[News] What if There Had Been No Coup in Chile in 1973?

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Thu Sep 7 12:13:42 EDT 2023


What if There Had Been No Coup in Chile in 1973?: The Thirty-Sixth 
Newsletter (2023)
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*What if There Had Been No Coup in Chile in 1973?: The Thirty-Sixth 
Newsletter (2023)*


Gracia Barrios (Chile),/Multitud III/ (‘Multitude III’), 1972.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=2e82854bbb&e=d206d0a40d>.

Imagine this scenario. On 11 September 1973, the reactionary sections of 
the Chilean army, led by General Augusto Pinochet and given a green 
light by the US government, did not leave their barracks. President 
Salvador Allende, who led the Popular Unity government, went to his 
office in La Moneda in Santiago to announce 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=f7c579be60&e=d206d0a40d> 
a plebiscite on his government and to ask for the resignation of several 
senior generals. Then, Allende continued his fight to bring down 
inflation and to realise his government’s programme to advance the 
socialist agenda in Chile.

Until the moment when the Chilean Army descended upon La Moneda in 1973, 
Allende and the Popular Unity government were in a pitched fight to 
defend Chile’s sovereignty, particularly over its copper resources and 
its land as they sought to raise sufficient funds to eradicate hunger 
and illiteracy and to produce innovative means to deliver health care 
and housing. In the Popular Unity programme 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=57bc70425f&e=d206d0a40d> 
(1970), the Allende government founded its charter:

The social aspirations of the Chilean people are legitimate and possible 
to satisfy. They want, for example, dignified housing without 
readjustments that exhaust their income; schools and universities for 
their children; sufficient wages; an end once and for all to high 
prices; stable work; timely medical attention; public lighting; sewers; 
potable water; paved streets and sidewalks; a just and operable social 
security system without privileges and without starvation-level 
pensions; telephones; police; children’s playgrounds; recreation areas; 
and popular vacationing and sea resorts.

The satisfaction of these just desires of the people – which, in truth, 
are rights that society must recognise – will be a preoccupation of high 
priority for the popular government.

Realising the ‘just desires of the people’ – a laudable objective – was 
possible amidst the public’s optimism for the Popular Unity government. 
Allende’s administration adopted a model that decentralised the 
government and mobilised the people to attain their own ‘just desires’. 
Had this model not been interrupted, the depositors in the government’s 
social security institutions would have remained on directive councils 
with oversight of these funds. Organisations of slum dwellers would have 
continued to inspect the operations of the housing department tasked 
with building quality housing for the working class. Old democratic 
structures would have continued to strengthen as the government used new 
technologies (such as Project Cybersyn 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=f823bf2a19&e=d206d0a40d>) 
to create a distributed decision system. ‘It is not only about these 
examples’, the programme noted, ‘but about a new understanding in which 
the people participate in state institutions in a real and efficient way’.

Roberto Matta (Chile), /Hagámosnos la guerrilla interior para parir un 
hombre nuevo/ (‘Let’s Fight the Guerilla War Within Ourselves to Give 
Birth to a New Man’), 1970.

As Chile’s people, led by the Popular Unity government, took control 
over their economic and political lives and worked hard to improve their 
social and cultural worlds, they sent a flare into the sky announcing 
the great possibilities of socialism. Their advances mirrored those that 
had been attained in several other projects, such as in Cuba, and 
boosted the confidence of people across the Third World to test their 
own possibilities. The eradication of poverty and the creation of 
housing for every family was an inspiration for Latin America. Had the 
Popular Unity project not been cut short, it very well might have 
encouraged other left projects to demand the satisfaction of just 
desires in a world where it was possible to attain them. No longer would 
we live in a world of scarcity, which impedes the realisation of these 
desires. No Chicago Boys would have arrived with their noxious 
neoliberal agenda to experiment in the laboratory of a military regime. 
Popular mobilisations would have exposed the illegitimate desire of the 
capitalist class to impose austerity on the people in the name of 
economic growth. As Allende’s government expanded its agenda, driven by 
a decentralised government and by popular mobilisation, the ‘just 
desires’ of the people might have eclipsed the narrow greed of capitalism.

If there had been no coup in Chile, there might not have been coups in 
Peru (1975) and Argentina (1976). Without these coups, perhaps the 
military dictatorships in Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay would have 
withdrawn in the face of popular agitation, inspired by Chile’s example. 
Perhaps, in this context, the close relationship between Chile’s 
Salvador Allende and Cuba’s Fidel Castro would have broken Washington’s 
illegal blockade of revolutionary Cuba. Perhaps the promises made at the 
UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting in Santiago in 
1972 might have been realised, among them the enactment of a robust New 
International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974 that would have set aside 
the imperial privileges of the Dollar-Wall Street complex and its 
attendant agencies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World 
Bank. Perhaps the just economic order that was being put in place in 
Chile would have been expanded to the world.

** 
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But the coup did happen. The military dictatorship killed, disappeared, 
and sent into exile hundreds of thousands of people, setting in motion a 
dynamic of repression that has been difficult for Chile to reverse 
despite the return to democracy in 1990. From being a laboratory for 
socialism, Chile – under the tight grip of the military – became a 
laboratory for neoliberalism. Despite its relatively small population of 
roughly ten million (a tenth of the size of Brazil’s population), the 
coup in Chile in 1973 had a global impact. At that time, the coup was 
not just seen as a coup against the Popular Unity government of Salvador 
Allende, but as a coup against the Third World.

That is precisely the theme of our latest dossier 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=7704c2857f&e=d206d0a40d>, 
/The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973/, produced in 
collaboration with Instituto de Ciencias Alejandro Lipschutz Centro de 
Pensamiento e Investigación Social y Política 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=656f848032&e=d206d0a40d> 
(ICAL). ‘The coup against Allende’s government’, we write, ‘took place 
not only against its own policy of the nationalisation of copper, but 
also because Allende had offered leadership and an example to other 
developing countries that sought to implement the NIEO principles’. At 
the third session of UNCTAD in Santiago (1972), Allende said that the 
mission of the conference was to replace ‘an obsolete and radically 
unjust economic and trade order with an equitable one that is based on a 
new concept of man and human dignity and to reformulate an international 
division of labour that is intolerable for the less advanced countries 
and that obstructs their progress while favouring only the affluent 
nations’. This was exactly the dynamic that was derailed by the coup in 
Chile as well as by other manoeuvres of the imperialist bloc. Instead of 
promoting an order ‘based on a new concept of man and human dignity’, 
these manoeuvres resulted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of 
people’s advocates (among them leftists, trade unionists, peasant 
leaders, environmental justice campaigners, and women’s rights 
activists) and prolonged the destiny of hunger and illiteracy, poor 
housing and medical care, and the general orientation of a culture of 
despair and toxicity.

Please read our dossier and share it. These dossiers – produced once a 
month – are a product of collaboration and hard work, a synthesis of how 
we, as an institute rooted in popular movements, see key events of our 
history. The art for this dossier comes from the Salvador Allende 
Solidarity Museum, which preserved art from the Popular Unity period and 
from the struggle against the coup. We are grateful to them, and to 
ICAL, for our collaborations based on solidarity and against the 
neoliberal ethic of parochial greed.

Two weeks before the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile, 
Guillermo Teillier, the president of the Communist Party of Chile (PC), 
died. At his funeral, the party’s general secretary Lautaro Carmona Soto 
described how Teillier – with the coup’s cordite still in the air – went 
to work in Valdivia to protect and then build the party as part of the 
broader resistance to the coup regime. In 1974, Teillier was arrested in 
Santiago and subsequently held and tortured for two years in the 
Academia de Guerra Aérea. For another year and a half, Tellier was held 
in concentration camps in Ritoque, Puchuncaví, and Tres Álamos. Released 
in 1976, he went into hiding and continued to build the party back to 
its fighting strength, joined the following year by PC leader Gladys 
Marín. This was dangerous work, made even more dangerous when Tellier 
took over as the leader of the party’s military commission, which 
managed the aid sent from Cuba to Chile and oversaw the creation and 
operations of the Manuel Rodríquez Patriotic Front (FPMR), the PC’s 
armed wing. Though attempts to assassinate Pinochet failed, broader work 
to build the movement for democracy succeeded. It is the bravery and 
sacrifice of people such as Tellier, Marín, and countless – and often 
nameless – others, that brought the dictatorship of Pinochet and the 
Chicago Boys to an end in 1990.

The 1973 coup in Chile destroyed lives and suspended a process of great 
promise. Today, that promise must be revived.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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