La Via Chilena

Eric Hobsbawm wrote that, following the Cuban Revolution, ‘[T]here was not an intellectual in Europe or the USA who was not under the spell of Latin America, a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions.’ The columnists of Tribune, under Richard Clements’ editorship, were no exception: the 1960s saw a marked expansion in coverage of South America within the pages of the publication.

Tribune’s first engagement with Salvador Allende’s politics came in 1964, in its treatment of that year’s Chilean presidential elections, in which the veteran socialist, trade unionist, and physician stood for the Frente de Acción Popular (FRAP) — a precursor of Popular Unity. Reporting from Santiago, the Latin Americanist writer Richard Gott stressed the geoeconomic significance of Chile’s elections: ‘Chile produces a third of the world’s copper, and if Dr Salvador Allende wins on Friday he will almost certainly fulfil his election pledges to nationalise the American-owned copper mines.’

Gott predicted, however, that ‘[S]uccess for Allende would only be the beginning of his troubles.’ Already in 1964, Tribune’s coverage warned of the significance of ‘the army’ as ‘an arbiter in Latin American politics’; the paper had spotlighted the US-backed military coup in Brazil earlier that year, and it now forewarned that such a dynamic could one day strike in Chile:

If the United States wished to oppose a FRAP government, this would prove the simplest subterfuge. It is likely, too, that they would look on benevolently if the army decided to oppose a FRAP decision to renew diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba.

Allende’s FRAP ultimately lost out in that year’s elections to the Christian Democrats under Eduardo Frei, who, Tribune would eventually confirm in 1974, had entertained ‘American support’ to the tune of millions of dollars. However, though ‘[a]t this stage the CIA was successful in securing the defeat of Allende’, the Left in Chile would make considerable advances throughout the later 1960s, with Popular Unity forming in December 1969.

In ‘Chile’s Road to Socialism’, Portuguese anti-colonialist journalist Antonio de Figueriedo gave Tribune’s take on Allende’s ‘sensational’ election victory in September 1970. In the article, he claimed that ‘the combined strength of Left-wing followers’ might comprise ‘more than 60 percent of the Chilean people’ for Popular Unity’s platform, La via chilena al socialismo — envisaging a parliamentary (rather than insurrectionary) transformation of Chile’s economy in a properly Marxist direction.

Such a programme was, naturally, anathema to the country’s wealthy elite and US transnational corporations. Electoral legitimation counted for little as a run on the banks and oligarch press hysteria began immediately. Though noting that ‘the constitutional process ha[d] so far taken its course’, de Figueriedo observed concerns on the Chilean left that ‘some Right-wing army people might feel encouraged by the military regimes in Argentina and Brazil, and, of course, the CIA, to depart from Chile’s record of disciplined respect for civilian rule, and overthrow the new President’

For Tribune, a democratic socialist publication greatly sympathetic to Allende’s vision of social change, ‘[The] situation in Chile, because of the novelty of the perfectly constitutional election of a Marxist President [was] … an important testing case in the politics of Latin America, and, indeed the world.’

The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie

Representing such a ‘testing case’ for the viability of a parliamentary road to socialism under bourgeois democracy, Allende’s experiment attracted significant interest from the Left in Britain. The Association for British–Chilean Friendship (ABCF), set up to foster positive relations between British civil society and the Popular Unity government, had the support of several labour movement leaders and politicians.

With the Labour Party’s sister party in the Socialist International, the Radical Party of Chile, a part of Popular Unity, Tribunite Labour MPs Judith Hart and Eric Heffer were part of delegations to Santiago, speaking at length with Allende and becoming greatly inspired by the socialist transformations they saw. Following her first visit, Hart reflected: ‘[I]t is unique ground, this democratic revolution. There are no patterns to follow: it is new ground all the way.’

Tribune reported thus the following year:

Popular Unity has succeeded, despite a Parliament in which it cannot count on a majority, in taking into public ownership copper, nitrates, the textile industry, coal, the banks and many other enterprises. Land reform, though still in its early stages, is going ahead.

For the Labour left in Britain, fighting to get some extension of public ownership onto the Wilson Labour Party’s policy agenda, such achievements were a marvel. In working- class Chile’s shantytowns and tenements, Heffer would later recall in Tribune, Popular Unity’s road to socialism was actually ‘winning wider and wider support’, evidenced by its 44 percent vote share in the March 1973 elections — ‘an increase of 8 percent over the 1970 figures’.

This proletarian support, however, was matched by intensifying hostility from bourgeois and other conservative forces in Chile, and from international capital. US banks and corporations (notably International Telephone and Telegraph, and copper firms Anaconda and Kennecott) were scheming in lockstep with the Nixon administration, wrote Tribune in October 1972, to ‘starve the country into submission’. Inside Chile, Hart recalled, following Popular Unity’s downfall, the resulting ‘shortage of foreign exchange for essential imports produced a situation in which the extreme Right wing … were able to foment strikes among the middle classes and particularly lorry-owners’.

Amid the ‘war of economic sabotage’ wrought by capital big and small, violent intimations of a coup d’etat began to appear. Tribune was aware of this menace, beginning with the 1970 murder by anti-Allende officers of the constitutionalist General Schneider ‘shortly before Allende’s inauguration as President’, in a ‘plot which, in its earlier stages, had involved the CIA and … ITT [International Telephone and Telegraph]’.

Known for their spider symbol, the fascist organisation Patria y Libertad, ‘as racialist and anti-semitic as the Nazis’, appeared as the armed street vanguard of the anti-government forces, receiving ‘training under retired officers’. Despite the mounting threats of reactionary insurrection, peace campaigner Gordon Schaffer, reporting from Santiago, determined that

Allende desires and in fact has no alternative to working strictly within the constitution. Most observers say here that while he does that, he can count on the loyalty of the army. That is why the demands of Leftist groups for more sweeping measures outside the constitution is a danger, because the Right hope for provocations.

Sadly, the next twelve months would prove Tribune’s contributor wrong.

Chile Under the Gun

The paper’s discussion of Chilean developments throughout the summer of 1973 evinced a growing concern that the crisis was approaching its denouement. After the quashing of a short-lived ‘attempted military coup … by a breakaway section of the army’ and civilian fascists in late June, correspondent Dick Barbor-Might, soon bound for Santiago himself, concluded that ‘Chile this week faces one of the gravest crises in its history. The country may now stand on the brink of civil war …’

Allende’s government, obstructed in its efforts to declare a state of siege by a hostile congress, stuck to its constitutional guns and resisted calls from the revolutionary left to arm its supporters. Meanwhile, the resignation of loyalist General Prats, under pressure from his fellow officers, prompted the president to appoint his second-in-command, Augusto Pinochet, as commander- in-chief. The stage was now set.

Whatever happens, there can be little doubt that the polarisation of political forces is greater than ever before and that the stakes are as high now as they could be. The Chileans need all the help and solidarity that they can get.

Tribune’s last article on Chile before 11 September implicitly recognised that, one way or another, Popular Unity’s peaceable approach had run out of road: the moment of confrontation was upon it. By the time of the publication’s next word on the subject, Allende would be dead and Barbor-Might, like tens of thousands of others, in a prison camp.

The labour movement in Britain was watching when Pinochet’s fighter jets bombarded the presidential palace in Santiago as his troops stormed occupied factories and herded trade unionists onto trucks. A few weeks earlier, several prominent Tribune figures had signed an ABCF leaflet entitled ‘Socialism in Danger’, which declared, ‘We in the British labour movement urgently call upon British workers to express soli- darity with Chilean workers in their struggle to establish democratic socialism.’

The long-prepared golpe militar that came on 11 September 1973 represented, Hart asserted in Tribune’s leader three days later, ‘a violent counter-revolution’ by ‘Right-wing extremists’, aimed at the ‘total destruction of [the] hopes and ideals’ of the workers of Chile. Heffer later recalled in his memoir that he ‘wept unashamedly at the news’ of Allende’s death, ‘for an attempt to achieve socialism through the Parliamentary process had been murdered too’.

In ‘Chile Under the Gun’, Hans Janitschek, secretary general of the Socialist International, reported on the conditions prevailing under the ‘new regime in Chile’:

Courts martial dispense summary justice to those whose sole offence has been the defence of constitutional legality. To the thousands killed in the first few days must be added the numbers — undoubtedly higher than the regime will admit — of those being summarily shot all over the country.

With the systematic torture and murder of supporters of Popular Unity, the task of socialist construction gave way to that of resistance to the extermination of the Chilean left and pauperisation of the working class. Tribune’s front page on 14 September 1973 carried a statement from Jack Jones, the left-wing general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union and head of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) international department, who as a young anti-fascist had fought in the International Brigades:

All progressive opinion must strongly deplore the actions of the military in attacking the democratic Government in Chile which has led to the death of President Allende. What we warned of last week at the TUC has occurred. We are at the beginning of another Spanish war situation.

Drawing upon the British labour tradition of support for Republican Spain, in which his own politics had been fired — and the cause for which Tribune had been founded back in 1937 — Jones extolled the urgency of material assistance for those facing Pinochet’s terror: ‘I am sure that all trade unionists in Britain wish to express their solidarity with their comrades in Chile, and that once more contact is re-established with them, proof of that solidarity will be given to the full.’

The Chile Solidarity Campaign

The aftermath of 11 September saw a deluge of activity among internationalists across the British left, who scrambled to cohere a response to the coup in Chile. Judith Hart addressed a 3,000-strong rally in Hyde Park, held by the anti-colonial organisation Liberation on 16 September: ‘We condemn the collusion between the capitalist forces inside and outside Chile to defeat the democratic will of the people of Chile.’

Trades councils and union branches passed resolutions condemning the Tory government’s recognition of Pinochet’s regime, beseeching the TUC to pursue an economic boycott of Chile. By the end of the month, Tribune reported, ‘[m]eetings and demonstrations ha[d] been held in various parts of the country’, from Hull to Liverpool to Greenock, ‘in support of a campaign to boycott all Chilean goods and to bring down the undemocratic military dictatorship’.

Labour historian Ken Coates, in a letter to Tribune’s readership, expressed his anxiety ‘that the issue of Chile should be properly debated at the forthcoming Labour Party conference. The whole question of the constitutional right of peoples to change their social system by peaceful means is raised by the Chilean experience.’ For Coates, workers everywhere had ‘a duty of solidarity’ — to be expressed in ‘a worldwide trade union and Labour boycott’, or, if viable, even ‘an International Brigade’ — as ‘the principle at stake affect[ed] the Socialist movement in every corner of the world’. At Labour’s Blackpool conference that October, Coates, alongside Ian Mikardo, would successfully move an emergency resolution on Chile:

This Conference utterly condemns the military coup in Chile and sends its sympathy to the members of UP [Unidad Popular] and the people of Chile. It expresses its horror at the violence of the fascist military junta, at the death of President Allende, and at the present suffering and repression in Chile.

Tribune’s own rally at the Labour conference that year, addressed by Mikardo, Jones, Heffer, Tony Benn, and former editor Michael Foot, included as special guest the exiled Chilean speaker Carlos Parra, who had been ‘unofficial political ambassador in Europe for the late Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity Government’. Parra, The Guardian reported, spoke ‘in moving terms’ of the plight of his country, while Heffer and Jones warned of the political significance of the Chilean army’s CIA-backed mutiny for a prospective socialist government in Britain.

From the ferment of the first month following 11 September was formed the Chile Solidarity Campaign (CSC). A broad left organisation, with close links with the Labour Party, the Communist Party, and the trade union movement, the CSC developed out of conversations between the ABCF, the Tribune group of MPs including Hart and Heffer, Jack Jones for the trade unions, and Liberation, out of whose offices the CSC initially operated.

Tribune covered the Chile campaign’s public launch in early November: a national demonstration in Trafalgar Square attended by ‘[m]ore than 10,000 people, the vast majority coming from outside London’. The ‘Chile Solidarity Campaign rally’, bristling with Tribune figures, had as its main speaker ‘Senora Hortensia Allende, the widow of the former President of Chile’, who gave ‘a moving address’.

Her message is a simple one:if the Chilean people are to regain their democratic rights they need the support of all progressive people…. [T]he junta is particularly trying to stamp out the news of protest from the outside world. It is her view that the spirit of socialist change which has been alive in the Chilean people for some time now has not been extinguished. But it will need the most massive effort to breach the wall of silence which the present Chilean leaders are trying to erect around her country.

Lessons from Chile?

Tribune’s primary response to the coup in Chile was to rally practical labour movement solidarity, expressed throughout the following months in rank-and-file boycotts of Chilean or Chile-bound goods. But for a publication committed to the democratic socialism of its co-founder Nye Bevan, there was no avoiding the unsettling political questions of the viability of the politics that the downfall of Popular Unity posed.

If Allende’s government had indeed been a ‘testing case’ for the possibility of popular socialist transformation through the constitutional channels of the bourgeois state, as Tribune had supposed back in 1970, then its anti-democratic betrayal and murder boded ill. Did Chilean events imply that a parliamentary road to socialism was invariably doomed, that the ruling class would always burn down democracy before permitting it to yield a peaceful transition out of capitalism?

Vladimir Derer, co-founder that year of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, criticised Tribune readers who saw ‘Salvador Allende’s failure as a triumphant confirmation of the truth of a sterile [revolutionary] dogma’:

Allende’s failure and death no more proves the impossibility of using parliamentary institutions for the instalment of socialist ends than does the death of Rosa Luxemburg, in the aftermath of an abortive revolutionary uprising, ‘prove’ the futility of attempting to overthrow the old order by extra-parliamentary means.

Derer’s perspective was reflective of that of most Tribune commentators; deeply wedded to the historic project of the Labour left, the publication was, unsurprisingly, reluctant to disavow the sphere of parliamentary politics. But that did not mean it took no lessons from the Chilean experience, especially with regard to the anti-democratic impulses of the capitalist class.

The infamous editorial by Times editor William Rees-Mogg (13 September 1973), justifying the army coup against Chile’s elected socialist president on the grounds that ‘there is a limit to the ruin a country can be expected to tolerate’, was especially notable for Tribune. The Times’ ‘Strange and Deadly Doctrine’ appeared to imply for Britain too that ‘[i]f a socialist government goes beyond modifying capitalism in its details and tried to make serious inroads upon it, why then the employers will dislocate the economy; the country will be ruined; and ruin will justify military dictatorship.’

The winking endorsement by the British establishment’s historic paper of the fascist strangulation of Chilean democracy was something ‘of which all democratic socialists should take note’. Jack Jones, who had once defended a democratic republic against fascists by force of arms, concluded that the Chilean tragedy ‘should strengthen the determination of all trade unionists and socialists to be vigilant in resisting the attacks of fascists and big business in trying to get their way by any means including the most unconstitutional’.

Heffer agreed, calling at the 1973 Tribune rally for ‘a trade union for the army’, so that ‘the rank-and-file could have some say in running the army’ should the prospect of a generals’ coup against a Labour government ever arise. Later, however, reviewing Argentine Marxist Helios Prieto’s book, Chile: The Gorillas are Among Us, excoriating Allende’s ‘reformist’ strategy from the revolutionary left, the Labour MP for Liverpool Walton still demurred at Helios’ conclusion that the attempt ‘to achieve socialism by democratic means … is not worth trying’.

Tribune in (and Against) Government

Heffer’s hesitancy to declare the pursuit of socialism through parliament doomed made sense, especially as by the time he wrote his review, he had become minister of state for industry in a Labour government. Elected on a relatively radical platform in February 1974, the new Labour ministry brought several Tribunites into government, including Judith Hart and Heffer.

‘With a Labour Government now in power there is every hope that a more radical policy against the military junta in Chile will be pursued.’ In the first days of the new administration, Tribune relayed the appeal of the ‘Chile Solidarity Campaign … calling upon a Labour Government to break off diplomatic relations; to halt the sale of arms and military equipment; to grant asylum to all refugees’, and to take other measures to economically and diplomatically isolate Pinochet’s regime. Noting that the Labour conference had already passed ‘motions’ supporting all this, the paper declared that ‘there is no excuse for back-sliding by the Labour Party’.

It did not take long for the backsliding to begin. The Foreign Office announced later that month that while there would be no new British arms sales to Chile, it would honour its existing contracts. Uproar from the Labour membership was echoed in Tribune: ‘MrCallaghan’s announcement … deserves the contempt not just of the Foreign Secretary’s “Left-wing colleagues”, but of the entire Labour movement and beyond…. [T]he decision is an affront.’

The events in Chile were compared to those of the period of the Spanish interwar Popular Front: ‘Mr Callaghan must need reminding [that] the events in Chile last year and the fascism now dominant there are as significant for democratic socialists in the seventies as the Spanish civil war was for an earlier generation.’ Significantly, this was the context in which the famous ‘blacking’ of Chile-bound fighter-jet engines by workers at Rolls-Royce East Kilbride, depicted in the 2018 documentary Nae Pasaran, began.

Tribunite MPs led the opposition, in the cabinet and out of it. Callaghan complained of the Tribune group undermining him in Parliament, with Heffer risking his ministerial position by giving a speech publicly condemning the policy and violating ‘collective responsibility’.

It is my view that we should never say one thing in Opposition and do another thing in Government…. The whole labour movement condemns the murder and imprisonment and torture now going on in Chile. It is now clear that nothing should be done which can offer succour and comfort to the undemocratic military regime.

Ultimately, though, despite sizeable labour movement protest, most of the outstanding arms did head for Chile. This was a defeat for the Tribunite left within the post-1974 Labour government — and a harbinger of things to come.

Despite this reversal, however, ministers from the Tribune group managed to achieve much for the cause of Chile solidarity in government. Perhaps most consequential among these were the efforts of Judith Hart as minister of overseas development to offer asylum for persecuted Chileans. Hart overcame civil service opposition to found the Joint Working Group for the Resettlement of Refugees from Chile, which — in coordination with the CSC and labour movement — welcomed 3,000 Chilean political exiles to Britain between 1974 and 1979.

Speaking to reporter Stephen Kelly two years into the ‘refugee programme’, Popular Unity activists who had experienced prison and torture before arriving in Britain expressed their thankfulness to Tribune and its supporters for their role in Chile solidarity: ‘Please tell your readers how grateful we are for everything.’

Venceremos

For those exiles in Britain, as for Tribune and the broader British left involved in Chile Solidarity, the wait for light at the end of the military dictatorship would be a long one. Marking the second anniversary of the coup in 1975, Kelly conceded: ‘There seems to be little likelihood of guerilla activity becoming effective enough to overthrow the regime in the near future.’

However, he claimed: ‘While we may not be able to change the regime overnight, the very least that can be done is to make life bearable and to provide hope for the many trade unionists and socialists in Chile who face a grim future.’ The CSC and Tribune remained active throughout the years of the junta’s reign, keeping up support for trade union boycotts, helping in refugee resettlement, and exposing the crimes of the regime.

The election of Margaret Thatcher began a new phase for CSC. Jerry Hughes of the CSC wrote for Tribune in June 1979 that the new Tory government had begun making ‘a series of moves towards restoring full diplomatic relations between Britain and the Pinochet regime in Chile’. United with the regime by a common authoritarian neoliberal project inspired by the Chicago School doctrine of Milton Friedman, Thatcher’s government, the paper wrote the following year, was ‘do[ing] its utmost to befriend’ Pinochet.

Tribune recognised the common cause behind the economic projects of the two governments, carrying on its front page a speech by Malcolm Pitt of the Kent National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to the CSC annual demonstration in 1984: ‘Our enemy is the same as yours. The multinational monopolies who are standing behind Thatcher in her efforts to break the miners are the same as those who collaborated with imperialism to bring down President Allende.’

When the transition to civilian government in Chile finally began at the end of the 1980s, progressives in Britain celebrated. Left-wing Labour MP Stan Newens, reporting for Tribune from Santiago, stressed that there was ‘a long way to travel between the Pinochet regime and democracy’. The dictator might have gone, but his authoritarian 1980 constitution remained, as did his ‘almost completely privatised, free-trade economy’ — with ‘5 million of 12 million Chileans liv[ing] below the poverty line.’ He wrote:

International pressure is still needed … to push other demands for human rights and for political, economic, and social advance. The need for solidarity will not cease with the restoration of political democracy.

In his final broadcast to the nation, as the palace walls shook around him, Salvador Allende famously prophesied that ‘sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society’. In today’s Chile, exactly half a century since the crime of 11 September 1973 buried the dreams of Popular Unity, the inheritors of Allende’s tradition have charted a return to the heights of politics through President Borić’s Apruebo Dignidad coalition.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile, we pay tribute to all of those associated with Tribune who contributed to the solidarity effort — and remember with great affection the efforts of those Chilean socialists during the Allende project itself, whose legacy continues to inspire us even decades later.