Word: chileanizing
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MUCH NONSENSE has been written in the American press about Salvador Allende and the Chilean revolution. The picture the press has presented--and continues to present with renewed fervor despite the bloody golpe de estado against the Allende government--runs something like this: Chile, a prosperous nation with a long tradition of stable democracy, moved into the vanguard of Latin American progress in the late 1960s under the enlightened leadership of President Eduardo Frei. The popular Frei, who led the Christian Democratic Party, guided Chile well along the road to reform when the Chilean Constitution unfortunately intervened...
Frei needed nationalization to restore Chile's economic sovereignty. But the feeble infant Chilean industries produced only luxury goods for the tiny upper class. Only nationalization accompanied by a marked income redistribution to create a market for Chilean production could have started Chile on the path to industrialization--and income redistribution was precisely the step Frei, crippled by his ties to the right, never tried to take...
...hardly halcyon times of peace and social justice. Frei snuck past Allende in the 1964 election with strong conservative and CIA support, and he was always beholden to the right. As a consequence, his rhetoric outstripped reality: his touted agrarian reforms did little to change the shape of the Chilean landscape and he never got around to nationalizing the copper interests and other North American businesses as he promised...
...Chilean Left, which had been growing in strength in the previous years--Allende also came close in a 1958 election--attempted to pressure Frei into actually enacting his reforms. A group of younger radicals, tired of the plodding style of the Socialist and Communist Parties, broke away and formed the Movement of the Revolutionary Left--las miristas...
...SITUATION worsened in the later sixties and strikes began to rock Chilean cities, Frei turned to his only feasible alternative--repression--but only after he fought off the left within his own party. He broke the strikes with police, outlawed the miristas, forcing them underground, and formed the hatred grupo movil, his secret political police force...