When Scots refused to service Chile’s jet fighters after the 1973 military coup, their protest all but grounded the air force – and may have saved prisoners’ lives. Nae Pasaran, a powerful documentary, tells their story
The artificial spiders’ webs hanging in the windows of the Royal British Legion in East Kilbride, on the edge of Glasgow, are just part of the Halloween decorations. But they feel oddly appropriate on this bright, frosty morning in the company of men whose distant triumphs have recently had the cobwebs dusted off them. Sitting off to one side is the 41-year-old Chilean film-maker Felipe Bustos Sierra. Huddled around a table next to him are the former Rolls Royce plant workers whose bold statement of solidarity with the Chilean people in the mid-1970s is the subject of Nae Pasaran!, an inspirational documentary that proves principled acts can have positive consequences – even if they take decades to come to light.
Six months after the bloody coup of 11 September 1973, which began the brutal 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, these four Scotsmen – Bob Fulton, Robert Somerville, John Keenan, Stuart Barrie – downed tools and refused to service and repair engines for the Chilean air force’s Hawker Hunter planes. “Down tools?” says Bob, a former engine inspector and the instigator of the boycott. “We hadnae time to pick ’em up!”
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