BY JORGE JORQUERA
My only vivid childhood memories are from Chile in September 1973 — the gunfire, the burning of documents and the waiting. Like thousands of Chilean workers, my father did not return home from work on the afternoon of September 11. In his factory, like in hundreds of workplaces, the workers debated what to do. His factory had ample supplies of petrol and some workers argued to use this in an attempt to engage in armed battle with the tanks and soldiers invading the streets of Santiago.
Hundreds of thousands of class-conscious workers heeded President Salvador Allende's call that morning: "I call on all workers to occupy their workplaces... the people must be alert and vigilant. You should not allow yourselves to be provoked nor to be massacred but you must also defend your gains."
Allende's words encapsulated the impotence of the Popular Unity (UP) leadership in the face of the generals' coup. In his first announcement at 7.55 am, Allende still assured the workers that "loyal [armed] forces respecting their pledges to the [government] authority, together with the organised workers, will squash this fascist coup that threatens the nation". By the time of his final radio announcement at 9.10 am, Allende had resigned himself to the tragedy now awaiting the Chilean workers.
In their factories the workers hung on every word from Allende. He told them he would not resign and would pay with his life defending the "Chilean revolution". The workers waited for direction — how were they to resist? Allende sent a message through his daughter, Tati, to Miguel Enriquez, general secretary of the Chilean Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR). "It's the hour of Miguel", Allende said.
It was far too late. The MIR, the only consistently revolutionary party-organisation of the Chilean working class. was not strong enough on its own. Its members tried desperately to activate their networks to provide the leadership the Chilean workers so desperately required.
Enriquez had met early that morning with leaders of the Chilean Socialist Party (PS) and Communist Party (PC), the two largest organisations in the UP. The PS leadership and its ranks had increasingly radicalised throughout the period of the UP government. They were disposed to struggle but they lacked the cadre organisation to effect this in such a crisis.
The far better organised PC told the MIR that it would wait to see if the leaders of the military coup would close parliament before deciding on a course of action.
Workers were left without recourse — many fought valiantly for the socialism they believed they had begun to construct with the UP government. Thousands died in hand-to-hand combat defending their factories. Most went into hiding to fight another day, only to be arrested, tortured and jailed.
On September 17, General Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship criminalised the national trade union federation (CUT). On September 24, it dissolved parliament. On October 1, it replaced all university rectors with military personnel and on October 8 it criminalised all left parties.
The PC and sectors of the PS and of other components of the UP, such as the Radical party and Movement of Popular Unitary Action, maintained the view that the left's strategy should centre on winning the "democratic bourgeois" away from supporting Pinochet and that any form of armed resistance should be avoided so as not to scare off such support. The reformist leaders who had dominated the UP government continued with the same strategic perspective that had led to this historic defeat.
In April 2002, the government of left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez also faced a right-wing military which, like that launched against Allende 30 years ago, was strongly supported by the country's capitalist business elite. However, thanks to the radically different strategy pursued by Chavez and his close associates, the Venezuelan Pinochets and their backers in Washington were dealt a stunning counterblow.
The election of Chavez in 1998, like that of Allende in 1970, reflected a rise in the confidence and expectations of their countries' working classes. The Allende government sought to implement a program of national economic development based on extending the public sector.
Within its first year, the UP government nationalised the copper, nitrate, iron and coal industries, as well as many banks and textile mills. Other reforms included the expropriation of 3300 large land holdings, increasing the wages of lower-paid workers by 66% and providing a litre of free milk a day each for 4 million children. The increasing state controls over banking and foreign commerce led to a halving of unemployment and increasing consumer purchasing power.
In the April 1971 municipal elections the UP obtained 50.86% of the vote, an increase of 13%, thus strengthening its ability to counter right-wing opposition to its reform agenda. However, it failed to do so. Instead, the Chilean capitalist class grasped the initiative and in March 1972 the leaders of the opposition parties and the employers' associations met to plot a vast plan of civil disturbance and economic sabotage.
In April 1972, a small section of the UP, previously part of the Radical party, broke with the government, and the opposition organised its first "march of democracy".
In contrast, after winning his first election in December 1998 with 56% of the vote, Chavez moved immediately to the election of a "constituent assembly" to draft a new constitution. The new constitution was approved in a referendum by 70% of the voters.
After the new constitution was adopted, the old congress was disbanded and new elections held. In July 2000, the Chavez forces won a majority in congress and Chavez was re-elected president. In November 2000, the government enacted 49 new laws, including a land reform law and a law aimed at re-organising the national oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDSVA).
Unlike the UP in Chile, the Chavez government deliberately set out to strengthen the independent organisation and mobilising power of the working classes. In early 2001, the government began to organise working people into the Bolivarian Circles, neighbourhood-based action committees which provide the embryonic structures of organs of working people's power.
In October 1972 the Chilean National Confederation of Road Haulers declared an indefinite national strike. On October 13, shopkeepers also declared a national strike.
In the face of the "bourgeois strike", supported by all the right-wing parties, the Chilean working class mobilised and began to takeover over production in the factories and distribution of consumer goods in their neighbourhoods.
Faced with this working-class offensive, the Christian Democrats — the main right-wing party, withdrew its support for the bosses' strike. The UP leaders interpreted this as a new opportunity to win the Christian Democrats' support. On November 2, 1972, the UP announced the entry into the cabinet of three generals. According to the PC this was going to be a "cabinet against subversion".
The UP leaders' orientation toward the army were symptomatic of their reformist strategy. Instead of strengthening the hand of the constitutionalist generals and officers in the armed forces (of which there were significant numbers), by encouraging the united action by the rank-and-file soldiers and junior officers with the workers' movement, the UP government refused to go "behind the backs" of the armed forces' high command.
In a meeting with UP MP Laura Allende, also attended by MIR leader Andres Pascal Allende, Colonel Ominami, who was in charge of the El Bosque air force base, pleaded that President Allende should meet with pro-democracy officers. Allende never did.
By contrast, Chavez has consistently organised the democratic forces within the armed forces. In 1982, he was one of the four founders of the clandestine Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement (MBR-200), which in 1992 organised some 2000 officers and soldiers in a revolt against the right-wing government of President Carlos Perez.
In 1999, the Chavez government launched Plan Bolivar 2000, drawing the soldiers into public works and encouraging them to develop direct links with the working class.
By the end of 1972, Washington and the Chilean capitalist class had already begun making serious coup plans. By May 1973, they had decided on a June coup date. Still the army's III Division, responsible for Santiago, was unreliable, with too many democratic officers and soldiers and the coup plan was uncovered.
Allende called on workers to mobilise and threatened to arm the people if necessary. Hundreds of factories, offices, schools and population centres were occupied. Democratic officers in the armed forces demanded the UP government pass over to an offensive against the coup plotters. However, the UP government, imprisoned by the reformist strategy of building an alliance with the so-called "democratic sectors" of the bourgeoisie, decided against any offensive.
Demoralised, the constitutionalist head of the armed forces, General Carlos Prats, resigned himself to the looming defeat as did hundreds of democratic officers and thousands of soldiers.
The April 2002 coup in Venezuela put the Chavez government to the same test as the June 1973 coup attempt in Chile. The popular response to the April 2002 coup revealed the embryonic development of a worker-peasant-soldier counter-power to that of the capitalist class and its generals.
Within hours of Chavez's kidnapping by right-wing officers on April 11, a popular uprising against the coup had begun in all these sectors. The people in Caracas' poor hillside suburbs started to come out onto the streets. At the same time, protest action began throughout the country's interior.
The decisive action came from General Raul Baduel, in charge of the Maracay-based parachutists' brigade and a founding member of the MBR-200. He refused to recognise the coup regime headed by employers' federation leader Pedro Carmona and, together with the people of Maracay, the parachutists' brigade set up barricades in preparation for battle.
Word of Baduel's stand soon reached leaders of the popular movement and soldiers throughout the country. The order went out through the Bolivarian Circles and other mass organisations for people to march to the army barracks. They did so in their thousands, calling on soldiers to support the movement and to demand the return of Chavez.
This strengthened the resolve of the pro-Chavez officers and soldiers. On April 12, a group of young officers with contacts in the military academy, where a number of the coup conspirators had set up their base, met to organise themselves. They had two key goals — to find a general at the army headquarters (Fuerte Tiuna) who would side with the people, and to break the media blackout on developments.
Lieutenant-colonels Jesus Manuel Zambrano Mata and Francisco Espinoza Guyon played a leading role. They garnered the support of generals Martinez Mendoza and Garcia Carneiro at Fuerte Tiuna and they organised the retaking of the government TV channel, Canal 8, from the coup makers.
By 10 am on April 13, the presidential palace regiment took over the palace and forced coup leaders to flee. By then, hundreds of thousands of people were on the streets of Caracas, sweeping down to the city centre from the hillside suburbs. The atmosphere was defiant, with repeated chants of "Pueblo, escucha, unete a la lucha" (People, listen, unite in the struggle); "Chavez, amigo, el pueblo esta contigo" (Chavez, friend, the people are with you).
Having crushed the coup attempt, the Chavez government moved against the coup plotters, sacking over 400 leading military officers. By the time of the second attempted capitalist conspiracy to oust the government — last December's oil industry lockout — the Chavez government was able to mobilise an increasingly class-conscious and combative working class movement to break the bosses' strike and to bring the oil industry under workers' control.
The power of the Venezuelan capitalist class is yet to be smashed and replaced by the organisation of the working class as the ruling class, but the Chavez government has opened up the road to this outcome.
Thirty years on from the Chilean tragedy, the working people of Venezuela have begun to learn in practice the negative lesson of the experience of the Chilean tragedy of 1973 — summarised by MIR leader Miguel Enriquez at an underground press conference held one month after Pinochet's coup: "The crisis of the system of [capitalist] domination ... [was] crystallised in the rise of the UP government. This generated conditions that would have permitted, if the government had been utilised as an instrument of the working class struggle, the conquering of power by the workers and a proletarian revolution.
"But the reformist project assumed by the UP imprisoned itself in the bourgeois order... With the hope of achieving an alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie, it didn't base itself on the revolutionary organisation of the workers, in their own organs of power. It refused an alliance with the soldiers and junior officers; it preferred trying to fortify itself within the capitalist state apparatus and the officer corp of the armed forces.
"The reformist illusion allowed the dominant classes to fortify themselves in the superstructure of the state and from there initiate its reactionary counter-offensive. The reformist illusion was paid and is being paid for cruelly by the workers, their leaders and parties ... dramatically confirming the words of the French revolutionary of the 18th century, Saint Just: 'Those who make revolutions in halves only dig their own graves'."
From Green Left Weekly, September 10, 2003.
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