The Atlantic and Its Enemies (69 page)

Allende had been a veteran figure of Chilean politics - a Marxist, claiming that he wanted ‘a Chilean road to socialism’,
i.e.
without the assorted bloodbaths. He was a Valparaíso 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, Régis 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
Kulturkampf
as tended to happen in Catholic countries. They had a view of the world that went quite logically from macro-America via capital and ‘comprador class’ - minority or foreign middlemen - to micro-paterfamilias and the foreman cracking his whip at downtrodden peasants.

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
dictionnaire des idées reçues
on the reasons for the troubles of the ‘Third World’. In fact, the Americans accepted the diagnosis often enough and in an effort to improve their popularity had produced a sort of Marshall Plan for Latin America, called ‘Alliance for Progress’, in 1961. They spent $20bn but, not being in occupation, found that much of the money went to thieving oligarchies.

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,
callampos
, shanty towns (literally, ‘mushrooms’). Half of the population lived in the central valley, and large estates accounted for 80 per cent of all land, up to the 1960s; there was a native Araucanian Indian population, though in scale it did not compare with those elsewhere in Latin America (the Chileans having exterminated many). Chile had in some degree faced the same demographic problem as Latin America as a whole, where the population went up from 211 million to 261 million between 1961 and 1968, and by 1984 had reached 408 million. In Chile it grew at almost 2.5 per cent every year, a figure matched today by Uganda, which has the fastest-growing population in the world, and the cities began in places to be choked. The same was true of Turkey in the same period, adding the population of Denmark (4 million) every year to herself. As with Marx’s Paris, shanty towns, ‘dangerous classes’, woeful sewage, epidemics were a constant reminder that revolution was at the gates.

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 Tomić’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
Che Guevara Población
around ‘bourgeois’ Santiago, and installed 1,200 families in occupation. The great symbolic figure, Castro, came for a three-week visit at the end of 1971, during which he made inflammatory speeches: ‘we have already learned more than enough about . . . bourgeois, capitalist liberties’,
etc.
Allende himself shook his head with disapproval at the antics of the MIR, which denounced his ‘reformism’ as an ‘illusion’, and wished to take power at once, by arming the inhabitants of the shanty towns. Land expropriation took, in all, 9 million hectares of land, and in some cases the land had already been occupied by peasants; and this even affected farms with no more than eighty hectares. In 1972 the university boiled over, as thousands of students went off to the countryside for ‘consciousnessraising’ exercises; by now, thousands of foreigners were flocking in to participate in a socialist revolution, and the secretary-general of Allende’s own socialist party, the upper-class Carlos Altamira, announced that the battle with ‘the bourgeoisie and imperialism’ though postponed was on the cards. Nationalizations went ahead, and the United Nations Economic Council for Latin America contained Marxist economists who gave Allende their sanction. The parliament gybed at this, and some of the nationalization was pushed through by a device close to fraud. A law already in existence allowed firms to be sequestrated if they were badly managed, and it was easy enough for Allende to push up wages, drive a firm into bankruptcy, and then sequestrate it; strikes might have the same effect. The State had run forty-three enterprises in 1970 but, by 1973, had 370 on its books, as administrative chicanery was used to demonstrate that they had been incompetently run in private hands. At any rate, Allende was bypassing Congress, by executive action, and this naturally threatened American investments, which, in copper and with the multinational ITT, were considerable. Nixon, late in 1970, had resolved to give no credit to Chile, while also using the US influence to prevent others from giving it.

If Chile had been Cuba, no doubt matters would then have come to a breach. But Castro had come to power in the outcome of a revolution that had destroyed the old army; there was no parliament or constitution of any significance. Allende did not have Castro’s tools. Without dollar support, by September 1971 inflation was going up. It always was a problem in the state-dominated Chilean economy, with a balance of payments deficit, and with swollen employment rolls and pay-packets; Allende imposed price controls. These had the usual effect, of driving down supply, and, besides, the consequence of the land seizures was also to cause shortages, which in turn could be made up only through imports, of $280m (including French chickens). These led to the creation shortages and queues, and there was a sign of things to come when 5,000 middle-class housewives, banging saucepans, were met by teargas.

Matters worsened up to the summer of 1972, as, even on official figures, the cost of living rose 163 per cent. The government tried to control prices (through a Cuban in the Directorate of Industry) but hardly knew what it was doing: the lorry drivers, on whom Chile, a very ‘long’ country, depended, went on strike, and the queues lengthened. ‘Planning’ had been reinforced, and what it entailed was the taking on of more and more labour for concerns that were unsuccessful: ‘floods of red ink on the books of nationalized firms,’ said the American ambassador (himself not at all anxious for any kind of American intervention: he did not do his career any good). Investment fell off, as people bought black-market dollars or went abroad. One outcome of the land reform was predictable: harvests dropped by one quarter in 1973. Trade union elections were ‘rigged’, so that ordinary workers’ behaviour could be dictated, despite their own wishes, from the radical Left, and such ‘rigging’ became easy enough because so many workers were standing in queues or otherwise making ends meet: apathy, the abstention of the voters, generally does occur on a great scale in the course of a ‘revolutionary situation’. Even in the great October of 1917, in elections for the trade unions, most people did not bother to vote, because they were tired, bored and bewildered. The Bolsheviks got their majority at last.