(The following article, the first in a series of four, appeared in the May 9 issue of the French Trotskyist weekly, Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Nineteen months of military dictatorship, misery, and terror. Nineteen months of counterrevolution, during which an entire people have seen their hopes destroyed. For those whose whole activity has been devoted simply to surviving-that is, the great majority-it has been an eternity.
There have been many changes during this period. Comrades and friends have died or disappeared, in the camps or in exile. The faces one recognizes are tired and aged. There is calm and silence everywhere-the silence of the crowds in the streets; the silence of the army of beggars that has invaded the downtown areas; the silence of the walls, all carefully painted over so that no trace remained of the mobilizations of the past.
As of April 1975, 20.5 percent of the working population were unemployed, with no unemployment compensation, to be sure. Sixty percent of the workers who have been spared unemployment were getting the minimum wage for a forty-nine-hour workweek. (The minimum wage is 80,000 escudos [US$21] a month.) The inflation for the last twelve months was 527 percent. The productive apparatus-the durable consumer goods sector—is operating at 45 percent of its capacity. And to achieve that-for the two are inseparably linked-more than 30,000 persons were killed, 25,000 were deported or imprisoned, and more than 200,000 have fled into exile.
This is the end result of the work of Pinochet; the Chilean officers; and their North American advisers, who more or less discreetly are now scurrying about in Santiago.
But what is the meaning of such figures, such percentages, for the Chilean people? What does it mean to live on 80,000 escudos a month?
At the end of March, after a new "readjustment," a liter of milk cost 900 escudos, a kilo of bread 850 escudos. A kilo of mediumgrade meat cost about 5,000 escudos. The great majority of working-class women have lost their jobs or been forced to give up working because of the elimination of most child-care centers in the working-class 992
capsin
PINOCHET: Worried about the unemployed losing "good work habits."
neighborhoods or because of their prohibitive cost.
Thus the 80,000 escudos a month is in most cases the only source of income for the whole family-not to mention the fact that very often a person who is "lucky" enough to keep his job must help maintain his parents or friends who have nothing, or elderly persons whose pensions have lost up to 90 percent of their purchasing power through inflation.
In fact, there are very few Chilean workers and their families who eat enough after the tenth of each month. How many of those hundreds and thousands of sad and humiliated women who come downtown on this or that day to beg near the hotels lodging foreigners were workers and activ. ists, mobilized in the struggle for a better world, before the coup of September 11, 1973?
Whether or not one can work, whether or not one can get a square meal-these are not the only preoccupations of the Chileans. Every aspect of daily life is a problem-for example, getting around in Santiago, one of the most sprawling cities in the world. A bus ride cost half an escudo at the time of the coup. Today, one must spend 350 escudos! Taking the bus has become a luxury available only to a minority. A worker who makes a roundtrip from his home to the factory every day has spent one-fifth of his pay by the end of the month. So every morning and evening crowds of pedestrians can be seen in all the neighborhoods. It is common to walk two hours to go to work, and two hours to return home after working ten hours in the shop.
Reading a newspaper has also become a luxury. Even the worst rag costs 500 escudos. A weekly sells for 2,000 escudos. It is easy to figure out what that costs in a month. So there are continual queues around the kiosks to read the front pages.
The response of the officers, in fact their policy, can be summed up in two words: terror and cynicism.
Above all, terror. Although there is no organized force that constitutes a serious threat to the regime in the immediate future, the repression, which is massive yet selective at the same time, continues with the same intensity. Every night there is a curfew throughout the country. Residential areas are cordoned off and systematically searched, with helicopters flying overhead beforehand. The police raids and arrests are given enormous publicity.
All of this has a very precise function. Apart from their immediate effects, such operations conducted consistently and on a daily basis are aimed at making the whole population feel concretely the weight and the reality of the repressive apparatus. The aim of maintaining this climate of terror is to discourage any form of opposition, no matter how modest or politically limited it may be.
The cynicism of the official propaganda surpasses the imagination.
At the beginning of April, the Chilean junta became alarmed at the debacle of its North American defenders in Vietnam and Cambodia and decided to go on the offensive. A great campaign was launched to adopt Vietnamese orphans, "victims of Communist barbarism." The press, radio, and television carried daily reports about how the "Reds" were eating abandoned children during their offensive.
A member of the junta made a speech on television hailing the humanist and Christian tradition of the Chilean people. He concluded that to save the children from this barbarism, each Chilean must consider it his responsibility to adopt or pay the travel costs of one of these unfortunate Vietnamese!
In the same vein, the campaign to aid the unemployed must be mentioned. To "help" the hundreds of thousands of unemployed, the junta decreed that each municipality must hire in rotation and for a period of two months (so more people would benefit) several dozen (!) unemployed, mainly to sweep the streets.
Here too a great propaganda campaign was launched around this drop in the bucket. And in a very "official" manner, the officers explained that the central objective was not so much to give some income to those who were hired temporarily, but "to keep them from losing the habit of working, since good work habits are a precondition for a sound social structure."
The beastly terror and feebleminded cynicism cannot make the Chileans forget the total failure of the officers and their economic and political policies. Quite the contrary.
The regime is now almost totally isolated, in a context of crisis and economic disorganization that is unprecedented in Chile. This is demonstrated by the fact that the whole of what remains of the Christian Democrats and the great majority of the Catholic hierarchy have gone over into open opposition.
But to conclude from this that the dictatorship will collapse by itself, the victim of its excesses, its incompetence, and its isolation, would be to feed on gossip and tragic illusions. Paradoxically, one of the junta's strengths even today is that by repressing the workers movement as it has, and by gagging bourgeois sectors opposed to its orientation, it has created a fantastic political vacuum. It is this vacuum that the terror is designed to maintain. In these conditions, there is virtually no credible alternative in the short term, either among opposing bourgeois elements or, even more so, in the labor movement.
Yet the outlines of a readjustment or even a realignment in the relationship of political forces are appearing. In the last analysis, the fate of the regime will depend on these embryonic phenomena as well as on the international and Latin American political situation.
[Next: The Christian Democrats Begin to Grumble]
Intercontinental Press will give you a week by week analysis of the most important world events.
Forced to Confess to Phony 'Invasion'
Three PSP Members Tortured in Santo Domingo
Three supporters of the Puerto Rican independence movement, arrested in early June in the Dominican Republic, confessed to trumped-up charges of aiding a "guerrilla invasion" only after they were savagely tortured, they testified at a court hearing June 30.
In statements at the Santo Domingo hearing, the three prisoners-Raúl García, Johnny Sampson, and Angel Gandfacharged that they were beaten with rubber saps, given electric shocks, and kept naked and bound for two weeks until they agreed to sign the phony confessions. All three are members of the Puerto Rican Socialist party (PSP).
The hearing capped a series of disclosures that have completely discredited the Balaguer regime's assertion that it is the victim of a powerful guerrilla-warfare operation, imported from nearby Cuba.
Sweeping repressive measures started with a June 5 roundup of more than 300 opponents of the Balaguer regime and an official announcement two days later that a band of guerrillas had invaded the island. Dominican authorities claimed that Claudio Caamaño, Torbio Peña Jáquez, Manfredo Casado Villar, and other unnamed Dominican rebels had been transported from Cuba and dropped off somewhere near San José de Ocoa. (See Intercontinental Press, June 23, p. 858.)
On June 11, Juan Bosch, former president of the Dominican Republic and leader of the Partido de la Liberación Dominicana (PLD-Dominican Liberation party), announced that three Puerto Ricans had been arrested off the coast of the Dominican Republic. They were accused of having transported Caamaño and the others from Aguadillas, Puerto Rico, in a fishing boat.
The story that the guerrillas had been brought from Cuba was quietly dropped.
Puerto Rican attorneys who flew to the Dominican capital to defend the three prisoners could get no information on their clients.
Then a United Press International dispatch, published in the June 24 issue of the New York Spanish-language daily El Diario, reported that García, Sampson, and Gandía had confessed to the charges. At a news conference held at a military installation, the three prisoners said they had acted under orders from the PSP
The habeas corpus hearing for the three on June 30 placed the story in an entirely different light.
The prisoners testified that they were tortured and constantly threatened with death during their detention. Hence the
"confessions" and the staged news conference.
Sampson said that in addition to the other tortures, he was threatened with castration and told that his wife would be a young widow. All three were threatened with being thrown out of an airplane, shot, or simply made to disappear, Gandía testified.
The prisoners were promised that they would be returned to Puerto Rico if they signed a statement saying they had brought Caamaño and the two other rebels to the Dominican Republic.
Explaining how they happened to be on Dominican soil, Sampson and García said that they had accompanied Gandía on an expedition to survey Mona Island in the channel between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. They were attempting to confirm reports that the United States had begun constructing a superport there.
There has been ongoing protest in Puerto Rico over U.S. plans to build such a facility, which would pose a serious ecological threat to the region.
Bad weather drove their boat off course. They were lost and running out of fuel when they met a fisherman who told them that the Dominican town of La Romana was nearby. They were in La Romana refueling the boat and buying provisions when they were arrested.
In addition to the "invasion" charge, at the habeas corpus hearing García, Sampson, and Gandía were also accused of trafficking in drugs. The district attorney produced no evidence to substantiate either charge, but claimed that on the political charge, he considered the confessions sufficient proof.
Protests in Puerto Rico against the frameup have begun to mount. The 15,000- member Teamsters Union has announced that it will not move any cargo destined for the Dominican Republic until the prisoners are returned to Puerto Rico. Rubén Berrios, the president of the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP-Puerto Rican Independence party), made an appeal for setting aside ideological differences to defend the human rights of García, Sampson, and Gandía. Even the bourgeois daily San Juan Star made an editorial appeal that the rights of the three be guaranteed.
Meanwhile, almost one month after the alleged guerrilla landing, not a shred of evidence has been presented to confirm the presence in the Dominican Republic of Caamaño, Peña Jáquez, Casado Villar, or any other members of the phantom guerrilla band.