The Chilean Road to Socialism, 50 years on

Trans. by Andree Conrad (New York: Harper & Row, …, 1975

"NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHERS: "Ever since 1973 coup in Chile there has been considerable speculation about what really happened and about the involvement of the U.S. government and U.S. business interests. Now, this explosive account by a Chilean journalist who lived through it all reveals the military, industrial, and commercial conspiracy, abetted by North American interests, to bring down the Allende government. "Beginning on the day of the coup with Allende's murder and the military's artful staging of his "suicide", the book goes on to reveal the background of intrigue and counter-intrigue; the participation of the CIA, the Pentagon, and U.S. business interests, as well as that of the Brazilian government; the sinister roles of the Chilean armed forces, police forces, and political parties; the events throughout Chile on the day of the coup as the massive military apparatus got under way; and the reign of terror and torture unleashed on the civilian population. This is a fast-moving, well-paced narrative, with a "State of Siege" quality to it. It will be an important and controversial book which neither Allendistas nor the conspirators and their respectable fronts will like. It shows the latter as a gang of premeditated murderers and the former, including Allende, as honorable but very foolish men, who, until the very last moments, believed that the military was made up of loyal soldiers, faithful to the Constitution they were sworn to uphold. The author is an excellent reporter and has carefully woven together the strands of seemingly unrelated events into a coherent, compelling, and well-documented story of who did what to whom, when."

Radical Americas, 2021

The election of Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) in 1970 unleashed a radical and original revolutionary process, discernible not only in the depth of its redistributive measures and the expectations it generated, but also in the ferocity with which those who identified with the counter-revolutionary ideal responded to that project. The counter-revolution, initially confined to the conservative and reactionary sectors, in a matter of months became an immense mass mobilisation that would end up paving the way for the military coup. This article analyses that counter-revolutionary process, exploring its historic roots, the main actors involved and the innovations in political practices it developed at the time. The ‘counter-revolutionary bloc’ was formed by a diverse array of political and social actors – some of whom did not have previous experience in political mobilisations – who based their actions on the adoption and socialisation of a long-standing anti-Com...

IDS Bulletin, 1985

In the context of profound, worldwide economic crisis, socialist forces are critically re-valuating past strategies. This process has produced analyses of gradualist strategies from Eurocommunism to the popular revolutionary models of Central America. A common reference point in these debates has been the experience of the Chilean Popular Unity (UP) government of 1970 to 1973. Not only the Chilean, but also the European and North American left, have tried to derive 'lessons' from the Chilean experience for their own struggles. The UP, an electoral coalition including the Socialist, Communist, and a number of smaller social democratic and radical left parties, assumed office on a narrow, working class base, and largely because of the disunity of the bourgeois parties. The UP government adopted a strategy of gradual structural reforms aimed at winning over the petit bourgeois (or 'middle') strata, thereby isolating monopoly capital and large landowners. The left parties were divided, however, over the pace of implementation of the programme, the appropriate role for mass organisations, and the nature of the alliance strategy itself.

It is now over a quarter of a century since the fall of the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship and the return of democracy in Chile. Yet the impact of this period remains profoundly felt in contemporary Chilean life. This is not only a result of the now well-known heinous crimes committed by the dictatorship: the more than 3000 Chileans murdered, the widespread use of brutal torture, the quarter of a million arbitrary arrests and the massive campaign of internal and external exile of political opponents. It is also a result of the ongoing damage inflicted by a series of radical economic, political and constitutional measures imposed during the dictatorship, many of which have proven almost impossible to unravel. These measures implemented in the late 1970s and early 1980s included the mass privatisation of public assets, the slashing of all state expenditure (aside from that of the military), outlawing of organised labour and the sudden removal of price controls and trade restrictions. As a consequence, Chile today has the highest level of income inequity and the lowest public investment in education in the OECD, as well as being one of the most privatised economies in the world. Significantly, these outcomes are a testament to the extreme free-market theories of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, who—under the benign tutelage of dictatorship—were able to undertake their first 'real life' experimentation without fear of social consequences. And now in Chile, we are able to clearly observe the profound social and economic implications of four decades of neo-liberalist economic policy. So how did this disastrous social experiment emerge and what implications has it had for a generation of Chileans? As is the case with so much of the recent history of Latin America, what happened in Chile has deep roots in the obsessive desire of the United States to maintain its political and economic hegemony in the region. We know from declassified documents from the Nixon-era White House that the real prospect of the election of socialist Salvador Allende in the 1970 Chilean Presidential election was something the US refused to accept. Indeed, the now infamous Henry Kissinger (who was Nixon's Secretary of State at the time) argued to that 'the election of Allende as president of Chile poses for us one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere'. The threat (and inspiration) of a democratic socialist who may threaten the interests of US capital was too much for the White House to bear. This was the catalyst for the commencement of a CIA-led covert campaign in Chile, which was to involve the funding of Allende's opponents and increased contact with the Chilean military forces. However, despite their best efforts—including an attempt to stop Allende's inauguration through the assassination of the Chilean Chief of the Armed Forces days before—the covert campaign failed and Allende became president in November 1970. Refusing to accept the democratic outcome and enraged by Allende's popular early moves to nationalise foreign capital and moves toward agrarian reform, the Nixon administration further stepped up its covert operations to bring the Allende government down. This involved 'making the economy scream' through an economic blockade and such things as funding truck drivers to strike and encouraging the stockpiling of goods to create shortages. More insidiously, the

This is an exhaustive analysis of the revolutionary government of the UP under the presidency of Salvador Allende. It reviews the political and socio-economic conditions in Chile at the time, the main political actors involved in the experience, the characteristics of the Chilean road to socialism, the internal confrontations within the Unidad Popular camp and with the forces of counter-revolution, the variables of the external environment and, finally, it compares this experience with Eurocommunism as an attempt at the same time to find democratic ways of transition to socialism.

1973 Chilean Coup, 2022

It was 1973, Chile’s military forces staged a coup d’état against the Chilean government of President Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist and Socialist leader in Latin America. Allende withdrew with his supporters to La Moneda, the fortress-like presidential palace in Santiago, which was encircled by tanks and infantry and bombed by air force jets. Allende survived the aerial attack but then was found dead as troops stormed the burning palace, The United States and its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had worked for three years, 1970-1973, to provoke a coup against Allende, who was regarded by the Nixon administration as a threat to democracy in Chile and Latin America. Ironically, the democratically elected Allende was succeeded by the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled over Chile with an iron fist for the next 17 years torturing, killing, and disappearing tens of thousands.

2011

Chilean democracy has grown beyond what General Augusto Pinochet had in mind when the 1980 Constitution was drafted. Democracy today is more consolidated and inclusive than in the past. Yet, the 1973 coup and the Pinochet dictatorship remain defining moments since democracy is built on the foundations set in place by the 1980 Constitution. Although amended several times, the Constitution reminds us that Pinochet is the father of today's Chile, and the Concertación coalition has been a deserving stepfather, helping heal deep social and political wounds and presiding over a successful period of economic growth, social inclusion, and democratic progress. 1 The election of Salvador Allende (1970), who promised a-Chilean road to socialism,‖ reflected the fact that the old democratic system was not functioning well. From 1960-1970, Chile's economic growth averaged 4.1 percent (1.7 percent per capita). Inflation averaged 27 percent in the 1960s. Chile was a profoundly unequal society in 1967: the poorest 20 percent received 3.7 percent of national income whereas the richest 20 percent received 56.5 percent (Navia 2010). The dictatorship dramatically transformed the country after 1973, and the economic model put in place remains the basis of economic policies. The constitutional order designed to keep the military in power also provided space for democracy. After an economic crisis in 1982 forced the government to accommodate the opposition, and protests threatened the regime, political 1 The Concertación has been one of the longest-lasting and most successful coalitions in Latin American history. The success of the Concertación, which governed Chile since its return to democracy in 1990, was due to its ability to devise a formula for governing based on consensus among the disparate collection of center-left political parties that opposed the military government of Augusto Pinochet. Read more:

Radical History Review, 2003

Chile has historically viewed itself as atypical compared to other Latin American countries, especially because of the political stability achieved following independence and the marginality of the military from explicit involvement in politics. Convinced of this particularity, the country was shocked by the violence exhibited by the armed forces on the morning of September 11, 1973, and during the days and months that followed the unseating of the constitutional president, Salvador Allende. Seventeen years of one of the most cruel dictatorships in the memory of Latin America brutally replaced Chile's long history of civilian rule. Terror took control of a large part of the population, incapable of understanding and, least of all, responding to the violence that hovered systematically over it. As Norbert Lechner has put it to so well, Chilean society "was dying with fear." 1 The level of political and social polarization in Chilean society during the months and days leading to the military coup constituted one of the factors that, from the beginning, allowed the Pinochet regime to justify the violence it employed against the population at large. The high degree of concentration of power and social control in military hands also facilitated a hegemonic discourse about the causes of, and those responsible for, the final crisis: the Marxist left that made up the overthrown Unidad Popular (Popular Unity). For seventeen years Chilean society had ample opportunity to internalize the messages emitted by the dictatorship. This rendered the regime's repeated refusal to recognize its systematic use of repression intelligible. During the entire period, General Pinochet and his followers rejected

1991

Latin American Perspectives, 2024

Latin American Perspectives was born in turbulent times for Latin America. The second number of the journal (Summer, 1974) was evidence of how US critical thinkers were politically involved and intellectually engaged with Latin American developments, especially regarding socialist experiences and the struggle against coups and dictatorships (usually supported by the US government, as Eisenhower did in 1954 in Guatemala and Paraguay; and Lyndon Johnson did in 1964 with the coups in Brazil and Bolivia). That issue of the journal was called “Blood into the Peaceful Road,” edited by Norma Chinchilla and Donald Bray, with the co-authorship of Bill Bollinger in the Introduction, who was then a history graduate student at UCLA. The Chilean Road to Socialism was definitely one of the most attractive experiences for US left-wing researchers and activists. In the U.S., the anti-Cuba official propaganda encouraged an automatic association between “socialism” and “guerrillas.” For solidarity activists in this country it was easier to dispute public opinion influenced by the Washington-based line in the case of Salvador Allende, given his commitment to the pacific road to socialism. At a different level, US scholars were deeply interested in the changes that were occurring in Chile on multiple fronts.

Global Dialogue ISA, 2019

Journal of Cold War Studies, 2021

The Chilean Christian Democratic Party The PDC's Revolution in Freedom (Revolución en Libertad) from 1964 to 1970 was also presented as an alternative to a Marxist, specifically Cubanstyle, revolution and had important international allies. Even before Frei's government, the Chilean PDC positioned itself as a reference point for reformism in Latin America. 2 From the mid-1950s, the party had ties with the U.S.