In the same month, the Central Committee of the Chilean party sent a second letter to the CC of the Chinese party. It was provoked by an increasing stream of Chinese and Albanian propaganda that was then entering Chile. That letter began with a condemnation of the attitude of Chinese fraternal delegates to various European Communist party congresses.
The document went on to say, “Before terminating this letter we wish to tell the Chinese comrades frankly and openly that we feel preoccupied and justifiably worried by certain situations that affect the normal and fraternal relations between our two parties. Continually, and in increasing quantities, broad mass organizations are receiving copious correspondence from the Albanian Party of Labor, as well as some Chinese publications, which, instead of furthering the ideological and political unity of the communist movement, insist on accentuating the divergence to which we have referred above, and what is worse, are threatening to confuse many elements.”[225]
Finally, in March 1963, the Politburo of the Communist Party of Chile warned its members against Chinese and Albanian material. The Politburo told the party faithful “In response to various inquiries regarding the circulation in our country of ostensibly Marxist-Leninist documents attacking the line of the international communist movement as well as several parties, the Politburo declares that the line of the Communist Party of Chile is incompatible with the contents of these documents. At the same time it is our duty to recommend to the members of the party and of the people’s movement a deeper study of the Moscow Declarations, of the programmatic documents of the Communist Party of Chile, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and of other brother parties that defend this general orientation.”[226]
The Central Committee of the Albanian party replied to this ban on its materials and those of the Chinese by the Chilean Politburo. An extensive letter to the Central Committee made a violent personal attack on Luis Corvalan, the Chilean Secretary-General. It followed this up by charging that “Chilean divisionists are at work in other countries without your knowledge.”
This Albanian letter concluded “We have tried to determine the origin of these unhealthy tendencies within the Chilean party in order to understand ourselves and facilitate the understanding of others of what forces create fertile groups in which opportunism, dogmatism, and all sorts of revisionism flourish. … What we ourselves have noticed are the assiduously cultivated illusions as to the possibility of finding a painless road to power”[227]
By mid- 1963, the break between the Chinese and Chilean Communist parties had become virtually total. In June of that year, the Chinese published a long attack on the Soviet party entitled “Proposition Regarding the General Line of the International Communist Movement,” to which the Chilean Politburo replied a month later. In their document, the Chileans said that the Chinese statement “is a veritable call for the division of all those communist parties that do not share the Chinese deviation.” It also claimed that the Chinese position was “in flagrant contradiction to the letter and the spirit of the programmatic documents and the principles of the international communist movement.”[228]
The Spartacus Group
Meanwhile, there had developed a small pro-Chinese group within the Chilean Communist Party and in the ranks of its sympathizers. This group centered on the Espártaco Editores, a literature distribution firm established in March 1962, which shared offices with the New China News Agency. The group came to be known as the Spartacus Group.[229]
Ernest Halperin noted, “Espartaco Editores was staffed by a group of Communist Party intellectuals. … Besides their open activities as publishers and as distributors of Chinese propaganda materials, the Spartacus Group was apparently engaged in clandestine factional activities inside the Communist Party.”[230]
The Spartacus Group not only widely distributed Chinese and Albanian literature among Communist members, it also sought a wider readership among the general public. Two Socialist Party papers, Última Hora and Clarín, carried advertisements of the group, announcing that Pekín Informa, the Spanish-language edition of Peking Review, was available in the office of Espartaco Eclitores.[231] The group also made available to Diario Ilustrado, the Conservative Party newspaper, the text of the letter of the Central Committee of the Albanian party to that of Chile, which we have already quoted. The Conservative newspaper published it in full.[232]
In September 1963, the Spartacus Group began to move beyond distribution of Chinese and Albanian literature. It organized a meeting in the Baquedano movie house in Santiago to celebrate the fourteen anniversary of the victory of the Chinese Communist revolution. This meeting was addressed not only by seven Communist intellectuals but also by leading figures of the Socialist Party. The Communist Party ran a rival meeting the next day.[233]
After this meeting, the members of the Spartacus Group were “publicly expelled” from the Communist Party, “and a quiet purge had eliminated their known supporters from the Communist Party and the Communist youth.”[234] However, Communist Party Secretary-General Luis Corvalan claimed that the Spartacus Group “were not able to split one single cell” of the party.[235]
In October 1964, the Spartacus Group again held a meeting to commemorate the Chinese Communists’ victory. Among the sponsors was Socialist Senator Salvador Allende, who had recently been the unsuccessful presidential candidate of the Socialist-Communist coalition. One of the two principal speakers was the Socialist deputy Clodomiro Almeyda.[236]
Soon after their expulsion from the Communist Party, the Spartacus Group began issuing its own publications. These included an “ideological review, Principios Marxista-Leninistas, and a news sheet, Combate, which appear at infrequent intervals and are remarkable for their well-nigh incredibly low level of intellect and knowledge.”[237]
By 1964, the Spartacus Group had an ally. This was a pro-Chinese element in another far Left group, Vanguardia Revolucionaria, an organization that had been composed of proChinese ex-Communists and Trotskyites, but in 1964 split into two separate groups. By 1965, the pro-Chinese Vanguardia element was reported to be negotiating unity with the Spartacus Group.[238]
The Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile (PCRCh)
Late in 1964, Senator Jaime Barros, who resigned from the Communist Party, joined the Spartacus Group. In September 1965, he visited China, and upon returning home undertook the leadership in transforming the Spartacus Group into the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile (Partido Comunista Revolucionario de Chile; PCRCh). This transformation took place at a conference in May 1966. The new party was immediately recognized by the Chinese as their Chilean counterpart.[239]
239
William E. Ratliff, in Yearbook on