Word: chileanization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...final crescendo of middle-class rebellion that toppled the socialist government of Salvador Allende was led by Chilean truck owners, whose month-long strike against Popular Unity caused the shortages which helped cripple the government. Most of the truck-owners were not giant monopolists, but small businessmen, owners of one or a few trucks who were honestly fearful that Popular Unity planned to expropriate their property. They acted from fear, a fear that their world was about to be shattered. They could have acted no other way. And yet they helped overthrow a government dedicated to greater freedom and justice...
...Left dilemma was posed anew by the military takeover in Chile. As the dictatorship fastens its hold on the country, as the generals with the sunglasses issue orders for more executions, the debate that has divided the Chilean Left in recent years will flare up once again on a world scale, just as it has so many times before in this century...
Whether Popular Unity could have hung on without resorting to the Activist solution is going to be a matter of great debate--second-guessing about aborted revolutions is a time-honored Left pastime. Allende was a skilled political veteran whose knowledge of the Chilean political situation was based on over 40 years of experience, and it at least initially seems doubtful that anyone else would have been better equipped to handle the wave of crises. But perhaps he missed a few key chances for compromise, or bungled with one policy or another...
...errors will be hard to find. The scale of historical events is too vast for their outcome to hinge on one man, or one decision, or one policy. Chilean Legalism seems inevitably to have led to the polarization, the increasing Right attacks, the growing extra-legal threat. There seems little way a crisis could have been forestalled...
...Chilean example clearly strengthens the position of the Activists in the continuing debate and once again poses the awful dilemma of revolutionary violence. Should Popular Unity have crushed the truck-owners strike when it began, locked up or if necessary killed those fearful businessmen of principled rectitude, and then outlawed and rounded up the rest of the opposition? In retrospect, the answer seems to be yes, but who can forecast the future...