Yearbook 2008
Chile. Both the Government coalition Concertación and the
opposition alliance Alianza por Chile claimed with some
right that they won the municipal elections on October 26.
The Concertación won 146 mayoral positions, which was 57
fewer than in the last municipal elections in 2004, while
the opposition increased its share by 38 to 142. The
opposition also won in some of Chile's largest cities, such
as Valparaiso, Concepción and the capital Santiago. By
contrast, the government's candidates won the most seats in
local parliaments across the country - 45 percent of the
votes cast, against 36 percent for the opposition. In fact,
however, both party constellations represented pyrrhic
victors because a third party coalition, Chile Limpio, took
votes from both and won a total of 8 percent of the votes
for local parliaments and seven mayoral positions.
According to
Countryaah reports, a clear problem for the government's candidates in the
municipal elections was the rising inflation in Chile, which
reached 9.5 per cent on an annual basis in July. At the same
time, and partly as a reason for that, the Chilean economy
grew strongly by 6 percent during the year, and the high
world market price of Chile's most important export
commodity copper led to a tripling of foreign investment
compared to the previous year and a stable budget surplus.
However, President Bachelet also had some political
issues to deal with during the year. In southern Chile, the
activities of the Mapuche Indians increased with almost
daily protest marches, hunger strikes and roadblocks. The
government is squeezed between the Indians' demands for,
among other things, demilitarization of their core area of
Araucanía and the release of what the Indians consider to
be political prisoners, and the interests of forest and
mining companies in the area.
1970 Unidad Popular wins the election
Unidad Popular's victory in 1970 was not the case for a
random voter vote that struck the left just that year. For
nearly 20 years, the Chilean labor movement had stayed just
behind the bourgeois government alternatives in voter
turnout, and it had been a significant political force in
Chilean society for about half a century. The labor movement
in Chile was by far the strongest and best organized in all
of capitalist Latin America - not just party politics, but
also trade unionism. In the 1960's, the trade union
organization, CUT, stood for example. at the head of five
general strikes, while conducting between 700 and 1,000
local strikes annually.
The organization of the working class began in the coal
and saline terminals of northern Chile in the late 1800's.
Thousands of workers were concentrated in a few mines, where
they lived in miserable conditions. In the year 1900, the
workers formed the first trade union in the northern city of
Iquique. In 1904, 15 unions formed a national association
with a total of 20,000 members, and the same year in
Valparaíso came the first violent clashes between the
Chilean proletariat and the military. Three years later,
2,500 striking workers and their families were mowed down
with North American automatic weapons at a massacre in
Iquique.
In 1909, the first professional national organization -
FOCH - was formed under the leadership of Luis Emillo
Recabarren. He was also in 1912 one of the founders of the
Socialist Workers' Party, which after World War I joined the
Third International, and which has since borne the name
Chile's Communist Party (PCCh). The party has always had a
strong foothold in the working class - especially among the
miners and in the heavy industry. The second major workers'
party, the Socialist Party, was formed in 1933. The starting
point was one of the strangest events in the country's
history. By 1932, a group of socialist officers under
Colonel Marmaduke Grove had carried out a military coup and
created what was later called the "12-Day Republic." Various
groups that had supported the republic gathered in the
Socialist Party, which after a few years gained about 20%
support in the elections.
Throughout its history, the Chilean Communist Party has
been closely linked to the Soviet Union, while the Socialist
Party has remained internationally independent. The split
between the two workers' parties also had a parallel at the
professional level, but in 1953 the single country
organization CUT was formed, which has since been the sole
ruling organization. In the 1950's and 1960's, the two Labor
parties held a joint front in the presidential elections
every six years - each time with Salvador Allende as
presidential candidate. In 1958, he lacked just 30,000 votes
to be elected.
At the 1970 presidential election, Unidad Popular gained
36.3% of the vote and won the election. The Conservative and
Christian Democratic candidate got 34.9% and 27.8%
respectively. The doctor and Socialist Party leader,
Salvador Allende, became the country's new president. Unidad
Popular - The People's Unit - separated itself from the 1938
People's Front by the fact that the socialist parties were
completely dominant. In addition to socialists and
communists, it consisted of the parties MAPU and Izquierda
Cristiana (Christian Left). It was not a defensive front,
but an offensive government coalition, which in its program
aimed to "end the rule of imperialism, monopolies and the
land-owning oligarchy and begin the construction of
socialism in Chile".
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