“No”: Advertising against fear, or how Chile ousted Pinochet
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On 5 October 1988, the dictator Augusto Pinochet submitted his continuation in power to a plebiscite designed to legitimise his regime. The Chilean citizenry, after fifteen years without elections, responded with historic turnout and a result that opened the door to democracy.

The military regime had made the 1980 Constitution its framework for institutionalisation. The twenty-seventh transitional provision established that, at the end of the presidential term, the Military Junta would propose a single candidate for a new eight-year mandate, subject to popular ratification. Pinochet was designated as that candidate, and the ballot offered two options: “Yes”, which would extend his rule until 1997, and “No”, which would open the way to democratic elections. Electoral registration reached 97.53% of eligible citizens, a figure unprecedented in Chilean electoral history.

The television campaign became the axis of the contest. For the first time in the country, electoral broadcasting slots were regulated: fifteen minutes per day for each option during the thirty days prior to the plebiscite. The opposition, organised around the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Coalition of Parties for Democracy), faced the challenge of mobilising the vote in a climate of fear. The “No” campaign opted for communication that steered clear of directly denouncing the dictatorship’s crimes: under the slogan “Chile, la alegría ya viene” (“Chile, joy is already on its way”), it deployed an advertising strategy appealing to hope and the future, using the market tools that the regime itself had imposed.

The official result gave victory to the “No” with 54.70% of valid votes (3,959,495 ballots), against 43% for the “Yes” (3,111,875). After initial hesitation, the government acknowledged the opposition’s triumph, and Pinochet was forced to call presidential and parliamentary elections, handing over power on 11 March 1990.

Pablo Larraín brought this episode to the screen in 2012 with the film “No”, starring Gael García Bernal as a publicist who runs the opposition’s television campaign. The film, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the first Chilean film to achieve that nomination. Larraín described his work as a reflection on the ambiguity of that triumph: Pinochet’s defeat did not entail the disappearance of the neoliberal economic model that the regime had implemented.

The magnitude of the event lies in its foundational dimension. A process designed to perpetuate a dictatorship became, through mass participation and the sovereign decision of the citizenry, a mechanism that brought an end to fifteen years of military rule and opened a new political cycle in Chile.

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