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It wasn't only the United States that overthrew the Chilean leader.
September 11, 2023
When I heard that Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidential elections in September 1970 and sought to bring his country to socialism by peaceful means, I decided to do my doctoral dissertation on Chile. In May 1972, I went to take a crash course in Spanish in Cuernavaca in the Mexican state of Morelos, the birthplace of the legendary peasant leader Emiliano Zapata whose life had been made into a movie starring Marlon Brando that I had seen and liked as a teenager. After three weeks, I felt that the course had substantially improved the rudimentary Spanish I had from high school in the Philippines. So, I flew to Santiago, arriving in the capital in the midst of the Chilean winter, greeted by tear gas and skirmishes of opposing political groups in the aftermath of a demonstration. Hauling two suitcases, I made it with great difficulty from the bus depot to the historic Hotel Claridge, a few blocks from La Moneda, the presidential palace.
Two expectations were immediately dashed when I arrived in Santiago. The first was that I could get by with my "Mexican-Filipino" Spanish. This could only be remedied through daily conversations with Chileans, and I soon learned how to swallow consonants at the end of a word, as in mao о meno instead of mas o menos.
The second was that the topic for my dissertation, leftist organizing in the callampas, or shantytowns, was worth pursuing. A few weeks in Santiago disabused me of the impression of a revolutionary momentum that I had gathered reading about events in Chile in left-wing publications in the United States. People on the left were constantly being mobilized for marches and rallies in the center of Santiago, and increasingly, the reason for this was to counter the demonstrations mounted by the right. My friends brought me to these events, where there were an increasing number of skirmishes with right-wing thugs.
The Revolution on the Defensive
I noticed a certain defensiveness among participants in these mobilizations and a reluctance to be caught alone when leaving them, for fear of being harassed or worse by roaming bands of rightists. The revolution, it dawned...
