Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile by Joshua Frens-String

Author:Joshua Frens-String [Frens-String, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Latin America, South America, Political Science, Labor & Industrial Relations, Public Policy, Agriculture & Food Policy
ISBN: 9780520343368
Google: 4wEqEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2021-06-29T01:48:27+00:00

REVOLUTION AT THE MARKET

The direct action that left-wing groups took to resist the strike quickly became the basis for new modes of community-based regulation and distribution that ran parallel to the state but went beyond the traditional scope of the JAPs. In early 1973, Punto Final, another publication affiliated with the MIR, recounted one such experiment in popular consumer democracy that emerged on the periphery of the upscale Santiago neighborhood of Las Condes. According to the magazine, militants on the left first organized a supply and distribution network within a small, working-class section of the parish sometime in late 1972. A short while later, the group temporarily seized control of a provisions warehouse controlled by the state distribution company DINAC, in order to begin distributing basic goods to poor and working-class consumers on their own terms. On the day of the citizens’ takeover, members of the network held a secret-ballot election to elect a leadership committee, and a resident of the community, rather than a state-appointed official, was selected to head the new organization alongside a council of twenty-four other individuals. “If capitalism can be used in such a way that it benefits us, we’ll use it. If not, we’ll take another route,” Luis Cáceres, the newly elected president of the consumer committee, told Punto Final. Leftist activists dubbed the experiment Chile’s “first soviet for basic consumer provisioning.”82

To be sure, in presenting their work as an alternative to the sometimes vertical structure of the PCCh–run JAPs, the activists who in early 1973 organized and expanded Chile’s network of almacenes del pueblo, or people’s stores, as well as various types of autonomous supply committees, known as comités de abastecimiento popular (popular supply committees, CAPs), did not see their actions as being in opposition to the UP.83 Rather, in the wake of the October Bosses’ Strike, they portrayed their work as an alternative mechanism for restoring the JAPs’ original promise of economic democracy in the consumer marketplace.84

This was what happened in the neighborhood of Nueva Habana, a self-built neighborhood formed just prior to the revolution in the parish of La Florida. In late 1972 and into 1973, the work of food distribution embodied revolutionary action in Nueva Habana as grassroots leaders demanded that all private producers of basic foodstuffs be socialized and food provisioning be handed over to locally run communal councils.85 After the October strike, the community’s leaders, among them the prominent MIR activist Alejandro Villalobos, built an economic architecture that cut out private distributors and, in large part, the state itself. Local residents selected a delegate from each block in Nueva Habana to identify the basic needs of every household in the community. The local consumer delegates then issued each family one of three color-coded ration cards—yellow, red, or white, depending on family size—and instructed residents to present their cards to the community’s new “people’s store” to receive a set number of weekly goods at a fixed price.86

Some of the most dramatic enactments of a more participatory, more equitable food economy occurred in the western Santiago parish of Maipú.

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