Salvador Allende was an exceptional political personality in the 20th century. Born on June 26, 1908 in Santiago de Chile into a wealthy family, he was the grandson of an illustrious and progressive doctor, Ramón Allende Padín, and a descendant of those three Allende Garcés brothers who at the dawn of the 19th century fought for the national independence.
He approached revolutionary ideas as a boy, guided by the class consciousness of an anarchist carpenter of Italian origin, Juan Demarchi, in Valparaíso in the mid-1920s.
After graduating in Medicine from the University of Chile, in 1933 he participated in the founding of the Socialist Party (PS), a political force distanced from social democracy and also from Moscow, Marxist and deeply Latin Americanist. His political career was meteoric. In 1937, at the age of twenty-nine, he was elected deputy for Valparaíso, he would be appointed undersecretary general of the PS in December 1938, and between January 1943 and July 1944, after his time as Minister of Health, he assumed the General Secretariat.
It was in the 1940s, a period of harsh divisions in Chilean socialism, crossed by the international situation (the Second World War, the beginning of the Cold War), when he began to propose the project that he would lead from 1951: the alliance between the Socialist Party and the Communist Party (PC) to win the presidency of the Republic and develop a program of profound transformations. In 1945 he won a seat in the Senate for the southern provinces and confirmed his prestige in national politics.
In 1951, when most of his party decided to support the presidential candidacy of former dictator Carlos Ibáñez, whose populist project evoked Peronism, he ran with the support of a minority sector of the socialists and the PC, in a coalition called the People's Front. . Although he barely obtained 51,975 votes in the 1952 election, he did begin to put into practice the proposal that he had already expressed in 1944: “We socialists call on the left to unite around a program; a program that we will agitate from the streets and from Parliament; a program of national interest, which brings together the maximum of wills around it.”
The unity of the left was strengthened with the creation of the Popular Action Front (FRAP) in 1956 and the reunification of socialism a year later. In the presidential elections of September 1958 he lost by just thirty-three thousand votes against the right-wing Jorge Alessandri: “Allendism” was born.
The united Chilean left was an alternative of power, and this caused, since 1962, the successive tenants of the White House to order a massive intervention in local politics to prevent its triumph. In 1964, with a gigantic “campaign of terror” and the support of the right, Eduardo Frei, of the Christian Democracy (DC), defeated Allende, despite obtaining 38.9% of the votes.
In 1969, the left incorporated the historic Radical Party and a splinter force from the DC into its new coalition, the Popular Unity (UP), and on September 4, 1970, Allende was finally victorious, with 36.2%. . In the following weeks he managed to forge an agreement with the Christian Democrats for which his parliamentarians voted, along with those of the UP, for his appointment as president in the National Congress. On November 3, Allende entered La Moneda.
He immediately ordered the implementation of the UP program, and his government proceeded to nationalize some of the most important industries and part of the banking sector, deepen the agrarian reform, deploy social measures, and historic nationalization. of copper, which took place on July 11, 1971. In this last case, the decision not to compensate the American multinationals for the “excessive profits” that they had accumulated from their exploitation for decades, intensified the covert aggression ordered since 1970. by Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger.
Due to his humanism, he valued the possibility of building socialism through “peaceful means,” and thus, at the May Day event convened by the Single Central of Workers, he had stated before hundreds of thousands of people: “Think, comrades, that in other parts the peoples rose up to make their revolution and that the counterrevolution crushed them. Torrents of blood, prisons and death mark the struggle of many peoples and, even in those countries where the revolution triumphed, the social cost has been high, social cost in lives that are priceless, comrades.
On June 8, the murder of Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, a prominent Christian Democrat leader, by an ultra-left group opened a chasm between the Popular Unity, in a minority in the National Congress, and the Christian Democrats and precipitated the latter's alliance with the right-wing National Party. Furthermore, the DC soon promoted a reform of the Constitution, supported by the right, aimed at paralyzing the process of building socialism.
The political conflict around the size and composition of the nationalized sector went through those days and proved unsolvable despite President Allende's repeated attempts, until the end, to reach an understanding with the DC.
Since the beginning of 1972, a crisis was also seen in the Popular Unity, a product of dissent around the strategy, in the face of the contradictions, challenges and opposition generated by the construction of socialism. Only the strike orchestrated by employers' organizations and the middle and professional sectors in October of that year diluted, for a few weeks, such differences in the midst of the gigantic popular mobilization of support for the government that prevented the collapse.
As a solution, Allende integrated three high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces into his ministerial cabinet, including the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Carlos Prats, who took over the Ministry of the Interior. The participation of the military in the executive, unprecedented since the convulsive period of 1925-1932, evidenced their interest in incorporating the Armed Forces into a project of national sovereignty, but also the deep division of the country, polarized around the dilemma of capitalism. -socialism.
In March 1973 Allende became the president who had obtained the greatest popular support in twenty years, after two and a half terms, and the 43.4% achieved by the Popular Unity prevented the opposition from removing him through constitutional channels, but also showed to the latter that their only recourse before the presidential elections of September 1976 was a coup d'état.
After the failed military uprising of June 29, a dramatic appeal by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez paved the way for the last stage of negotiations between Salvador Allende and the Christian Democrats, but the leadership led by Patricio Aylwin, with the tutelage of former president Eduardo Frei, and fueled by CIA dollars, rejected the proposed agreement and opted instead to approve, on August 22, a declaration from the Chamber of Deputies that was nothing more than a knock on the door of the barracks.
The following day, after the irrevocable resignation of General Prats, Allende appointed as the new Commander-in-Chief of the Army the institution's number two, General Augusto Pinochet, who had impeccably fulfilled his constitutional duties as the main commander of the Santiago garrison. in 1971 and, later, as chief of the General Staff of the Army.
On September 9, hours after Allende explained his intention to call a plebiscite as a solution to the serious conflict that divided the country, Pinochet decided to join the conspiracy hatched by other senior officers from the three branches of the Armed Forces. Two days later, he led a coup that destroyed the most advanced democracy in Latin America, and became the head of a dictatorship that for seventeen years exhibited utter disregard for human dignity.
Allende, for his part, was loyal to the promise he made to his people on several occasions: he would not hand over the power he had democratically granted to any coup leader. Thus, he put an end to his life in the flames of a palace devastated by the bombardment of two war planes.
As President of the Republic, he addressed the most humble people on multiple occasions with deep respect and affection, and these feelings merged in his last words on September 11, 1973 from La Moneda Cercada: “Workers of my country: I want to thank you for your loyalty that they always had, the trust they placed in a man who was only the interpreter of great desires for justice, who pledged his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and he did so.
”Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced and the quiet metal of my voice will not reach you. It doesn't matter, you will continue to hear it, I will always be with you. At least my memory will be that of a worthy man who was loyal to the loyalty of the workers. [...] I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this gray and bitter moment where betrayal tries to prevail. Continue knowing that much sooner rather than later the great avenues will open again where the free man can pass to build a better society.”
This text is part of an article published in number 666 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
