With Labor and Courage

UNTIL 1970, Chile was one of that vast majority of nations about which most North Americans have heard little. Eduardo Frei, Chile's Christian Democratic leader and president from 1964 to 1970, merited an occasional New York Times pat on the back for his support of the Alliance for Progress. But to the U.S. government and press in the sixties, Chile's seemed a stable government. Here was one place in Latin America where a legally elected president could expect to serve out his term in peace.

With the election of President Salvador Allende in 1970, Chile's image in the U.S. public eye began to focus sharply. Reports from liberal and conservative sources alike--of which The New York Times was one of the worst--painted Allende as an imposter, a Red opportunist elected on a fluke. He was labelled "Marxist President" Allende to suggest that he was not a president in the sense of a Frei, a Thieu, or a Nixon. He was blamed for Chile's economic distress and for the consequent demonstrations of pot-banging housewives and striking truckers. He was, as The Times wrote, operating "brilliantly on borrowed time." Bernard Collier wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1972: "The political problem for President Allende now is to control the kind of immature people his party has always attracted." The U.S. press had finally provided its readers with a clear-cut image of Chile: Latin America's most stable, most prosperous democracy tricked by its own constitution into socialist leadership.

Chile: with poems and guns is an hour-long documentary which dissolves the myths U.S. readers were fed about the government of Salvador Allende. It shows how these lies and distortions were rooted in misconceptions about the Chile before Allende's government. The film was produced collectively by members of the Los Angeles Group for Latin American Solidarity, eight filmmakers, writers, and historians who put what they call a film pamphlet together. It is based on a script by Charles Horman, a U.S. citizen killed by the junta after the U.S. Santiago embassy denied him asylum.

The film quite expectedly lacks some of the production virtues one would find in a film produced by some big U.S. film company. The volume of background music sometimes muffles the narration. The camera work and editing have occasional rough edges. But nothing detracts from the clarity or importance of the film's story. In a way, the film's roughness even enhances its politics; it seems unafraid to show itself as the product of labor, of a commitment to content over gloss.

The lies about Chile are easy to debunk. It is easy to show that the protesting women were upper class matriarchs, complaining because higher wages for workers meant more costly luxury items and food. It is easy to point out that the truckers were not salaried drivers, but independent owners who controlled their own trucks. Under Allende, production in the state-run economic sector, in fact, rose 20 per cent, and 35 million acres of land were redistributed to peasants.

There is also abundant evidence to debunk the fluke election theory. Unidad Popular, the six-party coalition which backed Allende in 1970, won 51 per cent of the votes in the April 1971 municipal elections. Traditionally, ruling parties lose votes in the mid-term congressional elections; in March 1972, Unidad Popular raised its national vote count to 43 per cent of the total electorate. The right, which expected to take 60 per cent of the vote in 1972 began to fear that UP would win with 75 per cent in 1976.

THE REAL ENEMIES of Chilean economic and social progress were Chile's upper class and the United States. From the first month after Allende's election, right--wing extremist groups tried assassination and terror to spark a middle class Red scare and a military revolt. Management struck factories which workers forced to stay open; workers established committees for self-defense and to distribute goods directly to the people.

The United States set up an informal economic blockade, choking off normal lines of credit in all sectors but the military. The lack of credit and workers's demands for wages created shortages in the goods upper and middle class Chileans demanded: beef, wool, radios, cameras, machine parts, and so on.

While the United States helped frustrate Chilean middle class consumerism, it eagerly armed the generals waiting to topple the government. Last summer, the United States expected to donate $45 million this year to Chile's army and air force--more than ten times the $4 million in all other forms of aid the United States was providing for the Chilean people.

But these upsets were not momentary interruptions in a stable history. Chilean society has been marked by militant labor struggles for the last century, since Britain and not the U.S. was the country's dominant economic power. The government killed 2000 men, women, and children crushing a miners's strike in 1907; demonstrations were quashed violently under Frei in the sixties. As the film says, Allende's election was the culmination of a process, perhaps the turning point which proved that Chile's road to socialism will not be traveled peacefully.

The film documents U.S. economic interest in Chile. Anaconda Mining, one of the two biggest U.S. mining operations in Chile before nationalization, made 80 per cent of its profits for one year in Chile although Chile represented less than 20 per cent of Anaconda's investments. UP estimated in 1972 that the average rate of profit on copper investment for U.S. companies was 52.8 per cent compared to a 10 per cent return offered these investors by other countries.

But such facts could be conveyed in a printed pamphlet. This documentary is uniquely effective addressing imperialism's effect on Chile's culture and in demonstrating the junta's war against the hearts and minds of Chile's working class. Under UP government, Chilean worker art and culture flourished. "Art," the narrator says, "was joyous, collective, and public." New images and themes emerged, an emphasis on labor, freedom, and unity. A dazzlingly colorful abstract form arose unlike some other socialist countries's crude, gray realism.

This spirit was a chief target of the junta's attack. Marxist literature and books of all kind were burned in the streets. Soldiers ransacked the manuscripts of Pablo Neruda. A folksinger was shot for entertaining the prisoners in Chile's national stadium, which had been converted into a concentration camp by the military regime. Meanwhile, the North American press pressed on; The Times wrote that Agosto Pinochet, Chile's new strongman, was "quiet and businesslike," "powerfully built," and presumably despite his predisposition towards repression, a man with a "sense of humor."

Chile: with poems and guns is not a complete film. For example, it does not sufficiently explore the relation of UD to the Christian Democrats or disagreements with UP. What it does do, vividly, is establish a perspective on the blather which North Americans have heard these last three years about Allende, the Chilean working class, and the prospects for socialism. It relates Chile's experience to the experience of U.S. workers and is particularly sensitive to problems of racism, sexism, and the exploitation of children. What shines through the horror, the anger and frustration is the Chilean people's determination to resurrect the progress and joy that for a moment was theirs.