[The moment that Salvador Allende was violently deposed on
September 11, 1973, democratic socialists in the US knew it was a
crime. They joined others around the world organizing solidarity
efforts and supporting political refugees.]
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IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE 1973 CHILEAN COUP, US SOCIALISTS SUPPORTED
THOSE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM  
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David Duhalde

Jacobin
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_ The moment that Salvador Allende was violently deposed on September
11, 1973, democratic socialists in the US knew it was a crime. They
joined others around the world organizing solidarity efforts and
supporting political refugees. _

Chilean president Salvador Allende speaks before the United Nations
General Assembly in New York City on December 4, 1972, (Bettmann /
Getty Images).

 

In August, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and several congressional leaders
visited Brazil, Colombia, and Chile to meet with leftist activists and
elected officials — a goodwill trip that the _Wall Street
Journal_ dubbed “AOC’s Socialist Sympathy Tour
[[link removed]].” In
Chile, Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues insisted
[[link removed]] that
the US government declassify more documents related to Washington’s
support for the coup that overthrew socialist president Salvador
Allende in 1973.

Bowing to pressure, the State Department released several of President
Richard Nixon’s daily briefings concerning the Chilean military’s
movement against the democratically elected government. As the memos
show, Nixon knew at the time of the coup that Allende was open to a
“political solution
[[link removed]]”
(likely holding a plebiscite
[[link removed]])
and hoped to “fend off a showdown
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which he never got the chance to do. The revelations confirmed that
the United States went into the putsch with its eyes wide open and
still backed a coup that wiped out Chilean democracy.

AOC and the delegation’s successful push for declassification is the
latest action in nearly five decades of US democratic socialist
solidarity with Chileans, stretching back to the Democratic Socialists
of America’s two predecessor organizations: the Democratic Socialist
Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). While
not the primary US movers of what became known as Chile Solidarity —
the global social movement supporting democratic rights in the
Southern Cone country — DSOC and NAM, in their publications and
organizing, played a real role in opposing Chile’s military
dictatorship.

US Democratic Socialists’ Immediate Reactions to the Coup

When the 1973 coup erupted — bringing General Augusto Pinochet to
power and ending Chile’s democratic road to socialism — NAM and
DSOC were still a decade away from uniting to form DSA. The two groups
were ideologically distinct in many respects. DSOC, an “Old Left”
social democratic organization chaired by well-known intellectual and
organizer Michael Harrington, originated as a split from the Socialist
Party of America at its 1972 convention. DSOC supported progressive
elements of the labor movement and Democratic Party and sought to
build relations with social democratic parties across the globe. NAM,
founded in 1971, was a revolutionary democratic socialist formation
made up of former members of Students for Democratic Society and the
Communist Party USA. It bore the mark of the New Left, with an
emphasis on feminist politics and skepticism of “reformism.”

The political differences between DSOC and NAM were apparent in their
initial responses to the overthrow of Allende’s Popular Unity
government — a coalition of several left parties, including
Allende’s Socialist Party, the Chilean Communist Party, and the
Radical Party. (The revolutionary group MIR, though not a part of the
coalition, was also a critical supporter of Allende’s government.)
In their respective publications, the _Democratic Left _(DSOC)
and _Moving On _(NAM), the two groups expressed solidarity with the
Chilean people while taking different lessons from the events.

Header from October 1973 issue of Democratic Left, the newsletter of
DSOC. (Courtesy of Democratic Socialists of America)

DSOC was the first to address the coup, with the article “How the US
Helped Overthrow Allende” leading the October 1973
[[link removed]] newsletter
and an article by Harrington appearing later in the issue.
Harrington’s article began unequivocally: “The United States
actively helped to destroy democracy in Chile. That, as will be seen,
is not speculation. It is a fact which can be documented from the
public record.” After offering a caveat that may seem ridiculous
given what we know today about the involvement of US covert forces
[[link removed]] —
“This does not mean that CIA agents were responsible for the coup,
or that they played a major role in it. That may, or may not, be the
case” — the DSOC chair continued:

There are criticisms which can be made of Allende’s tactics and
particularly the role of the ultra-Lefts from the Altamirano wing of
the Socialist Party and from the Movement of the Revolutionary Left
(MIR). This is not the time to detail them. This is the time to
understand America’s despicable role in destroying a democratic
movement which, whatever its faults, was the hope of the Chilean
people.

The rest of Harrington’s piece chronicled how the Nixon
administration and global capital undermined and ultimately smothered
democracy in Chile because it stood in the way of profits. Harrington
noted that these attacks escalated as a direct response to UP’s
soaring vote share, which rose to nearly 50 percent in multiparty
municipal elections in 1973 compared to the roughly third of the vote
that Allende received for president in 1970.

Timeline of US involvement in the Chilean coup from the November 1973
issue of Moving On, NAM’s publication.

In a call to action, the DSOC newsletter included a petition entitled
“Protest the Chilean Junta” signed by Harrington, Lawrence Birns
of the New School, and congressman Donald Fraser. The _Democratic
Left _added, “This petition was drafted in minimal terms so it
could be widely circulated, not only among those who were sympathetic
to the Allende government, but to all who are outraged by what is
happening in Chile in terms of basic democratic liberties.” The note
was a harbinger of DSOC’s strategy to incorporate a wide range of
progressives and even moderates into the fold of Chile Solidarity.

NAM’s initial reaction to the coup came in the November 1973 issue
of _Moving On. _The magazine provided
[[link removed]] a
timeline demonstrating US involvement in the coup and ferocious
opposition to Allende. While it overestimated the people killed by the
coup (fifteen thousand to the more-agreed-upon three thousand), the
organ accurately noted that thousands of dissidents were in danger.
Unlike Harrington, NAM’s analysis was more critical of using
elections to build socialism:

Much of the left acted as though it would be possible to gain
socialism in Chile primarily through the electoral process. Other
aspects of the movement were often subordinated to electoral work. It
would seem that the Chilean experience speaks clearly against a
perspective that sees elections as a primary route to power. This is
not to say that the Chilean left should have abstained from elections;
no major left group advanced such a position (including the MIR). But
there were real differences on the importance of elections, and on the
relations between elections and building a movement that could take
power.

Showing its roots in the New Left, NAM also called attention to the
feminization of anti-Allende opposition, which co-opted progressive
language to undermine the socialist government:

Another element in the anti-government strategy of the right involved
demonstrations of housewives against UP policies and alleged food
shortages. These demonstrations employed quasi-feminist slogans. Many
observers have said that these demonstrations were primarily of
bourgeois women. Even if this is true, were there policies that might
have been pursued by the UP that would have made it unlikely for these
demonstrations to occur?

A f
[[link removed]]ew
years later, _Moving On _dedicated a cover article
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the situation of women in Chile.

Last, again displaying its ideological colors, _Moving On_ used its
postcoup issue to focus on the implications for global revolutionary
movements. The publication asked: “How could UP better have defended
itself? How could it have applied the successful experience of the
Cuban and Vietnamese, and the relatively unsuccessful experiences with
guerrilla warfare in Latin America in the 1960s, to the situation in
Chile?”

Chile Solidarity in the United States

While these articles appeared weeks after the coup, the response to
the crisis in Chile was immediate in the United States and abroad.
According to Mike Dover, now a Cleveland DSA activist, in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, a quickly convened Chilean Support Coalition held a mass
rally on campus. Following some “guerilla theater” that included
Dover, three hundred people marched to the downtown office of US
representative Marvin Esch. Fifty people staged a sit-in until Esch
agreed to meet with them a week later, when he announced it would be
premature to recognize the junta.

This action was one of countless protests organized in Western and
communist countries in defense of Popular Unity and against US
imperialism. The protests soon developed into a global movement (Chile
Solidarity) that sought to pressure the military junta and support
dissidents and leftists, many in exile for exercising democratic
rights.

In the United States, the solidarity movement tended to reflect the
long-standing divide between the Old Left and the New Left. The
National Coordinating Committee in Solidarity with Chile (aka the
National Chile Center, formed in 1974) had strong participation from
CPUSA members and their allies from the anti–Vietnam War movement;
Nonintervention in Chile (NiCH), with much New Left involvement, was
closer to the MIR. DSOC never formed a mass formation like the CPUSA
did because, according to Radical Party activist Alejandro Duhalde, a
refugee in the US who worked in DSOC (and is my father), Harrington
said the socialist group simply lacked the resources.

A NAM flyer promoting an anti-CIA protest. (Courtesy of Alice Embree)

Often, DSOC and NAM members acted through their own networks and other
collectives to aid the Chilean cause. A local example was the chapter
activism of Austin, Texas, NAM and its center, Bread and Roses, which
hosted Chile Solidarity activities. This included providing space for
a group called the Austin Committee for Human Rights in Chile. Alice
Embree (today an Austin DSA member) helped start the committee, which
took a broader focus on human rights under the advice of Orlando
Letelier
[[link removed]],
the foremost Chilean exile in the US until his 1976 assassination
alongside his colleague Ronni Moffitt in Washington, DC. Letelier
advised them to create a group that went beyond a left-wing base to
those invested in defending democracy.

A few weeks after Letelier and Moffitt’s murder by car bomb, former
CIA director William Colby came to speak at the University of Texas at
Austin. The NAM chapter and the Austin Committee for Human Rights in
Chile collaborated on a direct action at his event. “Some of us took
a banner onto the stage before Colby could speak,” Embree recounted,
“and began to sing ‘Solidarity Forever’ before Colby as we were
removed from the stage; others demanded a moment of silence for
Letelier and Moffitt.” (They were arrested for the demonstration,
but eventually the charges were dropped.)

The Austin-based Chile Solidarity group continued to meet until the
1988 plebiscite that legally ended the Pinochet regime. Embree would
join the core in the mid-2010s that revived the Austin DSA chapter.

Unlike NAM, DSOC’s support was less about direct action and more
about using its networks (especially those of Harrington). In
1978, DSOC organized a tour for exiled Radical Party leaders such as
Anselmo Sule
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then living in Mexico, to speak to chapters. The speaker series even
caught the eye of the US State Department. In a since-leaked cable,
the US government expressed
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that “failure of the US and other governments to encourage the
Radical Party will tend to drive it leftward and into the arms of the
Chilean Community Party.”

While Chile’s cause remained important to DSA, DSOC’s first
staffer, Jack Clark, observed that by the 1980s Chile began to take a
backseat in the organization to campaigns on apartheid in South
Africa
[[link removed]], nuclear
freeze
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and Central American solidarity. At the 1983 DSA convention, a year
after the DSOC-NAM merger, the resolution on Latin American policy
dedicated
[[link removed]] significant
space to supporting the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and the Salvadoran
Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, with only one line about
ending military and diplomatic support to Pinochet’s Chile.

The cover a booklet of labor solidarity, Solidarity With the Unions
of Chile. (Courtesy of Alejandro Duhalde)

Still, DSAers continued to back Chile Solidarity in other ways.
Harrington drew on his personal networks to buoy Chile democracy
efforts, often using the strategy of appealing to left-liberals and
moderates as in the 1973 petition DSOC circulated. In this final
draft of a 1987 letter
[[link removed]] seeking
support for Sule and other Radical Party leaders to safely return to
Chile, Harrington secured the signatures of not only DSA member Ron
Dellums, a California congressman, but also liberal Democrat Barney
Frank and moderate Democrat Stephen Solarz.

The Future of US Solidarity With Chile

Chile remains an important part of DSA’s international work nearly
three decades after the end of the dictatorship. Since leaving the
Socialist International in 2017, DSA has built relationships with
newer socialist parties, such as Chilean president Gabriel
Boric’s Convergencia Social
[[link removed]].
Other actions include a 2021 delegation to the second round
[[link removed]] of the presidential election that sent
Boric to office, exchanges between US and Chilean Starbucks workers
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union and political activists
[[link removed]]. This
weekend, DSA was represented by newly elected National Political
Committee member Luisa Martinez in Chile for a fiftieth anniversary
commemoration
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joining other guests from around the world.

Martinez, who was born in Chile, reflected that the demonization of
Allende in the United States, including by liberals, later happened
with other democratically elected figures, such as Hugo Chávez of
Venezuela and Lula da Silva of Brazil. She emphasized the necessity of
building global solidarity to push against this vilification, which
makes it

so important to hold events like the International Summit for
Democracy and Human Rights: 50 Years of Allende
[[link removed]]. In the eyes of people
from the United States, Chile is a victim, and I wonder if it’s much
more than that even among the Left. But the resistance that Chileans
showed under the dictatorship, against US power, is also what it means
to be Chilean and to be Latin American and to be from the Third World.
That resistance was and continues to be inspired by the ideas of
President Allende and Unidad Popular.

Another Chilean, Christian Araos, is now a cochair of national DSA’s
Americas Subcommittee. He reflected on the lessons that US leftists
can take today about the threats to democracy everywhere:

The coup needs to be commemorated because we have a political
responsibility to highlight how modern democracy can be murdered in
the name of anti-socialism. For both the US and Chilean right, what
happened fifty years ago is a point of pride — not shame — because
of anti-socialism. The US and its allied interests in Chile, South
America, and in the transnational business community did not care for
the results of free and fair elections.

He added, “Ultimately, a lesson to be learned for DSA is seeing what
happens when we have a singular figure capable of winning a
presidential election, but a dearth of reliable and selfless
administrators who are ultimately the ones responsible for determining
that figure’s administrative success.”

US socialists should learn from the past, including the mistakes and
setbacks, in building a better world. We should also take pride, on
the fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean coup, that we played a small
role in supporting our southern neighbors in their time of need and
continue to foster a relationship of unity and respect.

_David Duhalde is a longtime Democratic Socialists of America member
and the former political director of Our Revolution._

_Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

* Chilean coup
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* Popular Unity
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* Salvador Allende
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* Augusto Pinochet
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* US Imperialism
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* Solidarity
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* democratic socialists
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