González Videla continued with a litany of accusations of unpatriotic intentions against the Left, especially the labor movement. He broke off diplomatic relations with all Communist nations, claiming the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia had infiltrated the country. The red scare now raged throughout the Americas: in Argentina, Juan Perón outlawed the Argentine Communist Party and there were plans to deny all Communists the right to vote, and the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations were at their height in the United States.
In Chile, the government’s widening persecution and imprisonment of Communist labor leaders provoked precisely what those measures were intended to prevent, as mine and railway workers went on strike all over the north. The military was called in to maintain order; the soldiers were far from gentle. Those arrested were sent to Pisagua, which Neruda would decry as a “Nazi-style concentration camp.” On the Senate floor on October 21, Neruda raised his voice: “Now even Congress is subject to censorship. You can’t even talk now!” The poet did not hold back his anger, shouting, “There have been murders in the coal-mining region!” Afterward, incensed, he told his friend Tomás Lago that González Videla was a “traitor. A despicable person of the highest order.”
The government shut down the Communist newspaper El Siglo on November 27. With the Chilean press under such censorship, Neruda felt an “unavoidable duty, in this tragic time, to clarify the situation in Chile” for the world, and he did so through a long article for his friend Miguel Otero Silva to publish in his Caracas paper, El Nacional. He described it as an “intimate letter to millions,” and his urgency was expressed in its title: “The Crisis of Democracy in Chile Is a Dramatic Warning for Our Continent.” He began with his need to “let all my friends throughout the continent know about the despicable situation in Chile right now . . . since the North American news monopolies have surely carried out the same strategy as they have before in other areas, falsifying the truth and distorting the reality of the facts.” Throughout the piece, he argued that the breakdown of democracy and basic rights that was taking place in Chile, due to the Cold War and other factors, could easily take place in any other country in the region, and more so if the situation in his country was not rectified soon.
Neruda further detailed the situation in Chile: that the Communist members of the cabinet were expelled after they courageously crusaded to make sure the government kept its promises to the Chilean people; that the “new, active, and popular style of politics” the Left was practicing “deeply offended the sensibilities of the old, feudal Chilean oligarchy, which had increasingly greater influence over the president”; and that “the agents of North American imperialism, in the form of powerful companies in Chile—all-powerful, one might say,” which own “all of Chile’s mineral deposits”—lost no time in wrapping their many tentacles around the recently elected president.
Neruda then explained the actions of González Videla by citing a cable that a British reporter for the News Chronicle had sent back to London that past June: “President González Videla thinks that the war between Russia and the USA will begin in less than three months, and current internal and external political conditions in Chile are based on that theory.”
Neruda also tried to explain what the Left, in particular the Communists, was fighting for. Their ambitious agenda included distributing uncultivated land to landless campesinos, wage equality between men and women, the nationalization of major industries, the creation of a state bank like the Federal Reserve, and a national initiative to build public housing on a massive scale.
Neruda described the abuse of workers and labor leaders in his country, and warned that the repression would soon spread throughout Latin America. The United States’ “puppet regimes . . . will perpetuate the cycle of sinister slavery for our countries.” Such a puppet regime, he said, “will use the [conservative, anti-communist] Reader’s Digest as his bible,” combined with police tactics, to enact “torture, prison, and exile.”
The article was reprinted and circulated in Chile. It was published and distributed throughout Latin America, as well as in the Soviet Union and other countries. On the Senate floor on December 10, Neruda criticized the government again for its terror tactics and censuring of the press. He lambasted the U.S. State Department for spreading anti-communist repression throughout the continent.
But his colleagues were not impressed. Under the Chilean constitution, all senators are privileged to certain protections, including immunity from legal prosecutions. On Christmas Day 1947, the Chilean government petitioned the Supreme Court “to strip Senator Neruda of his immunity for his violation of the Internal State Security Law” and for “denigrating Chile abroad and calumny and slander against the president.”
But Neruda was not deterred. On December 30, he took to the Senate floor once again, to cheer the Panamanian parliament for having refused to grant the United States some of its land for military bases. Panama, he said, was an example and hope for all of Latin America, a sharp contrast to González Videla’s regime. On January 5, the court of appeals ruled fifteen to one that Neruda’s “false” words against the government were grounds to strip him of his immunity. Neruda and his lawyers immediately
