In the shadow of Pinochet: Recollections from the resistance struggle against the dictatorship in Chile

Introduction – Stockholm in September 1973

More than fifty years have passed since September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet overthrew the elected government of President Salvador Allende in one of the most violent military coups in in Latin America. For this reason there is cause to remember what happened and, above all, to remember the brave resistance struggle that took place in Chile against the oppression of the military dictatorship. Many years had to pass before Chile could return to even a limited democracy.

In the following chapters I will explain what I did and what I was a part of from 1973- 1976, when I participated in the resistance movement during the first years of the dictatorship in Chile under Pinochet. This story is based both on my own recollections, letters, documents and newspaper cuttings that I have kept or that have been returned to me, together with information shared with me by several compañeros and compañeras² who were also part of the resistance. I am particularly grateful to Pedro Naranjo Sandoval who fact-checked my text and referred me to other existing documents.³ Much has been written in Spanish on the dictatorship and the resistance movement. There is some documentation in English and other languages as well. I have used articles and books as well as academic papers as well as information from Chilean public inquiries regarding the dictatorship’s victims and the actions of its perpetrators, as well as some of the Chilean Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria – MIR)’s own internal and public documents from the years mentioned. The photographs are both from the MIR´s archives as well as my own.

The background to my engagement in Chile and the resistance movement lies in my own childhood in Latin America, as well as my student years at the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s. My parents emigrated to Colombia on a freight boat in 1954 with my brother, my elderly grandmother and myself when I was three years old. The reason for my family´s emigration was that my father had travelled abroad extensively as an international sales manager for a large Swedish company in the years following the second world war. He had seen what he considered were great opportunities to start a new life in the New World. He was an engineer by training and was fluent in a number of languages, including Spanish, as well as having a somewhat adventurous nature.

During my childhood in Colombia I witnessed poverty at close hand, and saw how deep class differences led to injustice. During the 1950s and the 1960s , intense and violent clashes between both large landowners and poor farmers in the rural areas, as well as between the working class and the owners of industries in the urban areas, were common in Colombia. The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerilla was already well established.

In many ways I identified myself as a Latin-American. When I arrived back in Sweden as a sixteen year old, the anti-war movement for Vietnam was very strong and made a deep impression on us highschool students at the time, as did the May 68 revolt in Paris. The Swedish Left grew rapidly, not least in Lund where I was a university student. I lived in a leftwing commune and participated actively in organizations such in Swedish Vänsterpartiet Kommunisterna, VPK ( the Left Communist Party), and what we had named the Revolutionary Women´s League.

At Lund University I studied political science, sociology and most of all economic history. At that time economic history was the only subject where we could study issues of development and underdevelopment in the so-called Third World. I wanted to understand the social and economic realities in Latin America that I had experienced as a child.

During my years in Chile I never knew the man who later would become the father of my children, Juancho ( Mario Espinosa Mendez), but I got to know him shortly after he arrived in Sweden in 1976. Juancho was a nuclear physicist by training and had joined the MIR in the 1960s. Juancho was taken prisoner in 1974 and was subjected to cruel torture before he was finally sent into exile and arrived in Sweden.

I am writing this story for my children and my grandchildren for it is a central part of both my own and Juancho´s lives in Chile and they have a right to know about them. It is also a tribute to those who gave their lives for a free and just society in Chile, and a contribution to ensure that their stories not to be forgotten. For that reason I also wish to share this story with my close friends and compañeros, who are familiar with what happened in Chile during these years, and who participated in resistance and solidarity activities.

Apart from the friendship that united us, Tor, who wrote the preface to this book, and I have shared both political beliefs and engagement. Tor gave his support to the resistance movement through solidarity work in Sweden, and had even, for a brief period in 1973-74, been MIR’s representative in Sweden. One month after he wrote the preface, Tor passed away. He had at that point been battling his illness for many years with incomparable willpower.

² I will consistently use the Spanish term compañero to designate fellowMIR members rather that the term comrade which in English is strongly associated with the Communist Party

³ Many of these documents can be found in the electronic archive Archivo Chile (www.archivochile.com) that has been set up by CEME, Centro de Estudios Miguel Enriquez

Chile before and during the Unidad Popular

government

It makes sense to take a retrospective look back at the developments in Chile before the military coup. Chile was for a long time considered as a model for democracy in Latin America. At a superficial level the traditional democratic institutions seemed to be working well; elections were held regularly and a parliamentary system was in place; freedom of speech was respected. Yet though there appeared to be a high degree of stability in the political system, violent class antagonisms and confrontations had taken place during the course of history. The institutional reply to these had been oppression. The military and the police forces had been responsible for massacres, abuse and repression; many thousands were killed on different occasions during the last century even before the military coup of 1973. The most infamous massacre was the one that took place in the school Santa Maria de Iquique at the beginning of the 1900´s when more than two thousand Chilean, Bolivian and Peruvian workers and their families, who were demanding better working and living conditions, were cold-bloodedly shot to death by the military. Thus Chile has, throughout its modern history, been characterized by these parallel tendencies; parliamentarism and oppression of powerful social movements⁴.

During the sixties there was a surge in the social movements and the Left in Chile, as a result of the growing discontent with high rates of unemployment and economic stagnation. Eduardo Frei Montalva, a leading politician from the center-right Partido Democrático Cristiano – PDC (Christian Democratic Party), was elected as President for the period from 1964 – 1970, on a program for social and economic reform. He failed to implement important parts of the reform program. This program was based on the attraction of foreign loans and investments as well as stimulating an import-substitution industry, a model that benefitted the national bourgeoisie. Frei had also taken important steps towards economic and social reforms that his successor, President Salvador Allende could later build on. Frei initiated the nationalization of the copper mining industry; he also started a much-needed agrarian reform and allowed landless farmworkers to organize in trade unions; as well as having promoted maternity centers. At the end of Frei´s presidential period growth had stagnated, unemployment had risen and inflation had increased. At that point, Chile was confronting very big economic and social challenges, at a moment in time when its foreign debt had also grown exponentially.⁵ Frei´s politics both provoked confrontations within the ruling class as well as giving rise to mass protest movements among the poorest.

In this context the revolutionary Left grew rapidly, a Left that was inspired by the revolution in Cuba and the guerilla movement in Bolivia. Che Guevara became a powerful symbol. In many corners of Latin America, similar leftist movements gained strength during the same period, for example in Colombia, Uruguay and Brazil. In Chile there already existed a strong working class movement⁶ , as well as social mobilization among the urban poor that lived in the shanty towns and landless farmworkers. The student movement was an active driving force in the growing mass movements. Strikes, land occupations, expropriations and other militant actions became more and more common at the end of the sixties. Polarization increased between the leftist forces in Chile, which were primarily composed of parties with reformist programs, and the national bourgeoisie that was represented both by the conservative right and the Christian Democrat Party.

Salvador Allende, who had been one of the founders of the Chilean Partido Socialista PS (Socialist Party), was able to form a coalition among the reformist left-leaning parties in what became the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity). The coalition consisted of the Socialist Party, the Partido Comunista – PC (Communist Party), the Partido Izquierda Radical – PIR (Left Radical Party), the Izquierda Cristiana – IC (Christian Left ) and the Movimiento para la Acción Popular Unida – MAPU (Movement for Popular United Action).

The Unidad Popular coalition stood for election in 1970 with a program focused on the introduction of a Chilean road to socialism. Allende won the election with only 36,3% of the votes, to a large extent because the conservative forces were split internally. It wasn´t evident that Allende’s electoral triumph would be approved by Congress but, in the face of the threat of a civil war, Allende was approved as president.⁷ The Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria – MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement) chose to remain outside the Unidad Popular governmental coalition and, from the very start, warned of the risk for a military coup d’état.

In the course of the three years that followed, Allende´s ambitious government tried to implement radical structural reforms, characterized as anti-imperialist and anti-monopolist, in an attempt to rectify the extremely unequal distribution of income and power between the classes. The public sector would have a dominating role in the so-called new economy. The economic public sector would be composed of the large scale copper, nitrate, iron and coal mining industries, as well as the financial system, including banks and insurance companies, foreign trade, distribution monopolies and strategic industries. The agrarian reform that Frei had initiated would be completed and implemented.⁸

Some of these reforms, such as the nationalization of the large -scale copper and nitrate mining industries, were successful. The national bourgeoisie including important sectors of the middle class as well as the officer corps within the military, mobilized rapidly against Allende. Strikes, lockouts, capital flight and other forms of economic sabotage were used by the rightist forces. Politically the Right organized itself in fascist-type and paramilitary organizations Patria y Libertad –PL (Fatherland and Liberty), Partido Nacional – PN (National Party) and the reactionary segment of the Christian Democratic Party. Simultaneously workers, small-scale farmers, shanty town⁹ dwellers and students mobilized on a grand scale in order to defend measures already taken by the Unidad Popular government and to push for further reforms. This mass mobilization was led in great part by the historic Left, that is the parties that were part of the government coalition, but also by the revolutionary movement MIR. MIR had strong support and grew very fast during the Unidad Popular period. It was a time of many acute and hard confrontations between the mass movements and the reactionary forces in an authentic class struggle. The reactionary forces, with support of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), were at last able to gain the upper hand.¹⁰

Allende’s Unidad Popular government was overthrown in a military coup on the 11th of September 1973.

⁴ Allende´s Chile, the political economy of the rise and fall of the Unidad Popular, Stefan de Vylder

⁵ idem

⁶ The working class constituted 60% of the population in 1970; see "Chile, mass mobilization and popular power 170-1973 ( in Swedish), Tort Sellström

⁷ de Vylder, idem

⁸ de Vylder, idem

⁹ In Chile the shanty towns were called mushroom towns (poblaciónes callampas), which were settlements in informal neighborhoods that sprang up like mushrooms on empty plots outside city limits. They consisted of small constructions of left-over building materials like wood planks, cardboard and in the best of cases tin roofing, and were home to the poorest of the poor.

¹⁰ The Condor Years, John Dinges

Preparations

This story begins in 1973, a year that would be so fatal for so many, particularlyn Chile. For me it was also the year that changed my life forever.

In my student world 1973 had started in a very uneventful way. I lived in Lund which is a small city in the south of Sweden characterized by the centuries-old university, which I was attending. I lived in a commune and could never have imagined what would happen towards the end of that year. I was taking courses in