucrats to dictate what can be built where, that allows incumbents to weaponize the state against disruptors.
The startup world, my beat, sees this every single day, albeit in less bloody, but no less stifling, forms. Young companies trying to innovate, trying to create value, constantly run into walls of "no." No, you can't offer this service. No, you can't use this technology. No, you can't disrupt our well-connected friends in the established order. The scale is different, the violence is economic rather than physical, but the root cause is identical: an overweening state apparatus that believes it knows best, that believes it has the right to control.
So, as the film world mourns Guzmán, let's not just lament Pinochet’s brutality. Let’s lament the enduring human tendency to concentrate power, to trust institutions over individuals, to believe that some central authority can wisely manage the complexities of human society. Guzmán’s lens showed us the ultimate endpoint of such thinking. The real tribute to his work isn't just to watch his films, but to fight tooth and nail against every single encroachment on individual liberty, every regulatory overreach, every demand for permission from those who would rule us, whether they carry a gun or a clipboard. The battle for freedom is never truly won; it’s just fought on different fronts.