The PCRCh did not do much better in student elections in this period. It was active in the campaign for election of a new Rector of the University of Chile, supporting Luis Vitale, a Trotskyist. However, Vitale received only 418 votes, less than 1 percent of the total.[250]
The PCRCh and the MIR
One problem faced by the Partido Comunista Revolucionario de Chile was that it was confronted with an important competitor on the extreme Left, the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). The MIR was established in 1965 by a group of ex-members of the Socialist and Communist parties. It was basically Castroite in orientation, and had some immediate success, particularly among students. It won control of the Student Federation at the University of Concepción, and got 800 votes in the student federation at the University of Chile in Santiago.
Control of the MIR was taken over by students and other young people. As a result, many of the members of the older generation, including Oscar Waiss—a onetime Trotskyite and longtime leader of the Left of the Socialist Party—who was probably the most significant of the founders of the MIR, virtually withdrew from the organization.[251]
During the Christian Democratic Party administration of President Eduardo Frei (1964-1970), the MIR gained most notoriety from a series of robberies of banks and supermarkets, presumably to raise funds for the organization. Typical of these was a holdup at the Banco Continental in Santiago in August 1969, which netted the robbers 161,000 escudos in cash and checks.[252]
The MIR also organized several subsidiary groups. These included the Movimiento Campesino Revolucionario (MCR) among the peasants, the Jefatura Nacional Revolucionaria among the residents of urban squatter colonies, the Frente de Estudiantes Revolucionarios among students, and the Frente de Trabajadores Revolucionarios (FTR) among urban trade unionists.
It was largely through these organizations, particularly the MCR and the FTR, that the MIR carried out a large number of “seizures” of land and industrial and commercial enterprises during the Allende administration. In a review of the first year of the Allende government, El Rebelde, the organ of the MIR, recounted that “the workers, peasants and students carried out more occupations of bourgeois properties by June 1971 than in the preceding years. … These data show that the working people are not inclined to let themselves be bogged down in the labyrinth of bourgeois legality, nor make concessions to pressures from the right.”[253]
Throughout the Allende period, the MIR, although seeking to avoid direct confrontation with the government, continued to insist that the only way to power for “the workers” was through armed struggle. Typical of this position was an article in June 1971 by Nelson Gutiérrez, President of the Students Federation of Concepción and a major leader of the MIR. He wrote, “It is possible that a social force in which the proletariat and peasants have established an alliance with the petty bourgeoisie can get control of part of the apparatus of the state. But the seizure of political power by a revolutionary social force, the worker-peasant alliance, is possible only as the consequence of the class struggle reaching its greatest confrontation, that is, through armed confrontation.”[254]
Although the rhetoric of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chile did not differ substantially from that of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, the effectiveness in action of the Maoists could not approach that of the MIR. Throughout the Frei and Allende administrations, the MIR remained in practical terms the most militant and most important element on the extreme Left.
PCRCh during the Military Dictatorship
The Allende regime was overthrown on September 11, 1973, by a military coup. That event ushered in a seventeen-year period of military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. The Partido Comunista Revolucionario, like all of the Chilean Left and, for that matter, all of the country’s political parties suffered severe persecution.
The PCRCh claimed not to have been taken by surprise by the coup led by General Pinochet. William Ratliff wrote, “The PCRCh, which has for years argued that, that ‘revolution would come to Chile only by armed struggle and people’s war,’ was not surprised by the military coup of September 1973. … As an exile party leader said in December 1973, the party had examined the armed forces carefully in 1971—the results were published in the group’s unofficial journal Causa Marxista-Leninista No. 21—and thus knew what to expect. The leader acknowledged, however, that the PCRCh lacked adequate communication with the people and thus had not been able to prepare most Chileans for the events of 11 September.”[255]
The fall of Allende and the rise of the Pinochet dictatorship served to confirm belief by the PCRCh in the correctness of its own strategy of revolution. In a statement issued by the underground Central Committee of the party in April 1974, it said, “The Chilean people, consisting of the workers, poor peasants, middle groups of the city and the countryside, students and progressive intellectuals who, together, represent more than 95 percent of the population, have no possibility of advancing in their liberation if they do not have for the purpose of their own organization an army. Only the proletariat and its vanguard party can lead the anti-imperialist, anti-monopolist and anti-landowners struggle effectively and to the end.”[256]
Undoubtedly during the first years of the Pinochet dictatorship, the Chilean Maoists, like all far Left groups in Chile, had to function deeply underground. Occasional copies of its periodical El Pueblo were published,[257] but it is doubtful that its activities went far beyond such occasional efforts. William Ratliff noted in 1978 that “The PCRCh has been weakened in recent years by Chilean government suppression and by internal dissension.”[258]
However, Ratliff later noted that by 1979, under the leadership of party Secretary Jorge Palacios, “the group has become increasingly active, both domestically… (where its role in strikes, demonstrations, and agitation is still limited) and especially abroad. Palacios toured the United States in late 1979, speaking on college campuses, sometimes under joint sponsorship of university departments.”[259]
The PCRCh and Changes in Chinese Policies
The Partido Comunista Revolucionario of Chile, like many Maoist groups elsewhere, was seriously affected by the zigs and zags of the policies of the Chinese party and government during the 1970s. However, it put the best face possible on the first of these shifts in policy, the visit of U.S. President Richard Nixon to China in 1972. The PCRCh argued at the time that the visit was “an admission of defeat by the United States and was not seen as a Chinese betrayal of its revolutionary ideals.”[260]
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