Chile: the balanced view : a recopilation of articles about the Allende years and after

INTERNAL PROBLEMS OF THE UNIDAD POPULAR It must be remembered that -¡'le Unidad Popular coalition was made up of six parties (seven if one counts the Movimiénto Izquierdista Revolucionario as a party) only two of which were Marxist. Cognizant of the fact that the label of "Marxist" hindered more than it helped the coalition in elections, the Unidad Popular had hoped to play down their image as Marxists by pointing out that they were a "minority" in the coalition. In reality this was not so, since of the 36 percent of the vote that Allende received in 1970, approximately four-fifths had been accounted for by the Socialists and Communists. Thus, ¡jI actuality, the otherfour parties were minor partners in the alliance. In 1970, the Communists could claim the major role in decision making and leadership since as can be seen in the Table below, they had received the highest vote total of any of the three major parties in the coalition. As is also evident in Table 19, however, this situation changed suddenly after the 1971 elections when the Socialist vote total surpassed the other parties in the coalition, thus making it the most important group in the Unidad Popular. The initial Communist and Radical leadership of the Marxist government was relatively conservative, but after 1971 the much more violence and confrontation prone revolutionary Socialists suddenly seized a .commanding position. Communists' Socialists Radicals Table 19 SELECTED VOTING PERCENTAGES 1969 15.9 12.2 13.0 In 1969 and 1971 1971 16.9 22.3 8.1 Source: Chile. Dirección General del Registro Electoral, Variación Porcentual de los Partidos Políticos, /957·/97/. The fact that the most violence prone factions of the Unidad Populat became the majority force within the coalition led to numerous contradictions and problems for Allende's purported desire to achieve socialism peaceably and democratically. Working closely with the Movimiento Izquierdista Revolucionario (MIR), the Socialists waged a tough ideological campaign of intensifying the class struggle in order to bring about the "victory of the proletariat." Carlos Altamirano on numerous occasions argúed that "class conflict is irreconcilable, that ¡s, there is no room tor conciliation nor coexistence. It only ends when one of them (the classes) assumes total power."(79) However, far from creating a mobilized mass of workers ready to defend the revolution, this incitement to violence, conflict. and hatred had the counterproductive effect of unifying the opposition to Allende and of lending greater weight to the argument that the Unidad Popular's real goal was to establish a totalitarian dictatorship in Chile. The extreme left-wing's delibel'ate strategy of . taking over industries through politically motivated strikes and tomas left little doubt in the minds of many Chileans that the government was engaging in wholesale violations of the law, in spirit as well as in fact, because it was not doing more to put a stop to these illegal activities. . By the first week of July, a few days after the abortive coup of June 29, 1973, the magazine Punto Final published an edition with large headlines reading: "And now to a popular dictatorship: the working class has sufficient strength."(80) The article inside (79)Carlos Altamirano, Decisión Revolucionaria, p. 8. (80)punto Final, July 3, 1973, p. 4. 197