By Jorge Jorquera
September 11 marks the 25th anniversary of the overthrow of the left-wing president of Chile, Salvador Allende, by the military. The bloody coup which brought Augusto Pinochet to power ended with the assassination of Allende and began a wave of repression in which thousands were forced to flee the country. Tens of thousands more disappeared, were tortured or murdered.
In the 1980s, Latin America witnessed the rise of what was referred to as "democratura". The military regimes that had repressed the popular and working-class movements of the 1970s had begun to exhaust themselves. A process of reform emerged that produced "dictatorship-democracy" (democratura) regimes.
In part, the previous military regimes had fulfilled their role — to repress the working class and implement the harsh economic austerity policies demanded by imperialism.
New contradictions had emerged in these countries. Rapid, if only limited and targeted, industrialisation in some Latin American countries (Brazil, Argentina) created a new industrial working class. Rapid neo-liberal deregulation (Chile, Venezuela) created new concentrations of marginalised, semi-proletarian, urban poor. These circumstances produced a renewed base for youth radicalisation and radical organisations.
The revival of working-class militancy between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, and the destabilising effect of the inevitable decline of the economic "prosperity" of the middle classes, resulted in the Latin American dictatorships losing support from sections of society which previously backed them. Internal divisions within the regimes opened and different "survival" strategies emerged.
In Chile, a powerful democratic movement and a radicalisation of youth emerged in the mid-1980s. Pinochet was eventually forced to resign after a 1989 plebiscite rejected his continued rule. However, he continued to rule the country as its armed forces' chief and head of the National Security Council (consisting of the heads of the various branches of the armed forces and police). The NSC had veto power over the parliament under the provisions of the 1984 military-imposed constitution.
How Chile's "democratura" emerged, and the subsequent years of economic disaster and political disenfranchisement for the majority of Chileans, is instructive for the democratic movements fighting to overthrow dictatorships, such as in Indonesia today.
The democratic movement
Following successes in the early 1980s in the industrial arena, despite a repressive labour code, the Chilean trade union movement stepped into the political arena.
This gave confidence to the developing democratic movement. Students and the urban poor began to radicalise in a more generalised way.
The left-wing of the democratic movement was revitalised. The growing weight of the left meant the movement's demands were more consistently democratic. The influence of more timid bourgeois-liberal elements, who feared the democracy of the masses and interpreted democratisation as simply greater freedom of criticism "within" the elite, declined.
The burgeoning youth radicalisation forced a shift to the left by the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh). The PCCh formed an armed wing, the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR).
The radicalisation also spurred the growth of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), as well as another politico-military organisation based on the urban poor youth, Mapu Lautaro.
The growth of the democratic movement also gave weight to radical tendencies in the Chilean Socialist Party "current". [The Socialist Party "current" — which included the Democratic Party split from the Socialist Party — ended up as a right-wing social-democratic adjunct to the "democratura". Today Chile faces the prospect of a Democratic Party presidency committed to a neo-liberal agenda and controlled democratic reform.]
A relatively "structured" bourgeois opposition formed around the Christian Democrats (which became the Concertacion), while a coalition of the "left wing" of the democratic movement, which included most left organisations, called the Popular Democratic Movement (MDP), was formed.
At the peak of the movement, the MDP provided the dominant political direction for the democratic movement as a whole; forcing the bourgeois-liberal opposition to take a more consistently democratic stance.
Pinochet
The Pinochet regime continued its strategy of "low-intensity repression", targeting the most exposed (usually middle-level) cadre of the left organisations. This was no small component of the dictatorship's strategy.
With the revolutionary left having lost many of its founding cadre in the 1970s, and with thousands of others in exile, undermining new cadre growth was central to the government's tactics for preventing revolutionaries from consolidating their leadership of the broader left bloc and harnessing the revolutionary dynamic of the democratic movement.
A failed attempt to assassinate Pinochet in 1987 (arguably at the peak of the democratic movement) gave the dictatorship the pretext to greatly increase repression of the democracy movement, and of the revolutionary left in particular. This forced a retreat by the more conservative, ideologically confused and militaristic sections of the left.
The old-guard leadership of the PCCh, still Stalinist and clinging to the reformist view that a democratic revolution was possible without a struggle to smash the old state machinery, re-emerged as the dominant tendency within the party. At the same, there was a rightward shift of the Socialist Party current.
The retreat also affected the revolutionary left (MIR, FPMR, Mapu Lautaro). The Chilean revolutionary left, as in most of the Latin America, defined its anti-reformism by taking a militaristic stance.
While the PCCh dominated the trade unions and other working-class "institutions", the revolutionary left concentrated on developing and organising politico-military units based on students and the urban poor.
After the 1987 crackdown and under pressure from the massive repression, the retreat of the left and the resulting retreat of the masses, a section of the revolutionary left (including much of the old-guard of the MIR leadership) split to the right.
With the peak of the democratic movement over, and the left weakened, the more far-sighted sections of the Chilean elite, backed by US imperialism, began to map out a "transition to democracy".
While the democracy movement remained strong, the revolutionary left had been marginalised and the bourgeois-liberal opposition — now joined by the social-democratic Socialist Party current and unchallenged by the immobilised PCCh — hegemonised the movement.
The "transition to democracy" had become largely a subject for debate between US imperialism, the Chilean bourgeoisie, the military machine and the bureaucrats of the social-democratic left. The Chilean people — without a revolutionary leadership — played little part in the process.
"Democratura" was as far as the bourgeois-liberal leadership which hijacked the democratic movement was prepared to go. The Chilean capitalist class and significant sections of the middle class still felt they had something to gain from militaristic neo-liberalism.
They feared the political power of the working class under genuine democracy far more than they feared a strong military ruling behind a limited democratic facade.
Had the left presented a clearer revolutionary project, both in theory and practice, it is certain that Chile would be much closer to democracy today.
The Chilean revolutionary left abstractly understood the central question of the working class and its allies taking state power in order to carry through the democratic revolution. In practice, however, it turned the tactic of armed struggle into a strategy.
What was required was a consistent, and if necessary prolonged, strategy of applying every tactic toward expanding the mass struggle and developing the consciousness and combativeness of the working-class vanguard.
The goal should have been to create the crucial force missing from the mid-1980s political panorama: a working class that understood the need, and was capable and confident enough to establish a "people's democracy" led by it.
Without a working class conscious of its political task, and willing to undertake the struggles necessary to achieve it, it was inevitable that the democratic movement would flounder under the dominance of the bourgeois pretenders.