The legacy of Popular Unity: Chile 1973-2003

Abstract

Thirty years after the bombing of the presidential palace and the death of Salvador Allende, what has been the lasting legacy of the Popular Unity (Unidad Popular-) government of -? The following discussion will highlight the most important features of the thousand days of Popular Unity in an attempt to shift the predominant focus of recent times. Unfortunately the seventeen years of dictatorship, the destabilising role of successive  administrations in the region, and struggles between activists on the left and the right (also within the left and the right), have cast a long shadow over those years. For these reasons, they are remembered very much in terms of the undermining of a socialist government.However, this is a highly geopoliticised and internationalised vision of Popular Unity, cast in terms of the Cold War and the armed struggles of the s and s. It is a vision that is valid and well documented, but why was the conspiracy between capitalists, the military and Nixon's  administration so urgent and executed in such a dramatic way?The answer to this question can be found in the transformation of social relations that lay at the heart of the strategy that Allende defined as the Chilean road to socialism, and the real changes that this entailed in the lives of the Chilean proletariat and campesinos (peasants) in particular. The strategy involved the brief rupturing of an elitist development model of dependentThe Chilean road to socialism W hat lessons can be learned from Chile's 'Road to Socialism', -? In contrast to the predominant focus on the undermining of the government by opposition forces (the US administration, domestic and foreign capitalists, the Chilean military and right-wing movements), this short comment highlights the importance of social property and mass mobilisation to the UP programme. It points to the largescale land redistribution that took place, also the changes in industrial control. The conclusion stresses that the legacy of the UP government should be one of social mobilisation and the possibilities for rapid changes in social relations.