Chile,Latin American Perspectives,and the Theorization of Human Rights

LAP published its first collection of articles on Chile in 1974, the second issue of its existence. Almost a year had passed since the bloody coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. For the next 17 years, until the return of a civilian government, LAP’s authors would contribute to discussions of the nature of Chilean resistance and to debates within the Left regarding what led to the failure of Allende’s peaceful road to socialism and what was the best way forward. But 35 years would pass before LAP explored the Chile solidarity movement, a movement many considered the most important of its kind in the United States since the Spanish Civil War (Power, 2009).

The movement in solidarity with Chile had an organized and active presence throughout Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, and parts of Asia and Africa, as well as in North America. Hundreds of deeply committed supporters hounded the Junta’s representatives, denying them a platform from which to propagate the regimes’ lies outside of Chile. Workers from the US to the UK refused to repair Chilean airplanes or load products bound for that country. Many more signed petitions, attended solidarity concerts, sent postcards demanding the release of specific prisoners, or refused to consume Chilean grapes or drink Chilean wine. And, while many violent, authoritarian coups produce a momentary upsurge of sympathy for the deposed democracy, Chile solidarity turned Pinochet into an enduring international pariah, an avatar of brutality.

Perhaps one of the most significant outcomes of the international Chile solidarity movement was in the transformation of human rights into a powerful cause for action. Human right as an activist movement had languished since the UN’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Amnesty International, founded in 1961, barely survived the 1960s, and then largely by defining itself as against the Left. But “[t]he 1973 coup in Chile [would be] a watershed event in the creation of the Latin American human rights network,” Kathryn Sikkink observed, “playing a catalytic role in the generation of an entire political apparatus devoted to human rights protections (Sikkink, 1996: 63).” Samuel Moyn agreed: “The spectacular Chilean events. . .provoke[d] human rights to crystallize as an organizing framework (Moyn, 2010).”

The question remains, however, as to why the overthrow of Allende ignited a human rights movement. This is not as simple a question as one may think. Consider the fact that within days of the military uprising, over 250,000 people in Buenos Aires marched to protest the coup; 100,000 demonstrated in Mexico City, as did hundreds of thousands in Rome and Paris. Thousands took to the streets throughout the United States. These protesters came out not because the soldiers were violating human rights (although they certainly were). They mobilized in protest of the brutal overthrow of a democratically elected government and in support of Allende’s dream of a peaceful road to socialism. Why, then, was the left internationalist, anti-imperialist movement which was on clear display in the immediate aftermath of the coup so quickly replaced by a movement organized around the protection of individual human rights?

In the United States, the Chile solidarity movement in the United States had coalesced around two national organizations. Non-Intervention in Chile (NICH), founded prior to the coup in 1972, advocated for the more militant sectors of the Chilean Left, focusing on anti-imperialist analysis and demanding support for the resistance (“active resistance demands active solidarity”). The National Coordinating Committee in Solidarity with Chile, formed in 1974 with close ties to the Communist Party USA, promoted the position of the more centrist Chilean Left (the Communist Party and moderates in the Socialist Party, among others), and it quickly oriented its organizing efforts towards human rights protections.

This position soon became dominant, and the reason is relatively straightforward: If active resistance demanded active solidarity, it was no less true that a left internationalist solidarity movement required active resistance on the ground (Striffler, 2019). To all intents and purposes, the Chilean Left was unable to seriously challenge the military regime until the early 1980s (Arrate and Rojas, 2003). Or, as Moyn put it, “the unviability of political alternatives provided the main rationale for the turn to human rights (Moyn, 2010).” If Left parties continued to demand that examples of Chilean resistance be brought to a wider public, they also required immediate human rights support for their militantes who were being detained, tortured, and disappeared.

The human rights movement came to predominate within Chile solidarity and was fundamental in saving countless lives, both there and elsewhere. But questions remain not just in terms of what was lost by the sidelining a broader inquiry into how the dictatorship’s emerging neoliberal state would condemn the country’s workers and poor to on-going oppression – questions that continue to bedevil Chilean democratic forces as they attempt to shed the dictator’s constitution – but how we theorize the relationship of human injustice to human needs, human rights, and human liberation (Dover, 2019). We look to LAP to provide us with information and insight in the future.