The Rise of the Opposition
Dinges, John
SANTIAGO-The intersection of Macul and Grecia streets in Santiago is a normally quiet, middle-class neighborhood with a stupendous view of the Andean Cordillera-an unlikely but somewhat...
...There were four major groups by 1976: the Group of 10, which established firm links with the international arm of the AFL-CIO...
...In that first period of intense repression, lasting 17 until late 1976, open party work was impossible, but the debate over the significance of the coup was just beginning...
...It lent legitimacy to the government's labor policy and pulled the rug out from under the efforts of exiled CUT leaders, who had represented Chile before the ILO in years past, to contest the credentials of the Chilean delegation...
...The exception was perhaps the Movement of the Revolutionary Left-MIR-which was not part of the Popular Unity and had gone underground to prepare militarily for what they believed was an inevitable and bloody coup...
...In an unpublished study, "Evaluaci6n de la experiencia de negociaci6n colectiva en los sindicatos chilenos," Farabella provided a study of the internal negotiating process...
...The PN fully supported the coup...
...The previous year, 1979, the Socialist Party had split into two, then many factions, leaving the other parties with the unappealing task of choosing which group of Socialists to recognize as part of the Popular Unity...
...0 Having vented their protest, the unions proceeded to hold elections under the new stipulations that only union members who had not held union office during the past 10 years could be candidates...
...In one of the mansions, a third floor room reachable only by climbing up a narrow spiral staircase into a turret, was the headquarters of the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Prisoners, an independent group staffed by the relatives themselves...
...Included the Communist Party (PC), Socialist Party (PS), United Movement of Popular Action (MAPU), Radical Party (PR), Popular Independent Action (API, which joined after the elections in late 1971), and the Christian Left Party (IC, which joined in 1971...
...The party opted for a strategy of waiting for the military to eliminate the strength of the Popular Unity and the leftist grassroots organizations, expecting that power would then be handed over to Eduardo Frei...
...4. Justice Minister Jaime Del Valle, cited in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Latin America, June 6, 1983...
...Still, there was a certain ambiguity in the junta's treatment of unions...
...6 The unions were grouped in national unions and federations, all but a few of which belonged to the Central Unica de Trabajadores (CUT), whose name, accurately reflecting its status, translates as the "Single Workers Central...
...The parallels are largely valid, as long as there is appropriate emphasis on the differences...
...Decree Law No...
...Diaz Estrada succeeded in establishing good relations with a large group of Christian Democratic unions (later known as the Group of 10, and most recently as the Democratic Union of Workers) and persuaded its leaders to represent Chile in 1974 at the annual meeting of the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva...
...The Christian Democratic Party moved into full, unequivocal opposition following semi-clandestine party elections in December 1976...
...The leftist organizations were in disarray...
...There were even times I doubted my political ideas and thought that Pinochet was creating something that might work...
...POLITICAL FORMATIONS IN CHILE: 1970-1983 POPULAR UNITY [UP): Formed in 1970 as an electoral, and then a governing coalition...
...21NACLA Report to build a political base and fill the vacuum created by the weakened Left...
...government...
...The terrorizing effect of these assassinations was not lost inside Chile...
...Disarray in Defeat On September 12, 1973, the day following the coup, there was little sign of opposition in the non-leftist groups that would form an important part of the movement 10 years later...
...One month later, Pinochet decreed the forced exile of the Christian Democrats' Zaldfvar...
...In 1980, the plebiscite and the victory in Nicaragua led to an important part of the Left opting for a military approach...
...11...
...CUT president Luis Figueroa served as minister of labor for much of the Allende government...
...Splits on the Left On the Left, the blow to morale fell on already factionalized organizations, whose bond in the Popular Unity coalition had all but disappeared...
...Former Finance Minister Andros Zaldivar was elected party president...
...Pinochet's new labor minister, Sergio Fernindez, was a civilian closely associated with the Chicago Boys...
...Politically, the new union code moved the unions in precisely the direction the government meant to avoid...
...It was signed by 11 politicians representing the political space from center-right to center-left, from the new Democratic Right Party to three factions of the Socialist Party...
...The elections were also fought-to Pinochet's consternationalong clearly partisan political lines and served to show the continued vitality of the leftist parties...
...The interest in labor unions had in the past led to the creation of specifically Christian-oriented unions, most of which were anti-communist and closely identified with the Christian Democratic Party...
...It allowed collective bargaining and the right to strike, but only at the plant level...
...The weakness of the labor movement, and opposition in general, was evident in its inability to respond with more than verbal protests to the 1975-76 economic depression, brought on by the government's so-called shock plan...
...The measure was Draconian, by any test of 20Sept/Oct 1983 union freedom, but it left the basic structure of the Chilean labor movement intact...
...5. The pro-government movement was known as the Union of Chilean Workers (UNTRACH...
...Communist Party leader Lufs Corvaln, speaking on Radio Moscow's program directed to Chile, praised those who carried out the action for "daring and effectiveness...
...Chile-Amirica, Nos...
...POLITICAL COMMITTEE OF UNITY: A recent attempt by four of the five main branches of the Socialist Party to reunify the party...
...I quit fighting...
...The DINA raids directed at the Communist Party's leadership came several weeks before the visit to Chile of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, during which he praised the Pinochet government for human rights improvements...
...But by 1977, it was the unions that became 22Sept/Oct 1983 a a. 0 Pinochet's Army, Santiago, August 1983...
...The plan dictated the near-total restructuring of the nation's unions and the total replacement of existing leadership...
...There is a strong, and at times disquieting Copyright 1983 by John Dinges feeling of ddjk vu in Chile these days...
...Union members fell roughly into four categories: 300,000 each in civil service unions, white collar and peasant unions, and 200,000 in the blue collar unions...
...Significantly, the principle of the workers' right to join unions was never questioned in official statements...
...The principal problem of the Left is not its strength-that is a given," said Gazmuri...
...Pinochet attended with all the honors of head of state-and a photo taken in the cathedral that day of the scowling dictator with dark glasses and folded arms became more than any other the logotype of the regime of terror that was to come...
...Most of those released were forced into exile and other Chilean dissidents who left the country on their own accord were banned from reentering the country...
...The labor plan fit the anti-union fantasies of the free market ideologues in control of the economy, but politically it was to backfire...
...As each detail of the pending law was revealed during 1977 and 1978, the still divided union groups spoke out with increasing vehemence...
...As of mid-1983, there were three basic unity tendencies on the Left...
...The most prominent victims were Bernardo Leighton, a Christian Democratic leader wounded in Rome in 1975, and Orlando Letelier, Allende's foreign minister, killed a year later in Washington, D.C...
...ernment in an April 1974 declaration called "Country of Brothers," the first public document to criticize the ruling junta...
...The minuscule United Workers Federation, affiliated with the Christian-oriented CLAT, was a fifth union group...
...PRODEN (NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECT): Formed in March 1983 as a group of 17 centerright and right-wing leaders from the PDC, PN and labor to urge Pinochet to speed up his timetable for elections...
...One of the first military pronouncements after the coup said, "Chilean workers, the armed forces will respect your rights...
...The sights, sounds and smells, even the drab, smoggy Santiago winter, are reminiscent of the last days of Allende, and the unavoidable temptation is to describe these events 10 years later as the last days of Pinochet...
...Disappearances ended early in the year and DINA chief Contreras was forced to resign in November, largely due to pressures applied by the Carter Administration...
...Three years later, they returned to us a dismantled party, a leftist movement thrown back 30 years and compafiero Allende dead in La Moneda...
...Left-Wing Opposition The Left parties of Chile have gone through a tortuous process of surviving, reconstituting and defining their approach to the dictatorship and class and party alliances...
...The most hard hit parties were the Socialists, who lost almost their entire in-country leadership twice between 1974 and 1976...
...Before that, she was an investigative reporter digging at the regime's human rights scandals and ingeniously finding loopholes in the government-imposed control of the press to write and broadcast her stories...
...Its major function was to provide legal help to fired workers...
...the Pinochet plebiscite victory made it seem to some leftists that there was no other way...
...It should be noted, however, that the result was the reverse of the old union-party relationship in Chile, in which the party led and its union militants were expected to act as conduits of the party line to the rank-and-file...
...Predictably, the main political disputes involved the role of the Communist Party, the democracy of internal party structures and the use of violence...
...Union elections were prohibited, union leaders were to remain in place and those who were unable to continue in their posts (e...
...MIR was responsible for a series of spectacular urban guerrilla strikes in 1974 (directing its use of violence at institutions such as banks and purposely avoiding harm to people), but the military government was able to penetrate MIR's clandestine apparatus by the end of the year, reducing MIR activity to defense of its own structures...
...Within the united workers organization, elections were of national significance and as hotly contested among the Communist, Socialist and Christian Democratic candidates as government elections...
...is not one law more or one law less, or this or "We have reached the moment to stand up that modification, but it is much more pro- and say: Basta...
...Disappearances were running at 30 to 40 a month for the first 10 months...
...Once viewed as a sometime ally, the Church has become a full partner in opposing and resisting military rule...
...Gradually, as opposition to Pinochet grew to include those outside the Left, the Church's function as a safe meeting place and an institutional shield for self-help activities took on equal, then more importance than the human rights activities...
...Our defeat has been much greater than we ever believed," said former mining minister Sergio Bitar, one of those shipped off to Dawson Island in the Straits of Magellan to begin two years of imprisonment with other top UP officials The toll bears repeating: approximately 5,000 people were executed in the first two months after the coup, according to a U.S...
...Perhaps the most striking to one who watched the unravelling of the Allende government and the subsequent years of secret police savagery is 15NACLA Report the phenomenon of people of diverse political stripes marching together, their former bitter antagonisms suppressed if not forgotten...
...veloped and oppressed us, that contradicts our In the document, known as the "Vow of El nature as Chileans and workers, that has tried Salvador," the miners said, "we leaders have to asphyxiate us with weapons such as fear and begun to conclude definitively that our problem coercion in order to envelop us even more...
...In addition to human rights work, the two institutions provided what Precht called a"place of encounter" for leftists, Catholics and people who had been politically opposed to Allende...
...The transition might take one or two years, and involve a harsh military crackdown, but the Christian Democrats were convinced that Frei would be the inevitable candidate for a return to civilian rule...
...Congress, Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973...
...The initial leadership role of the unions in the current opposition movement appears as the natural culmination of 10 years, in which they received the strategic support of the Catholic Church, the leftist political parties, and, finally, the Christian Democratic Party...
...Forced by necessity to make their own national policy decisions during times when the leftist parties were incapable of formulating detailed policy guidelines or even reaching official decisions inside the country, the unions found it natural to act on their own by 1983...
...The MAPU split into two factions in 1973 known as MAPU-Garreton (a more radical grouping) and MAPU-Obrero-Campesino (MAPU-OC, a more moderate party...
...The strategy, according to one account, was to create "a network of social organizations defended by popular forces trained to stand up to the dictatorship and prepare for mass insurrection...
...The Nicaraguan experience made revolution by insurrection seem possible...
...Also, U.S...
...The union had just elected as national president a young Christian Democrat, Rodolfo Seguel...
...This issue, and the previous one, provide a documentary account of the breakup of the Socialist Party...
...Dfaz Estrada talked of worker-management committees to discuss factory policy and promised profit-sharing for workers...
...Others were Christian Democrats who had opposed the coup...
...In the Lota Schwager coalfields near the city of Concepci6n, for example, six of the seven leaders elected were longtime Communist militants...
...Labor Minister Nicanor Dfaz Estrada, an Air Force general, was one of several officers in the government who were convinced that the regime needed an organized, populist approach Cardinal Raul Silva Enriquez...
...In other unions, the Group of 10 and CNS ran joint slates, dividing the candidates 23NACLA Report half and half...
...the Coordinadora Nacional Sindical (CNS), with links to the Socialist International and the World Trade Union Federation, and whose strength was in the leftist textile and coal mining unions...
...The Communist Party, which during the Allende government was the foremost advocate of non-violence and the chief critic of the MIR's use of urban guerrilla tactics, considered the plebiscite a sign that no 24Sept/Oct 1983 .L 0 8 "e Copper workers' leader Rodolfo Seguel, September 1983...
...By establishing a system by which the unions could reorganize, but blocking them from achieving their specifically union goals of increased pay and improved working conditions, the law made inevitable what later happened...
...56-57 (August-October 1979), p. 19...
...Opposition activity faded as the center-right of the Christian Democratic Party moved to a timid "loyal opposition" to accommodate what they expected to be nine more years with Pinochet...
...The risk of working for the Peace Committee was real, and those who gravitated there were of three kinds: religious workers, activists seeking an outlet for opposition to the regime, and people who had personally suffered the loss of family members...
...In contrast to the almost total decapitation of the leftist parties, the unions retained between 50% and 75% of their pre-coup leadership, according to a study by Chilean labor researcher Gonzalo Falabella...
...He concluded that the economic results of the bargaining process were "negative," but said that even more important was the "mobilizing effect" on the union movement and the displacement of "yellow" leadership...
...While the UP literature envisioned a social coalition attracting the immense majority of Chileans, he said, in practice, the UP "did not carry out a policy of concrete alliances" with non-leftist political parties and potential social and ideological allies...
...The Chilean government acknowledges 10,000 exiles...
...The net result of the plan," Farabella said, "was that the four main union bodies.., finally united for the first time into a national command for the defense of union rights...
...The personal, ideological fights of the Left coalesced into two divergent strategies to overturn the government...
...After the initial months of mass persecution of leftists, the union leaders were able to resume their union duties at the plant level...
...2 DINA eliminated about 1,000 people, according to the conservative count of the Catholic Church, about two-thirds of whom were "disappeared...
...CUT leaders were hounded, imprisoned, killed or exiled in much the same way as those of the leftist parties...
...6. See Gonzalo Farabella, "Labour in Chile under the Junta, 1973-1979," University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies Working Papers...
...By recognizing the plant unions' and national union federations' right to exist, the Decree Law became "a vital resource legitimizing the reorganization process" of the unions over the next six years, Falabella said.' The once powerful union movement had been stopped dead and set back perhaps a decade, but it had not been destroyed...
...SOCIALIST CONVERGENCE: Built around many of the parties which shared a common heritage in the left-wing of the PDC in the 1960s, including the IC, MAPU and MAPU-OC, and some sectors of the socialists...
...4 "Our first problem was sheer survival, the second was reorganization and adapting to clandestinity," Jaime Gazmuri, the leader of a small UP party, MAPU-OC, said in an interview in Chile, where he has worked underground for all but three of the last 10 years...
...The Darkest Days The renewed union vitality in 1980 and 1981, however, went virtually unnoticed abroad, as Chile entered its boom years of 8 % growth rates and a feeling, at the beginning of the new decade, that Pinochet could last to its end...
...It would take the collapse of Pinochet's economic boom in 1982 to unite the opposition around that strategy...
...The years 1975-76 were also the time of greatest secret police activity in Chile...
...While some longtime militants were displaced, the major effect of the elections was to rid the unions of the often timid or openly collaborationist leaders installed by the seniority rule of Decree 198, and install a young generation of militant opposition leaders...
...In a book circulated and printed clandestinely MIR leader Andres Pascal Allende in Havana, 1978.NACLA Report in Chile at the time of the June 1983 protests, Gazmuri pinpoints the political error of the UP in its failure to struggle as fiercely for democracy as it struggled for socialism...
...The party formed an informal alliance with the MIR, the Almeyda Socialist faction and Anselmo Sule, leader of the Radical Party in exile...
...Slogans about "liberty," the creation of broad political coalitions to oppose the government (with the most militant openly calling for its ouster), national protests involving literally millions of individual Chileans in simple but acutely effective acts of defiance such as keeping children home from school and permeating the evening air with the din of cooking spoons banging against pots and pans...
...Taking Aim at Labor Until the 1973 coup, Chile's union movement was one of the largest in the world...
...COMMUNIST PARTY-MIR-SECTORS OF RADICALS AND SOCIALISTS: These organizations have come together tactically around the belief that only armed action can remove Pinochet from power...
...Combined with escalating secret police brutality, it was a policy of small carrots and very big sticks...
...The action was crucial...
...The most important of these programs was the labor department inside the Peace Committee and carried over to the Vicariate...
...Debates and Divergent Strategies In the perennial leftist debate over the use of armed struggle, those who opposed it saw the coup as provoked by the elements on the Left that took up arms-or threatened to-before the coup...
...In the 1972 CUT congress, the Communists won 30.9% of the delegates, the Socialists, 26.4 % and the Christian Democrats, 26.1...
...The Christian Democratic Party, led by former President Eduardo Frei, had worked to overthrow Allende and on September 12 issued a statement justifying the military action by charging that Allende had violated the constitution...
...The 68% vote in favor, for all the opposition arguments that the vote had been under the duress of the dictatorship, was a devastating blow to morale...
...FATHERLAND AND LIBERTY (PATRIA Y LIBERTAD): A fascist-terrorist movement begun in 1970 to oppose Allende's election and then his government...
...Over the next three years, the parties were further decimated by the systematic methods of DINA, the centralized secret police set up with technical assistance from the U.S...
...Other estimates are far higher.' Another 7,000 leftists, including almost all of the most visible figures of the UP, left the country after seeking asylum in embassies...
...The Church's traditional reluctance toward working directly with political parties did not apply to unions, which were seen as indispensable intermediary organizations to represent the rights of workers vis-d-vis their more powerful employers...
...He began a revitalization of the rankand-file party organization, defying the junta's ban on party activity...
...There were 10,000 unions representing 1.1 million wage earners, or about 44% of the working population...
...Anti-Union Fantasies With hindsight, it now appears that 1977 was the year the opposition began its arduous road to recovery and unity...
...The most significant of these is that Allende's opponents were not fighting a dictatorship...
...The parties' decision to devote what energy they had to rebuild the unions was one of historic pragmatism...
...The morgue stacked with bodies, the embassies filled with leaders seeking asylum and the mass arrests funneling thousands into the National Stadium and other makeshift political prisons were only the visible signs of the destruction of the Left as a political presence in Chile...
...The committee was a sacrament of the Church-Left encounter...
...Opposition leaders play up the similarities for good political reason: they are seeking to persuade the Chilean military that the vast majority of the same people who asked them to take power in 1973 are now demanding they return to the barracks...
...But some were more substantive and reflected the rethinking of the UP strategy from historical distance...
...g. those in prison, executed or exiled) were ordered replaced according to seniority...
...Larger units, such as national or regional union federations, were excluded from all bargaining activity...
...This Church focus on unions as a strategic priority (second perhaps only to the defense of human rights) during the harsh, early period of the military government coincided with the plan of action of the major leftist parties...
...8. Ibid., p. 19...
...THE RISE OF THE OPPOSITION 1. Jaime Gazmuri cites one study of death rates in Chile showing that 10,000 more people died in 1973 than in a normal year...
...2. See John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp...
...Small Carrots and Big Sticks For the first several years of its rule, the junta tried to co-opt and divide the union movement...
...They saw the end of Allende's socialist experiment as a political defeat, in addition to an act of force...
...CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY (PDC]: Formed in 1957, reached the presidency through Eduardo Frei in 1964-70...
...NATIONAL PARTY (PN): Established in 1966, it represented the most conservative political elements in Chile's traditional party system...
...The problem is the program that it offers...
...It called on Pinochet to resign immediately...
...They were also the only organizations in Chile in which known Communist Party or Socialist Party militants could exercise leadership roles...
...The opposition's discouragement centered on the September 1980 plebiscite engineered by Pinochet to approve a new constitution...
...Thus, in the darkest years of the dictatorship, a close working relationship was born between the Church and the Left, cemented by a mutual interest in human rights and in bolstering the labor movement...
...Many of the issues of the split involved personalities and perhaps are more relevant to a study of exile political behavior...
...Lest that statement sound Pollyanna-ish, it must be added that 10 years of military rule produced the dismemberment of the Popular Unity coalition, and that deep divisions still exist among Chile's many leftist parties...
...In April of this year, the Copper Workers Confederation met in a national congress-appropriately at the Roman Catholic retreat center at Punta de Tralca on the coast...
...Three blocks to the west is the Macul campus of the University of Chile, known 10 years ago as the center of leftist student activity...
...A minority faction dissented in a littlepublished statement, calling the coup the destruction of Chilean democracy...
...with the ability to organize demonstrations and analyze the country's problems in the open," wrote Falabella...
...It was a happy coincidence, the main effect of which was to concentrate opposition efforts and to ensure the survival in strength of the unions-the very actors that later would achieve the breakthrough from passive resistance to mass-based protest...
...The Church hierarchy expressed "moral opposition" to the gov18Sept/Oct 1983 Church-sponsored soup kitchen, Santiago, 1983...
...MIR declared it would organize the masses into clandestine "resistance committees," and projected a popular insurrection against Pinochet in 1974 or 1975...
...It has stressed the importance of developing a democratic approach to socialism...
...The development that led up to today's mass opposition movement is the story of a once seemingly impossible reconciliation among adversaries, the story of a bitterly polarized society groping again for ways to carry out a political struggle among alternative models-basically the tension between socialist and capitalist models of development-without the state-imposed brutality of the past 10 years...
...No strike could last longer than 60 days, at which time the workers had the choice of accepting management's last offer or leaving their jobs...
...the Communists, who lost at least one entire central committee and an irreplaceable party veteran, Victor Dfaz, in 1976...
...Virtually all of the military leaders who advocated populist or corporativist approaches were removed from the inner circle of power around that time...
...the front line of public opposition to the government, their legitimacy guaranteed by Decree Law 198...
...And when the mass protest movement started in 1983, it was the unions that emerged as the leading edge-with the parties playing catch up...
...SANTIAGO-The intersection of Macul and Grecia streets in Santiago is a normally quiet, middle-class neighborhood with a stupendous view of the Andean Cordillera-an unlikely but somewhat symbolic place for the riot that broke out there on June 14, part of the surge of monthly protests against Chile's military dictatorship...
...3. Interview in Chile with a member of the current leadership of the Socialist Party...
...The rules were simple: no one was allowed to use the Church facilities for partisan political activity...
...There, in the working together of Socialists, Communists, Christian Democrats and priests and nuns on behalf of human rights, was the beginning of the political reconciliation expressed so strongly in the 1983 protest coalitions...
...The other leftist opposition strategy, described in March 1981 by APSI, the only aboveground leftist political magazine in Chile, called for the opposition to use every legal opening to organize a mass popular movement and prepare to confront Pinochet with determined, but nonviolent, civil disobedience on a massive scale...
...The toll in human suffering (or "social cost," as it was euphemistically called in Chile) was as high as during the 1982-83 depression, but the reaction was nil by comparison...
...A Place of Encounter" As the Left spent most of its energy on survival, resistance to the increasingly evident totalitarianism of Pinochet arose with fresh force from a new actor: the Roman Catholic Church, led by the archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Raul Silva Henrfquez...
...Ibid...
...The Peace Committee was virtually the only place in Chile where organized activity against the government's repression of the Left could be carried out with a modicum of protection...
...At the other end of the leftist spectrum, the MIR, and Socialists who shared their view, interpreted the coup as a military defeat that could have been avoided with a more militant strategy...
...And it was largely the UP-CUT marriage that gave Allende a credible claim to be "el gobierno de los trabajadores"--the workers' government...
...1 3 In November 1980, a commando of two MIR and two Communist Party members blew up power lines around Santiago...
...They argued that the coup proved the bankruptcy of the so-called parliamentary path to socialism...
...Peace Committee staff members worked out of two crowded mansions owned by the Church just outside of central Santiago...
...The unions moved more and more to identifying the goal of their activity as political change and an end to military rule...
...By the time the law was promulgated in July 1979-taking virtually none of the union objections into account-the union groups were signing joint proclamations condemning the law...
...The Vicariate started publishing its own biweekly news magazine, Solidarity...
...7. Ibid...
...94th Congress, 1st sess., December 5, 1975, p. 40...
...Its members were responsible for most acts of violence against the Allende government and, following the 1973 coup, many merged into Pinochet's new security police, DINA...
...Embassy count kept confidential at the time...
...It began to grumble against military rule in 1974, but didn't move into full opposition until 1977...
...You can't call it a right of workers...
...Until 1976, there was a standing political prisoner population at various concen16Sept/Oct 1983 tration camps of between 2,000 and 3,000...
...and the MIR, whose top leader, Miguel Enrfquez, was killed in a DINA shootout in October 1974, and whose successor, Andr6s Pascal Allende, was forced to flee into exile a year later (although he later returned).' In addition, at least 100,000 people were arrested and held for varying lengths of time and often tortured...
...They were the administrators of defeat.' 2 The 1979 Sandinista victory in Nicaragua also had a major impact on the Chilean Left...
...The target of union protests were the junta's draft versions of a total revision of Chile's labor laws...
...Under new management, the secret police apparatus eased some of the pressure on underground leftist parties, although torture and arbitrary arrests continued...
...1 4 A one-year wave of such urban guerrilla actions followed...
...Most of its ideas were rejected by the military...
...They are the only ones that can "confront the government on all kinds of issues which are at the very basis of the economic and political model of the junta, and they have done so...
...A porter at the gate outside checked the identities of all those entering...
...The problem is that our program failed...
...The Peace Committee, and its successor in 1976, the Vicariate of Solidarity, was the other level of Church opposition...
...Although a "Freiista" and a representative of the party's center-right wing, the combative "Chico" Zaldfvar brought to the office new energy and a determined personal opposition to Pinochet...
...The insurrection did not, of course, come off, but MIR probably gained a certain degree of popular esteem among the poor as the most visible challenge to their military oppressors...
...He did not disguise his hostility to unions, declaring soon after taking office, "Strikes hurt the entire society, nobody receives legitimate benefit from them...
...In 1979, the UP ceased to be an element of unity," a Socialist Party leader said in an interview in Santiago...
...7 A strong Socialist-Communist majority was in control throughout the decade prior to the coup, and CUT was a mainstay in the Popular Unity's mass base of support...
...The party had important leaders on all sides of the political spectrum...
...They enjoyed the protections of a wideopen democracy, full civil and political liberties, in their struggle against an elected government whose political program they rejected...
...The influence was in two directions," said a priest who worked there for five years...
...Its most odious provision set conditions for strikes...
...DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE: Announced on August 7, 1983 by Gabriel Valdes, the PDC's head, it includes five parties: Democratic Right, Social Democrats (actually a very small party known as the Left Radical Party, PIR, which broke from the PR), PDC, PR and some sectors of the Socialist Party...
...and the country's largest single union, the Copper Workers Confederation, whose leaders were kept under direct government control because of copper's strategic importance to the economy...
...Called for an immediate "effort [to restore] democracy...
...The Socialist and Communist Parties returned to a strategy more consistent with their own histories: seeking a rapprochement with the Christian Democrats in an "Anti-fascist Front" and promoting grassroots organizing around bread-and-butter survival issues, such as union rights and severance pay for those fired from their jobs as unemployment soared...
...We asked them to make sure that the groups using Church facilities for meetings were politically pluralist and avoided partisanship," the priest said...
...During the Pinochet government, however, the Church set up programs to ensure the survival of all existing unions-without discriminating between leftist and anti-communist unions...
...A Strategic Priority Perhaps the most important area of Church opposition activity was in its support of labor unions...
...By 1977, the Vicariate's expanded work with unions warranted the creation of a separate Pastoral Vicariate of Workers, which also provided training for union leaders at a time when the government was trying to create a subservient, pro-government union movement...
...A significant measure of the party's weakness was its inability to mount a successful protest against the expulsion of its top leader...
...Most of the leftist parties and their militants were too terrorized and shellshocked by the military blitzkrieg to carry out such activities, even if there had been the political will to do so...
...It included some of Allende's major opponents...
...The junta forced the closing of the ecumenical Peace Committee, but Cardinal Silva responded by immediately using most of the same staff to found the Vicariate of Solidarity under entirely Catholic Church auspices...
...Organizationally and ideologically, the damage was even deeper and harder to repair...
...One month after the coup, Cardinal Silva cosponsored, with Protestant and Jewish clergy, the Committee for Cooperation for Peace to provide legal and humanitarian assistance to the thousands of relatives of political prisoners and exiles...
...Management had the right to begin to contract scab labor to replace strikers after 30 days...
...The last time I had seen Chileans put riot police into retreat was almost exactly 10 years earlier, in the Chilean winter of 1973, when demonstrators against Allende's government skirmished with police from barricades and trenches on the Alameda, Santiago's main thoroughfare...
...The congress, representing the union's 22,000 members, voted to approve a 25NACLA Report document presented by the El Salvador mine, found: [the problem] is the entire economic, which called for a national strike led by the cop- social, cultural and political system that has enper miners on May 11...
...With the slogan "MIR Does Not Seek Asylum," the already underground organization began preparations to reverse the coup militarily...
...According to official statistics, 2,574 contracts were negotiated in 1980, involving over 600,000 workers...
...On the side of the Church, it began to see its work less as proselytizing, more as service...
...Church organizations became known as the "paraguas"--the umbrella...
...In November 1975, a group of priests and nuns, including Peace Committee activists, were revealed to have arranged medical treatment for underground MIR leaders and assisted them in evading the secret police...
...MOVEMENT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY LEFT (MIR): Formed in 1964, remained outside the UP, pushing it to define a more radical approach to the transition to socialism based on mass political action and strength, but supportive of the government against attacks from the Right...
...It was an era of crypto-fascist rhetoric about creating mass movements in favor of the government and a tripartite government-business-labor alliance to solve the country's economic problems...
...The factional dispute between exiled Socialist leaders Clodomiro Almeyda and Carlos Altamirano was particularly intenseits bitterness reflected in a statement by respected Socialist leader Aniceto Rodriguez to the exile publication Chile Amirica: Our compaineros in Chile remember that in 1970 [Almeyda and Altamirano] inherited a victorious party, a popular movement that was united, and a socialist militant who had become president of the republic...
...It continued the suspension of the rights to collective bargaining and strikes, and permitted unions to meet only for informational purposes and only with explicit police permission...
...The Guardian (London), March 29, 1981...
...119-144, for an account of DINA's founding and organization...
...Farabella, "Labour in Chile...
...Communist casualties in May 1976, including the Vfctor Dfaz arrest and disappearance are described in Vicarfa de la Solidaridad, Ddnde Estdn?, Vol...
...The unions, therefore, became virtually the only surviving, leftist-influenced organizations allowed to operate at the grassroots level...
...Following the coup, the view that the opposition problem was essentially political rather than military led the UP parties to conceive their task as rebuilding and protecting grassroots organizations, especially labor unions, and pursuing an alliance with the Christian Democratic Party...
...1973-1983 All the parties of the UP and the MIR were outlawed after the coup...
...Patria y Libertad ceased functioning as an independent entity...
...And they did...
...The current number of exiles is estimated at 70,000 by the Catholic Church and the Chilean Human Rights Commission...
...On taking power, the military junta aimed its destructive power at the CUT as the political underpinning of the Allende government...
...Not surprisingly, the economic gains were small, but union leaders found they were again working with a vital, energetic movement...
...It broke down prejudices on both sides, including my own," he said, referring to his former anticommunism and opposition to Allende...
...Several more blocks away is the National Stadium, a coliseum-like edifice used by the Chilean military to house 10,000 political prisoners rounded up in the days following the overthrow of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973...
...For several hours that afternoon in June, the crowds of students and roughly dressed youths from the nearby slums held the police at bay, ignoring clouds of tear gas and occasional volleys of automatic rifle fire over their heads...
...After the elections, collective bargaining began...
...I was resigned to living the rest of my life in a dictatorship...
...The idea of armed resistance against Pinochet, however, was largely an element of propaganda outside of Chile...
...The years of leftist underground activity loosened that relationship and led to what is likely to be a permanent autonomy in party-union interaction...
...9. La Tercera (Santiago), March 28, 1976...
...The Reverend Christian Precht, who was named to head the committee in late 1974 and presided over its growth from a staffof25 to 200 by 1977, said the Catholic Church had become an outlet for opposition on two levels...
...The PDC and the PN were first suspended, and then outlawed in 1977...
...2 (Santiago: Vicarfa de la Solidaridad, 1979...
...Inside Chile, aside from the occasional graffiti on street walls, there was little sign that the grassroots "resistance committees" were operative...
...The Group of 10 collaboration was brief, until Dfaz Estrada's ouster in March 1976 and the end of such populist blandishments...
...peaceful way could be elaborated to get rid of Pinochet...
...Young men parked in cars across the street muttered into walkie talkies...
...Twice, a charge by riot police to retake the street was driven back by the protesters' countercharge and a hail of rocks...
...They were the darkest days we went through," said a 33-year-old opposition journalist who dropped out of political reporting in 1980...
...Unions are the only ones...
...Nonbelievers began to see the Church as their own house, where they could meet and work...
...MULTIPARTIDARIA ["MANY-PARTY FORMATION"]: Issued its first public declaration on March 14, 1983, shortly after a major policy statement by Pinochet attacking civilian politicians...
...The opposition story also establishes Chile's labor unions in a vanguard role, upstaging the political parties, at least for the time being, and brings a new actor to the fore-the Roman Catholic Church...
...Although the advent of the Chicago Boys drove the Christian Democratic union leaders into opposition, the junta had come close to realizing its first goal: to neutralize the influence of political parties in the unions and to divide the national labor movement into competing, ideologically hostile camps...
...and abroad, DINA chief General Manuel Contreras had mounted Operation Condor, an international assassination apparatus to attack Chilean exiles...
...Despite the near impossibility of mounting a successful job action, the unions put great effort into the bargaining as a way to revitalize rank-and-file participation in the unions...
...Virtually all of the latter two categories and many of the first were UP sympathizers or members of leftist parties...
...In 1976, as the junta's purge of dissident scholars from the university was al19NACLA Report most complete, the Church formed the Academy for Christian Humanism, with a wide variety of opposition-oriented research activities and its own monthly political magazine, Analysis...
...Centrist and Right-Wing Opposition to Pinochet GROUP OF 24: Officially known as the Constitutional Study Group, this organization of conservative and moderate political leaders and some academics, was formed in 1978 to present ideas on a new political constitution for Chile...
...The Catholic Church, whose hierarchy had added fuel to the anti-UP bonfire with a hardedged manifesto opposing Allende's educational reforms several months before the coup, lent the Pinochet government legitimacy by going ahead with religious ceremonies in the national cathedral to celebrate Chile's independence day, September 18...
...Although several conservative bishops clearly had welcomed the military coup, a strong majority of the Chilean Bishops' Conference followed Cardinal Silva's lead along the path of increasing resistance and opposition...
...Collective bargaining was suspended and strikes banned, hundreds of plant union leaders were rounded up in the sweeps of known leftists in 1973...
...It fiercely attacked the "politicization" of the labor movement, outlawing the CUT on the charge that it had become the tool of political parties...
...They included hundreds of soup kitchens providing meals to poverty stricken children, and organizations of unemployed men and women seeking jobs or participating in cooperative handicraft projects to earn money...
...Its conservative side won increasing control over the party during the UP government, and it openly supported the coup (although a few members dissented...
...198, issued in December 1973, established a set of regulations for unions that remained in force until 1979...
...the Council of Private Employees of Chile, which once formed part of the Group of 10 and followed a cautious, unimaginative leadership...
...The remaining delegates belonged to the smaller Left parties...
...The military rulers always justified their attacks on union leaders as part of its "clean-up" (limpieza) of the leftist parties, rather than as attacks on unions as such...
...It was recently reported that the fifth branch, headed by former Secretary General Clodomiro Almeyda who supported the PC-MIR position, has joined this unity attempt...
Vol. 17 • September 1983 • No. 5
