On September 11, 1973, the democratically-elected Popular Unity government of Chile was overthrown in an imperialist-backed coup d’état, leading to the death of president Salvador Allende and thousands of leftist activists and sympathizers over the course of decades of repressive dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.
In “Chile: An Attempt at ‘Historic Compromise,’” author and Chilean Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR) member Jorge Palacios paints a different picture of the Popular Unity government from the more sympathetic renderings of many non-revolutionary leftists, tracing the tragic implosion of the Chilean economy and eventual coup to the conciliatory “peaceful transition to socialism” model adopted by the Communist Party of Chile and the Popular Unity. By failing to adhere to Leninist principles and ignoring lessons learned in the Chinese revolution regarding the revolutionary path of semi-feudal, semi-colonial countries like Chile, these elements rendered the country vulnerable to manipulation and sabotage from within and without. Palacios’ analysis and the lessons of the Chilean experience are invaluable today, as so many progressive impulses in Latin America are funneled into electoralist politics that have failed to dig those countries out of the entrenched subservience to imperialism they find themselves in.
This part includes section 3 of chapter 5.
You can read this text at:
https://archive.org/details/ChileJorgePalacios/mode/2up
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