Chile, 1947–1950s

Like the Peruvians the Chileans now drove the left out. They did so to place more emphasis on economic growth, price stabilization, foreign investment, and to achieve an alignment with the United States during the Cold War. Industrial development and social welfare were the tandem goals of populism inherited from the 1930s that now came into conflict with the growing emphasis on accumulation emerging at the end of the 1940s. At this point most Latin American governments decided to clamp down on labor and to restrain its demands on their fragile, inflation-ridden economies. By suppressing leftists and workers, rulers believed they were defending democracy by removing the conditions that would justify right-wing military plots.

Under pressure from conservative elites and the United States, after only five months in office González Videla threw the Communists out of his government and then into illegality. Having begun his presidency in the belief he was still waging World War II, he soon began to act as if he were fighting World War III. Indeed some of the president's advisers warned him that a new global conflagration was imminent and that he should now explicitly align his government with the United States against the Communists.

As the Cold War took hold, González Videla believed that the Communists were no longer his reformist allies but aggressive revolutionaries acting under the direct orders of Joseph Stalin. The Communists, he complained, were attempting to control him like "a useful fool." He resented their attempts to persuade him to follow the Soviet line in foreign policy and to

oppose the various proposals and projects of the United States: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Continental Defense Pact for the Americas. González Videla especially worried about the strength of the Communists in the mines, which produced Chile's main exports and would be vital to the West in the event of war with the Soviet Union. Finally, he justified repression with the spurious claim that the Communists, at the behest of their Soviet masters, were planning an uprising to overthrow him; the Communists, he insisted, were attempting to take over in Chile as they had succeeded in doing in Eastern Europe and were attempting to do in countries like Greece and France.^[45]

The United States helped persuade González Videla to move against the left and labor, especially in the mines, by withholding credits from the Export-Import Bank and from the international Bank for Reconstruction and Development. After González Videla had taken action against the Communists, the flow of technical assistance, loans, and investments from the United States began to increase. Chile now received credits for CORFO, loans to cover foreign exchange shortages, and lower taxes on copper imports. The State Department and the American copper companies became willing to accept slightly higher Chilean taxes on copper. Washington also signed a military assistance pact with Santiago.^[46]

Following their expulsion from the cabinet in 1947, the Communists launched protests and strikes; the government lashed back with military repression. In response to a Communist strike in the coal mines González Videla obtained emergency coal shipments from President Harry Truman. Applauded by the United States, González Videla escalated the conflict by severing relations with the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. He arrested Communist leaders and in 1948 supported the "Law for the Defense of Democracy," which effectively banned the Communist party for a decade.

The Communists blamed this bombardment on the global war against communism led by North American imperialism. But rather than fighting back, the Chilean Communists retreated into clandestinity. They continued to seek middle-and working-class alliances and to cooperate with the "patriotic bourgeoisie," and they still hoped to promote reform, industry, and democracy as the first step on a long road to socialism in what they saw as their semifeudal country. By the beginning of the 1950s the proscribed Communist party was upholding the same reformist and collaborationist

position it had been defending since 1935. The only important differences were greater emphases on hostility toward the United States and on the need for the proletariat to lead any multiclass reform coalition to avoid another betrayal by the bourgeoisie and centrist politicians.^[47]

Influenced by the United States, APRA, and the Venezuelan Democratic Action, the Chilean Socialists committed themselves to reducing the role of the Communists in the labor movement. Having strongly supported the Allies during the war, the Socialists and their unions received crucial support from the United States. From 1946 the United States government, the American Federation of Labor, the United Mine Workers, and their international representatives donated organizers and money to help divide Chilean labor into communist and anticommunist camps. The Socialists were denouncing the Communist party and its participation in the González Videla government even before the president turned against the Communists. Although officially neutral in the Cold War, the Socialist party described its struggle with the Communists as a battle between "democratic" and "totalitarian" forces.^[48]

Alleging it was dominated by Communists, the Socialist party also broke with Lombardo Toledano's Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL) in Mexico. To counter the CTAL the Socialists and the Apristas helped the AFL-CIO to launch the rival Inter-American Confederation of Workers (CIT). Socialist Bernardo Ibáñiez became the chairman of the confederation and the North American labor leader George Meany and Aprista Arturo Sabroso its vice chairmen. With the blessing of González Videla the CIT established its headquarters in Santiago. By 1948 international influences had played a major role in dividing and debilitating the Chilean left, as well as weakening leftist forces continentwide. The effects of these measures became particularly marked in Chile, where the leftist groups enjoyed unusual strength.^[49]

The majority of Socialists sided with neither the United States nor the Soviet Union in the Cold War, accusing both of imperialist ambitions. Gradually distancing itself from past populist counterparts such as APRA, the Socialist party groped for alternative socialist models, such as Titoism in Yugoslavia. Officially the Socialists opposed the onslaught against the Communists led by González Videla, although Bernardo Ibáñez and a handful of his followers joined the government's anticommunist crusade, thereby splitting the party. This issue became another illustration of the

way the Cold War further factionalized and weakened popular forces in Chile.^[50]

In the 1952 presidential election Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, the ex-dictator from the late 1920s, offered to end the petty quarreling and the chaotic multiparty coalitions of the past twenty years. Ibáñez attacked the Radicals for having sold out to the United States and even managed to attract a few Socialists who were attempting to create a labor movement like that under Perón in Argentina. Other Socialists, along with many proscribed Communists, sought to stake out an independent Marxist strategy for the future and in 1952 supported the token candidacy of Salvador Allende. From their opposition to President Ibáñez in subsequent years, the Socialist and Communist parties began to construct the political alliance that in 1970 eventually led to Allende's fateful election victory.^[51]