Jean-Pierre Beauvais, who has been to Chile at regular intervals since the coup, returned from his latest visit in April. Below we print the first of a four-part series on his assessment of the situation. Future articles will deal with the bourgeois opposition, the parties of Popular Unity, and the MIR. Santiago, April....
Nineteen months of military dictatorship, of misery, of terror. Nineteen months of counter-revolution which have transformed the hopes of an entire people into powerlessness. Nineteen months which for all those whose main problem is just to survive - in otner words, the vast majority - seem like an eternity.
What changes there have been during this period...so many comrades dead or missing, in the camps or in exile, while the faces one still recognises are drawn and aged. Then there is the silence: the silence of the crowds in the street, the silence of the army of beggars which has taken over the town centres, the silence of the walls, all meticulously repainted to remove all traces of past demonstrations.
527% INFLATION April 1975. Twenty per cent of the active population is completely unemployed, and they do not get any benefits. Sixty per cent of the workers who have escaped unemployment are on the minimum wage (80,000 escudos a month about £9) for a 40-hour working week. The rate of inflation over the last year has reached 527 per cent. The manufacturing sector - producing durable consumer goods - is operating at only 45 per cent of capacity. And to arrive at this state of affairs - for the two questions can't be separated - more than 30,000 have been killed, 25,000 imprisoned or transported to remote parts of the country, and nearly 200,000 exiled.
It is a balance sheet from which there is no appeal for Pinochet, the Chilean military, and the North American advisers whose numbers in Santiago are daily multiplying.
MISERY
But what do these figures, these percentages mean for the Chilean people? What is it like to live on 80,000 escudos a month?
At the end of March, after a new 'readjustment', a litre of milk cost 900 escudos, a kilogramme of bread 850 escudos, and a kilogramme of meat nearly 5,000 escudos. Since the vast majority of working class women have lost or have had to give up their jobs because of the closure of most of the creches and nurseries in working class areas — or because of their prohibitive cost - the monthly 80,000 escudos is in nearly all cases the sole source of revenue for a whole family.
On top of all this, anyone who has the 'good fortune' to keep their job will often have to help support parents, or friends without resources, or old people whose pensions have lost up to 90 per cent of their purchasing power because of inflation.
Few indeed are the Chilean workers and their families who are able to eat their fill after the 10th of each month. How many of the hundreds and thousands of women who, sad As to the cynicism, the forms it takes in official propaganda have to be seen to be believed.
At the beginning of April the Chilean junta alarmed at the disasters which had overtaken its North American protectors in Vietnam and Cambodia, decided on a counter-offensive. A big campaign was launched for the adoption of Vietnamese orphans, 'victims of Communist barbarity'. The press, the radio, the TV re ported daily how the 'reds' were living off abandoned children during their offensive. In a television speech a member of the junta, extolling the humanist and Christian traditions of the Chilean people, drew these conclusions we must save the children from this barbarity, every Chilean must consider it their duty to adopt or pay for the journey of one of these unfortunate Vietnamese!
The campaign to assist the unemployed falls into the same category. To help the hundreds of thousands of unemployed, the junta has decreed that each township should take on in turn and for a period of two months - in order to let others benefit - several dozen (!) unemployed, particularly to sweep the DROP IN THE OCEAN Here too a big propaganda campaign has been carried out around this drop in the ocean At the highest levels the military have explained that it is not so much a question of providing money for those temporarily employed, but that the main objective is to 'ensure that they don't lose the habit of working, for the habit of working is essential for a healthy social structure'.
But this brutal terror and sickly cynicism cannot make the Chileans forget the total failure of the military in both their economic and political policies.
In a situation of crisis and unprecedented economic chaos in Chile, the regime now faces near-total isolation. The move into open opposition of the whole of what remains of the Christian Democrats, along with a large majority of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, is there to prove it.
POLITICAL VACUUM But to draw from this the conclusion that the dictatorship will collapse of itself - a victim of its own excesses, its incompetence and its isolation - would be to encourage new and tragic illusions. Paradoxically, one of the junta's strengths today is still that - by totally repressing the workers' movement, and gagging the bourgeois sectors opposed to its orientation - it has created a fantastic political vacThe aim of the terror is to maintain this vacuum. In these conditions, there exists in the short term hardly any credible alternative - either from the bourgeois opposition sectors or from the workers movement.
However, the outlines of certain forms of political recomposition and regroupment are already appearing. It is on the development of Inese embryos, as on the internationa and South American situation, that the fate of the regime will finally depend