Chile: forty years after the coup

Opinions

Forty years after the coup d’état on 11 September 1973, Chile’s democracy is still struggling to recover. The country continues to be ruled by a constitution created by the military junta. The labour rights established by Salvador Allende Gossens and the Popular Unity (UP) government were crushed by unbridled neoliberalism.

Chile’s workers had made significant gains between 1970 and 1973 with the measures promoted by the UP government, but trade union rights were soon rolled back in the years that followed.

On 4 January 1972, under Allende, Chile’s Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT) was granted legal status and, therefore, access to funding by Act no. 17594, which gave the organisation a key role in the national economy and in the administration of the companies nationalised by the UP government.

Following the coup on 11 September, the CUT was stripped of its legal status and assets. Basic trade union rights and activities were banned (see box).

For CUT General Secretary Arturo Martínez: "Pinochet was in no doubt that a strong trade union organisation would undermine his plans to hold on to power, which is why he launched the cruellest ever operation to suppress trade unionists and passed Decree Law 2200 eradicating pay rates set at national level, reduced the role of intermediary organisations, then withdrew the confederation’s legal status and seized its assets."

Salvador Allende’s government, in addition to ’Chileanizing’ copper, also nationalised the saltpetre (potassium nitrate), iron, telecommunications and banking industries. Income was redistributed by a new wage policy and land reform was sped up.

As academic Hervi Lara reports: "The public ownership of industry was introduced and unemployment fell to the lowest rate ever, dropping from 8.3 per cent to 3.8 per cent. Gross domestic product rose by nine per cent. Industrial production increased by 13 per cent and the workers’ share of national income rose to 60 per cent," during the Popular Unity government.

For Luis Mesina, who was president of the CTB (Banking Workers’ Confederation) during the Popular Unity government: "The workers became highly organised and the cordones industriales (Industrial Belts), perhaps the most developed form of workers’ participation and democracy ever known in Latin America, were born.

It was within these organs of popular power that the workers would embark on the fight for a classless society. They decided on the factories to be taken over, on the nature of the companies, who would manage them, and their rates of production."

But everything they had achieved would be destroyed by the dictatorship.

The so-called "Labour Plan" developed by Pinochet’s Labour Minister at the time, José Piñera, privatised the public pension system and restricted the matters subject to collective bargaining, crushing the hard-earned rights won by the trade union movement over many years.

Since then, Chile has been deprived of collective bargaining legislation that respects the conventions on freedom of association and trade union rights ratified by the National Congress.

Mesina was unambiguous: "Forty years after the coup and the workers still have a long way to go. The coup of 1973 was essentially a coup against the working class, a coup against the rights won and the gains achieved, a coup against the superior form of organisation that workers had reached with the Cordones or ’Industrial Belts’. It is crucial that we commemorate this date, committing our efforts to the fight, to give the workers a real direction that restores the role they should never have lost."

Manuel Ahumada, President of the Confederación de Trabajadores del Cobre (Copper Workers’ Confederation), also spoke at the commemoration, underlining the workers’ ongoing commitment to renationalising the copper industry, to attain the economic independence Chile needs.

"In the name of the sector that is the country’s main source of wealth, and in honour of the feat achieved by President Salvador Allende, the new generations and workers’ organisations will continue to fight for the dignity Chile deserves and the economic sovereignty relinquished ever since the coup," said Ahumada.

ANTI-UNION RULINGS OF THE MILITARY JUNTA

  • Edict no. 12 of the Military Junta, September 1973, withdrawing the legal status of the CUT.
  • Edict no. 36, September 1973, suppressing collective bargaining demands and trade union leave.
  • Military Edict, September 1973, suspending agreements concerning salaries, benefits and automatic pension adjustments.
  • Military Edict, October 1973, ordering the overhaul of trade union executives throughout the country within two days.
  • Decree Law 133, December 1973, ordering the dissolution of the CUT and the seizing of its assets.
  • Decree Law 189, December 1973, limiting the holding of trade union meetings solely to the discussion of matters related to the trade union, subject to prior authorisation and the presence of representatives of the armed forces or the police.
This article has been translated from Spanish.