Chile: The Making of a Precedent

DESPITE the dire prophecies of violence, Chile remained calm last week in the wake of precedent-shattering elections. In a three-way race for the presidency, the Marxist candidate, Dr. Salvador Allende, had received the highest vote, polling 36% v. 35% for his rightist opponent, former President Jorge Alessandri, and 28% for the candidate of President Eduardo Frei's Christian Democratic Party, Radomiro Tomic. Since no candidate won a popular majority, the Chilean Congress must decide between Allende and Alessandri on Oct. 24. In the meantime, just about everyone in Chile was acting as if Allende had already become the first Marxist head of state ever to be elected freely in the Western Hemisphere.

In celebration, half a dozen women frolicked nude in the plaza fountain behind Government House. In Santiago's Constitution Square, a man paid off an election bet by carrying an open umbrella on a sunny afternoon and wearing a donkey tail. But other Chileans panicked at the news. Fearful of a stampede of scared investors, the Santiago stock market closed for a day for the first time since 1938, and depositors withdrew massive funds from Chilean banks. The black-market rate for the escudo soared to as high as 50 to the U.S. dollar--as compared with 14.5 at the official rate and 21 at the unofficial pre-election level. The U.S. consulate was swamped with calls for information about visas.

Castro's Congratulations. Cuban Premier Fidel Castro, who had reportedly contributed several suitcases-full of hard currency to the Allende campaign, sent his congratulations. In a journalistic pre-emptive strike, the Soviet party paper Pravda accused the U.S. of having "an intention to interfere in the internal affairs of Chile." In point of fact, Washington was reluctant to take any position at all on Allende's emergence, although it knew full well that his nationalization program would eventually affect virtually all of the $700 million U.S. investment in Chile.

Most alarmed of all were the military regimes bordering on Chile. The Bolivian government feared that Allende would allow leftist guerrillas to operate from sanctuaries in Chile. An adviser to Argentine President Roberto Marcelo Levingston, predicting that Allende's victory would cause Argentina's military budget to be doubled, declared: "It's a disaster. It means we have two Cubas in Latin America instead of one."

The stocky Allende, 62, has been engaged in politics all his life. He was expelled from medical school, imprisoned and later exiled for his political activities. When he was finally allowed to return and earn a medical degree, he was unable to get any post except an assistant coroner's job that nobody else wanted.

But his political fortunes quickly changed. Having helped to found Chile's Socialist Party after his graduation from medical school, Allende ran for office as a federal Deputy in 1937 and won. The next year he played an important role in the presidential election of Pedro Aguirre Cerda and was rewarded by being appointed Minister of Health at the age of 31. He has run for the presidency in each of the past four elections dating back to 1952. In 1964 he polled 39% of the vote but lost to Eduardo Frei.

Communist Role. This year, pitted against the aging Alessandri and the arrogant, lackluster Tomic, Allende was more successful. He played hard on such ancient grievances as poverty, foreign "exploitation" and the crippling inflation rate, and won a wide range of supporters, including a few liberal clergymen. Declared the Rev. Hernan Larrain: "There is no incompatibility between being Catholic and voting for a Marxist." Even so, Allende was opposed by more than 60% of the electorate. In the view of many observers, he owes his victory to the fact that President Frei was not permitted by the constitution to succeed himself.

Allende is a Marxist who has sought to work through the constitutional framework, and he has promised to "guarantee democratic rights and respect individual freedoms" (see box). But he has also vowed to expropriate the right-wing newspaper El Mercurio, leading Chileans to speculate cynically that El Siglo, the Communist party organ, will soon become the best-read paper in the country, and, they say "it will be printed on better presses too--Mercurio's." The Moscow-aligned Communists, a minority partner in Allende's Popular Front coalition, will probably play a disproportionately important role in the new government because they are better organized than Allende's own Socialist Party. Of the 8,000 Popular Front committees set up for the campaign, 80% were led by Communists.

Under Allende, the nationalization of Chile's key industries is regarded as inevitable. A likely first target is Anaconda, which resisted Frei's "Chileanization" program (51% government ownership). "I don't care if there is a big private ice cream company or a big needle factory," Allende says. "That doesn't worry me. I worry about those firms that interfere with the total development of the state." He has promised "compensation," but has given no indication of what that might mean.

Rightist Maneuvering. So far, Chile's military, which has not staged a coup since 1932, appears willing to continue its tradition of accepting the verdict of the electorate. Allende charged last week, however, that somebody was plotting to assassinate him. There is also some maneuvering going on among the rightists. In the past, the Chilean Congress has always selected as President the candidate who polled the most votes. But the rightists are suggesting that the Christian Democrats should throw their support this time to Alessandri, the runner-up. He in turn declared last week that if he should be designated President by the Congress, he would resign immediately. That would pave the way for new presidential elections in which the popular Eduardo Frei would be legally permitted to seek reelection. But so far Frei himself has refused to cooperate.

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