Human rights activists in Chile have been struggling for years to bring the guilty to justice. At the moment when their struggle is starting to bring fruit, they are accused of "jumping on the bandwagon," "seeking publicity," or Allende's experiment "breaking the agreement" which the right imposed on the left with the impunity
From outside the country it is easy to underestimate the climate of myopia and fear which the general still generates. Many people are terrified by the new signs of destabilisation and tension. They know all too well where it can lead.
Pinochet's detention will serve a positive role if it leads to a real process, inside Chile, of examining all the crimes of the dictatorship. The sad thing is that the human rights debate is inevitably focusing, almost exclusively, on the period of the dictatorship. The neoliberal system imposed thanks the dictatorship is outside the sphere of debate. Those who benefited from Chile's "modernisation" might even wash their hands, and sacrifice those who did the dirty work on their behalf.
Chile today is a country with a subtle, "civilised" form of dictatorship. There is some democratic space. But any deviation from the accepted norms is severely punished. To call Chile a democracy is as false as to condemn Pinochet, but ignore the crimes of his associates, and their foreign supporters. * Source: A longer version of this article appeared in Viento Sur (Madrid), December 1998. • Chile's Mapuche nation have asked Britain to | investigate Pinochet's responsibility for the attempted genocide of indigenous peoples.
More than 300 Mapuche militants were "disappeared" and executed during the dictatorship, with the aim of destroying the leadership of the ethnic group, repressing its political demands, and destroying its non-Spanish cultural and religious heritage.
The dictatorship continued and intensified the destruction of the Aymara, Rapa Nui, Atacameño and Kawéskar groups, Chile's original inhabitants. "Chileanisation" meant imposing a new lifestyle and education system, and
On September 11 1973 the Chilean army carried out a coup d'etat which it had been planning for the preceding two and a half years. The Popular Unity government was overthrown and its President, Salvador Allende, was shot dead in his room at the Moneda Palace, a large section of which was destroyed by artillery and aerial bombardment. The 'Chilean road' to socialism had come to an end... Tariq Ali* The election of the Popular Unity (UP) was seen as an important step forward by large sections of the working class.
The programme of the UP was without doubt confused (particularly on the co-existence of the public and private sector). But it transcended the reformism of (Eduardo Frei's) discredited Christian Democrats. It pledged to create a new Chile, to nationalise all foreign capital and foreign trade, to extend Frei's Agrarian Reform, and to lay the basis for the creation of a new apparatus under the control of the working class. In brief, the UP saw the electoral victory as the beginning of the process of the transition to socialism.
So was Popular Unity a classical Popular Front as existed in Chile, France and Spain in the 1930's, or was it something different?
A Popular Front embodies the collaboration between a working class party (or parties) and a party or parties of the bourgeoisie, and is a tactic utilised by sections of the bourgeoisie to contain the rise of the mass movement and keep a grip on working class parties. This was how the bourgeoisie conceived of the Chilean Popular Front in the Thirties.
Allende himself told the French writer Regis Debray "We consciously entered into a coalition in order to be the left wing of the system-the capitalist system, that is. By contrast, today, as our programme shows, we are struggling to change the system-Our objective is total, scientific, Marxist socialism"
Allende was telling the truth. The stated aim of the UP was socialism, whereas the Popular Fronts of the Thirties were pledged essentially to combat fascism together with important sections of the bourgeoisie, and remained completely within the ideological and political framework of bourgeois
The UP in Chile was a reformist united front dominated by two large working class parties. Even if there had not been a single grouping of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois origin in the UP there is nothing to indicate that its policies would have been different in any way.
The Chilean CP was a rather rightwing force within the UP, and Allende's SP was well to the left of the CP on virtually every political question. This fact becomes rather decisive in understanding why the UP was not in a position to contain the mass movement by selective repression (as the bourgeoisie would have liked), or even to outlaw the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left).
In the absence of a strong left-wing pole inside the SP, the CP would have irredeemably dragged the UP to the right and ultimately brought the Christian Democrats into the coalition, which
International Viewpoint #310 April 1999 33
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