The poetry Neruda wrote at the time, which would fill Canto General, was blunt and politically charged, progressive and reactionary. He wrote not just about the history of the Americas but of current events, in such poems as “The Corpses in the Plaza (January 28, 1946, Santiago de Chile)”:
In the middle of the Plaza this crime was committed.
The brushwood didn’t hide the people’s
pure blood, nor was it swallowed by the pampa’s sand.
Nobody hid this crime.
This crime was committed in the middle of the motherland.
In the midst of all this, Neruda once again received a cable from Carlos Morla Lynch, saying that Maruca was now in Belgium and that she still wanted to be reunited with her husband. She insisted that she hadn’t received money from him in nearly six months. Neruda responded through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that even though he was now divorced, he was still willing to send her money, and asked for her address in Belgium. That same day, August 22, Morla Lynch sent another message, saying that Señora Neruda denied that they were divorced and wanted her passage paid to Peru or Chile. Neruda stalled.
In January, Chile’s president, Juan Antonio Ríos, had resigned; he was dying of cancer. As new elections were called for, the growing conservative middle class created a split in the Radical Party. One faction of the Radicals created an alliance with the Left, including the Communists. They nominated Gabriel González Videla as their presidential candidate. His exaggerated, flamboyant left-wing stance irritated the more conservative elements of the Radical Party. This was a major reason for the split.
Neruda, with his charisma and ability to bond with the people, was named the campaign’s top communications official. He was to spread González Videla’s image everywhere, “even into soup,” according to the Chilean Communist politician and writer Volodia Teitelboim. At the kickoff to the campaign, Neruda read one of many ballads he would recite across the country, this one specifically for the candidate. The lines, the second and fourth rhyming, were sometimes stirring:*
In the north the copper worker,
in the south the railroad worker,
from one end of the country to the other,
the people call him “Gabriel.”
Neruda campaigned all over the country, on the radio, and in the newspapers (television in Chile was still nearly a decade away). On September 4, 1946, Neruda’s candidate won with 40 percent of the vote, as the Right’s vote was split between two other candidates. According to the Chilean constitution at the time, however, since he didn’t win a majority, González Videla had to be voted in by the National Congress. Violent altercations signaled the political polarization in the country, but González Videla was ultimately named president, after he composed a diverse cabinet and struck a secret deal with center-left Christian Democrats and some on the Right.
As soon as González Videla took office, he fulfilled his campaign promise to the Left by rescinding rural unionization restrictions. Almost immediately afterward, he made good on his secret deal with the Right, and its large constituent of landowners, and backed legislation that prohibited the new campesino unions from striking and limited their collective bargaining powers, among other restrictions.
This betrayal didn’t stop the Communists from promoting unionization efforts, now more than ever. The people were responding to them, and they did have party members in the cabinet and high up in various government ministries. They took their fight to both the mines and the cities, advocating for the workers’ quality of life and the right to organize. Their focus was on class struggle. The unions became the most effective tool to advance the Far Left and Communists’ front, and strikes were the most practical mechanism.
Meanwhile, the economy was lagging, and González Videla switched his legislative priorities away from the social reforms he had pledged to the Left and concentrated on promoting growth through industrialization, with no provisions that would allow workers to benefit from any increase in profits. He began to blame the Communists for exacerbating the country’s economic troubles.
By now, the United States had a significant influence on the Chilean economy through U.S. mining companies and the country’s importation of Chilean copper. It exerted great pressure on González Videla to crack down on the unionization of the mine workers in an effort to protect its economic interests. In addition, the Cold War was gearing up; Latin America would be a major battleground of that power struggle for the rest of the century, with U.S. foreign policy strategies focused on containing the threat of communism and Soviet influence in the hemisphere. González Videla seemed to be stuck with the choice of either pleasing Washington or aligning with the Soviets. He tried to please everyone, scrambling to hold on to some semblance of support and power, juggling different parties and factions to the left and to the right, abandoning whatever ideals he may have held in the process.
The divided government had an immediate impact on Neruda in late 1946. In December, President González Videla sent the Senate his nomination of Neruda to be ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary before the Italian government. González Videla assumed he was still enjoying his honeymoon with the Communists and wanted to reward his campaign’s chief of PR, but the marriage was about to fall apart. Members of the Liberal Party sided with the Right and voted against the poet’s nomination. The result was a tie. González Videla met with leaders of the Liberal Party, asking for their support, but they refused to vote for a member of the Communist Party. The president withdrew the nomination.
As 1947 began, political tensions in the Chilean government continued to rise, inflamed by the Chilean workers’ movement. On February 26, Neruda had just come back from a trip to the north, where
