Chile: The Expanding Left

Yankee, Yankee, Yankee

Be careful, be careful

You are going to hear the complaints

Black eagle, you will fall.

THE eagle is the U.S. The verse is part of a protest song that is popular in the cafes and boites of Santiago. In the dim light of those penas folkloricas, as they are known, Chilean students representing every shade of the leftist spectrum--from Christian Democrat to anarchic urban terrorist--gather to sing their praise of Fidel Castro's Cuba and their passionate hatred of the local oligarchy and the U.S.

At first glance, the fierceness of Chilean leftist feeling against the U.S. seems strange indeed. Chile, after all, is more prosperous and more egalitarian than most of its neighbors. It is also the staunchest democracy in South America, undisturbed by coups d'etat since 1932 and led for the past six years by the strenuously reformist government of President Eduardo Frei. Few countries in Latin America have appeared to be so devoted to the democratic process as this nation of 9,000,000. Even its geography helped by isolating it from its neighbors. Stretching more than 2,600 miles down the west coast of South America, Chile has the towering Andes to the east, the Pacific to the west, the parched and barren Atacama Desert to the north and, in the south, the craggy shores of Tierra del Fuego. Yet next week the Chilean Congress will confront a dilemma that no republican legislature has ever faced: whether or not to allow a freely elected Marxist to become President of the country. Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, 62, head of a coalition of leftist, Socialist and Communist parties, was the front runner in last month's elections. If he is denied the presidency, his followers may well plunge the country into a murderous civil war. But if he is acknowledged the winner, as seemed virtually certain last week, Chile may not have another free election for a long, long time.

Two months ago, the U.S. National Security Council received a report that if Allende won, a Communist takeover would inevitably follow. With it would come a dismantling of the democratic electoral process. As a Western diplomat put it last week: "Chile is a victim of Communist Russian roulette. Democracy gave the Communists one chance at power every six years. Now they've won, and they'll never give democracy another chance."

Allende has categorically denied such charges, but there have already been some disquieting signs. Chile's Communist Party has 45,000 members and is one of the largest in Latin America; it is smaller but far better organized than Allende's own Socialists. Of the 8,000 Popular Front committees organized for the campaign, 80% were led by Communists; the number of committees has grown to 12,000 in the past four weeks. Apparently because he is afraid of the Communists' strength, Allende has so far denied the Communists any key posts on his government planning team. That, of course, could change after his formal election as President. Late last week, in any case, Allende offered a government post to Felipe Herrera, president of the Inter-American Development Bank and a respected hemisphere financial expert. Herrera was said to be ready to accept if he believed that Allende would follow an independent, nationalist line.

Political Indoctrination

There have been disturbing notes, however, in the past two weeks. Under new contracts with the Ministry of Public Health, medical interns are required to devote at least an hour a day to "lectures not related to their professional interests," which apparently means political indoctrination. The chief of a Communist-dominated printers' union has refused to help turn out some needed textbooks. "Why bother?" he asked. "There will be new ones after Nov. 4." Reports that Communist journalists were intimidating their non-Marxist colleagues have been denied, but there is no question that an astonishing amount of censorship is already being practiced by union members. At the opening session of a conference of Pacific powers in Vina del Mar, President Frei is said to have delivered a stinging rebuttal to a Marxist economist's interpretation of power in the Pacific. Despite the drama of the confrontation, the Frei speech was not reported in a single Chilean newspaper or radio-TV broadcast. Also unreported by the Chilean press these days are the arrivals of Soviet-bloc officials and technicians.

Fearful that a Marxist takeover is at hand, middle-class Chileans have begun withdrawing funds from banks at an alarming rate; in one week, the banks lost 920 million escudos and the savings and loan associations another 340 million--a total of $87 million. The escudo dropped as low as 55 to the dollar on the Santiago black market (v. 14.5 at the legal rate). Almost 14,000 Chileans left the country during the first 24 days of September, causing long lines at passport offices and ticket counters; hundreds of others bought open one-way air tickets for themselves and their families to Buenos Aires, Miami or New York and tucked them away in bureau drawers, just in case.

Farmers delayed their spring planting. Consumers stopped buying. Sales of clothing dropped 30% in September, major appliances and furniture as much as 80%, automobiles 75%. Private construction trailed off to almost nothing. "The longer this goes on," said a foreign economist in Santiago, "the harder it is going to be to put the Chilean economy back on its feet." To reduce the money outflow, the government limited Chileans to one exit from the country per month except in special cases.

Pathetic Appeal

In the September presidential elections, Allende polled 36% of the vote, compared with 35% for former President Jorge Alessandri, 74, of the rightist National Party, and 28% for Radomiro Tomic, the nominee of President Frei's Christian Democratic Party. Since no candidate received a popular majority, the Congress is required to choose the new President from the two top votegetters. Although it is not obliged to do so, the Congress has always selected the man who received the highest popular vote. Moreover, since Allende's Popular Unity coalition controls 88 seats in the 200-member Congress, he needs the support of only 13 Christian Democrats to win a majority.

Despite Allende's clear if narrow claim to victory, the two losing parties seemed at one point to be on the verge of snatching the presidency away from him. Alessandri, the right-wing runner-up, said that if he were elected President by the Congress, he would resign immediately, paving the way for new elections. The popular President Frei, legally barred from succeeding himself, would then be permitted to run. Although he would probably have won an absolute majority against any and all opponents, Frei did not support the plan publicly, possibly because he believed that it was merely a way of thwarting the constitutional process.

Then the Christian Democrats tried another tactic. In return for the united support of all 75 C.D.P. Congressmen in next week's balloting, they asked Allende, would he guarantee the survival of Chile's opposition political parties, free press, labor-union autonomy, and right of assembly? And would he relinquish his right to name the chiefs of the armed services and turn that prerogative over to the armed forces themselves, subject to congressional approval? It was a pathetic appeal. TIME Correspondent David Lee noted: "The governing party was beseeching the apparent President-elect for guarantees of the very freedoms that had allowed his victory to take place."

Allende replied briskly that such guarantees were unnecessary; his own "democratic attitude," he said, guaranteed "the future behavior of my government." As for relinquishing his right to appoint the chiefs of the armed services, he refused to consider the matter: "I am an intransigent defender of the prerogatives of the chief of state." This time the Christian Democrats were ready to fight, and there were reports that President Frei's forces were trying to gain support for an alliance with Alessandri's National Party.

A Beautiful Experiment

Facing such a specific threat to their victory, the leaders of Allende's Popular Unity coalition conferred for 16 hours and agreed to meet with the Christian Democrats to consider a constitutional amendment incorporating all the C.D.P. demands except one rescinding the President's right to make military appointments. It was a thin concession on Allende's part, but it was enough to swing the C.D.P. In a session at week's end, the party agreed to support Allende unanimously. Barring an unlikely military coup or even more unlikely outside intervention, he will be inaugurated Chile's next President on Nov. 4.

At that time, the vital question will become what sort of Marxist President Allende will choose to be. The frightening fact is that Chileans have no idea. "It could be a beautiful experiment in democracy," says a Santiago conservative, "or it could be a concentration camp."

Allende insists that he will work within the democratic system, as he has done all his life. He has no intention, he says, of trying to impose a monolithic Communist regime. "For you," he told the New York Times last week, "to be a Communist or a Socialist is to be totalitarian. For me, no. I believe man is freed when he has an economic position that guarantees him work, food, housing, health, rest and recreation. I am a founder of the Socialist Party, and I must tell you that I am not totalitarian, and I think Socialism frees man."

Fidel's Five Points

In a more poetic but even less revealing mood, Allende likes to say: "The Cuban revolution had the flavor of sugar and rum. The Chilean revolution will have the taste of meat pies and red wine." Not that Allende has anything against sugar and rum. Shortly after the election, he sent his daughter Beatriz to Havana to have a talk with his old friend Fidel Castro. Beatriz returned to Santiago with five bits of advice for her father from Fidel: 1) "Keep your copper exports within the dollar area." 2) "Don't let your Chilean copper-industry technicians get out of the country." (Otherwise they may escape to neighboring countries, where the pay or working conditions may be better.) 3) "Don't talk too much revolutionary rhetoric. You know you're a revolutionary and I know it, but don't shout it from the rooftops." (For this reason, said Fidel, he would not attend the Allende inauguration.) 4) "Don't break off relations with the U.S." 5) "Try to maintain good relations with the Chilean military."

Allende hardly needed the last piece of advice. He insists that he is on good terms with the highly professional, U.S.-equipped 60,000-man armed forces. Washington intelligence sources believe that he can gain effective control of the army within six months through appointment of sympathetic officers and forced retirement of potential opponents. In the meantime, however, he will be particularly vulnerable until he takes over the crack, 30,000-man carabineros, the national police force. Most observers are convinced that unless Allende moves too precipitously in his efforts to remake Chile, the armed forces will adhere to their historic role of non-intervention in politics.

Losing No Time

How fast will Allende move? Most observers think that he will lose no time nationalizing the banks and the American copper interests. A prime target is the $200 million investment of the Anaconda Co. In the beginning, the firm resisted Frei's "Chileanization" program (51% government ownership) and has been slower than other copper companies to train Chileans for top jobs. Not far behind will be the Kennecott Copper Corp., with an $80 million interest in El Teniente, the world's largest underground copper mine; Cerro Corp., with $15 million in copper investments; and ITT, with $200 million or more in the Chilean telephone system, a cable company and two Santiago hotels. Others are the Dow Chemical Co., Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., the General Tire and Rubber Co. and North American Rockwell Corp. The pace of Allende's actions will also depend on the state of the economy. "The more his back is to the wall," says one American economist, "the more likely he will be to move harshly and quickly." Few American managers expect to remain very long. Allende neatly summed up his attitude toward the U.S. during a recent interview; when he was asked whether he would allow Americans to continue running a space-tracking station on Chile's Easter Island in the Pacific, he said with a grin: "Goodbye and good luck."

Some foreigners argue that the Chileans will never be able to run the mines on their own, but copper men disagree. Says a U.S. executive: "We've spent 15 years and millions of dollars training them to run the copper mines. They can do it.'' The number of American personnel is small, in any case. Kennecott, for example, has only seven Americans in its management. The mining supervisor of the giant El Teniente is a 36-year-old Chilean named Pedro Campino. The Chileans are afraid, however, of losing their native managers and technicians to other countries, and hence Allende will pay careful heed to Castro's advice. Chilean technicians have the reputation of being the best in Latin America. Many who now receive U.S.-scale salaries may try to go elsewhere if, as is likely, an Allende austerity program should reduce salaries of the middle class by as much as 50%. And as Allende addresses himself to the cares of the laborers and campesinos, who are his chief supporters, middle-class privileges will inevitably be trimmed away.

During the campaign, Allende vowed that he would expropriate the country's leading newspaper, the conservative El Mercurio. Now it seems that he will not even have to bother. He can achieve the same result by withholding government advertising from Mercurio and other offending publications; as the nationalization program gathers momentum, such punishment will become ever more deadly. Says a Chilean associated with the paper: "El Mercurio is like a candle in a bottle. It will give light for a while, and then will be smothered, leaving only a little black smoke. How long it lasts depends on how big a bottle the Communists permit."

In foreign policy, Allende will maintain close relations with the Soviet Union, and may well ask Moscow for substantial economic and financial assistance. In return, he may allow the Soviets to use the port of Valparaiso if they should decide to move into the Pacific, as they have moved into the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. On the other hand, such a gesture could prove so unsettling to either Argentina or Brazil that Allende might decide it was not worth the risk. Chile will not become a guerrilla base, but it will probably serve quietly as a haven for the Tupamaros of Uruguay and the guerrilleros of Bolivia.

Some foreigners in Santiago have made much of the fact that 63% of the Chilean electorate voted against Allende in the recent election. It is equally true, however, that a combined total of 64% voted for Allende and Tomic, who stood well to the left of Frei and whose platform was all but indistinguishable from the Marxists' by the end of the campaign.

Mushroom Cities

Frei, an eloquent 59-year-old, was deeply stung by the way Tomic, his party's candidate, turned against him. Frei had reason to be, for his record was an excellent one, even though his progress was hindered by a series of floods, a major earthquake and a long drought. Besides Chileanizing the copper industry, he expropriated 1,224 private estates and distributed the land to 30,000 families. He built 260,000 new housing units and tripled the number of schools in order to educate 600,000 more children. He gradually improved and even removed some of the callampas, the mushroom cities of cardboard and packing-crate shacks and huts that blight the edges of Santiago and other urban areas. In 1965, Frei's first full year in office, 25% of the national wealth was held by 5% of the population, and 2.5% by the poorest 20%. Today the slice controlled by the richest 5% has been reduced to 20%, and the amount owned by the poor 20% has been increased to 5%.

Swapping Watches

Such statistics show clearly the direction in which Chile was moving through taxation and land reform. But judging from the election, progress was not rapid enough for the demands of the age. A large percentage of Chile's people still live in rural and urban poverty. Hundreds of thousands remain in callampas and in conventillos, barracks-like structures or old mansions in which one or two families are cramped into a single room. Some 200,000 people live in and around the mushroom city of La Victoria, which has not a single telephone. More than half of Chile's children are undernourished, Allende notes, and half of the country's families live on less than $30 a month. Unemployment stands at about 7%, and underemployment is far higher. Despite all efforts to control it, Chile's inflation continues at the rate of 25% to 30% per year. Whether directly related to economic factors or not, alcoholism remains a tragic aspect of life in Chile, which has a thriving wine industry; 5% of all Chileans above the age of 15 are alcoholics, and 1 adult in every 10 dies of cirrhosis.

Opponents criticize Frei for pledging that he would build 360,000 new housing units and then falling short by 100,000. Similarly, although he succeeded in relocating 30,000 families on plots of land, he had promised to move 100,000 of the country's 350,000 landless rural families. Frei was also attacked for using army troops to break a 1966 copper strike that left eight dead, and for adopting a mano dura (hard hand) in his dealings with organized labor. Though Fidel Castro would seem to be in no position to talk, he said of Frei after the 1966 strike: "He promised revolution without blood and has given blood without revolution."

Allende, who is promising revolution and really seems to mean it, was born 62 years ago in Valparaiso, the earthy, exotic port city that Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda describes as a "filthy rose." Allende's father was a lawyer and his grandfather, a high-ranking Freemason, was a founder of the Radical Party and was known as "the Red Allende." As a student activist who helped to organize the Socialist Party in 1933, Salvador Allende was imprisoned twice but managed to graduate from medical school. Although many potential employers regarded him as a troublemaker, he finally found a job as a coroner's assistant. After two years of medical practice, he was elected a federal Deputy at the age of 29. He supported Aguirre Cerda for the presidency and was later rewarded by being appointed Minister of Public Health.

During the 1939 earthquake, he ran into an old friend in a Santiago street and was introduced to the friend's date, a University of Chile history and geography student named Hortensia Bussi. Allende later married her. (Radomiro Tomic, the defeated Christian Democratic candidate, met his future wife during the same earthquake.)

As a Senator and Socialist Party leader, Allende became a friend of Fidel Castro, and still proudly wears a wristwatch that used to belong to the Cuban. As Allende tells the story, Fidel kept eying the Chilean's gold alarm watch, and finally suggested that they swap watches. "No deal," said Allende. "Yours is silver and mine is gold." But Castro insisted and Allende relented. Later, Fidel's brother Raul asked Allende: "Why did you give Fidel that watch? He spent the entire Cabinet meeting playing with the alarm. Nobody could get any work done with the buzzer going off every few minutes."

In the early days, Allende's enemies labeled him El Pije (the Dandy), a reference to his stylish dress; his friends call him Chicho, an affectionate nickname. Today Allende dresses nattily but comfortably; he shocked his more elegant colleagues by showing up in a dark suit at a formal reception for Queen Elizabeth in 1968. He works long hours, tries to keep in shape by lifting weights, but rarely sleeps more than five hours a night. "I really don't work," he claims. "Working for the people is a pleasure."

Sheer Confusion

Despite his folksy, country-doctor looks and his man-of-the-people air, Allende occasionally betrays a penchant for stiff party jargon. In Santiago's right-wing political weekly Pec, a cartoonist last week captured the flavor of the Allendista phraseology in a strip showing a small boy rushing up to his father and shouting "Papa!" "What's this 'Papa' business?" his father scolds him. "You're supposed to say 'camarada'!" "Yes, camarada." "That's better." "Mama says--" the boy begins again. "What you mean is 'la companera'!" "La companera says that the baby--" "You mean 'the future of Chile'!" the father interrupts once more. Anyway, the boy finally concludes: "La companera says that the future of Chile just dirtied its diapers."

Allende was defeated for the presidency three times, although he increased his vote from 6% in 1952 to 39% in 1964, when Eduardo Frei won an absolute majority. "This time," said Allende a few months ago, "I'm going to ask that they put on my tombstone, 'Here lies Salvador Allende, future President of Chile.' " Such a gesture will be unnecessary. Allende won by putting together a broader coalition of leftist parties than any other candidate had managed since 1938. He also benefited from the Chilean electorate's gradual polarization into a broad left and a shrinking right.

The victory caught even Allende by surprise. In the 1964 election, he made meticulous preparations for taking over the government. He organized a Cabinet, made tentative appointments to other posts and gathered a well-disciplined cadre around him. This time, he was hopeful but did not really expect to win. He made no plans, and the result is sheer confusion. At the Allende home, swarms of beseeching office-and favor-seekers come and go, while a handful of lieutenants try vainly to sort out what should be done with whom. The tiny living room is constantly jammed, alive with a buzz of political speculation. In a way, Allende's home has become a microcosm of Chile itself--filled with people who mill about, talking nothing but politics, speculating on the road ahead.

The Allende victory has left the Chilean people as divided as they are bewildered. Many are delirious with joy. A young Chilean sought out TIME Correspondent Kay Huff in Santiago to say: "Please tell the people the truth about Chile. Please let them know that this is the only way for Chile." That same night, about 100 women gathered in Constitution Square, facing the Presidential Palace, to sing the national anthem and chant, "Chile si, Cuba no."

Deep Apprehension

Beyond Chile's borders, Nov. 4 is anticipated with considerable apprehension (see box p. 29). Nor are the country's immediate neighbors the only ones concerned. Convinced that Allende will establish some form of Communist government, the Nixon Administration is fearful that this could have a contagious effect on other South American countries. The Administration is also sensitive to the fact that the rise of a Chilean Communist regime could become an issue in the 1972 U.S. presidential campaign.

Still, some U.S. experts on Latin America urge that the U.S. not prejudge Allende or his government. They note that the Chileans, who are mostly descended from Europeans and do not have the sizable Indian minority that poses problems for most neighboring countries, have long lived in relative isolation in a land whose north and south are as different from each other as Saudi Arabia and Finland. Despite the inevitable drift toward the left under Allende, they believe that the Chileans will retain a system that is essentially their own.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Ralph Dungan insists that Allende means it when he says he is committed to constitutional rule. Dungan dismisses talk of a chain reaction throughout the region as "ill-informed nonsense. Foreigners and especially the U.S. should adopt an attitude of studied neutrality toward South America and let them work things out for themselves."

For the moment, at any rate, the U.S. and its neighbors in Latin America have little choice but to wait and see exactly what Salvador Allende has in mind when he talks about a revolution that tastes of meat pies and red wine.

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