Working for the Revolution

Chapter seven examines why and how Beatriz – and others on the revolutionary left –decided to become more intimately involved in Salvador Allende’s election campaign of 1970 and his presidency thereafter. It argues that Beatriz’s affective ties to him were pivotal in explaining her involvement and that he also benefitted from her ability to act as a bridge to the revolutionary Left, helping to bring it on his side. Beatriz participated in her father’s administration in a very specific way that fused her different loyalties to revolution together, bringing her intimate relationship with Cuba and training in covert intelligence and security to the job of assisting a democratically elected president. This chapter thus examines the confluence of different left-wing strategies and currents within Chile during the years of the Popular Unity government, how they interacted, coexisted, and responded to the mounting opposition they faced. It also explores the involvement and relationship Latin America’s revolutionary movements had with Chile during this period, arguing that Beatriz was one of their principal interlocutors.

Reform and Radicalization

Chapter four examines the emergence of a revolutionary left in Chile in the first years of Eduardo Frei’s presidency. Although this process would not dominate left-wing politics at a national level until later in 1960s, it resonated soon after Allende’s 1964 electoral defeat, influenced both by reformist projects and repressive efforts to contain them. By 1966, Beatriz was part of a weak but emergent revolutionary wing of the Chilean Socialist Party, inspired by local circumstances and international influences. These first years of the Frei government were dynamic, and productive. Beatriz and her cohort of medical students and socialist militants came into direct contact with the state’s new approach to healthcare, family planning, women, agricultural reform, and poverty. Beatriz benefitted from, and was shaped by, the reformist environment she inhabited, emerging like many of the radical left as a product of combined frustrations and opportunities it provided. By 1967, Beatriz had her first formal job in a community health center, epitomizing many of the Christian Democrat’s reformist goals. Closer to home, she had also fallen in love and married a young Socialist Party militant, Renato Julio, involved in effervescent student politics.

The Battle for Chile

Chapter eight charts the build-up to the right-wing military coup in Chile on 11 September 1973. It examines the progressive division of the Left amid conspiracies against the government, focusing in, as Beatriz did, on the impending prospect of a coup and the strategies Allende’s team employed in response. It also examines Beatriz’s gendered experience of the battle for Chile unfolding from 1971-73. By late 1972, even Allende accepted that a coup was a serious possibility and began putting measures in place that included stopping Beatriz fulfilling the role she expected to play. As someone with intelligence and communications training who knew how to use firearms, she was ready to fight to defend the Popular Unity government next to her father. However, Beatriz’s gender and her father’s efforts to protect her blocked her from being able to. That Beatriz became a mother in late 1971 and was pregnant with her second child by early 1973 strengthened Allende’s desire to save her. Ultimately, Beatriz was forced to leave the presidential palace on the day of the coup and sought asylum in the Cuban embassy. The chapter ends with her leaving the country with her Cuban husband, daughter and Cuban embassy personnel.

Onward March

This concluding chapter examines the aftermath of Beatriz’s death and the significance of her life as a protagonist of revolution and change in Latin America’s long sixties. Moving beyond 1977, it charts the different responses to her suicide, revolutionary resistance to Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, Chilean Left’s evolution into the 1980s, and the transition to democracy in Chile in 1990. It asks what Beatriz would have made of these developments and why her life is relevant both for history and for the present. It ends by looking at Beatriz’s legacy in the context of 21st century feminist movements in Latin America and the estallido social in Chile that erupted in October 2019.

University and Politics

Chapter two follows Beatriz to the University of Concepción to study medicine. It examines the type of medicine she studied in the early 1960s, how this related to evolving ideas about development, and how it shaped her political convictions. Young Chileans tended to follow their parents politically, especially when it came to the Left. But it was only in Concepción that Beatriz began understanding the basis for her loyalty to the Socialist Party independently of her father. In this respect, her visit to Cuba in the aftermath of Chile’s 1960 earthquake was decisive. In Havana she also attended the First Latin American Alongside a significant generation of students who would come to lead Chile’s revolutionary left in subsequent decades, studying a particularly socially-driven medicine at the university at the time, she began to act politically in her own right on a local stage through her involvement in study groups, student newspapers, and elections.

Revolutionary Upheaval

Chapter six examines revolutionary upheaval in the last years of Eduardo Frei’s presidency and Beatriz’s role in it while remaining committed to the ELN’s Bolivian project and Cuba’s revolutionary regime. It describes the fragmentation of the Left and the growing specter of violence in Chile, characterized by the government’s reliance on force and a growing propensity on the left to confront it. It asks how Beatriz responded, noting the role she played as a confidant of Chile’s revolutionary left leaders, her father, and Cuba’s intelligence apparatus through her love affair with one of its principal officials. Beatriz’s internationalist preoccupations and her age separated her from local developments and youth movements. Yet, as a lecturer at a new public health department, recruiter for the ELN and collaborator of the MIR, she was involved and complicit in political and societal upheaval – serving as a mediator, facilitator, and bridge between different factions. She was nevertheless pessimistic and depressed about the pace of change. When the ELN ran into trouble in Bolivia and was progressively abandoned by Cuba, her romanticization of guerrilla insurgencies diminished. Like many others on the radicalized left, she was also sceptical about electoral strategies for bringing about radical change.

Disillusionment

Chapter ten examines Beatriz’s growing disillusionment with Chilean Left’s chances of overturning the coup and forging a revolutionary path forward. Although global solidarity had undercut the dictatorship’s reputation and drawing attention to human rights violations, left-wing resistance on the ground in Chile was decimated by repression. The Chilean Left in exile was also mired in factionalism and recrimination; its revolutionary project more contested, ambiguous, and distant than ever. From Havana, Beatriz was pessimistic about the future and the prospects for revolutionary change, but remained loyal to Cuba and the revolutionary left project she had been wedded to since the 1960s. Responsible for compiling reports on the dead and disappeared in Chile, she was also struggling to process what had happened and come to terms with her father’s death. Closer to home, she found it increasingly hard to square gendered expectations of marriage and motherhood with what she perceived to be her revolutionary duties. She was desperate to fight against the dictatorship in Chile but was not supported by Cuba’s leaders. Depressed and unable to affect what she regarded as meaningful change, she withdrew from solidarity work. Chapter ten ends with her suicide on 11 October 1977.

Youth and Women

Having returned to Santiago to undertake practical medical training, Beatriz’s extra-curricular life became subsumed in her father’s third presidential campaign. Chapter three zooms in on Chile’s 1964 presidential election, examining the way it intersected with Beatriz’s life and how she participated in it. Because it was particularly relevant for Beatriz, the chapter deals primarily with youth mobilization and gendered dimensions of the campaign. It also argues that the way the election was fought, the issues it highlighted, and its outcome engrained Cold War logics more firmly into Chilean politics than ever before, initiating a new phase of ideological conflict, mobilization, and radicalization.

Another Life

Beatriz’s exile in Cuba, her role in left-wing resistance to Chile’s dictatorship, and the emergence of a global solidarity campaign are the focus of chapter nine. It deals with her role in constructing a Cuban-led narrative of the coup and her father’s death in the immediate aftermath of 11 September 1973, as well as how Chile’s left-wing parties responded to the coup, what strategies they employed to combat it, and with what success. Examining Beatriz’s perspective as an exile in Havana, it also deals with Chilean experiences in Cuba, the support the Cuban state offered exiles as well as the problems that emerged between the island’s leaders and those that now looked to it for support. And it shows Beatriz to be stuck as an intermediary between different groups, much as she had been between different left-wing sectors back in Chile but in a far more disadvantageous position.

An Awakening

Chapter one examines Beatriz Allende’s childhood and adolescence, looking at what it meant to grow up in Chile in the 1940s and 1950s, how her family background and gender affected her choices and experience. The chapter also deals with Beatriz’s political awakening stemming from Chile’s social, economic, and political crisis in the late 1950s, her father’s 1958 presidential campaign, and the Cuban Revolution. Rather than being unique, her growing interest in politics and revolution at the end of the decade epitomized a moment marked by youth participation and a resurgence of the country’s left, signalling the start of what would become the long sixties.