As we read of rising
tensions in Venezuela and growing class and race war, from a mainstream media
that provides a narrative of failed economic populism, the story of the role of
US imperialism in overthrowing the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende
in Chile comes to mind. Times and circumstances are different, but the needs
and struggles of the Venezuelan people for a better life bind them to the peoples’
histories of Latin America.
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THE
SPIRIT OF SOCIALISM IN CHILE LIVES ON: A Repost
From September
7, 2013
Harry Targ
The Chilean Song Movement had become so
identified with Popular Unity, it had been such a strong factor, emotional,
cohesive, inspiring, that the military authorities found it necessary to
declare ‘subversive’ even the indigenous instruments, whose beautiful sound had
become so full of meaning and inspiration. Together with prohibiting even the
mention of Victor’s name, they banned all his music and the music of all the
artists of the New Chilean Song Movement….
It was a mystery to me how Victor was
remembered. Since the coup his very name had been censored, his records
prohibited. But in spite of that I heard his songs being sung in poor community
centres, in church halls, football clubs and universities, with whole audiences
of young people joining in the singing as though his songs had become part of
Chilean folklore (from Joan Jara, Victor, An Unfinished Song, Bloomsbury,
London, 1998).
Victor
Jara, The Voice of the People
In a powerful
biography of the life of Victor Jara, his wife captures the deep political and
cultural roots her husband planted in the soil of the working people of Chile.
He committed his life to celebrating and popularizing the songs and stories of
the Chilean people, recognizing that his cultural project had to be intimately
connected to the political project of Salvador Allende’s socialist and
democratic Popular Unity coalition. Allende in October, 1970, was the first
elected socialist president of a Latin American country.
The Nixon Administration
and the Chilean military found the people’s choice unacceptable and set about
undermining Allende’s government. On September 11, 1973 the military launched a
coup, killed Allende, rounded up thousands of his supporters, and brought them
to a huge soccer stadium, and tortured and shot their cultural icon, Victor
Jara.
The
United States Crushes Revolution in Chile
The United States had
supported the Christian Democrats in Chile with official assistance and CIA
financing since the 1950s. The Christian Democratic candidate in 1970 was
opposed by Marxist Salvador Allende, who, as the head of a coalition of six
left parties, won a plurality of votes.
From the time of the
election in October, 1970, until September, 1973, when a bloody military coup
toppled Allende, the United States did everything it could to destabilize the
elected government. First, the United States pressured Chilean legislators to
reject the election result. When that failed, energy and resources were used to
damage the Chilean economy and build a network of ties with military personnel
ready to carry out a coup.
Allende developed
policies to redistribute land, nationalized the vital copper industry, and
established diplomatic relations with the former Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.
Popular culture stimulated by artists such as Victor Jara flowered and grew.
All these moves exacerbated tensions with the United States, since its
investments in copper, iron, nitrates, iodine, and salt were large.
The Nixon
administration formed a secret committee, “the 40 committee,” headed by
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to develop a long-term plan to
destabilize and overthrow the Allende government. The CEO of the International
Telephone and Telegraph Company, a major foreign influence in Chile, was
enthusiastic about the Nixon plan.
Among the policies
utilized by Washington were an informal economic blockade of Chile, termination
of aid and loans, International Monetary Fund pressure on the government to
carry out anti-worker policies, the engineering of a substantial decline in the
price of copper on the world market, fomenting dissent in the military, and
funding opposition groups and newspapers, particularly the influential Santiago
daily, El Mercurio. Despite growing
economic crisis and protests by the
rightwing spurred by U.S. covert operations, the Allende-led left coalition
scored electoral victories in municipal elections throughout the country in
March, 1973.
Since Nixon’s
directive to make Chile’s “economy scream” had not led to Allende’s rejection
at the ballot box, the Kissinger committee and the right-wing generals decided
to act. On September 11, 1973 the military carried out a coup that ousted the
Allende government, assassinated him in the Presidential Palace, and
established brutal rule under the leadership of General Augusto Pinochet. A
year after the coup, Amnesty International reported that some 6,000 to 10,000
prisoners had been taken. The new regime banned all political parties,
abolished trade unions, and initiated programs to assassinate pro-Allende
emigres, including former Foreign Minister, Orlando Letelier, who was blown up
in an automobile in Dupont Circle in Washington D.C.
The spirit of the
brutal U.S. policy in Chile was expressed by Kissinger in 1970 when he
declared: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist
due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” One year after the coup
President Ford (who replaced the discredited Richard Nixon) defended the it as
being in the “best interests of the people of Chile and certainly in the best
interests of the United States.” A different assessment was provided by a
distinguished diplomatic historian, Alexander De Conde who wrote that the
United States “had a hand in the destruction of a moderate left-wing government
that allowed democratic freedoms to its people and to its replacement by a
friendly right-wing government that crushed such freedoms with torture and
other police-state repressions.”
Chile is one example
of the way the United States has sought to control and influence the internal
affairs of nations. But the spirit of resistance planted in so many different
ways in so many places by cultural performers and revolutionaries such as
Victor Jara lives on.
As long as we sing his
songs,
As long as his courage can inspire us
to greater courage
Victor Jara will never die.
As long as his courage can inspire us
to greater courage
Victor Jara will never die.
“Singout Magazine” 1975
