11) WINNIPEG EVENT MARKS 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF CHILEAN COUP

 

Winnipeg's Chilean community had a panel discussion on Sept. 25 about Canada's response to the fascist coup against Chile's Popular Unity government in 1973. On the panel were former Manitoba Premier Howard Pawley, former NDP MP Judy Wasylycia‑Leis, Paul Graham and leader of the Communist Party of Canada in Manitoba, Darrell Rankin, whose comments are below.

 

            I want to thank the Chile 40 Committee for inviting us to discuss one of the most important turning points in your lives. It is hard to imagine the ordeal you endured to be here forty years later.

 

            I would like to talk about the early months of Canada's solidarity movement for a democratic Chile. The Trudeau Liberal government accepted thousands of refugees to Canada. Yet Trudeau rejected the demands of the solidarity movement not to recognize Augusto Pinochet's fascist junta and to ban the import of Chilean products.

 

            We will never know how many more lives could have been saved if the Chilean junta was more isolated and shut off from the world. Certainly, the parties of big business in Canada and around the world were guilty of handing Pinochet a big economic lifeline. It was help that failed to reach the Chilean people but propped up the oligarchy.

 

            The strengths and lessons of the solidarity movement are important today. I want to look beyond the facts and figures to understand the eruption of feelings of solidarity that took place across Canada...

 

            Percy Bysse Shelley, one of the finest poets in the English language, wrote that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Chile has made a major contribution to humanity's socialist future through its music, poetry and art, and you have brought that authentic humanity to Canada, all of you here. We are very thankful.

 

            Chile's fascist coup forty years ago shook the world. Defending the interests of the Chilean oligarchy and U.S. imperialism, Augusto Pinochet's military junta crushed Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government with the aim of eradicating socialist and Marxist thoughts from the people.

 

            In South America especially, the balance of forces shifted against democracy, socialism and the workers' movements, despite many kinds of resistance. For example, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976. In other continents, the coup provided a sharp warning to strengthen the struggle against imperialism, especially U.S. imperialism.

 

            Asia and Africa were emerging from colonial rule; the Vietnamese people were near victory. The socialist countries, led by the Soviet Union, pushed for dialogue and détente with the U.S. and other members of the NATO military alliance.

 

            Globally, the balance of forces favoured détente, disarmament, and anti‑colonialism. It favoured the broad socialist and reformist movements. The Soviet Union's prestige from fighting hardest to defeat Hitler in World War Two was in the living memory of all anti‑fascists.

 

            The global economy grew at a far faster pace than today. Working people knew if they united and struggled, they could achieve advances.

 

            In Canada, working people were able to win stronger public medicare and pensions. In 1972, the Canadian Labour Congress re‑admitted several communist‑led unions expelled in the 1950s. This had a positive effect on the militancy and direction of the CLC for the next twenty years.

 

            When the coup happened in Chile, the labour movement and a broad array of progressive forces were united, conducting big strikes and making political demands against monopoly‑inspired rising prices. Canada had its first and only general strike in 1976, against wage controls. The strike movement was far larger than it is today.

 

            The labour movement was becoming more political and moving in the direction of détente, disarmament and the peaceful co‑existence of socialist and imperialist countries. And because they were already in a fighting spirit, unions were ready to act swiftly and build a strong and powerful solidarity movement for a democratic Chile.

 

            The response was just as tremendous around the world. Salvador Allende's Socialist Party was the leading force in the Popular Unity government, a full member of the Socialist International. The election of his government showed what socialist and communist parties together can achieve.

 

            The Popular Unity government's programme stated that it was three million workers, together with the whole people, who, by "unified combative action," would be able to "break the present structures and advance in the task of their liberation."

 

            The program was not to reform capitalism, but to make decisive inroads against the power of the capitalist and landed oligarchy and its political structures.

 

            Unity in Chile developed into global unity for solidarity with Chile's democratic forces. The Socialist International, which includes Canada's NDP, condemned the military coup and called upon its member parties to assist Chilean democrats. It urged governments to refrain from taking diplomatic steps in support of the junta and to stop any kind of aid, credits or loans to the regime.

 

            In March 1974, the Socialist International formed a committee that was instrumental in launching large‑scale solidarity campaigns in many capitalist countries.

 

            The socialist countries, especially the Soviet Union, also acted firmly in support of Chile's democratic forces, as did the international peace and trade union movements. The international conference "Chile is not alone," attended by 57 countries and 17 international organizations on September 29‑30, 1973 in Helsinki, is just one example.

 

            The Soviet Union successfully negotiated with the junta in 1976 to free Luis Corvalan, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Chile. General Pinochet received a report every morning about the letters read by Radio Moscow sent to it by loyal listeners in Chile. The Soviet Union and communist parties, including in Canada, directly helped the resistance against the Chilean junta.

 

            It was the resistance and courage of the Chilean people themselves that played the main role in removing the dictatorship in 1989.

 

            In the end, Pinochet's junta accomplished nothing except the destruction of Chile's economy and undermining the country's sovereignty. It carried out a big, failed neo‑liberal experiment. It dealt a severe and sad, yet temporary setback to the people's movements and to socialism in Chile. For me, capitalism's inhumanity will never make me stop being a socialist. I agree with Frederick Engels' ideas that humanity's true history will begin only with socialism and that we are confronted with the choice of either socialism or barbarism.

 

            I want to end by asking "Why Chile?" When the world was moving in the direction of détente, mutual and balanced disarmament and the peaceful co‑existence of socialist and capitalist countries, why did U.S. imperialism target Chile, of all places?

 

            Quite simply, it was losing and wanted desperately to find a way to stop the transition of humanity from capitalism to socialism. It wanted to freeze history, to declare with bullets and torture that history had ended. It ran out of arguments in Chile, so it used bullets.

 

            Chile meant more to U.S. imperialism as a possession than other parts of the world. It was only one continent away from the U.S. It had a lot of U.S. investments. In 1975, Latin America's dependence on foreign investment was much higher per person compared to Asia and Africa ‑ $132 compared to $16 and $29, respectively. The U.S. imperialist oligarchy was protecting its back yard.

            Détente did not go as planned for capitalist imperialism, since even its coup in Chile did not stop Portugal's Revolution and the liberation of Vietnam two years later. It did not stop the Afghan revolution in 1978.

 

            By the end of the decade, imperialism ended up restarting the arms race recklessly by placing Cruise and Pershing 2 missiles in Europe, effectively ending détente. It has since become an increasingly reactionary and militaristic social system that endangers all of humanity more than ever, including through the heedless, anti‑scientific destruction of our environment.

 

            Humanity's setbacks on the road to a better society always give a lesson. Chile's lessons confirm the idea that socialism needs the support of the overwhelming majority of the working class and that the alliance policy with the small capitalists can be decisive at critical moments of the revolutionary process.

 

            There are no rules that say revolutions need to be violent. Both Marx and Lenin stated this. And, if we consider that we are in the epoch of humanity's transition from capitalism to socialism, violence cannot stand in the way ‑ violence is not a decisive force for either of the big contending classes. As socialists, our main problem, especially since the setbacks to socialism twenty years ago, is that imperialism has most of the weapons and newspapers at its disposal at this time.

 

(The above article is from the October 16-31, 2013, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)