Salvador Allende

President of Chile (1970-1973)

• Born: June 26, 1908
• Birthplace: Valparaíso, Chile
• Died: September 11, 1973
• Place of death: Santiago, Chile

Allende, the first socialist president of Chile, was one of the most important political figures in twentieth century Latin America. Elected in 1970 in his fourth bid for Chile’s highest office, he inaugurated a controversial program of reform that, opposed both by Chilean elite interests and the United States, culminated in his overthrow and assassination in 1973.

Early Life

Salvador Allende (SAHL-vah-dohr ah-YEHN-day) was born in Valparaíso, Chile, the last of four brothers and one of the eight children of Salvador Allende Castro and Laura Gossens Uribe. Allende’s father was a public defender with a strong interest in social justice, whose own father, Ramon Allende Padin, had been a prominent politician and a Chilean freemason. Laura Gossens, in contrast, was a devout Roman Catholic from a well-to-do family. Allende, a religious agnostic, was himself to be a lifelong freemason.

Allende spent the first eight years of his life in the northern rural town of Tacna, which had once been part of Peru and was returned to it in 1931. Returning to Valparaíso, he was educated at the Liceo Eduardo de la Barra and took an M.D. from the University of Chile in 1933. Already an activist, he supported the short-lived Socialist Republic of Chile proclaimed in 1932 by Marmaduke Groves, a friend of the Allende family. The republic was overthrown in a military coup sponsored by landed interests and British and American industrialists a coalition similar to the one that would overthrow Allende four decades later.

Allende was arrested for his support of the republic and was put through five trials before being released. Unable to secure a hospital staff appointment as a doctor, he worked in clinics for the poor, performed autopsies in a morgue, and was exiled for a time to the desolate northern port city of Caldera. A cofounder of the Chilean Socialist Party, he became its leader in Valparaíso and was elected to the Chilean National Congress in 1937. During the earthquake of January 25, 1939, in Santiago, he met his future wife, Hortensia Bussi Soto, whom he married later that year and with whom he had three daughters: Carmen, Beatriz, and Isabel. He also joined the staff of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, and in September, 1939, became minister of public health in Aguirre Cerda’s Popular Front government. Allende served in this capacity until 1942, working to reform what he described in his book La Realidad Médico Social de Chile (1939; Chile’s social and medical reality) as the “invisible tragedy” of the country’s unequal health system.

Life’s Work

After Cerda’s death in November, 1941, Allende resigned his position in protest at the rightward drift of Cerda’s successor, Juan Antonio Ríos. In 1943, Allende was elected secretary-general of the Socialist Party, which promptly split over his insistence that Communists remain part of the left coalition. Allende continued to defend the civil rights of Communists, including their participation in public life, in the Cold War atmosphere of the late 1940’s. Elected to the Chilean senate in 1945 (and a continuous member until 1970), he had emerged as the most prominent political figure of the country’s left by the late 1940’s.

In 1952, Allende made the first of four consecutive bids for the presidency of the republic. The left split again on the Communist question, with most members of the Popular Socialist Party supporting a former dictator, Carlos Ibáñez, who campaigned on a populist platform. Running on the Socialist Party ticket, Allende won only 5.5 percent of the vote, but he was vindicated when Ibáñez soon shed his electoral persona as the General of Hope and turned to the right. With broad left-wing support, including that of the newly legalized Communist Party, Allende was narrowly defeated in his second presidential run in 1958, getting 28.5 percent of the vote to 31.6 percent for the victorious Jorge Alessandri, son of a popular former president (and mistaken by some voters for his father).

Allende actually received his highest share of the popular vote 38.6 percent in his 1964 campaign against Eduardo Frei, but the latter was elected when the right abandoned its own preferred candidate, Julio Durán, and threw its support behind the moderately reformist Frei to block a socialist victory. Allende was elected speaker of the senate in 1966, despite his embrace of the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. In 1967 he met with the survivors of Che Guevara’s guerrilla band after Guevara’s death.

Chile fielded three major presidential candidates again in 1970. Allende, running on the coalition ticket of the Popular Unity Party, won a plurality with 36.2 percent of some 3 million votes cast, with Alessandri polling 34.9 percent and Radomiro Tomic, the new leader of Frei’s Christian Democratic Party, a relatively distant third at 27.8 percent. Lacking a majority, Allende was elected, according to constitutional provision, by congress on October 24, and he assumed office on November 3.

The failure of Frei’s administration, which had stemmed neither rising inflation nor unemployment, had created an opening on the left, and many in Chile and the United States looked on Allende’s prospective election with foreboding. A visit to North Vietnam in 1969 by the socialist leader did little to allay fears. Washington had a long tradition of manipulating Latin American elections, with the support of American business and banking interests and the cooperation of the AFL-CIO. It had heavily funded Frei’s campaign, and U.S. national security adviser Henry Kissinger ominously declared in June, 1970, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” On October 22, seven weeks after the election, General René Schneider, head of Chile’s armed forces, was killed during an apparent kidnapping attempt. Schneider had been a principled opponent of military interference in civilian affairs, and his murder was widely interpreted as an attempt to clear the way for a coup.

For the moment, the strategy backfired, and Allende’s election by the congress two days later was an affirmation of civilian rule. Nonetheless, Allende was obliged to accept restrictions on his power to appoint commanding officers and to remove civilian bureaucrats before assuming office. He controlled only a weakened executive, with a suspicious congress, a hostile army, and a supreme court determined to thwart him.

Despite these concessions, Allende pressed what he took to be a popular mandate. “I am not the President of all the Chilean people,” he declared, signaling his intention to pursue reform in the teeth of whatever opposition it might arouse. In truth, Allende had a strong base of working-class support and a degree of consensus from centrist constituencies on critical aspects of his program, particularly the nationalization of Chile’s copper industry. Idealistic allendistas fanned out into Chile’s shantytowns to bring social services to the poor, giving many people economic dignity for the first time. Wages were raised while prices and rents were frozen. To pay for this, Allende called on workers to voluntarily increase productivity, which rose 14 percent in the first year of his administration. Furthermore, Allende remembered his early commitment to health care. The government instituted children’s nutritional programs, and hospitals were ordered to accept all patients regardless of their ability or inability to pay. Mass cultural events were organized, and developing world delegations arrived to offer congratulations, topped by a visit from Castro. On July 11, 1971, the so-called Day of National Dignity, the copper, iron ore, steel, and nitrate industries were nationalized.

The United Popular Party increased its share of the vote in municipal and congressional elections over that of the presidential election itself through 1973. Nonetheless, the center-right electorate was increasingly alienated, while the United States pursued an active program of economic and political sabotage. Workers and peasants, responding to the challenge, began to seize factories and farms. Militant leftists within Allende’s coalition urged him to cultivate radical elements within the military to forestall a coup. While Allende resisted this, right-wing officers carried out their own purge of loyalist elements. On June 29, 1973, a military coup against the government was narrowly averted; on August 23, the constitutionalist general Carlos Prats, head of the armed forces, was compelled to resign in favor of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who was actively plotting Allende’s overthrow.

As tensions mounted, more than 750,000 Chileans demonstrated in Santiago on Allende’s behalf on September 4. Allende himself offered to conduct a popular referendum on his presidency. Within days, on September 11, a well-organized military coup toppled Allende’s government in a day of brutal and methodical bloodshed. Allende, barricaded in the presidential residence La Moneda but deserted by his guard and attended only by a few followers, announced by radio that he was about to “pay with my life defending the principles so dear to this homeland.” La Moneda was bombed to rubble, and the sixty-five-year-old Allende, machine-gun in hand, met death in a hail of bullets.

Significance

Allende was the first socialist leader democratically elected to power in the Western Hemisphere. As resolutely committed to democracy as he was to socialism, he was in life and even more in death a beacon for those who believed that social justice was compatible with a respect for constitutional norms, and that one could not be meaningfully exercised without the other. His brief experiment, against insurmountable odds, left a permanent legacy, but also deep divisions within Chilean society.

A long period of political repression followed under the regime of General Pinochet (1973-1990), and democratic normalization returned only gradually thereafter as Pinochet continued to hold the reins of military power. The political left remained effectively marginalized even under the nominally “socialist” administrations of Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet (the first female president of Chile). Pinochet himself was apprehended while traveling in London on a Spanish government warrant, and judicial proceedings against him were finally begun. He died under house arrest in Chile in December, 2006.

Allende’s example did inspire Latin populist leaders early in the twenty-first century, notably the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, but the dilemma of achieving a fully socialist and democratic revolution against entrenched elites remains unresolved. In the United States itself, revelations of the Central Intelligence Agency’s complicity in Allende’s overthrow were to shine a harsh light on the limits of America’s toleration of any challenge to its power and interests, whether democratically constituted or not.

Bibliography

Cockcroft, James D., ed. Salvador Allende Reader: Chile’s Voice of Democracy. New York: Ocean Press, 2000. Excerpts and addresses by Allende, with an introduction.

Collier, Simon, and William F. Stater. A History of Chile, 1808-2002. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. A standard history of Chile, from independence to the post-Pinochet years.

Falcoff, Mark. Modern Chile, 1970-1989: A Critical History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1991. A close socioeconomic analysis of the Allende years, with a brief postscript on the Pinochet era.

Sigmund, Paul E. The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977. An account of the Allende years from the perspective of the failed “revolution in liberty” program of his predecessor, Eduardo Frei.

Veneros, Diana. Allende: Un Ensayo Psicobiografica. Santiago, Chile: Random House Mondadori, 2003. A portrait of Allende that draws on interviews with colleagues, family members, and others who knew him.