Beatriz Allende by Tanya Harmer

Beatriz Allende by Tanya Harmer

Author:Tanya Harmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00


8 : : : The Battle for Chile

The battle for Chile intensified from mid-1971, playing out across society. As the government strove to implement its program, it encountered growing resistance from opponents and criticism from frustrated supporters. The lack of food supplies caused friction, while university campuses rocked with political clashes.1 Characteristic of the crisis unfolding was a growing disinterest in negotiation, if not refusal to countenance it. When the Unidad Popular (UP) candidate for the University of Chile’s rector in early 1972 stood for “coexistence,” for example, he lost, at least in part because the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) fielded its own nominee, campaigning against “conciliation.”2 True, Allende and the government—impelled by the Communists within it—continued to reach out to the Christian Democrats (PDC). But given a lack of compromise on core aspects of each other’s programs, exacerbated by the left wing and the right wing of the UP and the PDC, respectively, efforts failed. As in other parts of Latin America, the perception actors were involved in an urgent zero-sum game proved pervasive.3 Language employed in Chile certainly constructed politics in confrontational terms, alienating those the UP needed to persuade to join its program for radical change.4 As Francisca Espinosa Muñoz noted, “Words such as ‘conflict,’ ‘struggle,’ ‘resistance’” gave the impression of a “permanent ‘battle field.’”5 In this respect, governmental campaigns—the “battles” for production, copper, and hake—and Allende’s message to Congress in May 1972 referring to “two worlds … in confrontation, two concepts of social order and human existence,” clashed with the idea of a peaceful road to socialism.6 Having remained robust, Chile’s democratic political system founded on decades of consensus building and institutional legitimacy now entered into definitive crisis.7

Of course, in the struggle to determine Chile’s future, the Left faced a belligerent opposition. Chile’s professional middle classes, which the UP needed to win over to secure majority support for socialist revolutionary change, turned against the government at the end of 1971.8 Fidel Castro’s twenty-five-day visit in November–December 1971 also provided the context for a decisive new phase of oppositional mobilization. On 1 December, two days before he was supposed to leave Chile, female opponents of the UP took part in the first so-called March of the Empty Pots. Banging pans, women protested food scarcity before it was a significant problem.9 Women’s charges that extreme left-wing groups physically attacked them amplified their rebuke. Ignoring the participation of the right-wing paramilitary group, Patria y Libertad, in the women’s march, the PDC launched impeachment proceedings against Minister of the Interior José Tohá for failing to guarantee citizens’ security. Allende was forced to call a state of emergency.10

The women’s explicit suggestion they faced a foreign and un-Chilean threat resonated particularly loudly in the context of Castro’s visit. “We don’t want foreigners/in our offices … we don’t want Marxism,” a poem written by one of the marchers stated.11 Although branded as an apolitical cross-class protest in defense of Chile and the family, opposition parties also backed the march as an answer to Fidel’s presence in the country.



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