[The editors of Rouge announced in the October 19, 1973, issue of the French Trotskyist weekly that they planned to publish a series of articles on the coup d'etat in Chile and its meaning. Some of the articles would represent opposing views on various aspects of the counterrevolution and how best to struggle against it. The topics to be covered in this public discussion were listed as follows:
["1. The characterization of the Popular Unity from the election of Allende to the entrance of the military into the government in October 1972, and from October 1972 to the putsch.
['2. The organs of dual power that appeared with the crisis of October 1972. The comrades of the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria), for example, consider the comandos comunales as the principal form of popular power and explain that the cordones industriales, closer to a coordinated formation on a tradeunionist level, should be integrated solely as a component in the territorial structure of the comandos comunales. In an interview in the Militant (October 12, 1973), which reflects the views of the U.S. Socialist Workers party, Comrades Hugo Blanco and Eduardo Creus criticize this position as an attempt to overcome the influence of reformism in the working class by means of structures that never had the importance of the cordones and in which the proletariat's leading role was much less evident. (The interview referred to appeared originally in Intercontinental Press, October 8, 1973, p. 1107 - IP.)
"The relation between the structures of power rooted in the plants and territorial structures where the alliance between the workers and other layers of the poor population was sealed is not the least of the problems posed by the Chilean experience.
["3. The third question is that of the military strategy of the proletariat. From some of the statements of the MIR and those of the Chilean Communist League (a group that split from the MIR and brought out a jour- January 14, 1974
nal, Combate, last August declaring its sympathy with the Fourth International), it appears that these groups still held to the strategic perspective of a prolonged revolutionary war, combining rural and urban guerrillas. They never envisaged, and conse-
PINOCHET: Starvation for the masses.
quently never prepared for, a victorious armed insurrection. So that, while they armed and trained the vanguard, and supported local self-defense actions, they do not seem to have developed any systematic perspective of arming the masses, of centralizing an armed force of the proletariat, nor preparing an insurrectional offensive comparable, all proportions guarded, to that of the Bolsheviks in October 1917. The balance sheet of this experience and that of its current extensions are likewise indispensable to the international vanguard.
["4. Today the characterization of the regime installed by the coup d'etat of September 11 poses a new question. The Chilean CP as well as the MIR speak of a fascist regime. It is true that the extent of the repression, its savagery, evoke inevitably the specter of Nazism. But, if you wish to go beyond analogies, it is necessary to study the social basis of the junta, its real ties with big capital and imperialism, the depth of the defeat of the workers, and the state of disorganization, or otherwise, of the working class to define the new regime more precisely. Not because of any particular taste for precision. But because the orientation, the tasks, the slogans, the alliances proposed by the revolutionists depend on it. The strug gle against Nazism in the Germany of 1933; the struggle against the Thieu regime in South Vietnam; and that against Francoism today, aside from the intensity of the repression which they have in common, thus do not have the same meaning nor the same implications.
['5. Finally, another crucial question is included in the balance sheet and the perspectives of the Chilean vanguard, of which the MIR today constitutes the main force. There also exist in Chile a group of Trotskyist comrades of the Fourth International who were organized in the Revolutionary Socialist party ... There also exists the previously mentioned Communist League. For all of these militants, the construction of a solid revolutionary party is posed in a new context."
[Among the series of articles published by Rouge, the following was written October 29 by a member of its editorial board, following a trip to Chile immediately after the coup. Jean-Pierre Beauvais was able to talk at length in the underground with members of the Fourth International and of other organizations in the far left, including leaders of the MIR, as well as with members of the parties that supported the Unidad Popular.
[The translation is by Red Weekly, the newspaper of the International Marxist Group, British section of the Fourth International, which published the article in its November 16, 1973, issue.]
Seven weeks have now passed since the successful coup of the Chilean generals — seven weeks of horrible, shocking repression.
These have been seven chaotic weeks filled with massacres, summary executions, denunciations, bonfires of Marxist books, curfews, firing squads, deaths, disappearances, massive arrests.
At the conclusion of these seven weeks we must begin to take stock of the situation. Even the sceptics and cynics have to bow before the facts: The dead have to be counted in the tens of thousands - 20,000, perhaps even 25,000. Those imprisoned must be counted in the tens of thousands — about 30,000. Those who have gone underground, seeking to flee this nightmare, this hell, must be counted in the tens of thousands. The workers who have lost their jobs because they are suspected of left-wing sympathies and have been thrown into poverty or are even on the verge of starvation must be counted in the hundreds of thousands.
Seven weeks have passed; but the repression continues to mount. Two days ago, according to official sources, the courts pronounced thirty-two death sentences.
Seven weeks have passed, without any organized and coordinated response — apart from isolated and spontaneous incidents- directed against General Pinochet and his confederates. These have been, then, seven weeks of real and deep demoralization.
Beneath these shocking and unimaginable events, beneath the tears and blood of the Chilean workers, lie a multitude of political questions that we must discuss and debate with the Chilean vanguard. The first of these questions, the one that sets the framework for most other debates, in particular that on the political tasks of the left, concerns the nature of the military regime. What is its social base, who are its supporters, what are its ultimate aims?
It would be a mistake to look on the new Chilean military regime as just another military dictatorship of the kind we have seen throughout Latin American history. The Chilean military regime differs from those military governments that have come to power in a context of general apathy in that it has-and this is no exaggeration — genuine mass support, accorded the regime by a not inconsiderable percentage of the Chilean population.
Capitalists and petty bourgeoisie, still shaking with the fear instilled by the working-class mobilizations of the last months of the Unidad Popular government, today support the military junta blindly and without reserva- 20
tion. Artisans, small and largetraders, landowners threatened by the eventual extension of the agrarian reform, administrative staff in commerce and industry, and members of the liberal professions compete with one another in exhibiting their slavish gratitude to the numerous masters of the country.
LEIGH: Fond memories of Mussolini and
Hitler.
There are all sorts of examples of this-examples that anyone can see and experience daily in Santiago and throughout the country.
The most sickening, and the most widespread, are the denunciations. The newspapers and radio broadcast every day in every Chilean city the telephone numbers to ring in order to denounce someone or report anyone behaving suspiciously. Day and night, twentyfour hours a day, these numbers are busy, even though there are often many of them. Thousands of calls come in each day, we were told by one telephone operator. She was nonpolitical, but close to nervous exhaustion after the calls she has to receive and record throughout the day.
The most grotesque are the women from the middle and upper classes who queue up for hour after hour to donate a portion of their jewelery or savings to the fund for national roponctruction The most revolting is reconstruction. The most revolting is the unending file of thousands upon thousands of men and women, fathers leading their offspring by the hand, who come to openly and crudely exhibit their joy in front of the ruins of the Moneda presidential palace.
Because of the specific features of Chile's social and economic structure, we are dealing here with a numerically important sector: artisans, tradesmen, and small landowners represent about 30-40 percent of the total Chilean population.
The fact of their support is a key element in analyzing the nature of the regime that has been set up since September 11 and for an understanding of certain of the policies of this regime. As far as the repression goes, only the total, at times even enthusiastic, support of these groupswhich do not hesitate to play on occasion the part of useful auxiliaries for the policy of repression - allows us to explain and understand the massive, vindictive character this repression has had since the very first day of the coup.
This being said, two further questions immediately arise. This support is, at present, essentially spontaneous. It is not structured, organized, or directed. Can it continue for very long? Are there any plans for the organization of these masses into an actual fascist or semifascist party?
There are not at present any precise plans under way on the part of the military. Air Force General Leigh, who is described as the strong man of the military, has turned himself into a specialist in constitutional law and is drawing up a new constitution. The other day he offered the results of his first thought on Chilean television.
These had a surprising frankness. There were plenty of historical references: Mussolini? Not bad. Franco? The man and the regime to whom we feel the closest. The Cortes? A model of democracy. Hitler? To be taken seriously, many things are to be learned from his example. Salazar? A master.
The military seems, in the long run, to be looking toward the establishment of a corporatist regime in which the professional organizations —those of the right and far right, to be surewill play a fundamental role. The associations of the truck owners, traders, artisans, and others of this sort will thus see themselves rewarded for the key role they played in bringing down the Unidad Popular government.
But no one is seriously proposing the organization of a fascist-type mass party to structure these bourgeois and petty-bourgeois groups. The reason for this is quite simple: No matter how massive the support for the military regime is among these sectors, it remains in many respects superficial and subject to serious limitations. It is not support of a worked-out political plan, or a long-term or even medium-term set of economic and political policies.
It is nothing more than gratitude - often of a hysterical sort-to those who have eliminated a serious threat. As far as the medium and long terms are concerned, even in the absence of a clearly worked-out plan at the present time, the first tentative moves made by the military allow us to evaluate with very considerable accuracy the policies that they are putting forward.
The generals are not planning on policies that will serve the interests of the middle and petty bourgeoisie, but policies that coincide with the interests of the big Chilean capitalists - of a few great families of the Chilean ruling class who, in conjunction with foreign (especially North American) capital, control and own, in a remarkably concentrated fashion, the decisive sectors of the economy.
This is how we must understand the recent appointment of the director of Mercurio, the journal of the big bourgeoisie, to the Ministry of Economics. Besides its "journalistic" activities, this publication is the source of the power of several of these great families, the most powerful of which is the Edwards family, one of whose members is a vice-president of the international operations of Pepsi Cola.
Policies in the service of these groups, of this big Chilean bourgeoisie, linked to international big capital, must eventually come into contradiction with the interests of the small and middle capitalists. These policies will necessarily involve the rationalization of the economy, a modernization of the economic network, which in many cases will go against the interests of the excessive number of small artisans, traders, intermediaries of all sorts that characterizes the Chilean economy. In the shorter term the harsh measures taken by the junta to suppress the black market -the illicit traffic of all sorts that flourished under the Unidad Popular — will mean a severe fall in the income of these sectors.
As soon as the first moment of enthusiasm passes, the awakening promises to be harsh and bitter for all these backers of the massive repres sion. This makes it easier to understand why the junta does not plan on organizing the present mass support for the regime into political structures under these conditions, and that there is therefore no perspective for a mass fascist movement.
Another element that must feature in the analysis of the military regime is the repression that it is carrying out, which has become the very axis of its politics. It is not so much a question of the quantitative extent of this repression (about which much has been said, and which we must ceaselessly take up), but the qualitative nature of this repression: Who is it primarily directed against and what are its objectives?
In the short term the massive repression that Pinochet and Company are carrying out has an obvious purpose: to nip in the bud all attempts at, all possibility of, resistance to the coup. Given the level of mobilization of the masses and the importance of the organizations of the left and the far left, it has been necessary to strike quickly and hard to dismantle the left organizations, both political and trade-union, to liquidate physically their cadres and most active militants.
This is certainly an essential aspect of the repression. It aims at the systematic destruction, the physical liquidation, of the organized Chilean workers movement. But (and this has rarely been stressed before now the repression goes beyond this. The policy of repression is not only aimed at the destruction of the organized workers movement, but is directed against the entire working class.
For example, how is the repression carried out in the factories? After having crushed the various centers of resistance in the factories, the military arrested - and often executed on the spot-the officials and local leaders of the left-wing parties, along with the administrators appointed by the Unidad Popular government. They appointed the former owners and managers as administrators. Then they called together the workers, organizing virtual general assemblies - but with the participation of armed troops.
In many cases, either following denunciations extracted under threats of violence, or after turbulent mass meetings, an execution squad went to work under the eyes of the general assembly, shooting known or identified "ringleaders" who were present. Afterwards, the terrorized workers were told that only the docile and nonpolitical would be reemployed. In the most important firms, all sympathizers, supporters, or militants of the Unidad Popular parties were dismissed.
The leaders of the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria - Movement of the Revolutionary Left, tradeunion officials, and members of the Communist party Central Committee still on the spot all agree that today at least 30 percent of the Chilean working class has been dismissed from employment, is without work, has no hope of finding any, and is reduced to poverty or starvation. When it is realized that prices have risen by 400 to 600 percent in two weeks, that they are due to rise by 1800 percent between now and the end of the year, it becomes clear that the expression "starvation" is to be taken in its most literal sense.
Beyond the organized workers movement, it is really the working class — as a class-that is hit by the repression and that the military literally wishes to demobilize and dismember. (One sector has been almost totally spared the repression: the copper mines, which account for 80 percent of exports. There, none of the social gains have been abolished, and even the trade-union officials adhering to the Unidad Popular — a minority - have been left untouched. The big bourgeoisie and imperialism know how to be merciful when their fundamental interests are at stake.)
Today, no matter what possible developments may lie in the future, there can be little doubt that the features of the Santiago regime-the repression, the political aims (openly proclaimed or not), the mass support of the small and middle capitalists (even if not organized in a mass party, as was the case in Europe of the 1930s) —are those of a fascist regime, such as exists nowhere else in contemporary Latin America.