In the fall of 1970, Salvador Allende Gossens, a left-wing Socialist Party leader, was elected president of Chile. He was the candidate of Popular Unity, an electoral coalition of the Socialist Party, Communist Party, the bourgeois Radical Party, and several smaller parties. The CP and SP were the dominant forces in this front but made concessions to bourgeois forces inside and outside the coalition.

Allende’s electoral victory reflected a broad radicalization of the Chilean workers and farmers. The government carried out a number of far-reaching reforms in its first year, including the nationalization of foreign holdings in mining, as well as many banks and textile mills. In response to the working-class upsurge, growing sections of the Chilean bourgeoisie sought to undermine and overthrow the Allende government and U.S. imperialism opened up an economic war and propaganda campaign against it. On Sept. 11, 1973, Allende was overthrown in a bloody U.S.-orchestrated coup and the Pinochet military dictatorship was imposed. Copyright © 1982 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

For the first time in history, a new experience was developed in Chile: the attempt to bring about the revolution by peaceful means, by legal means. And he was given the understanding and support of all the world in his effort—not only of the international Communist movement, but of very different political inclinations as well. We may say that that effort was appreciated even by those who weren’t Marxist-Leninists.

And our party and people—in spite of the fact that we had made the revolution by other means—and all the other revolutionary peoples in the world supported him. We didn’t hesitate a minute, because we understood that there was a possibility in Chile of winning an electoral victory, in spite of all the resources of imperialism and the ruling classes, in spite of all the adverse circumstances. We didn’t hesitate in 1970 to publicly state our understanding and our support of the efforts which the Chilean left was making to win the elections that year.

And, sure enough, there was an electoral victory. The left, People’s Unity, with its social and political program, won at the polls.

Of course, that didn’t mean the triumph of a revolution; it meant access to very important positions of power by peaceful, legal means.

However, it wasn’t an easy task that President Allende was faced with. There were conspiracies right from the beginning. An attempt was made to keep him from being inaugurated after the elections….

But, in spite of all the conspiracies, in spite of all the efforts of imperialism, Salvador Allende, in the name of People’s Unity, took office as president of the republic.

But what problems confronted him? In the first place there was an intact bourgeois state apparatus. There were armed forces that called themselves apolitical, institutional—that is, apparently neutral in the revolutionary process. There was that bourgeois parliament, where a majority of members jumped to the tune of the ruling classes. There was a judicial system that was completely subservient to the reactionaries. And it was in those circumstances that he had to carry out his governmental duties. There was also the fact that the country’s economy was completely bankrupt, that the Chilean state was four billion dollars in debt.

That huge debt was the product of the imperialist policy, the product of the engineering of the United States, which was trying to create a showcase of the Christian Democratic government so as to confront and stop the advance of the social movement.

The United States granted Chile huge loans when Frei was president. But they weren’t loans to develop the country; they were loans for lavish consumption—for cars, television sets, refrigerators, and all kinds of other consumer goods which gave an image of progress and well-being to the Christian Democratic government.

President Allende found himself with a country burdened down by debt; a country in which imperialism had introduced its customs, its consumer habits; a country in which the mass media—the press, television, and radio—was in the hands of the oligarchy and reaction. And at a time when the price of copper plummeted from 75 cents to 48 cents a pound.

Moreover, the people had crying needs that simply had to be met. There was large-scale unemployment, and a solution had to be found for this problem. The most crying needs of the people, the demands most felt by the population, had to be attended to, and the government of People’s Unity found enormous economic obstacles in its path.

When the agrarian reform began to be put into effect, the large landowners and agrarian bourgeoisie started sabotaging agricultural production. The bourgeoisie, owners of the distribution centers, warehouses, and stores, started cornering the market and sabotaging the People’s Unity government.

As soon as the nationalization of the copper enterprises that had extracted thousands upon thousands of millions from the labor and sweat of the Chilean people—as soon as the nationalization of those enterprises was approved, imperialism froze all the loans granted by all the international organizations to the Chilean government and went about stifling the economy of Chile.

Those were the enormous difficulties which President Allende faced on taking office.  
 
 
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