Democracy murdered in Chile

Fifty years ago today, with the assistance and at the instigation of the United States government, the Chilean military overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, killing the elected leftist in the presidential palace. The coup was followed by years of brutal right-wing military rule headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in what had previously been one of the Americas' proudest democracies.

Ariel Dorfman -- Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist -- has preserved memory of that terrible time. In the New York Review of Books, Dorfman, who worked in Allende's government as a young man, explains the Chilean's crime: his government empowered the people, the wrong people.

.. the Chilean pueblo had many reasons to support the Allende experiment.

His cabinet—the first to include a peasant and an industrial worker as ministers—had undertaken a series of reforms, the most impressive of which was the nationalization of the enormous copper mines, until then owned by predatory US corporations. It had also nationalized the mining of minerals like nitrate and iron, as well as many banks and large factories, a number of which were being administered by those who worked in them.

An ambitious agrarian reform had been handing over latifundios—large rural estates—to the peasants who had toiled on them from time immemorial; by 1973 almost 60 percent of Chile’s arable land had been expropriated.

Though some of these initiatives (and blunders by the relatively dysfunctional government of the Unidad Popular, the alliance of left-wing parties that had supported Allende for president) caused economic and financial disruptions, there had been a remarkable redistribution of income and services to the most underserved members of society.

Other measures revealed Allende’s priorities: a half-liter of milk daily for every child; cabins erected by the ocean so workers could vacation with their families (most had never seen the Pacific before); the acknowledgment of indigenous identities and languages; the publication of millions of inexpensive books that were sold at newspaper kiosks; and major advances in health, affordable public housing, education, and child care.

All this was accompanied by a blossoming of culture, particularly in music, mural painting, and documentary film. But perhaps more important than these material advantages was the dignity felt by so many disadvantaged citizens, their sense that they were now the central characters of their nation’s history.

After the murder of the man and the democracy, decades of repression, torture, and murder followed. Chile eventually crawled out of autocracy, but as an oligarchic, a hollowed out society. That complex ongoing story is for new generations of Chileans to live and to tell.

Dorfman can only conclude:

The wounds of Chile are deep, but regardless of how Chileans decide to deal with our trauma and conflicts, Allende’s legacy might have some bearing beyond the borders of his country. The need for radical change through nonviolence that this unique statesman posed—and did not achieve half a century ago—has again become the crucial issue of our era. 

With new variants of Pinochet troubling so many lands, Allende’s insistence throughout his life that for our dreams to bear fruit we need more democracy and never less—always, always more democracy—is more relevant than ever. He calls out to us that there can be no solution to the dilemmas plaguing the planet—war, inequality, mass migration, the twin threats of climate change and nuclear annihilation—without the active participation of vast majorities of fearless and enthusiastic men and women marching past the balconies of the future.

Fifty years after his death, Salvador Allende is still speaking to us.

• • •

Months before his murder, President Allende tried to explain to distant and uncomprehending North Americans the scope of Chileans' bold aspirations.

I invite the North American reader to overcome all prejudice and listen to us with an open mind. To fully grasp what Chilean socialism proposes, an objective understanding is necessary of the true character of our people, whose aspirations, so often passed over or betrayed, are manifestly just.

. . . Reformism in Chile has not been able to eradicate the endemic evil of a society which has permitted a life of leisure for a few and deprivation for the majority. The search for a different formula, more daring and identified with the common man, could not do other than lead us to socialism, Chilean socialism. 

... We believe in the justness of popular aspirations, for we identify with the peasant, bowed down by his task of providing his dally bread; with the worker who gives us the wealth he has created with his hands; with the white collar worker, the soldier, the intellectual, the student, and all those who have the inalienable right to enjoy the wealth they produce by their effort and sacrifice.

As bumptious billionaire tech bros (and their real estate profiteer con man) plot to lord it over this country, might we too need to revive a democratic economic system even more inclusive than Chile's fifty years ago? The struggle for democracy doesn't end.