Popular Unity Research Articles

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the “Chilean Way to Socialism”

This paper offers an analysis of the policy of the CPSU in relation to the government of Popular Unity in Chile (1970—1973) and in general to such a political phenomenon as the “Chilean path to socialism”. Based on the documents of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the archive of the RGANI, the author proposes to explore the view of the Chilean events from the offices of the highest Soviet authorities, the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We are talking about the forms of political support for the government of Salvador Allende, for the line of the Communist Party of Chile, in the difficult internal and external conditions of the development of the Chilean revolution, including the ambiguous position of Cuba in the domestic policy of Chile. The USSR did its best in the political sphere to support its main ally in Chile, the Communist Party, although it made efforts to strengthen its position among the popular unity parties, primarily the Socialists. Economic assistance from the USSR was limited to the proposal of long-term development projects, while chileans needed concrete immediate financial support. Such a divergence of intentions between the parties has led to empty bureaucratic activity, declarations, exchanges of delegations that are not able to exert any influence on the dramatic state of the Chilean economy. The USSR did not fully believe in the success of the Chilean revolution, moreover, even otherwise it was extremely limited in its ability to help Chile, which was due to both the geographical factor and moscow's economic inability to provide the necessary funds, and not ideological differences about the ways of the revolution.

La identidad impuesta: cambios de la toponimia en los barrios de Chile (1973–1980)

This research aims at analyzing toponymic changes in Chilean neighborhoods after the coup d’état in 1973. My hypothesis is that the new authorities, in their intention to root out Marxist ideas, physically exterminate representatives and forbid their allegories, pursued the generation of cultural and identity changes in the popular urban sectors that had been bastions for the Popular Unity Party. In order to do so, they changed their emblematic left-wing toponyms, trying thus to reconfigure the political identity of the neighborhood population and imposed iconic names for the armed forces, as manifested in military deeds and heroes. For this exploratory research, various sources were used: press, oral testimonies, and official State documentation.

The USSR and the Chilean Revolution: to help and how? Issues of economic interaction during the period of Unidad Popular (1970—1973)

The dramatic experience of the "Chilean path to socialism" half a century ago raised a lot of questions about the fate of the left, socialist project in a modern, pluralistic society, about the combination of national and international factors in the fate of the revolution. This work is devoted to the policy of the USSR in relation to the Chilean revolution in the economic sphere. On the basis of documents from the archives of the Central Committee of the CPSU, it is proposed to analyze the Soviet policy of helping Chile, the process of negotiations between both countries, decision-making and their motives. The work is limited to issues of economic cooperation, which, in the course of the development of the crisis in Chile, have become key to the survival of the Unidad Popular government. Insuperable for greater dynamism of economic relations between the USSR and Chile were not only objective circumstances, vast distances and limited resources, but also the political failure of the government of Popular Unity, which turned out to be incapable of either formulating long-term tasks for the development of international cooperation or putting into practice the agreements reached with the USSR. The Soviet side was not ready for full-scale integration and assistance to Chile, plunging the process into a viscous mire of bureaucracy and the usual illusory. This is a story of bilateral failure, for which both sides are to blame.

MÚSICA Y COMUNICACIÓN POLÍTICA EN EL DOCUMENTAL DURANTE LA UNIDAD POPULAR

In this article, I analyse the music of three documentary films produced during the Popular Unity. I argue that a series of factors produced a shift in the use of music in documentary films from specially composed avant-garde music to pre-existent recordings. I am particularly concerned with how these recordings were pivotal in producing shared identification among the audience. At first glance, the use of music seems to be limited exclusively to the Chilean New Song repertoire, but on further inspection, a more complex scenario is revealed in which a broader range of genres and styles is used to channel discourses of class struggle and political identity.

The Gathering Storm: Eduardo Frei's Revolution in Liberty and Chile's Cold War

The Gathering Storm: Eduardo Frei's Revolution in Liberty and Chile's Cold War

The presence of left-wing militant women within projects of poder popular during the Popular Unity years in Concepción and Santiago de Chile, 1970–3

This article analyses, from a gender perspective, the socio-political experiences of eight former left-wing militant women in processes linked to so-called poder popular (popular power). It does so with a focus on poblaciones (shantytowns) and trade unions in Concepción and Santiago between 1970 and 1973. Methodologically, it takes a qualitative approach, contrasting oral history interviews with primary sources. The process of political socialisation in childhood and adolescence influenced women when it came to joining political parties on both the ‘traditional left’ and the ‘revolutionary left’. At the start of the 1970s, these militants participated in grassroots organisations, such as juntas de abastecimiento y precios (supply and price control boards, JAPs), shantytowns, centros de madre (mothers’ centres) and unions, among others. This meant that their practices as party militants had a high degree of continuity with lived social experiences from their youth. The main difference was that as party militants they moved through more politicised spaces and gained access to political training and, in some cases, took on leadership roles within social organisations. Indeed, one woman became a communal – and later, parliamentary – representative. The skills acquired and their experiences during the Popular Unity (UP) period shaped their life trajectories, and consequently, these women have promoted an intergenerational transfer of socio-political practices in new, contemporary Chilean, scenarios.

Women in Chile 50 years after the UP: ‘The revolution will be feminist or nothing at all …’

This article addresses the position of women during the Popular Unity years from the perspective of Chile’s Mayo Feminista (‘Feminist May’) and the estallido social. The article maintains that there was a process of building a political consciousness of women during the Popular Unity that was expressed in various forms of political and social militancy. This was deployed in the participation of women on various fronts of the Chilean path to socialism, in which work, care, health, education and other aspects were seen as fundamental to the project. In this text we address the articulation of women and politics in the processes of construction of social change in the recent history of Chile.

Scholarship on the Popular Unity in Chile since 2000. Are historians lagging behind?

This article examines the questioning indicated by some historians at the beginning of the twenty-first century regarding that they would be in debt to the study of the Allende government and the Popular Unity (UP) in Chile (1970–3). Although historians have investigated the diverse issues and problems of that period in varying depth, there are topics that have not been fully addressed: for example, the relationship between socialists, communists and President Allende, and the participation of left-wing women, native people and youth in the referred historical process. However, this work addresses the contributions on the subject made mainly by Chilean authors in books and articles on UP, namely: general studies on the period, works concerning Allende and some of his close collaborators, the economic changes that affected national and international private interests, some of the forces of the Left and Right (parties and movements), popular social sectors, the state coup, the military, culture and the press. A novel aspect in a significant number of these works is the use of interviews with witnesses who played a significant role in, or lived through, the UP period.

Fifty years after Popular Unity: Chile’s estallido social in historical context

In this article, the co-editors introduce key themes and contributions of this special issue of Radical Americas, particularly as they pertain to the 50th anniversary of Chile’s Popular Unity revolution (1970–3) and the more recent estallido social (social uprising), which began in Santiago de Chile in October 2019. They underline the historical context for contemporary events, arguing the need to recognise the influence, memory and significance of the past in the present.

A ‘popular option’ for development? Reconsidering the rise and fall of Chile’s political economy of socialism

As Salvador Allende and his supporters forged a democratic path towards socialism, the task of building a more sovereign and egalitarian national economy became one of the Popular Unity (UP) revolution’s first priorities. To that end, Allende’s coalition promoted a massive downward redistribution of income during its first months in office while also extending state control over many of the country’s most essential industries. Chile’s food economy, including its agricultural sector, received special attention during this early period as both purchasing power and domestic production soared. However, when a combination of economic, ecological and political factors caused consumer production to stagnate, acute shortages for a wide range of goods raised questions about the viability of the UP’s plans for a more just consumer economy. The emergence of a powerful opposition movement also raised questions about the government’s reluctance to pursue substantive political changes at the same time that it implemented major economic reforms. By examining the political economy of the UP experiment in the context of Chile’s 2019–20 uprising against inequality and political exclusion, this article reconsiders the consequences of the UP’s inability to link economic transformations with changes in how political power was exercised in mid-century Chile.

The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism

This article approaches the rebellions of the Mapuche people from a longue-durée perspective, from the Occupation of the Araucanía in 1861 to the recent events of 2020. Among other things, the article explores the Popular Unity (UP) period, and the ‘Cautinazo’ in particular, considered here as an uprising that synthesised the discourses and aspirations of the Mapuche people dating back to the Occupation, while also repoliticising them by foregrounding demands for land restitution. This experience created the conditions for a new cycle of mobilisation that began in the twenty-first century. In other words, the Agrarian Reform of the UP era set the stage for more recent rebellions that are once again challenging colonial problems related to private property rights, the usurpation of land and agricultural aggression. In seeking responses to these problems, the Mapuche movement of the early twenty-first century is being revitalised.

Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

With Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America, Tanya Harmer delivers a brilliant book that offers new and needed perspectives on the apex of the Latin American Cold War. This thorough biography of a prominent activist and key link within the multilayered regional Left expands far beyond the life of an individual and explores various Cold War patterns and dynamics. Owing to an extraordinary array of previously unconsulted primary sources, this book is a masterful example of how, by exploring one person's life and surroundings, researchers can scrutinize broader phenomena—in this case, “a particular revolutionary moment in Latin America's Cold War” (p. 16).A major asset of the book is Harmer's methodical examination of how the Eduardo Frei administration (1964–70) influenced the Chilean Left. There is a regrettable trend in Cold War historiography to disregard Chile's Christian Democratic experience, which fostered a “climate of reform and voluntarism” that had a strong impact on a younger generation of revolutionaries (p. 88). Frei's reformist agenda, which included rapprochement with the socialist sphere, helped set the scene for new patterns of mobilization and activated mounting hopes that forged a dynamic of radicalization by expectation. This concatenation had a lot to do with the rise and fate of Salvador Allende's socialist project. Thus while the Popular Unity period has received the bulk of academic attention, Harmer convincingly invites us to further delve into the years preceding it, in order to reveal those hard-to-grasp mechanisms that led to the growth of revolutionary awareness.A second major strength of this book is its incorporation of a gender approach across the entire volume. This approach demonstrates how decisive gendered political divisions were in determining (and stymieing) women's aspirations and political possibilities. The book probes episodes in both Chile and Cuba in which Beatriz Allende's ambitions were repeatedly hampered by well-entrenched, masculinist revolutionary imagery. This is aptly presented as evidence of how Latin American women were constrained in the political sphere.But despite these nearly insurmountable constraints, Allende played a pivotal role as key mediator among multiple revolutionary groups, often with clashing proclivities. She was able to navigate across several factions and managed—sometimes successfully—to build ties within the complex Latin American Left: among Cuban and Chilean officials under Salvador Allende, radical and moderate Chilean leftists, and local and exiled revolutionaries in Chile and Cuba. Far from simply an idiosyncrasy, Beatriz Allende's astounding ability to assume “different roles and personalities depending on the situation” contributed to shaping the hemispheric Left's progression (p. 104). By highlighting Allende's position as a bridge between factions—with constant and revealing illustrations of this peppered throughout the book—Harmer underscores the role of Cold War intermediaries and, by doing so, exposes why a transnational outlook is fundamental to a fuller picture of the Latin American Cold War.However, even though Harmer has long been a key proponent of the concept of the “global Cold War”—coined by her doctoral dissertation director, Odd Arne Westad—this book lacks a wider discussion of the appropriateness of a transnational history approach to Allende's biography. The book is punctuated with personal episodes of Allende's multifaceted and tormented life that exerted an impact on her political posture. While the book evinces both inner and transnational dynamics, it does not provide a broader debate on the main factors that ultimately played the greatest role in defining Allende's trajectory and, by extension, the nature of Latin America's Cold War. Can personal stories sometimes outshine global trends? Are people's political mobilization and choices molded by personal experiences? Or should we rather focus on the grand ideological narratives and developments? Harmer presumably has a clear answer to these queries, but a more straightforward discussion of this in the book would have been desirable in clarifying her intellectual approach.While the book certainly delivers an eloquently multidimensional view of the Left, the Right is barely considered for its ideological ramifications in the global Cold War. Undoubtedly Allende and her political entourage “faced terrible odds” in confronting “powerful, foreign-backed opponents” (p. 265). But beyond its repressive apparatus and sinister alliance with the United States, the Latin American Right, as Vanni Pettinà has pointed out, also had a political project, one that garnered significant support from the economic elite as well as large portions of the regional middle class. Harmer is well aware of this, but her depiction of the Right without its ideological distinctiveness (which ultimately motivated violence) is one slight flaw in an otherwise formidable and indispensable book for both contemporary Latin Americanist and Cold War experts.

“The Impact of ‘Third Cinema’ in the World” [1979

“The Impact of ‘Third Cinema’ in the World” [1979] CinémAction Translated by Jonathan Buchsbaum Introductory note: The journal CinémAction, created in 1978 by Guy Hennebelle and Monique Martineau, was first hosted by friendly journals before establishing itself as an independent journal. In that way, CinémAction assembled the dossier on “The Impact of ‘Third Cinema’ in the World,” published by the journal Revue Tiers Monde in Volume 20, no. 79, “Audio-visual and Development” (Presses Universitaires de France, 1979), directed by Yvonne Mignot-Lefebvre. —Monique Martineau-Hennebelle, 2020 Editors’ note: The CinémAction survey translated here is the third part (Part C) of a dossier devoted to “L’influence du ‘troisième cinéma’ dans le monde” that includes eleven responses to precise questions about the impact of the film and the manifesto in different countries. Part A of the dossier presented a background of Third Cinema and the Cine Liberación Manifesto (“Genèse, en 1968, d’une théorie argentine du cinéma d’intervention”) and Part B contained 15 “salient” excerpts from the Manifesto (“15 points saillants d’un Manifeste de 15,000 mots”), both by CinémAction. For Part C, Hennebelle’s CinémAction group posed the following three questions: 1. Was La hora de los hornos distributed in your country? Did it spark controversies? What were they? If yes, did [the film] contribute to establishing a network of alternative distribution? 2. Was the Manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema” published, translated if needed, in your country? Did it provoke debates, arguments? Which ones? 3. What did you think at the time of the publication of the Manifesto and what do you think of it today? Does it seem still pertinent? [End Page 57] C) The Impact of Third Cinema. Results of an International Survey Certain writers respond in order to the questions; others “mix” them. Some emphasize certain points; others offer general reflections. One can see that the very concept of “third cinema” has elicited quite different interpretations. It seemed to us that the variety of approaches was in itself revealing. For us, this survey could open the possibility of a conference and a reworking of the Manifesto. In Chile: “at first unknown, the Manifesto might, updated, be of use to the cinema of exile” (Jaime Larrain, Chilean, is an architect, filmmaker, and photographer. He worked in the cinema during the Popular Unity government. Exiled in Spain, he collaborates with the journal Interviu, Que, Reporter, Cinema 2002, and Eikonos, imagen y sonido.) “In a situation openly colonial, cultural penetration appears as the complement of the action of the foreign army of occupation; in a neocolonial situation, at certain stages, it is this penetration which plays the most important role. For neocolonialism, the mass media are more effective than napalm.” “Of course it is only after the conquest of political power that a culture and a revolutionary consciousness can be anchored in the masses, but it does not prevent the use of scientific and artistic means together with the political-military means from being able to prepare the ground for revolution to become a reality. And to ensure that the problems following the taking of power are more easily resolved.” These two citations can be read in the work of Solanas and Getino, Cine, cultura y descolonización, which contains the Manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema.” In Chile, The Hour of the Furnaces and the Manifesto were known by a minority of people several months before the presidential election of 1970. This political context has somewhat obscured the experiment distributed by the group Cine Liberación, and in particular the slogans expressed in The Hour of the Furnaces. Still, this is not the only reason for the noncommunication among Chilean and Argentinian filmmakers. We must mention also the too short existence of a national Chilean cinema (two years), the absence of clandestine cinema, and the still embryonic nature of militant cinema. On the other hand, the process that, in Argentina, led the group Cine Liberación to construct the project of a “third cinema” had had its equivalent in Chile after the first meeting of Latin-American filmmakers at Viña-del-Mar (1967), but...

Exílio chileno de Mário Pedrosa

Com base em uma ampla pesquisa de fontes primárias em arquivos de instituições no Brasil e no Chile, este artigo apresenta um panorama sobre o exílio chileno de Mário Pedrosa, durante o Governo Salvador Allende (1970-1973). Busca-se analisar as principais iniciativas culturais fomentadas pela Unidade Popular, uma coligação de partidos de esquerda, com objetivo de compreender a conjuntura na qual o autor brasileiro foi convocado. Pedrosa fez parte de um contingente de intelectuais latino-americanos exilados que colaborou ativamente na área acadêmica e, de forma ainda mais direta, na política cultural chilena, ao ser convidado para conceber o Museu da Solidariedade. Seguramente, essa instituição, formada exclusivamente por obras doadas, foi o empreendimento mais importante do governo popular, no entanto essa entidade inseriu-se em um programa cultural e político mais amplo, sendo necessário compreender o contexto geral no qual Pedrosa filiou-se. Apesar de ter se envolvido diretamente na criação do Museu, foi nas cooperativas de artesanato que Pedrosa enxergou o maior potencial comunitário da arte, cujo caráter revolucionário o crítico exaltou no artigo "Arte Culta e Arte Popular", escrito em 1975.

Emancipatory societal projects for Latin America: a critical commitment for the reconceptualisation of Social Work at Universidad Católica de Valparaíso School of Social Work

This article analyses the reconceptualisation movement of social work in Chile from mid-1960 to 1973 that impacted on universities, which, in turn, participated in theoretical and political discussions through Latin America during that time. The article has been prepared from the perspective of the project of the School of Social Work at the Catholic University of Valparaíso as an experience that merged the theoretical discussions around radical questioning and professional change. It covers the period from the ‘developmental policies’ in the geopolitical context of the Cold War, when occidental powers competed to extend their influence over Third World countries, to the transition process to socialism during the Popular Unity Government in Chile.

Protest and the persistence of the past

Protest has long been a motor of change in Chile. In October to December 2019 protesters in Santiago harnessed protest methods and memories of hope and change related to Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970–3), resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90) and discontent with the subsequent decades of neoliberal democracy (1990–2019). The 2019 protests evoked this past in the struggle against the neoliberal system of today. In doing so, the protests offer a complex demonstration of temporal bridging that provides a window onto protest culture and the persistence of the past in contemporary Chile.

The Chilean counter-revolution: Roots, dynamics and legacies of mass mobilisation against the Unidad Popular

The election of Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) in 1970 unleashed a radical and original revolutionary process, discernible not only in the depth of its redistributive measures and the expectations it generated, but also in the ferocity with which those who identified with the counter-revolutionary ideal responded to that project. The counter-revolution, initially confined to the conservative and reactionary sectors, in a matter of months became an immense mass mobilisation that would end up paving the way for the military coup. This article analyses that counter-revolutionary process, exploring its historic roots, the main actors involved and the innovations in political practices it developed at the time. The ‘counter-revolutionary bloc’ was formed by a diverse array of political and social actors – some of whom did not have previous experience in political mobilisations – who based their actions on the adoption and socialisation of a long-standing anti-Communist script, through which they could make sense of the period’s changing reality. That script – based on decades of taking in events from other parts of the world, elaborations and accusations against all those who identified as Communists – aimed to reduce the originality of the Unidad Popular’s political project to a remake of classic socialist experiences in Chilean territory and processed in a dystopian key. The counter-revolution’s power would be projected into the military dictatorship that began in 1973, when it became a sort of official state ideology, and it would become a foundational experience for Chilean conservative sectors with reverberations even in in the present.

‘To work more, produce more and defend the revolution’: Copper workers from socialism to neoliberalism

On 11 July 1971, Chile’s National Congress, in a historic vote, unanimously approved reforming the constitution, which opened the door to nationalise the large-scale copper industry. Traditional historical accounts of the nationalisation of copper had emphasised a history of negotiations between foreign capital and the Chilean government, documenting how economists and political leaders experimented with different approaches to obtain a share of the profits from the country’s most valuable commodity. By focusing exclusively on the political economy, however, scholars have overlooked the role of workers during and after the process of nationalisation and failed to account for why copper miners continued to fight to protect a state-owned company. Influenced by Peter Winn’s Weavers of Revolution and recent studies on people’s experience during the Popular Unity (UP) era, this article looks at the nationalisation of copper from below. It analyses how workers fought for, understood and experienced the nationalisation; how the UP transformed labour relations at the local level; and how the military, after 1973, redesigned the state company. By placing workers at the centre of the nationalisation, this article can help better understand its importance as a matter of both political economy and workers’ power and explain why the copper mines became the first site of labour resistance against the military regime.

An ambiguous tool of demos accountability: taking the metaphorical concept of majoritarian tyranny seriously

ABSTRACT Even before the invention of modern democracy, political theorists have warned about the dangers of ‘majoritarian tyrannies.’ While the concept has been perennially suspicious of serving as an antidemocratic stratagem, I propose to revalue it as an antipopulist tool of horizontal accountability among citizens (‘demos accountability’). Subverting the populist narrative of popular unity and virtue, it allows aggrieved minorities to call their majoritarian fellow citizens to account for the injustices they help to produce. Given its metaphorical quality, however, its rootedness in the image of the personal tyrant, the idea of majoritarian tyranny carries deep democratic ambiguities. To recognize these ambiguities, I argue, we need to resist the suggestive power of its animating metaphor and take the empirical complexities of its logical building blocks seriously: the exercise of tyranny, the exclusive targeting of minorities, and collective action by the majority. My stepwise analytical reconstruction of these three constitutive elements of majoritarian tyrannies reveals two metaphorical pitfalls that threaten the democratic fertility of the concept: its vilifying and its simplifying assumptions.

Movements in dialogue

In this interview, historians Mario Garcés Durán and Peter Winn discuss the emergence of the estallido social, or social uprising, that began in Santiago de Chile in October 2019 and quickly spread throughout the country. The two historians also consider connections between past and present, in particular the legacies of the Popular Unity revolution (1970–3), in which both were active participants.