Resizing 60 Years of Chilean Politics: Small Acts,Grassroots Movements,and Individual Responsibility

On October 14, 2019, a coordinated fare evasion led by Chilean students as a response to a fare increase in the Santiago metro system became the spark that has since precipitated dozens of protests, demonstrations, and confrontations with police across the country. While the larger protests have generally subsided, it is not difficult to find smaller groups on an almost daily basis in the streets of Santiago and other cities holding strong in their commitment to fighting and demonstrating against the Piñera government. After more than three months (at the time of this writing) of ongoing political engagement by a broad—and at times divergent—segment of Chile’s population, much of the coverage on these events has shifted from citizens’ demands to considerations of historical events and how they continue to shape Chilean politics and society. While clearly the legacies of the Pinochet dictatorship and its associated economic policies are at the heart of many of the protesters’ calls for things such as more egalitarian wage distribution, de-privatization of pension plans and resources, and better access to education, the three texts under review here (all published before 2019) derive from more particularized loci. Rather than looking at large-scale movements or major political figureheads, these works, in three distinct ways, examine the impact of individuals and small acts in the context of more than half a century of Chilean politics while insightfully setting the stage for current events and offering predictions of the shape of things to come.

The following words open the introduction of Marian E. Schlotterbeck’s book: “At this time no one ever asked about the people” (1). This simple statement draws a penetrating thread through the historical account of political mobilization in Chile’s central port city of Concepción in the 1960s and 1970s. These are the words of Juan Reyes, a retired textile worker from the city, and through his testimony and the testimonies of dozens of other “everyday revolutionaries” Beyond the Vanguard develops a complex, diverse, and alternative narrative to more traditional historical accounts of the revolutionary processes in mid-century Chile.

The book chronicles the grassroots development of Chile’s Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement—MIR) in Concepción. This group, known for its guerrilla military-style tactics and far-left political ideology, came to view itself as the revolutionary vanguard in the years leading up to and during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973). Schlotterbeck acknowledges, however, that whereas many historical accounts of this period link this revolutionary vanguardism with a breakdown in democracy (see, for example, Valenzuela, 1978; Winn, 1986), various events and activities among individuals and communities in Concepción call for a more nuanced understanding of how smaller revolutionary acts extend democratic participation to a wider range of people (12–13). To describe this process she uses the term “everyday revolutions,” meaning “to differentiate the local, contingent, everyday pursuit of change from the simultaneous national, globally mitigated, top-down battle for a peaceful revolution in Chile. . . . By widening our conceptual framework for revolution to mean something more than just the seizure of state power, other processes become visible” (5).

This alternative framing of a significant political era not only works to destabilize more traditional top-down and hegemonically oriented narratives of revolutionary processes but also opens up the revolutionary space to groups and individuals that have largely been excluded from these narratives. For example, Chapter 3 chronicles the development of Campamiento Lenin, a plot of land forcibly taken and converted into housing by a group of pobladores (urban poor) working in conjunction with the MIR’s community of activists and students. This community, while ultimately unsuccessful, had a profound effect on Concepción politics. The land takeover, in addition to delinking the community from the housing policies directed from above by Eduardo Frei Montalva’s Christian Democratic party, also provided opportunities for previously disenfranchised citizens to create and participate more directly in their own democratic processes (75). Furthermore, Schlotterbeck notes, the democratic structuring within Campamiento Lenin, while not entirely extending equal participation to women, did significantly reframe gender dynamics and enable women to take up a more direct role in revolutionary politics in which “their contributions within the domestic space of the camp became validated in a new language of revolutionary transformation” (77). Both of these points highlight the way Schlotterbeck shifts the discussion of revolutionary processes away from narratives that tend to focus on masculinity or masculinized leadership tropes such as el hombre nuevo (Pieper Mooney, 2009; Power, 1997).

Other events of this period, perhaps deemed unremarkable or indicative of political divisiveness in the Chilean left in other contexts (93), are reframed to demonstrate the remarkable ways individuals came together to enact democratic and revolutionary processes. Chapter 4 describes the events leading up to the Concepción People’s Assembly on July 27, 1972. This event was the largest of a group of grassroots assemblies organized by a collective of leftist party groups. While it was initially formatted as an event in which party leaders would give speeches, members of the audience called out to speak on their own behalf. Rather than viewing the leadership’s ceding of the stage as a failure, Schlotterbeck describes a reframing of democratic potential and participatory dynamics: “In converting the event into an open assembly where anyone could speak, Concepción residents not only broke free of party oversight but also asserted popular sovereignty within the revolutionary process” (113). Similarly, Chapter 5 details the events leading up to the grassroots takeover of a bakery in 1973. The bakery had been hoarding bread in response to the 1972 CIA-backed work stoppage aimed at creating food shortages across Chile known as the “Bosses’ Lockout.” Instead of framing this takeover as an instance of left-wing militancy, Schlotterbeck, relying largely on in-person interviews with individuals who directly participated, demonstrates how this group and others came together, independently of party leadership, to participate in the bread-making process and ensure equal distribution to members of the community (116–117).

What stands out in Schlotterbeck’s work is the voices and experiences of the individuals whose oral histories form the skeleton of the text. By foregrounding these individuals the author constructs a compelling and underrepresented narrative, all the while supporting her broader framework by weaving these stories together in a literal reflection of the democratic and grassroots dynamics they individually aim to describe. The events roughly between 1965 and 1973, from the MIR’s humble beginnings to Pinochet’s military forces’ taking Concepción in the early morning hours before the siege of La Moneda in Santiago, are recounted in almost literary fashion. While the intensity of this story unfolds through her focused and captivating writing style, her attention to detail and the thoroughness of her research are really what elevate this work, which animates a profoundly significant moment in Chile’s contemporary history.

After the 1973 coup and the installation of Pinochet’s military government, members of the MIR were forced underground, becoming some of the most aggressively targeted political actors. This movement may have further facilitated top-down narratives of political resistance in Chile, narratives of faceless monolithic revolutionary groups and masculinized tropes of political leadership. However, it is clear that moments of revolutionary mobilization continue to develop through complex and diverse grassroots processes. Similarly to Schlotterbeck, in Building Power from Below Carolina Muñoz Bank offers a nuanced and individualized analysis of contemporary labor movements. Her work describes the development, successes, and potential missteps of several labor unions in Walmart Chile’s retail and warehouse sectors. Employing ethnographic methods, she conducted interviews with lawyers, Walmart employees, and union organizers to develop an analysis that balances quotidian union activities with a more expansive look at the history of Walmart, the impacts of its extension in an international context, and a general history of labor movements in Chile.

Much as everyday revolutionary behavior fostered a shift away from the top-down directives of leftist party leaders in Concepción, many Chilean Walmart workers extricated their organizing projects from the direction of Chile’s labor federation, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (National Trade Union of Workers—CUT). Muñoz Bank describes how, in what was originally intended to destabilize bargaining power, labor regulations allowing multiple unions within the same corporation created opportunities for workers to establish alliances and independently develop demands and organizational identity. While in some instances this flexibility and independence caused rifts among groups within larger alliances, the author’s central point is that the advancement and positive change experienced in unions were linked to greater democratic participation by workers.

For Muñoz Bank, what was key to these workers’ successes was their ability to initiate disruption, whether symbolically or in terms of production, through forms of “social power” (10–11). In her analysis, social power flows, following Erik Olin Wright (2000), from either the “associational” power to form associations and organize or the “structural” power arising from strategic location within a supply chain. In the case of Walmart Chile, retail workers and warehouse workers drew social power from different sources and implemented different systems to utilize it. For warehouse workers, their position in the supply chain enabled them to strategically strike and disrupt flows to retail centers, giving them strategic power. They also employed an intensive education process for all union members, thereby giving workers the resources to understand both union and warehouse functionality in a democratically extended fashion (90–91). Muñoz Bank describes this combination of strategic implementation of resources and equal distribution of knowledge and participation in the union as “strategic democracy.” At the same time, she uses the term “flexible militancy” to refer to the retail workers’ strong associational power due to their concentration in big-box stores. While they lacked the structural power of the warehouse workers, they could publicly shame the corporation because of their visibility and their capacity to mobilize aggressively within stores (122–123, 127).

Muñoz Bank provides a comprehensive history of labor and organizing activity not just within Walmart Chile but in a broader international context extending to union alliances between Chile and both the United States and South Africa (see especially Chapter 6). In this way, her work is, more than a historical and theoretical analysis of organizational tactics, a set of questions designed to provoke new ways of thinking about international labor and solidarity movements. While she does not offer a clear prescription for accomplishing this, she leaves us with a broader understanding of the role that individuals and their direct democratic participation can play in undermining corporate conditions specifically designed to disempower them. She says that her work is grounded in an ethnographic methodology, but she seems to be reluctant to allow this project to be defined by its interlocutors as much as Schlotterbeck’s. It would be interesting to see if a greater presence of workers’ voices might strengthen some of the conclusions linking democratic participation and social power to individual and union empowerment. In any case, this book provides a useful framework that labor activists and scholars can use in considering their own approaches to the subject while offering hope with regard to the critical potential of “power from below.”

While completely distinct in both subject and methodology from the other two texts, the third book reviewed here similarly shifts the focus from macro-based historical analyses to smaller acts and individuals. In Civil Obedience, Michael J. Lazzara culturally reframes the Pinochet era by critically engaging with a diverse collection of autobiographical and biographical cultural products and reassessing the political, economic, and social conditions by which they historically affix their subjects to the atrocities of the dictatorship. However, rather than simply reexamining texts produced during the dictatorship (1973–1990), his work relies almost exclusively on works produced or published after the transition to democracy in order to demonstrate the ways that the ethical conditions surrounding life under Pinochet continue to affect politics in contemporary Chile. His analysis uniquely frames each work while still managing to draw out connections that link it both to others and to the past.

The primary framing is in terms of complicity and complacency. These terms, while distinct (the former denoting action while the latter may result from simply a lack of action), “evoke a broad spectrum of moral and ethical forms of responsibility that beg consideration. The points along this spectrum may be clearly distinguishable from one another . . . [but] they always exist in relation to one another” (7). The point here is that complicit and complacent positions not only governed the orientation of actors both directly involved and peripheral to the Pinochet regime but determine the way these subjects speak and are heard in the current political climate. For example, in Chapter 2 Lazzara explores the legacy of Jaime Guzmán, a political adviser to Pinochet, contributing writer to the 1980 conservative constitution, and founder of the right-wing gremialismo movement in the 1960s. He uses three different cultural products (a book, a documentary, and a film) produced by associates (in the case of the film, Guzmán’s nephew) to demonstrate the way that his “ghost” or “specter” haunts—in the Derridean (Derrida, 1994: 3, 45–48) sense of the term—the domain of contemporary neoliberal politics. Lazzara argues (66–67) that all of these works fall short of accomplishing an “avowal,” a statement that, in Foucault’s (2014 [1981]: 17) terms, “incites or reinforces a power relation that exerts itself on the one who avows”—in other words, makes the subject vulnerable in relation to the speech act and its recipients. They all attempt to delink Guzmán’s humanity and conflicted subject position from his complicity in human rights abuses under the Pinochet regime, thereby undermining the potential for an avowal to negotiate the way his specter continues to haunt them.

Lazzara goes on to parse both the expressed and the implicit nuances of the cultural products of complicit and complacent subjects through his understanding of what he calls “fictions of mastery”—the “kinds of stories [that] complicit subjects tell to assuage the pangs of conscience or existential crises that their complicity inevitably generates” (5). In Chapter 1 he describes the life of Mariana Callejas, a popular writer and collaborator with the Chilean secret police under the dictatorship who was ultimately involved in the assassinations of several prominent leftist politicians. In two works, Siembra vientos and the short-story collection La larga noche, Callejas works through her shame and remorse over earlier crimes but, as Lazzara skillfully demonstrates, fails to truly take ownership of her actions and instead deploys a series of rhetorical maneuvers to disconnect and segment an identity that she cannot live with. The final chapter explores the works of three former leftist revolutionaries, all of whom have in some way opted to disavow their revolutionary past and insert their identities comfortably into the neoliberal politics of the postdictatorship climate. Lazzara identifies the fictions that these individuals tell themselves not only to delink themselves from their former revolutionary selves but also to produce cultural products that will appeal to consumers, simultaneously affirming these fictions for a broader audience (151).

Lazzara’s work walks the reader through a host of ethical and literary considerations that, in addition to those mentioned, extend from such topics as truth-telling and justice (see Chapter 3) to biographical and journalistic responsibility when dealing with people peripherally involved with crimes against humanity (see Chapter 4). His work represents a nuanced and critical examination of the legacies of political violence and military dictatorships, but he recognizes the limitations of his sources, acknowledging the difficulties in crafting an analysis around accomplice figures who either went on to write or became subjects of the writing of others (23). In this sense, it is challenging to think about the ways complicity and complacency mark the quotidian aspects of a society that is still so clearly marked by the legacy of the dictatorship. It is furthermore quite disturbing to consider, in Lazzara’s framework, the myriad unpublished or unrepresented fictions that tens of thousands of Chileans likely tell themselves daily. The “silence” produced by these fictions is one that is painfully audible to those victimized under the Pinochet regime. While many of the students protesting across Chile today are members of the once-dubbed “generation without fear,” it is clear that they are standing up to this culture of silence and making their voices heard in a changing political climate.