by Norman Stone
Allende had died as his presidential palace was stormed in the 1973 military coup — suicide, in all likelihood, though even in 1990 his wife was claiming murder. It was the end of a three-year attempt to turn Chile into a popular, socialist democracy, and much romanticism was attached to Allende by a cohort of foreigners, such as the British Communist Brian Pollitt (who also had experience in Cuba, and whose books, along with the multivolume E. H. Carr history of Soviet Russia, were burned when the military took over) and the Frenchman Régis Debray, one-time supporter of Che Guevara in Bolivia. At this time, in the outcome of 1968, of the Vietnam wars of the intelligentsia, there were romantic films. There was, for instance, Z, in which the veteran Yves Montand played a left-wing Greek politician, done to death by the Colonels who had staged a military coup in Athens in 1967, allegedly with help from the CIA. It was (like the later Midnight Express) a very well-made film which, like so many such, distorted reality.
Allende became the absent hero of a film, Missing, by the maker of Z, Costa Gavras, and he stood, in a vague way, for ‘liberation’. There was a revealing little scene when he was overthrown. A left-wing young girl, in jeans, was told by a policeman that, once order had been restored, she would be wearing a less provocative set of clothes. In the Latin, Catholic world at the time, modesty was still required, clothing was political, and divorce was forbidden. Women had had the vote in chile since 1949, but there were separate polling booths for men and women, even in 1973, and although the country’s problems were obviously owed in large measure to demographic pressure, clinics for contraception were not opened. There was an element of cultural war in the Chilean affair, and Allende was recognizably a liberation figure, promising equality, liberty and fraternity, or at any rate socialism. In reality, Chile would be remembered, not for the Allende experiment, but for the ‘Pinochet solution’ — a period of authoritarian rule, during which economic reforms could be carried out, without political disruption. This happened, and Chile, on the whole, prospered. Democratic ways were restored; Pinochet did indeed organize a free election, and when it went against him, he retired without fuss, only with a proviso that he and others should be given immunity from prosecution. In 1975, after General Franco died in Spain, forty years after launching a brutal civil war and then a full-scale Fascist dictatorship, his successors agreed that the slate would be wiped clean: no prosecutions, of either side. But Pinochet’s enemies were in no mood to wipe slates.
There was another military coup, seven years almost to the day after Pinochet’s, on 12 September 1980, in Turkey. Military coups do not generally turn out at all well, and in Latin America they had been both frequent and ridiculous — men in preposterous uniforms, with epaulettes like fruit tarts, seizing power and then appointing their cronies and relatives to state posts, as in Peru. Argentina, once a very prosperous and advanced country, had been wrecked in a pattern of demagogues and attitudinizing generals (in 1980 a ‘junta’ of senior armed forces commanders). In the case of both Chilean and Turkish coups, the matter was far from simple, and the similarities are striking. If there is such a thing as a good coup, both succeeded in their aims: order was indeed restored; new economic rules — monetarism, of a sort, and worked out under IMF supervision — were brought in; after a bad patch, prosperity grew; democratic elections then happened. The costs in terms of bloodshed were also limited — in Chile, far less than with similar coups in Brazil or Argentina, which had not received attention from film-makers or The New York Times. The Left in both countries was, however, comprehensively defeated, and remained very bitter for decades afterwards.
Since universities had been at the centre of the trouble in both countries — in Turkey there had even been policemen standing in the corner of lecture rooms — there was much voluble complaint. A work that was very frequently read at this time was Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. It is the great-great-grandfather of Z. There had been revolutions all over Europe in the spring of, 1848, but the one that got the greatest attention of the world was French: would it repeat the experiences of 1789, Rights of Man, abolition of kings, aristocrats and, this time round, bankers? There was a Republic; in the June Days of 1848 part of the city was taken over by enraged, unemployed building workers (the first political photograph taken was of a barricade, from a rooftop). The middle-class National Guard, with troops and an assortment of rowdies from what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat, meaning in effect ‘underclass’, dealt bloodily with this, and 15,000 men and women were summarily executed or exiled. To Marx, this was the class war, and so it was for any observer of it; there were some very clever ones, not least Alexis de Tocqueville, who had written about democracy in the United States. He called the June Days a ‘servile war’, comparing them with the slave rebellion, under Spartacus, that had rocked ancient Rome. The liberals who were really behind the revolution of 1848 were nonplussed. Finally, there was the army: ‘the uniform was the peasant’s national costume’ and the army ‘the dregs of the peasant Lumpenproletariat ’. So: bankers, seedy journalists, a huge bureaucracy, isomorphous magnitudes of peasants, an army of bravos led by opera-mustachioed generals in corsets, and the clergy, but all of it likely in the end to fail. All of this, read in a university in Santiago in 1973 or in Istanbul in 1980, meant a great deal more than the long-ago historical events that were involved. The opposition to these military coups felt strongly that it had had history on its side, that it had been cheated. To this day it is vindictive.
Allende had been a veteran figure of Chilean politics — a Marxist, claiming that he wanted ‘a Chilean road to socialism’, i.e. without the assorted bloodbaths. He was a Valparaíso doctor and a cultivated man, reading widely, playing the guitar, able to discuss paintings. In Catholic countries, the anti-clerical tradition often did push doctors and engineers to the Left, and Allende therefore had a considerable number of intellectual cousins in Latin Europe: they agreed with his diagnosis of Chile’s condition, and a prominent member of the French Left, Régis Debray, who appeared in Chile, might easily point to the comparisons of Allende and Mitterrand, later the French president. In some ways it was a Kulturkampf as tended to happen in Catholic countries. They had a view of the world that went quite logically from macro-America via capital and ‘comprador class’ — minority or foreign middlemen — to micro-paterfamilias and the foreman cracking his whip at downtrodden peasants.
Such people applauded when Allende stated his creed at the United Nations late in 1972, in a speech that the American ambassador called ‘one of the most memorable speeches ever heard in the great hall’. It was a classic statement of a view, then widely held, that countries such as Chile were held back by ‘international capitalism’. Multinational firms extracted raw materials such as copper, paying low wages, and the copper would soon run out. If there were protests, these firms would bribe local politicians; ‘the power of corporations is so great that it transcends all borders’; ‘we are victims of a new form of im — perialism, one that is more subtle, more cunning, and for that reason more terrifyingly effective’; ‘the financial-economic blockade against us… is oblique, subterranean, and indirect… We are the victims of almost imperceptible actions, generally disguised in phrases and declarations that extol respect for the sovereignty and dignity of our country.’ One problem was that the great corporations repatriated the profits from their investments, many times over, such that Chile, and Latin America generally, had contributed $9bn to the rich countries over the preceding decade. Chile, potentially a rich country, therefore lived in poverty, apart from the hangers-on of the multinationals; ‘We go from place to place seeking credits and aid, and yet — a true paradox of the capitalist economic system — we are major exporters of capital.’ The Chilean answer must therefore be — nationalization of the country’s resources: as Lenin had put it, the expropriation of the expropriators, though Allende did not quote him. There was this to be said for him, that copper had declined in price, unlike other raw materials, from £620
per ton in 1969 to £412 in 1972: the vagaries of international capitalism. At the time, many people would have agreed with Allende as to this dictionnaire des idées reçues on the reasons for the troubles of the ‘Third World’. In fact, the Americans accepted the diagnosis often enough and in an effort to improve their popularity had produced a sort of Marshall Plan for Latin America, called ‘Alliance for Progress’, in 1961. They spent $20bn but, not being in occupation, found that much of the money went to thieving oligarchies.
But was Chile ‘Third World’ at all? She was very varied in character, with 9 million people over 3,000 miles of coastline, stretching from the sub-tropical copper-producing north to the near Antarctic south: great estates here, small peasant plots there, with modern cities and Indian tribes, a considerable problem of population growth, and, on the outskirts of the towns, callampos, shanty towns (literally, ‘mushrooms’). Half of the population lived in the central valley, and large estates accounted for 80 per cent of all land, up to the 1960s; there was a native Araucanian Indian population, though in scale it did not compare with those elsewhere in Latin America (the Chileans having exterminated many). Chile had in some degree faced the same demographic problem as Latin America as a whole, where the population went up from 211 million to 261 million between 1961 and 1968, and by 1984 had reached 408 million. In Chile it grew at almost 2.5 per cent every year, a figure matched today by Uganda, which has the fastest-growing population in the world, and the cities began in places to be choked. The same was true of Turkey in the same period, adding the population of Denmark (4 million) every year to herself. As with Marx’s Paris, shanty towns, ‘dangerous classes’, woeful sewage, epidemics were a constant reminder that revolution was at the gates.
Chile, with her weird geography and often unpleasant climate, had remained much poorer than Argentina: her people migrated there, and it was usual for them to be in such jobs as house-portering. But with a population derived from the Basque country and Galicia, she also had reasonably civilized politics. There was a moment of military takeover at a particularly bad time in the thirties, but even then it was much less nasty than elsewhere, and the military regime did not last long. There was a strong enough parliamentary tradition, but the divisions of the country were reflected in a multiplicity of parties, proportional representation doing nothing to correct this. As in so many other countries, there were unstable coalitions; the centre usually dominated affairs, and was Catholic or Christian Democrat. Marx simply did not understand religion, thought it absurd, and dismissed ‘Christian Socialism’ as ‘the holy water with which the priest assuages the heart-burnings of the aristocracy’. But there was more to it. Many Christian Democrats had no objection whatsoever to land reform, for the benefit of Catholic peasants; they did not like banks. Their spending on welfare was considerable, and associated with an inflation that already reached 30 per cent in the later 1960s. Dating back to the worldwide slump of the early 1930s, the State was widely involved in the economy — half of industry was controlled by it, through an agency called CORFO — and although the right-wing coalition (‘National Party’) might have tried to dismantle the institutions concerned, and to co-operate with the Americans in the liberalization of trade and investment, the Catholics and of course the Left had different notions. There were elections in 1970, and the left-wing coalition won more votes than either of the others, though not much more than one third. Salvador Allende, its leader, was duly and constitutionally elected president, with the votes of the centre. The essential point about Catholic democracy was made in an Italian context by Indro Montanelli, veteran journalist: Liberals and Catholics said different things in the same language, Marxists and Catholics the same thing in a different language.
Allende then set about reforms and was given further support when he took office. In the first place, the Americans behaved unintelligently. Washington took alarm: another Cuba? Kissinger said at a briefing, ‘I have yet to meet somebody who firmly believes that if Allende wins, there is likely to be another free election in Chile… massive problems for us, and for the democratic forces and pro-US forces in… the whole Western Hemisphere.’ Richard Helms of the CIA wanted to stop Allende, using the small armed Right, and there was an alarmist lunch with the head of Pepsi-Cola and the editor of a right-wing newspaper. Two excitable Chilean generals were roped in, and a constitutional-minded commander was murdered. This, naturally, backfired, creating a great anti-American constituency, and thereafter the Americans behaved more circumspectly. It was then Allende’s turn to make mistake after mistake, and his position was not very strong. He had almost no parliamentary majority, three of the parties in his ‘Popular Union’ coalition were small and likely to defect, and there was also a Constitutional Court able to block legislation where necessary. Then there was the army.
For a Marxist, here was an interesting challenge, both Czechoslovakia and Italy offering obvious points of similarity: a large Communist element (though Allende did not call himself ‘Communist’) in a position of some dominance. Why did Czechoslovakia get 1948, and Chile 1973? There was also Cuba, standing up to the USA and promising revolution throughout Latin America. As things turned out, Allende was a weak man, leaning this way and that way, but he started off quite well. In the first instance, Allende could advance a programme that would bring in allies from the Catholic centre, especially land reform and anti-Americanism. His coalition had two fifths of the parliamentary votes, and he took over 1.5 million hectares while nationalizing the copper industry, which accounted for four fifths of exports. He offered in the first instance money for various worthy causes — free housing, health, etc. — such that in municipal elections, in April 1971, he took nearly half of the vote. It also mattered that even then there was 25 per cent abstention — and apathy was in its way a revolutionary characteristic. His minister of the economy, Pedro Vuskovic, announced that ‘state control is designed to destroy the economic base of imperialism and the ruling class by putting an end to the private ownership of the means of production’, and three of the largest copper mines, American-owned, were taken over, without indemnification. Allende’s first year went well, buoyed by spending of reserves and by high copper prices. He himself later on said that his greatest mistake had been not to hold a referendum on constitutional reform at that time. He was soon to run into trouble.
His Communist supporters were, at the time, quite moderate: for Moscow, relations with the USA were very important, and that might easily mean just abandoning Allende; in any case, Lenin himself had had sharp words to say about left-wing ‘infantilism’. The Communists had some 15 per cent of the vote but they also controlled the trade unions, and they appealed to Radomiro Tomić’s Christian Democratic Left for a common reformist platform. But there was also a romantic Left in Latin America, the MIR, or Movement for the Revolutionary Left, and it was not very interested in such reformism. Quite the contrary, it provoked. It set up the Che Guevara Población around ‘bourgeois’ Santiago, and installed 1,200 families in occupation. The great symbolic figure, Castro, came for a three-week visit at the end of 1971, during which he made inflammatory speeches: ‘we have already learned more than enough about… bourgeois, capitalist liberties’, etc. Allende himself shook his head with disapproval at the antics of the MIR, which denounced his ‘reformism’ as an ‘illusion’, and wished to take power at once, by arming the inhabitants of the shanty towns. Land expropriation took, in all, 9 million hectares of land, and in some cases the land had already been occupied by peasants; and this even affected farms with no more than eighty hectares. In 1972 the university boiled over, as thousands of students went off to the countryside for ‘consciousnessraising’ exercises; by now, thousands of foreigners were flocking in to participate in a socialist revolution, and the secretary-general of Allende’s own socialist party, the upper-class Carlos Altamira, announced that the battle with ‘the bourgeoisie and imperialism’ though postponed was on the cards. Nationalizations went ahead, and the United Nations Econo
mic Council for Latin America contained Marxist economists who gave Allende their sanction. The parliament gybed at this, and some of the nationalization was pushed through by a device close to fraud. A law already in existence allowed firms to be sequestrated if they were badly managed, and it was easy enough for Allende to push up wages, drive a firm into bankruptcy, and then sequestrate it; strikes might have the same effect. The State had run forty-three enterprises in 1970 but, by 1973, had 370 on its books, as administrative chicanery was used to demonstrate that they had been incompetently run in private hands. At any rate, Allende was bypassing Congress, by executive action, and this naturally threatened American investments, which, in copper and with the multinational ITT, were considerable. Nixon, late in 1970, had resolved to give no credit to Chile, while also using the US influence to prevent others from giving it.
If Chile had been Cuba, no doubt matters would then have come to a breach. But Castro had come to power in the outcome of a revolution that had destroyed the old army; there was no parliament or constitution of any significance. Allende did not have Castro’s tools. Without dollar support, by September 1971 inflation was going up. It always was a problem in the state-dominated Chilean economy, with a balance of payments deficit, and with swollen employment rolls and pay-packets; Allende imposed price controls. These had the usual effect, of driving down supply, and, besides, the consequence of the land seizures was also to cause shortages, which in turn could be made up only through imports, of $280m (including French chickens). These led to the creation shortages and queues, and there was a sign of things to come when 5,000 middle-class housewives, banging saucepans, were met by teargas.
