[Jean-Pierre Beauvais, a member of the editorial board of the French Trotskyist weekly Rouge who had visited Chile just after the September 11 coup, recently returned from a second trip to Santiago. In the course of a threeweek stay, he spoke with militants of the Chilean left and far left about the situation in Chile and the development of the international movement of solidarity with the Chilean people.
[The February 1 issue of Rouge published the first of a series of articles written by Beauvais after his return to France. The Rouge editors explained that future issues would contain articles on the situation of the Chilean working class and the forms of resistance to the dictatorship, aswell as interviews with leaders of the underground organizations. We reprint below the first of Beauvais's articles.
The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
A little more than four months have passed since September 11. Four months of ferocious daily repression. The four bloodiest months Chile and all of Latin America have ever seen.
Four months during which the victory of the Chilean military and bourgeoisie has been asserted.
Signs of normalization, "their" normalization are present everywhere, always visible.
At the airport, for example, where the controls are weak -they have to reassure tourists and especially representatives of potential investors.
In the center of the city, where all traces of the battles of September have been carefully erased, where the facades of the buildings have been wiped
clean or repainted on orders from the military, where the outer walls of the Moneda presidential palace have already been rebuilt.
And finally, in the Barrio Alto, the bourgeois neighborhood where they lounge on lawns or by the sides of swimming pools enjoying the bright sun of the southern hemisphere summer.
Such is the spic-and-span image of Chile 1974 that the Chilean military wants to give to visiting foreignersbusinessmen, economic missions, etc.
But that normalization, while real, is but a paper-thin and sometimes completely transparent facade.
To find the real normalization you have to go elsewhere-to the factories, and poblaciones, to the countryside. There the military and the possessing classes present a much more truthful, more real image of themselves and the system they serve and represent. There the system of capitalist exploitation, made up of blood and misery, manifests itself openly and without embellishment.
After making the Chilean workers pay the price for their fears with a massive and blind repression, the bourgeoisie and the military moved to a new stage.
Assured of control, their order stabilized, they moved to make the workers pay the costs of "national reconstruction" (to use the official terminology), all the while continuing a more selective but no less brutal repression.
Starting production again was only the first step. They had to take advantage of the defeat of the workers to reorganize the productive apparatus according to a well-known law: that of maximizing profit.
It is this central objective that the Chilean military and big bourgeoisie are jointly working toward. That is what all their phraseology about "national reconstruction" really boils down to.
So, ironclad capitalist logic has replaced the massacres, innumerabledisappearances, arrests, and politically motivated firings of the first days with a system of frenzied exploitation whose intensity and concrete conditions are difficult to imagine. Week after week, the social and economic gains the workers had made thanks to a different relationship of forces - under the Unidad Popular government — are being eaten away, repealed, annulled.
This has really hit the wage earners hard. According to official figures, between September 1973 and January 1974 inflation cut the buying power of the workers by slightly more than 50 percent, in spite of the "readjustments" put into effect with so much publicity. And that's an average figure! The buying power of the workers making "minimum" wages was cut by much more. And people who were fired, for political or other reasons, were not included in the statistics.
But this policy goes way beyond the wage earners. In the poblaciones the collective teams (for education and sanitation) and the distribution mechanisms that the workers had begun to set up themselves- the first fruits of their mobilizations and the local forms of self-organization they created - have been destroyed, razed, and outlawed, creating the most tragic situations. Many women, for example, have had to quit their jobs because the daycare centers have disappeared; and this compounds the reduction in the husband's buying power.
But there is a lot more in terms of rapacity and cynicism. Like the total reorganization of the social security and insurance system. That was one of the great "reforms" worked out by the junta. Until recently, the social security system was paid for by the state. But the reform aims at transforming it into a pillar of Chilean capitalism by introducing a system of forced savings to serve as an agency for generating
capital. Nothing could be more explicit in this regard than the statement of Minister of Economics Leniz himself: "[The reform of the social security system] must therefore generate capital; it must reach the point that this policy of capitalization can be made decentralized, preemptive, uniform, and can be entrusted to private companies... In theframework of this program, decentralized development banks will be created aimed at collecting the resources of the various zones of the country. The initial contribution for these banks will be raised by assessments on the workers."
So the extension of the workday and the wage reductions are not enough. The workers have to donate a part of what they have left to the development of Chilean capitalism.
Such is the price of defeat. Those who were spared by the bloody repression will pay for it with misery, undernourishment, illness, and hunger. Difficulties
The defeat was the responsibility not of the workers but of the reformist leaderships of the parties of the UP, who counterposed demobilization in the context of agreements with the bourgeoisie to the mobilization of the workers, leaderships who preached about the peaceful road to socialism in face of counterrevolutionary violence. The defeat was the responsibility of those who today in Europe and elsewhere conceal their own bankruptcy and call themselves the representatives of the Chilean workers.
But the junta's policy of frenzied exploitation based on the September defeat and permanent repression, while it has already borne more than modest fruit-investments by foreign private capital, bank loans, postponement of debts, and new production in the export sector — is running into considerable difficulty.
Difficulties due to internal contradictions within the Chilean bourgeoisie and to a working class that has been severely beaten but not totally crushed the way the military had wanted. Difficulties due also to the opposition the junta has met on an international scale. Difficulties that are uneven but dialectically linked, some of them predictable immediately after the coup d'etat but weighing much more heavily in the development of the dictatorship than could have been foreseen.
In the past few weeks the junta has announced its economic policies, which are based on effecting a new division of the income extracted by the frenzied exploitation and pauperization of the
The junta's orientation workers.
amounts to total free enterprise, both for the internal market and for foreign trade. Hence, there are virtually no restraints on prices (even for bread!);
import duties have been lowered; and, the indispensable complement, the escudo has been devalued in order to stimulate exports.
All these measures move in the same direction: They favor the traditional bourgeoisie tied to businesses centered around import-export trade and tied also to the big multinational corporations and more generally to imperialist penetration. These are the sectors represented by Leniz, presently minister of economics, formerly editor of the daily El Mercurio, which expressed the politics of the National party.
But this policy is running into growing opposition from other bourgeois sectors that are more concerned with the internal market (consumer industries, middle-sized
• agriculture), the sectors generally represented by the
Christian Democracy, whose program when it was in power under Frei from 1964 to 1970 (industrialization and development of the internal market) perfectly expressed the interests of this sector.
The proposed total lack of restraints on foreign trade in fact threatens to ruin a section of these industrial sectors, which rest on fragile financial bases and small productive units that are not competitive in spite of the low wages. But more than that, as far as these sectors are concerned, the junta has already gone too far in reducing the buying power of the Chilean workers. Demand in the internal market fell so low during November and December that many enterprises - hotels, restaurants, workshops, small factories - had to close down.
Hence, for several weeks the newspaper La Prensa, organ of the Christian Democracy, has been waging a daily campaign for substantial wage increases. The campaign is conducted supposedly in the name of social justice, elementary defense of the workers' rights, and so on, but it comes through quite clearly that the section of the bourgeoisie that this party represents is worried about the immediate defense of its interests.
For example, one editorial in La Prensa argued for a wage increase because "it is a prescription that in our view would effectively stimulate production" and because "the whole income of the vast majority of people goes onto the market as demand for goods and services, and it must be understood that this money, transformed into buying power, is a stimulus to production, which thus responds to demand as its dynamic source."
It could hardly be clearer whose interests the Christian Democracy is defending in its campaign for wage increases and for more so-called social justice. But the opposition of the sectors represented by the Christian Democracy to the junta's economic policy expresses itself on other, no less important points.
Dismantling the State Sector
One of the most important aspects of Leniz's policy in the context of a return to "complete liberalism" (sic) is the massive restitution to the private sector of factories under (adminisor financial) state control, trative along with the whole banking apparatus.
The Christian Democracy is in favor of restoring to their former owners or stockholders the majority of factories that were taken over by the state during the reign of the UP, but it is vehemently opposed to completely dismantling the state sector, which it greatly contributed to setting up in the first place when it was in power. One of the reasons for this is that the state sector gives the CD a significant social base.
This dismantling of the state sector of the economy, while it is still only at an initial stage, has already reached incredible proportions. The minister of public works, for example, has already fired on a day's notice hundreds of functionaries, employees, and technicians. And that is only the first lot to go, because from now on public works will no longer be taken care of by the state but will be contracted out to private companies. And this in a country where three fourths of investment in construction of all kinds is financed directly by the state!
As we have seen, the entire banking sector is going to be returned in coming weeks to the private sector. Except, of course, for the Central Bank, the bank that issues notes, which will in any case cease functioning as a comany case cease functoning as a commercial bank. Because of this, more than 1,000 functionaries were laid off during the last week in December.
Many examples could be listed of things that have contributed in recent weeks to hardening the CD's positions.
These contradictions between the two main bourgeois parties and the sectors they represent are far from being a minor or superficial aspect of the Chilean situation at the beginning of 1974. They totally dominate the political scene, and the daily debates among their respective newspapers are but an attenuated reflection of much more violent confrontations within the state apparatus and the army. Confrontations that sometimes take on the aspect of showdowns that are fraught with serious consequences. This is the context in which we must understand the banning at the end of December of one of the far-right dailies by Minister of the Interior General Bonilla, whose ties to the CD are well known. The ban was issued under the pretext that the newspaper had reported the statements made by Chilean SP February 18, 1974
leader Carlos Altamirano in Cuba! It is also in this context that we must understand the many statements, tainted with populism and demagogy, made by this same Bonilla during his well-orchestrated, virtually daily visits to the poblaciones, factories, and offices.
But the implications of these contradictions go beyond such things. While the dominant sector in the state apparatus and in the army is and remains the most hard-line sector, with methods and objectives overtly fascistlike if not fascist, the increasingly open opposition of the sectors represented by the Christian Democracy has often made it difficult for the junta to put its plans into practice. For example, you hear a lot less talk about the constitutional projects directly inspired by Mussolini and Salazar that were so dear to General Leigh.
In fact, the unity realized immediately after September 11 by all the counterrevolutionaries, the unity of all the various bourgeois sectors
(the CD included) and the reactionary petty bourgeoisie, the unity that gave the dictatorship an important and active social base in the midst of the flush of victory, has vanished. For many, the hour of disenchantment has already come. But each side is conscious of the risks that an open break would involve, especially in respect to the unity and homogeneity of the armed forces.
Hence the efforts made by both sides to temporarily keep the contradictions within the framework of the present regime, and the adoption of measures like the tripling (or more) of officers' pay in terms of buying power-increases of 1,500 to 2,000 percent - in order to keep them aloof from the melee.
But this framework will be more and more difficult to maintain, for factors other than the quarrels among bourgeois factions with diverging interests are having their effect, notably the situation within the working class and the workers movement.