The Capture of an Ear

For 24 hours last week. Chile's economy lay in a coma: mines, factories and banks were idle, steel shutters covered shop windows. Some 500,000 workers were out on a one-day general strike.

The C.U.T.. Chile's biggest labor federation, staged the strike as a protest against the arrest of its president, Clotario Blest, who had made a rabble-rousing speech denouncing President Carlos Ibanez and his Cabinet as "traitors to the fatherland." Blest was released on bail a fortnight ago, but the strike was called anyway. It was an ugly symptom of the nation's sickness.

Squeezed by chronic inflation. Chile's workers have become strike addicts, and their burning discontent has benefited the Communists. Though the party is outlawed and the Ibanez government is antiCommunist, the Reds have burrowed deep into the labor movement. Their biggest coup was the capture of Clotario Blest. White-haired Bachelor Blest, longtime head of the National Association of Government Employees, is a strange bedfellow for Communists. He is a Roman Catholic whose favorite reading is the Thomist philosophers. In 1952 the Communists invited Blest to Moscow along with other labor leaders. The fact that Holy Week services were allowed in some Moscow churches made a vivid impression on him. Since then, the Reds have had Blest's ear, and when he was elected, president of C.U.T. last year, it became an ear well worth having.

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