Confrontation in Chile
Gerry FOLEY stakes have been rising rapidly On May 11, large numbers of people in the country's capital and major city defied the brutal regime to participate in a national day of action called by the unions and the antidictatorial opposition. The protests were met with severe repres-
Despite the violence and threats of the regime, the second national day of action on June 14 was qualitatively larger in the capital and got important participation in correspondent for Le Matin, a Paris daily close to the Socialist Party,
"It is estimated that the participation was three times what it was May 11. Schools and stores were boycotted. 8:00 in the evening there was a gigantic concert of pan banging and car-horn blow-
Automobiles slowed to a crawl and the lights in homes were turned out.
"This kind of noise has never been heard in Santiago before, because when the emply pots were banged in 1973, it was only among the rich. This time...it was everywhere - even around the military school....
"The provinces moved too, and that was a major new factor by comparison with May 11, which remained confined to the capital. In Valparaiso, Temuco, Concepcion, and Puerto Montt, there was
La chorus of pot-banging and horn
The working-class neighborhood of La Florida in Santiago, where 300,000 people are concentrated, was entirely surrounded by burning barricades, according to International Herald Tribune correspondent
The National Command of the Workthe national union leadership, decided not to call concentrated demon-
But there were many small ones, and some sharp and prolonged especially in the poor neighborhoods of Santiago in the late night and early morning of June 14-15. In San Miguel, a town south of Santiago, a 14-year-old boy was shot down by police. In Renca, to the north of the capital, police killed a twenty-year-old youth. Six other persons were reported wounded.
It is not yet clear whether the shootings occurred in the context of clashes or of punitive raids by the police. An inforof Liberation's correspondent, Christian Martin, went to the Lo Ermida shantytown at 11:30 p.m. when flaming barricades appeared. Martin summarized his report in the June 16 issue of the Paris
"Three or four cars of riot police and full of plainclothes police arrived at the same time as he heard bursts of automatic weapons fire could not go in. But for a half hour he and then the screams of the inhabitants....
The bloodthirsty regime has not lost its savagery, but after ten years and in the context of a desperate economic situation, it seems to be losing its effect.
On the evening of June 14, a local journalist commented to the Le Matin correspondent:
"On May 11, Chileans began to be less afraid, and this time they have lost more
The new rise of the mass movement in neighboring Argentina was obviously an inspiration to the Chilean protesters.
The Argentine slogan, "Se va a acabar, se va a acabar, la dictatura militar!" (It's going to end, it's going to end, the military dictatorship is going to end!") was one of the most widely heard on June 14.
There is a rising wave of opposition to all the brutal military dictatorships in the area that crushed the workers movement in the early 1970s.
In one respect, the Chilean junta was the strongest of these "tough" ships. It had a mass base among the petty that had become alienated from the Allende government.
That base is now completely gone, as a result of a far graver economic crisis than the one that arose under Allende.
A third of Chile's workers are officially unemployed. The foreign debt has increased from 3 billion to 20 billion under
The political failure of the Pinochet regime is nearly total. It finds itself isolated in the face of a mounting wave of
More has failed in Chile than Pinochet. US imperialism was deeply involved in shaping its economic poliey. The junta's
"made in America" "economic realism" in the
The growth of Chilean debt to US banks means that as the dictatorship sinks deeper into quicksand, the stakes of US capital in the regime are rising.
Juan de Onis stressed this aspect in the June 16 International Herald Tribune:
"While police and demonstrators clashed, and thousands of housewives banged their pots and pans throughout the city, Harry Taylor, the president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust, the US bank that has led foreign debt negotiations with Chile, was making television statements saying that the banks were happy to lend the country another 1.3 billion dollars to pay interest owed this year."
More than any other Latin-American dictatorship, the Chilean regime has become the symbol of the way the imperialists and their hired goons trample on the democratic rights of the masses of work. ing people in the countries they dominate.
The rise of revolt against Pinochet, therefore, is a demonstration to oppressed peoples in Latin America in particular but also in the rest of the world and to the workers movement in the advanced capitalist countries as well, that a ruthless dictatorship has not broken a conscious and organized working class.
The revival of the mass movement in Chile less than ten years after the slaughter of the entire vanguard of the workers movement is also a sign of the times. world capitalist crisis, which is having catastrophic effects in the dependent countries, is preparing the way for masstion in Nicaragua showed how quickly the most powerful repressive apparatus can be overwhelmed when a whole people has had enough.
What was true in Nicaragua is even more true on a wider scale. The more extensive the rise of discontent and rebellion, the harder it is to repair the cracks that appear in the walls the capitalists and imperialists have built.
Commentators in the international press talk about the US trying to restrain problems in Central anxious to keep a running sore from developing in Chile," Le Matin's cor-
It is clear already that the decay of the Southern Cone dictatorships has gravely weakened the position of US imperialism in Latin America and made it far more difficult and risky to intervene in Cen-
But if Washington wanted to restrain Pinochet, it did not have notable success. He reacted to the June day of action as to the previous by escalating repression, jailing the most prominent union leader and promising to fight to the death rather than give in to the mass movement.
Pinochet does not seem to have much room for concessions, or the US imperialists either. That makes the confrontation
Even if the workers organizations hesitate in the face of the regime's ultimatum, the pressure, over the long term, will continue to build up. Because there is no solution in sight to the desperate economic conditions the working people face, and because the rising anger against the capitalist economic crisis is so widespread.
The trade-union movement throughout the world, as well as supporters of democracy and human rights in general, also have a big stake in Chile. ' Chile cannot be forgotten. left to fight alone against a particularly people throughout the world increasing