The last true mystery of September 11, 1973, a mystery more eschatological than historical, is the final speech of Salvador Allende. About the rest we know almost everything that is possible to know: a process instituted in 2011 to establish whether the president was assassinated or committed suicide ended up clarifying a myriad of details that could be pending; Even the names of the officers who entered La Moneda that day are already known.
Some still do not accept the idea that the president has committed suicide. A murder would be better to simplify the story; above all, to turn it into a military defeat and not a political failure. The one who initiates this line is Fidel Castro; later endorsed by García Márquez. The family maintains an ambiguous and prolonged silence, perhaps due to its multiple ties to Castroism at the time. Years later, Castro will tell Hugo Chávez, also besieged in the Miraflores palace, not to imitate Allende’s gesture, to surrender, not to sacrifice himself uselessly. He tells it, of course, to someone who would never imitate him, to the commander who will die imploring for another hour of life. We already have a confession from each other: for Castro, Allende’s suicide has been a useless sacrifice. It’s curious: Allende, who only once exposed himself in a ridiculous pistol duel, knew that politics could cost your life; Castro, who exposed it all the more in the Sierra Maestra, seemed to forget it.
After the facts, the speech remains. Accusatory, lyrical, with dramatic volumes, changes in tone, mood swings, breaths of life and at the same time mournful. Improvised, but one of those improvisations “that are rehearsed many times in the shower,” as a witness told me at the moment he pronounced it. We know that Allende was a great orator, a virtuoso of that Senate of the 60s populated by swordsmen of the word. But this is something else. It is a speech of death. Death and eternity. These two things only come together in religious thought.
in his book Salvador Allende. The Chilean Left and Popular Unity (Taurus, 2023) the political scientist Daniel Mansuy writes that Allende’s speech leaves “a poison and an enigma”. The poison, I suspect, is political in nature: that day falls the chilean road to socialism, electoral route, majority vocation and respect for the law. More than the Chilean way, it is Allende’s way. Nowhere has he succeeded. He contradicts the entire revolutionary line that has prevailed in the Popular Unity and in his own party, the socialist. It moves away from the stills of Marxist theory, from the simplest, the Soviet, and from the most elaborate, the foquista, the insurrectional or the Trotskyist. And he opposes, above all, that of the hero of the Latin American left, once again Fidel Castro, who is about to show his own rags. In the year that Allende took office, let us remember, the harvest of 10 million tons failed in Cuba, leaving Cubans exhausted and Castro outraged.
As Jorge Edwards wrote, Castro saw history as nature and nature as history, both susceptible to being shaped by force. For Allende, on the other hand, the two things have something ineffable: the doctor knows that nature is unsubdued and the senator, that history is enigmatic: “The people make it.” The peoples, not the heroes. In its last hour, history becomes only future; He has given up the present.
Salvador Allende invents his own ghost at that moment, and sends it rolling around the country: “You will continue to hear me,” he says, “I will always be with you.” The ghost “morally” punishes those who overthrow it. And he uses “la patria”, that term that has never been comfortable in Marxist culture. There is not a word for the left, nor the Popular Unity, nor its party. He has pondered, surely, that omission. To define himself, he does not say “socialist”, but only “the interpreter of great desires for justice”. Years later, in the comfort of Paris, Régis Debray will write: “The revolution is not a homeland.”
Poison Expands Its Reach: Why Did It Fail? the chilean way? Because it was never possible or because many prevented it from being so? What weighed more: the action of the enemies or the lack of conviction of the allies themselves?
I return to Mansuy’s phrase: the poison and the enigma. We are left with the enigma. Here we enter the stormy terrain of political morality. Why kill a besieged man, but not condemned to an inevitable death? Why does his press officer, the sarcastic Dog Olivares, who shoots himself in the head in a corridor? Agree, a political act does not have to be a collective suicide. But it is that the Popular Unity is simply not in La Moneda, nor in its surroundings; La Moneda is defended only by those who work at La Moneda. The General Secretary of the Socialist Party, Carlos Altamirano, flees to seek refuge and will expose himself to incredible risks to go into exile. Altamirano doesn’t like Allende’s act either, let alone his speech. He is not a mobilizer, he does not call for resistance, he does not look at the ground under his feet: he only looks at history. What does he mean by “the people must defend themselves, but not sacrifice themselves”? Nothing! That is not an instruction!
Every socialist will have their opinion from that moment on and almost no one will be able to express it honestly. Discourse turns everything into eschatology. The left begins the analysis of what led the Popular Unity and the president to that situation; begins the process that we will know as the socialist renewal, headed by Carlos Altamirano, unexpectedly abroad. Inside, the stark self-criticism of Tomás Moulian and Manuel Antonio Garretón emphasizes the incompatibility of the Chilean road with their status as a minority, or at least with an insufficient accumulation of forces. Both sociologists note that the left has disdained the middle classes, without whom no majority is achieved, and has ignored the evolution of the Chilean state during the 20th century, which has ceased to be oligarchic and has become mesocratic. The revolutionary pole, and especially the MIR, has not even studied these things, obsessed as it is with determining what phase of the revolution we are in.
Allende has not done the theoretical homework. It’s not your thing. Simply, he has tried to convince his classmates, but his classmates have closed the door on him over and over again. Until the last day. Allende has no other solution than to break with Popular Unity, but that is almost more painful for him than the other ending. This is another unstudied rarity: Why on the left does the mere discrepancy always sound like treason, why do so many surrender to what has leftist stamp even if it is a monstrosity?
By omitting the Popular Unity from his speech, with his cunning as a speaker, Allende also invents a uchronia: things did not have to be as they have been. And once they have been as they have been, there is no other way out than the final act, the shot. Does it seem like a lot? Sure, it’s a lot. It is not a gesture that invites moderation; It is not a call for calm.
Uchronia has tremendous potential: if while Castro began to fail, Allende began to succeed, what would happen to all of Latin America, what would happen to the Montoneros, Tupamaros, the ERP, Tupac Amaru, the ALN, the world of Che? And in Europe, Africa, Asia? What would happen to ETA, the IRA, the Red Brigades, Lotta Continua, Baader-Meinhof…? Nobody has imagined that fracture of time. At least no one has written it.
Mansuy notes that when they get to the shot, the sharpest analysts, including Moulian and Garretón, run out of political language. They can’t find how to analyze it. Language, exhausted, abruptly becomes Christic, religious, salvific. The sacrifice, the holocaust, the immolation: words that are found in the Bible, not in Capital.
But this hermeneutical flaw has a problem: Allende has announced it many times, in public and in private, in speeches and in conversations. It is not a last minute decision. It is what he tries to say while the colleagues deny him the negotiations. Not only do they not obey him: they don’t believe him either. Three days earlier, Erich Schnake estimated that the president “exaggerates the dangers.” The PS, the Mapu, the MIR, consider generals and admirals as “sure informants”… who will later be leaders of the coup! No one will later assume this botch, this mockery in their own noses.
Allende no longer exaggerates or threatens: he begs, implores. His pride as a doctor, minister, senator, Mason, republic, president, prevents him from saying that he sees the precipice. He insists that he controls the situation, that he has everyone in his pocket… he doesn’t admit that no one pays attention to him. “You have to choose, President,” Patricio Aylwin told him. “You cannot be with God and with the devil.” Allende has pretended not to listen and has changed the subject. That selective deafness is an indication of his political paralysis. Aylwin interprets it as obstinacy. Both things are true, but more the first than the second.
In the repertoire of responsibilities for the coup, that of the Popular Unity is enormous. But Allende is not exempt, he could not, no matter how much he is also the first victim. It is very hard for the left to assume these things, but as long as he does not, as Mansuy writes, “he will not be able to have a history of Popular Unity worthy of the name.” She will live tied to an indecipherable myth and will tie the new generations with it. President Boric, for example, often cites the Allende of the myth, the disembodied Allende, who is already a ghost in a burning palace, an abstraction that repeats the inspired phrases of his final speech, emptied of historical legibility, devoid of volumetry. policy.
This is the enigma: is the immolation an excessive act or is it the only answer for his political solitude when Chile is on the verge of a civil war? We know that this idea is repugnant to the president; he has said it many times too. And he knows that some of his supporters are immensely excited; He has treated those as “irresponsible and cowardly.” But then, does Allende represent the martyrdom of social justice with peaceful resources or is he the scarecrow of a program that was never viable?
Mansuy has done the task of the intellectual and has made the left – to which he does not belong – see that he has another intellectual task pending. Word that derives, as we know, from intelligere: grasp. What commemoration is possible without understanding?
So that this is not just praise, I will only say that in his appendix of comments on other books, I would have preferred Mansuy to dedicate himself to those who seem to me to be the best, the most perceptive: Salvador Allende, a time in black and white, the almost unfindable and extremely sharp text by Alejandra Rojas; Allende and the Chilean experience, by the lawyer Joan Garcés, perhaps the most rigorous properly Marxist analysis; and Salvador Allende, a sentimental biography by journalist Eduardo Labarca, generally misread as a gossip chronicle, despite the fact that it is the book that brings us closest to the living Allende.
Mansuy’s is added to those books that one would always call necessary.
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