Fifty years after Popular Unity: Chile’s estallido social in historical context

In this article, the co-editors introduce key themes and contributions of this special issue of Radical Americas, particularly as they pertain to the 50th anniversary of Chile’s Popular Unity revolution (1970–3) and the more recent estallido social (social uprising), which began in Santiago de Chile in October 2019. They underline the historical context for contemporary events, arguing the need to recognise the influence, memory and significance of the past in the present.

‘To work more, produce more and defend the revolution’: Copper workers from socialism to neoliberalism

On 11 July 1971, Chile’s National Congress, in a historic vote, unanimously approved reforming the constitution, which opened the door to nationalise the large-scale copper industry. Traditional historical accounts of the nationalisation of copper had emphasised a history of negotiations between foreign capital and the Chilean government, documenting how economists and political leaders experimented with different approaches to obtain a share of the profits from the country’s most valuable commodity. By focusing exclusively on the political economy, however, scholars have overlooked the role of workers during and after the process of nationalisation and failed to account for why copper miners continued to fight to protect a state-owned company. Influenced by Peter Winn’s Weavers of Revolution and recent studies on people’s experience during the Popular Unity (UP) era, this article looks at the nationalisation of copper from below. It analyses how workers fought for, understood and experienced the nationalisation; how the UP transformed labour relations at the local level; and how the military, after 1973, redesigned the state company. By placing workers at the centre of the nationalisation, this article can help better understand its importance as a matter of both political economy and workers’ power and explain why the copper mines became the first site of labour resistance against the military regime.

Movements in dialogue

In this interview, historians Mario Garcés Durán and Peter Winn discuss the emergence of the estallido social, or social uprising, that began in Santiago de Chile in October 2019 and quickly spread throughout the country. The two historians also consider connections between past and present, in particular the legacies of the Popular Unity revolution (1970–3), in which both were active participants.

Scholarship on the Popular Unity in Chile since 2000. Are historians lagging behind?

This article examines the questioning indicated by some historians at the beginning of the twenty-first century regarding that they would be in debt to the study of the Allende government and the Popular Unity (UP) in Chile (1970–3). Although historians have investigated the diverse issues and problems of that period in varying depth, there are topics that have not been fully addressed: for example, the relationship between socialists, communists and President Allende, and the participation of left-wing women, native people and youth in the referred historical process. However, this work addresses the contributions on the subject made mainly by Chilean authors in books and articles on UP, namely: general studies on the period, works concerning Allende and some of his close collaborators, the economic changes that affected national and international private interests, some of the forces of the Left and Right (parties and movements), popular social sectors, the state coup, the military, culture and the press. A novel aspect in a significant number of these works is the use of interviews with witnesses who played a significant role in, or lived through, the UP period.

The presence of left-wing militant women within projects of poder popular during the Popular Unity years in Concepción and Santiago de Chile, 1970–3

This article analyses, from a gender perspective, the socio-political experiences of eight former left-wing militant women in processes linked to so-called poder popular (popular power). It does so with a focus on poblaciones (shantytowns) and trade unions in Concepción and Santiago between 1970 and 1973. Methodologically, it takes a qualitative approach, contrasting oral history interviews with primary sources. The process of political socialisation in childhood and adolescence influenced women when it came to joining political parties on both the ‘traditional left’ and the ‘revolutionary left’. At the start of the 1970s, these militants participated in grassroots organisations, such as juntas de abastecimiento y precios (supply and price control boards, JAPs), shantytowns, centros de madre (mothers’ centres) and unions, among others. This meant that their practices as party militants had a high degree of continuity with lived social experiences from their youth. The main difference was that as party militants they moved through more politicised spaces and gained access to political training and, in some cases, took on leadership roles within social organisations. Indeed, one woman became a communal – and later, parliamentary – representative. The skills acquired and their experiences during the Popular Unity (UP) period shaped their life trajectories, and consequently, these women have promoted an intergenerational transfer of socio-political practices in new, contemporary Chilean, scenarios.

Collective trauma, feminism and the threads of popular power: A personal and political account of Chile’s 2019 social awakening

Chile’s 2019 uprising marked a moment of social awakening for many Chileans, recasting historical memory tropes and shattering the fear of collective action internalised during the years of dictatorial rule (1973–90). This article explores the political legacies of the Popular Unity period (1970–3) made apparent during the 2019 uprising and the popular movement that emerged in its wake. It also centres on the Chilean feminist movement, its historic role as a political force in Chilean politics and how a new feminist discourse became the necessary preamble to Chile’s 2019 social awakening. Lastly, this study describes the sprouting of a neighbourhood assembly movement within days after the 18 October 2019 uprising, its role in rearticulating politics from below and its alignment with the feminist movement, culminating in mass participation in the 8 March 2020 feminist strike. This article places personal and familial accounts in conversation with scholarly works, utilising the 2019 uprising as a lens to revisit the historical past within the onward moving historical present.

The Chilean counter-revolution: Roots, dynamics and legacies of mass mobilisation against the Unidad Popular

The election of Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) in 1970 unleashed a radical and original revolutionary process, discernible not only in the depth of its redistributive measures and the expectations it generated, but also in the ferocity with which those who identified with the counter-revolutionary ideal responded to that project. The counter-revolution, initially confined to the conservative and reactionary sectors, in a matter of months became an immense mass mobilisation that would end up paving the way for the military coup. This article analyses that counter-revolutionary process, exploring its historic roots, the main actors involved and the innovations in political practices it developed at the time. The ‘counter-revolutionary bloc’ was formed by a diverse array of political and social actors – some of whom did not have previous experience in political mobilisations – who based their actions on the adoption and socialisation of a long-standing anti-Communist script, through which they could make sense of the period’s changing reality. That script – based on decades of taking in events from other parts of the world, elaborations and accusations against all those who identified as Communists – aimed to reduce the originality of the Unidad Popular’s political project to a remake of classic socialist experiences in Chilean territory and processed in a dystopian key. The counter-revolution’s power would be projected into the military dictatorship that began in 1973, when it became a sort of official state ideology, and it would become a foundational experience for Chilean conservative sectors with reverberations even in in the present.

The permanent rebellion: An interpretation of Mapuche uprisings under Chilean colonialism

This article approaches the rebellions of the Mapuche people from a longue-durée perspective, from the Occupation of the Araucanía in 1861 to the recent events of 2020. Among other things, the article explores the Popular Unity (UP) period, and the ‘Cautinazo’ in particular, considered here as an uprising that synthesised the discourses and aspirations of the Mapuche people dating back to the Occupation, while also repoliticising them by foregrounding demands for land restitution. This experience created the conditions for a new cycle of mobilisation that began in the twenty-first century. In other words, the Agrarian Reform of the UP era set the stage for more recent rebellions that are once again challenging colonial problems related to private property rights, the usurpation of land and agricultural aggression. In seeking responses to these problems, the Mapuche movement of the early twenty-first century is being revitalised.

Women in Chile 50 years after the UP: ‘The revolution will be feminist or nothing at all …’

This article addresses the position of women during the Popular Unity years from the perspective of Chile’s Mayo Feminista (‘Feminist May’) and the estallido social. The article maintains that there was a process of building a political consciousness of women during the Popular Unity that was expressed in various forms of political and social militancy. This was deployed in the participation of women on various fronts of the Chilean path to socialism, in which work, care, health, education and other aspects were seen as fundamental to the project. In this text we address the articulation of women and politics in the processes of construction of social change in the recent history of Chile.

Protest and the persistence of the past

Protest has long been a motor of change in Chile. In October to December 2019 protesters in Santiago harnessed protest methods and memories of hope and change related to Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970–3), resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90) and discontent with the subsequent decades of neoliberal democracy (1990–2019). The 2019 protests evoked this past in the struggle against the neoliberal system of today. In doing so, the protests offer a complex demonstration of temporal bridging that provides a window onto protest culture and the persistence of the past in contemporary Chile.