Chile: the Dream Bides Time
Schesch, Pat Garrett and Adam
CHILE: the Dream Bides Time PAT GARRETT and ADAM SCHESCH More than half a million people turned out in Santiago last September 4 to celebrate the third anniversary of Salvadore Allende's election...
...The civil war had already begun...
...In this way, the UP redistributed approximately twelve per cent of the national income in favor of salaried workers...
...The eyewitness accounts of the bodies floating in the Mapocho, the hundreds of bodies in the Santiago morgues, the executions of persons rounded up in their neighborhood or place of work, provoked international investigations...
...Second, it forged common interests between sympathizers and opponents of the government...
...It has declared the parties of the Left illegal and dissolved those of the Right...
...However, what these forces have lost is a major battle, not the war...
...These were the last and decisive preparations for the coup, which followed within a few days...
...This means, for example, that two pounds of lamb chops cost nearly one-sixth of the basic minimum monthly wage...
...In addition, the Allende regime almost completely eliminated the shacks and hovels in the squatter settlements, replacing them with prefabricated cabins with electricity, running water, sewage facilities, and roads...
...The premise of the constitutional amendment was that corporations had a right to a fair return on their investments, defined at twelve per cent annually...
...The social crises had reached the point where minor shifts no longer mattered...
...Overall, by the end of 1972, it had expropriated 3,282 estates, twenty-one per cent of the country's productive agricultural land...
...However, the decision to proceed with the coup had been made...
...This split, combined with the survival of the Left, portends an increasingly unstable political situation in Chile...
...These reports received little publicity in the American press...
...We were released because of the efforts of our friends and family in the United States, who mobilized a large campaign at the University of Wisconsin and among Wisconsin Senators and Congressmen to pressure both the U.S...
...After a five-hour ground and air battle, the presidential palace fell, and Allende was killed...
...Thus did the President say farewell to the people of Chile...
...Thus is the junta undoing agrarian reform and the socialization of industry...
...The UP had grown in strength because its program included many social welfare measures to improve living standards immediately: • It initiated a free milk program for pregnant and lactating women, and for children up to the age of fifteen...
...The Popular Unity government, using the same law, expropriated more than 1,000 estates in the first year alone...
...The headline and the declaration accompanying it indicated that the Allende government knew a coup was imminent...
...This highlights the need for agrarian reform...
...The top one per cent of the population received ten per cent of the national income, or sixty-nine times that of the lowest ten per cent...
...banks when Allende entered office, only $30 million was approved...
...As a result of this campaign we did not suffer the fate of two other Americans who were executed...
...In the early days of the coup, the air force authorized the bombing and strafing of industries and housing projects...
...Then the telephone calls started coming in from the contacts we had built up during the nearly three years we lived in Chile...
...As a result, an estimated thirty per cent of the buses stood idle, and copper production increases were held down...
...The Christian Democrats had some popular base among industrial workers...
...Poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and infant mortality were disproportionately concentrated in the rural areas...
...The answer given by the American press is that the coup—and its timing—was caused by the failure of the Unidad Popular...
...Adam was beaten during his first interrogation...
...We immediately turned on our two radios...
...Chile would compensate the corporations by considering the net worth of the investments, computing the legitimate return on these investments, and subtracting the excess profits from the compensation...
...But some groups are quite content with the changes...
...It turned out that the major copper corporations had parlayed an initial investment of $3.5 million into mining and smelting operations whose book value was $150 million in 1968...
...When the issue affected the industry as a whole, plant representatives met with the government, whose representatives had the majority voice...
...He hoped it would not come to that, but...
...Then, in 1973, the fascist group, the Fatherland and Liberty, issued a document which explained how technicians, professionals, construction and industrial owners, merchants, and students could all sabotage and harass the Unidad Popular...
...A friend called to say, "The coup is on...
...Now it is promising austerity...
...copper companies...
...The Chilean Left will bide its time...
...The printing presses rolled...
...When the military overthrew the Allende government, the young married couple was held in prison for a week...
...We became acutely aware of this shortly after our baby was born, when the police found 25,000 baby bottle nipples dumped into a stream...
...The offensive did not win over the workers...
...A typical plan called for architects and civil engineers to design buildings and bridges with deliberate overestimates of weight capacity so that terrible accidents could occur...
...The junta must contend with the consequences of economic warfare...
...But at home, the Right was in trouble...
...They had won twenty-eight per cent of the vote in the national confederation of unions' elections in May 1972, as opposed to the UP's seventy per cent...
...The elite had partially lost control over the industries, the banks, and the great estates, but it still controlled distribution...
...CHILE: the Dream Bides Time PAT GARRETT and ADAM SCHESCH More than half a million people turned out in Santiago last September 4 to celebrate the third anniversary of Salvadore Allende's election as president of Chile...
...Chile owed the Cerro Corporation $36 million, but Anaconda owed Chile $68 million, and Kennecott owed Chile $310 million...
...Frei made pro-coup statements in an important August interview...
...It has raised the official prices of basic necessities to the level which prevailed in the black market as a result of the truck owners' strike...
...The plan was for the economy to begin to produce for the majority of the Chilean population instead of for a small elite allied with international corporations...
...The opposition, like the Popular Unity, had a strategy...
...The Christian Democratic Party, whose progressive politicians were squelched under the increasingly right-wing leadership of Eduardo Frei, implicitly and explicitly approved the military intervention...
...Christian Democrat and Unidad Popular supporters alike died there...
...Furthermore, there were clear indications that Chile's major economic problems were on their way to solution...
...First, it generated massive popular pressure to expand the social area of the economy...
...Unemployment was 8.5 per cent in the year before Allende became president...
...Even within the party leadership there has been a split...
...One might think these are just spontaneous suicidal actions...
...Few of the known leaders have been arrested, killed, or driven into embassies...
...The heart of the UP program was to lay the basis for a socialist economy...
...corporations cooperated with the blockade in another way...
...The junta has also announced that farms "illegally" expropriated will be returned to their former owners...
...There is no doubt that the forces of political, social, and economic democracy have suffered a major defeat in Chile...
...Maternal leave was provided with full pay to 180 days...
...Consequently, the Left has the organizational and military capacity to initiate resistance to the junta...
...Workers, even in small and medium sized industries, wanted the government to nationalize them...
...Workers' participation, and its supporting educational programs, had two general effects...
...Vastly expanded day care facilities were provided in both factories and residential areas...
...Finally, sectors of the military had declared their independence from civilian authority, established entire zones under their control, and made forays throughout the country, ostensibly in search of illegal arms...
...Today the Left represents the overwhelming majority of the country's blue-collar and agricultural workers, along with substantial proportions of the country's white collar, self-employed, and professional groups...
...We could not find tires in any of the normal outlets, so we finally turned to the classified ads of EI Mercurio, the right-wing newspaper, to find a seller...
...The result was economic warfare between the two camps...
...It was a seller's market...
...The junta has created a new organization with the same initials which represents the "common interests" of workers, owners, and managers—a standard corporate state formula of traditional fascism...
...Finally, the workers maintained a union structure completely independent of the participation structure...
...Shortly before September 22, the day we left Chile, he stated that the eradication of Marxism might require the execution or imprisonment of ten to twenty per cent of the Chilean population—some 450,000 to 900,000 adults...
...Special training courses opened educational and occupational opportunities to women in these centers...
...Universities brought extension courses to factories...
...The Frei administration had expropriated 1,364 estates in the six years ending in September 1970...
...The Popular Unity government made one of its gravest errors when it failed to take control of distribution...
...Government and U.S...
...When nationwide congressional elections were held in March 1973 the Left received forty-four per cent of the popular vote...
...We got the word at breakfast...
...The minimum wage provided bare subsistence...
...Every morning, all over the city, the bodies of soldiers were found stripped to their underwear, their uniforms, arms, and ammunition stolen by the resistance...
...The invisible blockade by the U.S...
...Three years ago, the armed forces were a unified, cohesive, professional force under the control of traditional elements...
...For it was this same strength that inspired the Allende government supporters, marching through Santiago on September 4, 1973, to chant a new slogan: "El Pueblo Unido, Jamas Sera Vancido," "The People, United, Will Never Be Beaten...
...We were stunned that it had all happened so fast, but the coup itself was no surprise...
...However, the military junta has publicly declared that the parties of the Left are "intact...
...Instead of pursuing the matter in Chilean courts, as the constitutional amendment provided, the copper companies began international litigation in Europe and in the United States...
...The stations of the Right were playing martial music and rejoicing...
...There were approximately 30,000 "industries" in Chile, but 260 large firms dominated such a high proportion of them that they controlled production and prices for the economy as a whole...
...This required agrarian reform, and the nationalization of natural resources, monopoly industries, and banks...
...This meant that the Left was almost certain to win a popular majority in the presidential elections of 1976...
...This could be accomplished only through the participation of the workers in economic decisions...
...When we listened to the military broadcasting network, we got the impression that it had been a "clean" coup—that there was little if any resistance within the armed forces and that civilian resistance was so ineffectual as to be suicidal...
...Pensions were increased to compensate the retired for the entire rise in the cost of living...
...We personally experienced the reality of the repression...
...Repression goes far beyond search and seizure operations...
...All this may sound strange to anyone who has read only the American press...
...While the black market was the principal weapon of the opposition, Congress and the courts were not idle...
...Today, the Left's organizational strength also includes groups in neighborhoods, farms, and factories which can carry out a wide variety of resistance tasks under widely differing circumstances...
...university volunteers taught adult literacy programs...
...The Christian Democrats insisted that factories should not be returned to former owners...
...This political strategy was working when the coup changed everything...
...If the United States does not intervene with massive economic assistance, the Chilean economy will collapse...
...Immediately after the coup, the junta promised paradise...
...Why did the opposition, which was the "majority" (fifty-four per cent of the vote in March 1973) not wait to see the outcome of the presidential elections of 1976...
...But resistance justifies repression, and the repression itself has been fierce...
...If it survived the winter, the economy would begin to improve, and political support for the Left would increase even more rapidly...
...Workers' participation at the plant level was based on the general assembly, plus committees for special problem areas...
...The junta has abolished traditional democratic forms and political liberties...
...The junta has declared it will respect the gains workers made under the Allende administration, but the new regime has frozen wages, despite galloping inflation...
...Allende had been elected president in September 1970 with 36.2 per cent of the popular vote...
...The Christian Democrats joined the united opposition in voting a "Congressional Resolution" which maintained that the government had gone beyond the law...
...When Allende was overthrown, there remained not a single farm which could be expropriated without going beyond the existing legislation...
...The largest, a combined delegation of the International Association of Democratic Jurists, the International Federation of Human Rights, and the Movement of Catholic Jurists, all from Western Europe, issued a report verifying earlier accounts...
...An objective analysis indicated that the Chilean winter of 1973 (June to September) would be the most difficult period the government would face...
...It is not surprising, therefore, that the black market dollar has plunged to about half its pre-coup value...
...Santiago was flooded with leaflets urging people to turn in foreigners, who were described as having come to Chile to kill Chileans...
...When we were arrested four days after the coup, we were brought to this same Academy for preliminary questioning...
...People might want to change the government, but not at the cost of massive destruction and terrorism...
...In this context, the calls of the opposition for military intervention became increasingly desperate...
...Under the UP, many families had the first vacation of their lives...
...that industries which had not been definitively and legally nationalized would also be returned...
...The Allende regime conducted its agrarian reform program under legislation passed during the previous Christian Democratic government...
...As a consequence, agricultural production declined...
...On one occasion a group, which a guard said numbered thirty-seven persons, began singing...
...Government bills were gutted of their revenue sections to such an extent that, by 1973, income covered only fifteen per cent of expenditures...
...It has closed the national congress and municipal governments...
...Workers had the majority voice on purely plant issues...
...No other Chilean government in recent times had increased its popular support in any midterm election...
...The coup was caused by the successes of the government, not by its failures...
...Copper was nationalized according to Chilean law...
...Two out of three Chileans live at the poverty line or below, but only one-third had voted for the Left parties...
...As a result of three years in government, the Left has become stronger...
...abortive coup on June 29...
...The blockade was possible because Chile is a debtor nation...
...This was a permanent guarantee that the government, as "owner," could not ride roughshod over the interests of the workers in any particular industry...
...Exactly one week later, on September 11, the Communist morning newspaper El Sigio ran a banner headline: "Everyone to his battle station...
...Reaction to vigorous agrarian reform was virulent...
...In his three years as head of government, it averaged 3.5 per cent...
...Agrarian reform was a long-term solution to one of Chile's basic problems—paying out hard currency to import foodstuffs...
...In residential areas, resistance continued mainly at night...
...Thereafter, tensions had been mounting during the forty-seven days of strikes by employers and professional people...
...Commercial fishing boats caught quantities of whiting, and educational campaigns sold it to a public not used to eating fish...
...Today, they are riddled by purges, resignations, arrests, executions, insubordination, and desertions...
...Yet the copper companies challenged the legality of nationalization...
...The goal was to win over other sectors of Chile's poor by carrying out a broad program of economic and social change to improve the lot of the majority and lay the basis for a socialist economy...
...When we were arrested, our academic research files aroused suspicion, and we were threatened with death by firing squad...
...The invisible blockade was paralleled by a domestic offensive revolving primarily around the black market, which was made possible because the demand for goods surpassed production...
...When they lost their cases in foreign courts, the companies embarked on programs of economic blackmail...
...The objective of the invisible blockade was to make Chileans' lives more difficult and turn them against the Allende government...
...The leading politicians of the Right had been in contact with their counterparts in the armed forces for some time...
...But it is the major union confederation which has been a special target...
...The traditional elite with its foreign allies retained control of other parts...
...We had no choice but to pay five times the official price for tires...
...The root of the instability is economic...
...That is, the social and political tensions, economic chaos, rampant inflation, and the so-called "paralysis" of the country were caused by Allende government policy...
...It was the biggest election victory celebration in Chilean history...
...In short, it must govern Chile in the face of overwhelming odds...
...The Left was growing in numbers and in organizational strength...
...U.S...
...It has closed down the newspapers, magazines, and radio stations of the I^eft, and censors those of the Right...
...It must maintain industrial production, although workers sabotaged plants or the armed forces destroyed them during the coup...
...The junta has dissolved the 800,000 member CUT, the Chilean equivalent of the AFL-CIO, and the principal base of the popular United Parties...
...Massive vaccination campaigns were conducted, mobile health teams sent throughout the country, and clinics set up in densely populated residential areas...
...Only one station remained to broadcast Allende's final message...
...Destruction and death befell Unidad Popular and opposition sympathizers alike if they were poor...
...For example, the government appointed the plant manager, but the workers could reject him at any time and force the government to appoint another...
...Three years ago, the organizational strength of the Left was in orthodox trade unions and parties geared to electoral struggle...
...In industrial zones, resistance was a holding operation designed to permit the sabotage of the plants, the transfer of arms and food supplies to nearby housing projects, and the escape of key political and union leaders...
...They refused to sell spare parts to keep U.S.-made machines running...
...It must placate salaried people even though it refused to adjust wages to cover inflation and raised the prices on all basic necessities...
...The country earned this money by selling copper, and the nationalization of the copper industry was a keystone in the Popular Unity's economic program...
...Within the military itself there was armed resistance to the coup...
...Not a single industry, large or small, closed down during the great strikes of truck owners, merchants, distributors, doctors, lawyers, and engineers in October 1972 and September 1973...
...UP proposed selective salary hikes which exceeded the rate of inflation for the lowest paid workers, were equal to inflation for the majority of workers, and lower than the inflation for the best paid workers...
...It was in these nationalized industries that the Unidad Popular ran some of its most innovative programs...
...Several important liberals, including two of the party's former presidents, Renan Duenteadba and Rodamiro Tomes, have broken party discipline, openly criticized the junta, and voluntarily defended Unidad Popular leaders...
...We were released after a week in the infamous Santiago Soccer Stadium prison...
...Congress rejected the government-proposed legislation to curb speculation...
...Civilian resistance occurred in the major areas of industrial concentration and in the predominantly working-class residential areas of Santiago...
...State Department and the Chilean junta...
...corporations was a key part of this strategy...
...The objectives of agrarian reform, then, were to make the country self-sufficient in food production and to guarantee a decent standard of living to food producers...
...But the stations of the Left were going off the air...
...Yet the policemen must return home every night to the very same housing projects and shantytowns that other police units terrorized by day...
...But what has gone completely unreported is a statement by General Gustavo Leigh, representative of the air force to the military junta...
...But it makes sense in the light of Unidad Popular (UP) strategy, which was based on the assumption that socialism is good for the majority of the Chilean people...
...Chilean negotiators were told in Washington that the blockade would be lifted when Chile agreed to compensate the nationalized U.S...
...It must control the lucrative black market, which has outlived its political function...
...Former owners are indeed reclaiming their former properties...
...The police force is in the worst shape of all...
...The stations of the Left were reading last minute instructions to government supporters...
...It must maintain agricultural production even though seed and fertilizer arrived too late for the spring planting because of the truck owners' strikes...
...The Allende administration simply omitted the last step—monopoly industries remained nationalized...
...There is an alternative explanation which fits the facts much better...
...in practice, seventy-five per cent of the people received less than a decent living wage...
...Allende's opposition was running scared and could not wait for the presidential elections of 1976...
...Our personal experience trying to buy tires revealed the rapacity of the black market...
...Since the coup, the popular base of the Christian Democrats has shown its opposition to the military junta, while the party's leaders, including Eduardo Frei, are expressing their approval...
...Vast agricultural estates covered seventy-five per cent of the land, but they produced only sixty per cent of the food and employed only forty per cent of the labor...
...The UP sought to nationalize these monopoly industries, so as to create an economy which would produce for the majority of the population...
...His words were somber, made more dramatic by the muffled sounds of explosions and gunfire in the background...
...But the expectation was that production would rise once the estates were all expropriated and the peasants learned to organize themselves and work cooperatively...
...These and other economic measures became known as the "invisible blockade...
...It has the second highest per-capita debt in the world—the total debt was $2.4 billion in 1970...
...For example, Chile could not buy spare parts for buses or mining machinery, even though it offered to pay cash on the line before delivery...
...The tactics of the strikers turned off some anti-Allendeists...
...Previous governments had cut the real income of salaried persons by refusing to readjust salaries to meet the full impact of inflation...
...As the firing began the number of people singing dwindled until finally there was no more singing and there was no more firing...
...They recently returned to their studies at the University of Wisconsin...
...Protein foods were made available to the general public by developing the resources of Chile's long coastline...
...There we saw the officers admiring their new insignias and congratulating each other on their recent promotions...
...The Supreme Court joined the chorus...
...It is clear that the Christian Democrats, the largest multi-class reformist party in Chile, has polarized and split as a result of the coup...
...Warehouses were found with food products so old that they had spoiled...
...Previous administrations had no trouble securing short and long-term credits...
...It built popular vacation resorts, which provided meals, lodging, and planned recreational activities at modest cost...
...The poorest twenty per cent of the population received only four per cent of the national income, or one-half the legal minimum wage...
...The three years of the Unidad Popular government represented an unparalleled opportunity for the Left to grow in strength...
...One result was that infant mortality declined by half...
...During our imprisonment in the Stadium, we knew that throughout the day and into the early hours of the morning people were savagely beaten...
...It has expelled some foreign journalists and censors the dispatches of those who remain...
...Chile is a country potentially capable of feeding itself, but it had been importing food since 1945...
...When the coup came on September 11, workers in a nationalized textile plant drew lots to determine who should stay and defend the plant against military attack...
...There had been an Pat Garrett and Adam Schesch are graduate students in sociology and history who spent most of the past three years doing field research work in Chile...
...The number of patients seen in public hospitals and clinics more than doubled...
...Why was the coup launched when it was...
...The Chilean Right won the propaganda campaign internationally with the false claim that great sectors of Chilean society wanted the Allende regime ended...
...The owners responded by burning crops or refusing to plant, by slaughtering cattle or shipping them illegally across the border, by destroying machinery or selling out...
...In the words of one of its members, Joseph Nordman, "We send thirty to forty missions around the world yearly and we have not seen, in recent years, a situation so grave as that in Chile, not even in Brazil or Greece...
...The constitutional amendment which made this possible passed the opposition-controlled Congress without a dissenting vote...
...Nevertheless, there was a dialogue back and forth...
...We witnessed the organization of the executions up to the final step when the prisoners were led just out of our sight and the heavy automatic-weapons fire began...
...We were psychologically prepared for the coup, but not for the speed and ruthlessness with which the Uni-dad Popular (Popular Unity Party) government was toppled and fascist control was established...
...Furthermore, fascist para-military groups had gone underground and were performing assassinations, terrorism, and sabotage...
...At issue was how to make workers' participation in the economy truly effective...
...The coup occurred that same day...
...The police are the key repressive organization and as large as the army itself...
...Chile refused, saying those corporations had long since been compensated by their huge profits...
...Chile's economy was dominated by a few family clans, each of which had ties to major international corporations...
...The economic program of the TJP government allowed it to control part of the economy...
...From 1925 to 1968 alone they earned $2.5 billion in net profits, a sum which was greater than Chile's foreign debt...
...Though we had lived in our neighborhood for a year and a half without incident, we were denounced by a right-wing neighbor four days after the coup...
...The Allende government switched the emphasis in construction from luxury apartments and homes to low-income housing projects...
...The result was that three times more permanent housing was provided each year than in the best year of the preceding Frei administration...
...The censored Chilean press reports the capture of only a small percentage of the small arms, automatic weapons, bazookas, and explosives that the Left is known to have...
...Much more than welfarism was at stake...
...This affected approximately 25,000 beneficiaries...
...Since then, we have been able to confirm much of what we were told by reading the censored Chilean press, speaking with other witnesses, and reading reports by a clandestine information service operating inside Chile...
...Delegates were elected by popular vote, but all workers participated in the general decisions affecting production, work norms, working conditions, and the like...
...Allende said that he understood his responsibilities as President of the Republic, that he would never betray the trust of the Chilean people, and that the people would know how to react...
...Chile nationalized copper and other natural resources by amending its constitution in 1971...
...The poor worked in the industries and lived in the housing projects which the military terrorized...
...Thereafter the franchise was extended to eighteen-year-olds and illiterates, so that the voting population became more representative of the adult population as a whole...
...The all-out economic offensive by the Right had not paralyzed the economy, which went limping along with the help of volunteer labor...
...One result of income redistribution was that the demand for food increased nearly thirty per cent in 1971...
...What we heard did not jibe with the junta's story...
...There was a day-and-a-half battle to subdue resistance at the National Academy for Noncommissioned Police Officers, two blocks from our house...
...In 1970, only thirty-six per cent of the population would vote for it and fewer fight for it...
...When Chile applied its nationalization formula, compensation was due Chile in some cases...
...This permitted the elderly to live in modest circumstances instead of destitution...
...The Allende government set about to change this distribution of income through its wage policy...
...In 1974, the Left can expect the majority of the population to support armed resistance...
...The anti-AUende strategy involved imposing an economic blockade around the country, generating internal economic chaos, obstructing governmental initiatives in Congress and the courts, and organizing mass protests against government policies...
...The objective was to force the government to abandon its program or failing that, to overthrow it militarily...
...The government was forced to choose between cutting social security, health, welfare, and education measures, or printing money...
...There was no legislation to nationalize industries comparable to the agrarian reform law...
...The UP knew that socialism was not possible under the laws written by Chile's elite, but if the Left grew stronger, it could push harder for basic change...
...American reporting, in this sense, mirrors the Chilean anti-Allende press...
...There were merely some antiquated laws which allowed the state to intervene in industries with labor conflicts or production problems, and to requisition industries for national security reasons...
...In addition to the black market, the Chilean elite organized a sabotage campaign of incredible proportions...
...But of $230 million of credit open in U.S...
...It was the Right's fear of this growing strength which led to the coup...
...Mass arrests and executions were commonplace...
...Demand far outstripped the industrial production increases of twelve per cent in 1971, and four per cent in 1972...
...Preceding administrations had used these laws to take over ailing industries, reorganize managements, make the necessary new investments, and return them to their former owners with the taxpayers footing the bill...
...The legally constituted Marxist government had fallen to the military, controlled by its most right-wing elements...
Vol. 38 • February 1974 • No. 2
