socialism’, i.e. without the assorted bloodbaths. He was a Valparaiso doctor and a cultivated man, reading widely, playing the guitar, able to discuss paintings. In Catholic countries, the anti-clerical tradition often did push doctors and engineers to the Left, and Allende therefore had a considerable number of intellectual cousins in Latin Europe: they agreed with his diagnosis of Chile’s condition, and a prominent member of the French Left, Regis Debray, who appeared in Chile, might easily point to the comparisons of Allende and Mitterrand, later the French president. In some ways it was a
Such people applauded when Allende stated his creed at the United Nations late in 1972, in a speech that the American ambassador called ‘one of the most memorable speeches ever heard in the great hall’. It was a classic statement of a view, then widely held, that countries such as Chile were held back by ‘international capitalism’. Multinational firms extracted raw materials such as copper, paying low wages, and the copper would soon run out. If there were protests, these firms would bribe local politicians; ‘the power of corporations is so great that it transcends all borders’; ‘we are victims of a new form of im — perialism, one that is more subtle, more cunning, and for that reason more terrifyingly effective’; ‘the financial-economic blockade against us… is oblique, subterranean, and indirect… We are the victims of almost imperceptible actions, generally disguised in phrases and declarations that extol respect for the sovereignty and dignity of our country.’ One problem was that the great corporations repatriated the profits from their investments, many times over, such that Chile, and Latin America generally, had contributed $9bn to the rich countries over the preceding decade. Chile, potentially a rich country, therefore lived in poverty, apart from the hangers-on of the multinationals; ‘We go from place to place seeking credits and aid, and yet — a true paradox of the capitalist economic system — we are major exporters of capital.’ The Chilean answer must therefore be — nationalization of the country’s resources: as Lenin had put it, the expropriation of the expropriators, though Allende did not quote him. There was this to be said for him, that copper had declined in price, unlike other raw materials, from ?620 per ton in 1969 to ?412 in 1972: the vagaries of international capitalism. At the time, many people would have agreed with Allende as to this
But was Chile ‘Third World’ at all? She was very varied in character, with 9 million people over 3,000 miles of coastline, stretching from the sub-tropical copper-producing north to the near Antarctic south: great estates here, small peasant plots there, with modern cities and Indian tribes, a considerable problem of population growth, and, on the outskirts of the towns,
Chile, with her weird geography and often unpleasant climate, had remained much poorer than Argentina: her people migrated there, and it was usual for them to be in such jobs as house-portering. But with a population derived from the Basque country and Galicia, she also had reasonably civilized politics. There was a moment of military takeover at a particularly bad time in the thirties, but even then it was much less nasty than elsewhere, and the military regime did not last long. There was a strong enough parliamentary tradition, but the divisions of the country were reflected in a multiplicity of parties, proportional representation doing nothing to correct this. As in so many other countries, there were unstable coalitions; the centre usually dominated affairs, and was Catholic or Christian Democrat. Marx simply did not understand religion, thought it absurd, and dismissed ‘Christian Socialism’ as ‘the holy water with which the priest assuages the heart-burnings of the aristocracy’. But there was more to it. Many Christian Democrats had no objection whatsoever to land reform, for the benefit of Catholic peasants; they did not like banks. Their spending on welfare was considerable, and associated with an inflation that already reached 30 per cent in the later 1960s. Dating back to the worldwide slump of the early 1930s, the State was widely involved in the economy — half of industry was controlled by it, through an agency called CORFO — and although the right-wing coalition (‘National Party’) might have tried to dismantle the institutions concerned, and to co-operate with the Americans in the liberalization of trade and investment, the Catholics and of course the Left had different notions. There were elections in 1970, and the left-wing coalition won more votes than either of the others, though not much more than one third. Salvador Allende, its leader, was duly and constitutionally elected president, with the votes of the centre. The essential point about Catholic democracy was made in an Italian context by Indro Montanelli, veteran journalist: Liberals and Catholics said different things in the same language, Marxists and Catholics the same thing in a different language.
Allende then set about reforms and was given further support when he took office. In the first place, the Americans behaved unintelligently. Washington took alarm: another Cuba? Kissinger said at a briefing, ‘I have yet to meet somebody who firmly believes that if Allende wins, there is likely to be another free election in Chile… massive problems for us, and for the democratic forces and pro-US forces in… the whole Western Hemisphere.’ Richard Helms of the CIA wanted to stop Allende, using the small armed Right, and there was an alarmist lunch with the head of Pepsi-Cola and the editor of a right-wing newspaper. Two excitable Chilean generals were roped in, and a constitutional-minded commander was murdered. This, naturally, backfired, creating a great anti-American constituency, and thereafter the Americans behaved more circumspectly. It was then Allende’s turn to make mistake after mistake, and his position was not very strong. He had almost no parliamentary majority, three of the parties in his ‘Popular Union’ coalition were small and likely to defect, and there was also a Constitutional Court able to block legislation where necessary. Then there was the army.
For a Marxist, here was an interesting challenge, both Czechoslovakia and Italy offering obvious points of similarity: a large Communist element (though Allende did not call himself ‘Communist’) in a position of some dominance. Why did Czechoslovakia get 1948, and Chile 1973? There was also Cuba, standing up to the USA and promising revolution throughout Latin America. As things turned out, Allende was a weak man, leaning this way and that way, but he started off quite well. In the first instance, Allende could advance a programme that would bring in allies from the Catholic centre, especially land reform and anti-Americanism. His coalition had two fifths of the parliamentary votes, and he took over 1.5 million hectares while nationalizing the copper industry, which accounted for four fifths of exports. He offered in the first instance money for various worthy causes — free housing, health, etc. — such that in municipal elections, in April 1971, he took nearly half of the vote. It also mattered that even then there was 25 per cent abstention — and apathy was in its way a revolutionary characteristic. His minister of the economy, Pedro Vuskovic, announced that ‘state control is designed to destroy the economic base of imperialism and the ruling class by putting an end to the private ownership of the means of production’, and three of the largest copper mines, American-owned, were taken over, without indemnification. Allende’s first year went well, buoyed by spending of reserves and by high copper prices. He himself later on said that his greatest mistake had been not to hold a referendum on constitutional reform at that time. He was soon to run into trouble.
His Communist supporters were, at the time, quite moderate: for Moscow, relations with the USA were very important, and that might easily mean just abandoning Allende; in any case, Lenin himself had had sharp words to say about left-wing ‘infantilism’. The Communists had some 15 per cent of the vote but they also controlled the trade unions, and they appealed to Radomiro Tomic’s Christian Democratic Left for a common reformist platform. But there was also a romantic Left in Latin America, the MIR, or Movement for the Revolutionary Left, and it was not very interested in such reformism. Quite the contrary, it provoked. It set up the
