And then, in December 1944, the Chilean Communist Party named its candidates for the parliamentary elections coming in March 1945. Though he was still not an official member, the party asked Neruda to be a senatorial candidate for the northern desert mining provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta. There were five Senate seats up for election, and this arid region was where the Communist Party had the most strength from the large working-class population. Neruda would likely be a very popular candidate there. The poet accepted the nomination.
The Atacama Desert, which covers northern Chile, is the driest desert in the world. The sand was filled with numerous valuable minerals, most importantly an abundance of copper and crucial nitrate fields. These held the ingredients that yielded sodium nitrate, or Chilean saltpeter, a superior form of gunpowder and a lucrative export to countries fighting wars around the world. Sodium nitrate was also mined as a profitable soil fertilizer (until cheaper synthetics did it in). The importance of the region’s minerals was so great that in 1879, Chile started the War of the Pacific against Bolivia and Peru to take the top of the desert all for itself. (Chile emerged victorious in 1884; Bolivia lost its coastal access, and Peru, its southern territory.) Chile captured Peru’s most valuable nitrate province, suddenly bringing the mines there under Chilean control. The Peruvian government had nationalized its mines by going into foreign debt, a burden the Chilean government did not want to assume. Instead, it enabled private entrepreneurs to control the resources that became the main source of revenue for the Chilean state, initiating a wave of economic expansion, while providing a bonanza to the new private mine owners.
Within the next few years, one enterprising Englishman, John Thomas North, had amassed so many holdings that he was deemed the “Nitrate King.” Before the end of the 1880s, the value and expanse of the resources he controlled seemed to constitute a state within a state. And it wasn’t just the nitrate fields that British capital had bought; Britons controlled the majority of Chile’s means of production: the mines, the railroads, and the banks that funded the economy and reaped its rewards. The British, and then later the United States, took Spain’s place in the economic exploitation of the country and its people.
Many would later criticize the government for not having kept the mines in Chilean hands, but others argued the country simply couldn’t afford it and pointed toward the windfall the treasury gained from the export taxes. As then-president Domingo Santa María put it: “Let the gringos work the nitrate freely. I shall be waiting at the door.”
The Chilean poor migrated in great numbers to work the mines in the north, where they were paid pitiful wages and often lived in grim company housing or shantytowns set up around the mines. As had happened throughout Latin America—in the banana industry, for example—workers were forced to rely on the company store for their provisions. The already miserable plight of the Chilean proletariat then became desperate with the virtual collapse of the economy in 1919. Not only was there a slowdown in the demand for minerals after the end of World War I, but Germany had invented a synthetic substitute for sodium nitrate, which sold at prices lower than Chile’s saltpeter. Thousands of workers lost their jobs and made their way to Santiago looking for any form of employment. They lived in sprawling, filthy tenements. Many became politically active and radicalized.
The government’s continual repression of the workers’ movement during this time shaped the country’s politics, creating tremendous tensions and divisions that lingered throughout the twentieth century. Even before the economy’s collapse, the Chilean armed forces began breaking up strikes and protecting the (mostly foreign) companies. There was a massacre of fifty-eight workers (with more than three hundred injured) in Antofagasta in 1906 and another bloodbath in Iquique the following year. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Chile’s tireless socialist labor leader, Luis Emilio Recabarren, was elected to the National Congress with the votes of the workers. Recabarren formed the Socialist Workers Party in 1912. Ten years later he completed his conversion to Marxism and formed the Chilean Communist Party. Neruda renders his interpretation of this history in the Canto General poem “Recabarren (1921)”:
It is the Chilean interrupted
by unemployment and death.
It is the enduring, rugged Chilean,
survivor of the labor
or shrouded by the salt.
It was there that this captain of the people
arrived with his pamphlets.
He took the solitary offended man,
who, wrapping his broken blankets
over his hungry children,
accepted the fierce
injustices, and he told him:
“Join your voice to another voice,”
“Join your hand to another hand.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He organized the loneliness,
he took books and songs
to the walls of terror,
he united a complaint with another complaint
and the slave without voice or mouth,
the extended suffering,
was named, it was called Pueblo,*
Proletariat, Union,
it took on a persona and elegance.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and it was called Party.
Communist
Party
Workers’ strikes were so rampant in 1920 that President Sanfuentes declared a state of siege in Santiago and Valparaíso. In 1925, soldiers gunned down more than twelve hundred nitrate workers at La Coruña, and some two hundred people were arrested at the Industrial Workers of the World’s headquarters in Valparaíso. Workers’ newspapers were banished, union
