Since the dictator seized power through the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, the majority of Chileans who have lived through the most combative and heroic decades of our people have been unable to avoid feeling a sense of shame at the successive heads of state who have governed our country. Some, driven by personal ambition, such as Patricio Aylwin; others, through their servile subordination to imperialism, such as Eduardo Frei, Ricardo Lagos, and Michelle Bachelet; another, even worse, through his extreme narcissism, greed, and excessive lust for power, such as Sebastián Piñera; and then Gabriel Boric, a young man who represented what was old and shameful in petty-bourgeois morality—arrogance, conceit, haughty airs, and opportunistic conduct—which seriously compromised the dignity of his office and political standing, including his declaration of support for the Nazi government of Ukraine and his alignment with the most criminal imperialism in history. Finally, there is the current president, José Antonio Kast, a Nazi through and through. Thus, for present-day Chile, we have witnessed the most mediocre figures our country has ever had as presidents and statesmen.
Pablo Neruda once said that José Manuel Balmaceda and Salvador Allende were, up to that point in our political history, the best presidents Chile had ever had. Both were, in the truest sense, dignitaries: distinguished by their political and moral authority, their prestige and legitimacy, and the honorability with which they exercised the highest office in the land. They were capable of offering their lives for Chile and for the project of social justice that they embodied.
We believe that this provides the necessary point of comparison for us, on this occasion, to address the figure of compañero President Salvador Allende Gossens with the responsibility and revolutionary commitment that such a task entails. We know that this is a delicate undertaking, requiring the humility to understand that our pen faces an enormous challenge: to encompass, within our limitations and our words, the historical stature of his example as the apostle of the people he represented.
Without fear of constructing an opportunistic, idyllic, or ahistorical portrait, we have decided to write about him from the sole political, social, and economic significance that defined his commitment, clear and pristine, from the moment he began his journey of more than thirty years as the candidate of the working class and the people. We say this because throughout his political trajectory, throughout his arduous path toward socialism, there were no compromises of principle, no hesitation, and no betrayal. And it was for this reason that his people elevated him to La Moneda.
THE 40 MEASURES: THE MOST CONCRETE, THE MOST HISTORIC
Salvador Allende was a student of Chilean and world reality. He rigorously examined, in a scientific manner, the antagonisms and contradictions expressed through the class struggle. But he was not merely an intellectual observer standing at a distance. For many years already, “Chicho” Allende had traveled through the different social fronts, maintaining close contact with the people and learning with empathy about the realities experienced by workers and popular sectors throughout Chile.
His knowledge of the social and economic dramas suffered by the people remained with him as a clear point of reference regarding the problems that had to be resolved in a country marked by enormous inequalities and injustices.
His actions and struggles—as a student leader first, as a physician afterward, as Minister of Health in the government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, and later as a Senator of the Republic—demonstrate a personality deeply committed to the aspirations and interests of the oppressed and exploited classes.
His presence among the hardships and poverty of the people was not an electoral exercise undertaken because the circumstances required a parliamentarian to appear among them. It was his responsibility and duty as their representative that compelled him to reach workplaces, working-class neighborhoods, universities, and, above all, the tragic and painful centers where the bourgeois power exercised through the repressive institutions of the state unleashed massacres.
He went wherever the blood of workers and ordinary people had been spilled. He questioned and condemned with force and clarity the murderous actions of governments, demanding punishment for those responsible and justice for the victims of these crimes of state. He went to the El Salvador mining district and to Pampa Irigoyen in Puerto Montt, mourning alongside the people in those hours of pain.
These were not minor events in the class consciousness of workers, residents of poor neighborhoods, and peasants. They became part of the foundation and justification for a program of social justice that had become necessary within the national context of class struggle.
The diagnoses made during the first decades of the twentieth century were already established. The crisis of the system and the failure of the economic model were more than evident. At the same time, class consciousness was developing, and the discontent of the masses was expressed through an unstoppable rise in mobilizations for the rights of the people.
Secondary-school and university students, workers, peasants, and residents of working-class settlements moved from mass demonstrations to incorporating direct mass action into their struggles, and land and property occupations—the tomas—began to multiply as an insurgent tendency.
The working class and the people were putting into practice the slogan that “only struggle gives what the law denies.”
Basic necessities such as food, housing, employment, fair wages, education and cultural development, health care, freedom of expression—in short, an entire dimension of the democratization of society—were embodied in the Program of the 40 Measures of the coalition of parties forming the Popular Unity alliance led by Salvador Allende.
Among the program’s most emblematic achievements were the nationalization of copper and Chile’s basic natural resources, a genuine and effective agrarian reform, and the provision of half a liter of milk to every child in Chile.
AN ATMOSPHERE OF POPULAR PARTICIPATION
The victory of Popular Unity, with Salvador Allende as its undisputed leader, can be unfolded through images that appropriately evoke this leader who had won, in full measure, the minds and hearts of Chile’s poor.
The people poured into the streets to celebrate the victory: in the working-class neighborhoods and camps, in the mining workplaces, in the internal passages of industries and factories, in the coves and landing sites of artisanal fishermen, along rural roads, in secondary schools, on university campuses, along the avenues, and, of course, on the Alameda in central Santiago, where, from the headquarters of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile (FECH), the newly elected President of Chile addressed the people who had chosen him to lead the process of change that our country urgently needed.
The wood- or paraffin-burning stove, the chipped enamel mug, the lack of crockery and dishes, never having known a dining-room set, a living-room suite, or a sideboard. “Homes” made from pieces of wood, cardboard, corrugated metal, and roofs covered with fiber-cement sheets that could withstand the rain for only some time.
Clothing that covered nakedness but did not protect against the cold. Food and other basic products were extremely scarce in popular households, even in those of people who worked and, fortunately, had a regular income.
People were poor—very poor. Patches did not decorate their clothes; they covered tears and extended the usefulness of garments. Pieces of string or worn-out suspenders held up trousers. Poverty was painfully severe, often enough to provoke tears or rage.
Salvador Allende entered and came to know these spaces of misery. He respectfully confronted that reality, a reality that moved him and—which, in the language of liberation theology, one might say—challenged him and converted him to the cause of that heroic people who struggled tirelessly against centuries-old deprivation.
The image of compañero President appeared in newspapers, magazines, and weekly publications. Those who owned televisions could see him on their screens. His face was always serene, always confident; his bearing conveyed certainty, assurance, and control over events.
There was no arrogance in his speech, but intelligence. There was no conceit, but wisdom and an honest and clean spirit.
The people were immensely proud of their president, proud of their historic representative. They trusted his project and trusted his word—“the confidence they placed in a man who was only the interpreter of great aspirations for justice,” as he himself expressed it.
And that aspiration for justice gradually took shape as popular participation and protagonism.
The university reform of the 1960s consolidated tripartite representation among the different constituencies within Chile’s public universities and promoted unprecedented university extension efforts that brought the academic sphere closer to the world of work and, conversely, brought the world of work into closer contact with the university.
As a result of this conception of the university, “Seasonal Schools,” voluntary work programs, and an extraordinary number of initiatives emerged throughout the country. These efforts helped connect intellectual work with manual labor, thereby contributing to the revaluation and redefinition of manual work in the eyes of students, academics, and intellectuals in general.
The transfer of fragments of science and knowledge into working-class and popular spaces created favorable cultural conditions for the mass organization of artistic and cultural activity among workers and the people.
In factories and industries, in sectors of the countryside affected by agrarian reform, in working-class neighborhoods and camps, in hospitals, and in universities, excellent amateur theater groups emerged everywhere. They were organized nationally through the National Association of Amateur Theater of Chile (ANTACH), alongside initiatives arising from the political commitment of the staff of the Catholic University’s Department of Extension and Communications.
The University Department for Workers and Peasants (DUOC) was another expression of this atmosphere of consciousness, which also reached private institutions and advocated for a new and more just society.
In the countryside, peasant unionization multiplied, and demands grew for the expansion of land expropriations to estates exceeding forty basic irrigated hectares. The reform that had already begun was considered insufficient, and peasants with higher levels of political consciousness aspired to the definitive dismantling of the latifundia system in the country.
A similar situation existed within the industrial and factory world. Workers, too, aspired to expanded workers’ control over production, distribution, and consumption.
This radicalization of the working class gradually acquired concrete organizational form through the Industrial Cordons, conceived as embryos of popular power. They demanded an expansion of the “Social Area” of the economy and called for the expropriation of industries possessing the greatest capital assets and which, at that time, constituted the most important economic reserve of the industrial bourgeoisie.
The classic “Worker-Student Alliance” of that period was permeated by two antagonistic discourses.
On one side were the weak discourses of the reactionary right and social Christianity, which at that time retained a pronounced anti-communist character, accompanied by the typical accusation that Marxism sought to control people’s minds.
On the other side stood the government’s project for the National Unified School System, which, in its essential purpose, sought to overcome historically the segregationist and class-based practices embedded in bourgeois methodology and pedagogy.
Students who understood themselves as an auxiliary sector of the working class had opted for a resolutely revolutionary struggle advocating education in the service of the people—free and comprehensive education—while seeking progressively to narrow the gap between manual and intellectual labor.
The inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods and settlement camps developed their levels of consciousness by formulating their own platforms of struggle and rights, pursuing an understanding of social dignity that included the demand for decent housing as a prerequisite for a dignified life.
Their movement incorporated land occupations, popular self-defense, militias, and gradually developed a conception of popular justice through the exercise of forms of popular tribunals.
Their greatest organizational development was expressed through the Supply and Price Control Committees (JAPs), which, despite being placed within a legal framework under Decree with Force of Law No. 2 of the National Directorate of Commerce (DIRINCO), functioned extensively as a genuine organ of popular power.
Within a context of black markets, speculation, hoarding, and shortages caused by the bourgeoisie, the JAPs were able to secure and guarantee food supplies for working-class neighborhoods. They assumed responsibilities for control and distribution and, in extreme cases, requisitioned products from sectors of the bourgeoisie connected to the trade in essential foodstuffs.
We briefly enumerate these events, experienced by an entire people who knew with profound conviction that there, at La Moneda, was a man who had untied important knots in history and restored to the people confidence in their own strength and power, as well as certainty in the justice of their cause.
Despite the employers’ offensive, the complicity of a treacherous and cowardly military command intent on carrying out the coup, and an imperialism hostile to humanity, Allende—who had publicly confessed to his comrades that he had no vocation for martyrdom—arrived at La Moneda on September 11, 1973, took his position at the combat post, and amid fire and smoke proclaimed:
“I will pay with my life for the loyalty of the people… Other men will overcome this gray and bitter moment… Much sooner than later, once again the great avenues will open…”
Only great historical figures can become a turning point in history.
Allende was such a turning point—perhaps the most important in the history of Chile.
Those already mentioned, and others besides them, are merely minor figures.
