Allende

In 1946, while demonstrating in support of a group of striking nitrate workers, a twenty-year-old female communist named Ramona Parra was shot to death by police in Santiago, Chile,  in what has come to be known as the Bulnes Square Massacre. A product of political marginalisation, the details of Parra’s life are sketchy. But for fleeting mentions in art history books she is otherwise a mystery.  Her death, however, has had a far-reaching significance, for she became and remains a martyr symbol of the Chilean struggle against oppression. In particular, her name was proudly taken to identify the artistic movements of the muralist brigade of the Chilean Communist Party (CCP), the Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP) in 1968. 

On September 11, 1973, Chile, and with it the CCP, was thrown into turmoil. The country that homegrown poet Pablo Neruda once described as a ‘long petal of sea, wine, and snow’ was transformed from Latin America's foremost social democracy under Salvador Allende to the region's darkest dictatorship under the military regime of Augusto Pinochet.  The latter ushered in a period of widespread torture and the murder of an estimated 3000 Chileans. Furthermore, the regime carried out an assault on culture that saw the erasure of swathes of leftist literature, film, music, and art, which included the whitewashing of BRP murals that had for five years colourfully decorated and secured Santiago’s streets for Salvador Allende.  As Geoffrey Hutton stated in the immediate aftermath of the coup, ‘Now, a bullet through the head is more effective than a vote in the ballot-box’.

In the process of writing a brief history of the BRP collective, this article contextualises the violence imposed on Chile by Pinochet’s Military Regime; and in doing so documents how members of the left perpetuated modes of artistic expression and protest at home and in exile throughout dictatorial rule. By attributing meaning to the murals of the BRP, the aim is also to contribute, if only moderately, to the reconstruction of a fragmented, distorted, and, in part, whitewashed (i.e., destroyed) past. Interwoven is an acknowledgment of the role the BRP played in the 1988 ‘No’ campaign; in this respect, the efforts of the BRP, which are largely without recognition, to paint and ultimately reclaim Santiago’s streets served as an essential subsidy to the widely lauded and successful savoir-faire TV campaign orchestrated by Eugenio García.

El artículo analiza la manera en que el golpe militar de Augusto Pinochet afectó las relaciones exteriores de Chile y puso en práctica una nueva diplomacia fijada por las Fuerzas Armadas, hecho al que se suman los crímenes de lesa humanidad cometidos por los militares. Se presenta la reacción que el golpe produjo en los organismos internacionales y en las sedes diplomáticas, especialmente en Suecia, donde tuvieron lugar movilizaciones de protesta.

"NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHERS: "Ever since 1973 coup in Chile there has been considerable speculation about what really happened and about the involvement of the U.S. government and U.S. business interests. Now, this explosive account by a Chilean journalist who lived through it all reveals the military, industrial, and commercial conspiracy, abetted by North American interests, to bring down the Allende government.
"Beginning on the day of the coup with Allende's murder and the military's artful staging of his "suicide", the book goes on to reveal the background of intrigue and counter-intrigue; the participation of the CIA, the Pentagon, and U.S. business interests, as well as that of the Brazilian government; the sinister roles of the Chilean armed forces, police forces, and political parties; the events throughout Chile on the day of the coup as the massive military apparatus got under way; and the reign of terror and torture unleashed on the civilian population.
This is a fast-moving, well-paced narrative, with a "State of Siege" quality to it. It will be an important and controversial book which neither Allendistas nor the conspirators and their respectable fronts will like. It shows the latter as a gang of premeditated murderers and the former, including Allende, as honorable but very foolish men, who, until the very last moments, believed that the military was made up of loyal soldiers, faithful to the Constitution they were sworn to uphold. The author is an excellent reporter and has carefully woven together the strands of seemingly unrelated events into a coherent, compelling, and well-documented story of who did what to whom, when."

On September 11th 1973, the Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende, bringing forty years of democracy to an end in Chile.  As troops blasted buildings and helicopters sprayed bullets into the top floors of the British Embassy, the Presidential Palace was ablaze following a direct-hit from an aerial strike.  The country was in the final throws of ‘self-managed socialism’  and Salvador Allende in the midst of the epilogue of his reign. The Marxist experiment, or as some have labelled it, the initiation and implementation of radical and social reforms, crashed to a violent and bloody end.  In a single day, a lifetime of work and dreams was torn asunder in a campaign of random violence and terror.

This thesis reconstructs a history of life in Santiago, Chile in the aftremath of Allende's death by analysis the street murals of the Brigada Ramona Parra and the poetry of Raul Zurita through a microhistorical and subaletrn methodological framework. In doing so, aspects of personal and group suffering emegre as well as a sense of collective action in the face of unrelenting subjugation at the hands of the Pinochet regime.

Cuando Salvador Allende fue elegido Presidente, advirtió que la suya no era una presidencia más en el poder, sino que se iniciaba la "vía chilena hacia el socialismo", que implicaba someterá la nación chilena a una "nueva moral", una "nueva economía", un "nuevo Estado" y una "nueva socie­dad", mediante un proceso irreversible, en donde no se aceptaría una "vuel­ta atrás".
Este trabajo identifica algunos de los trazos fundamentales de la revolución allendista y de la Unidad Popular desde una perspectiva bastante original: a través de los planeamientos que sobre ella formalizó el mismo Allende en sus discursos presidenciales.

Las interpretaciones históricas de la visita de Fidel Castro a Chile han tendido a remarcar el carácter polarizante y el intento de disputa del liderazgo socialista continental. Desde otra mirada, sin desconocer el impacto de su presencia, este artículo propone que esta visita se enmarca en la solidaridad e internacionalismo socialista, y que no significó una disputa o alteración de los discursos o correlación de las fuerzas de la izquierda nacional.

Se trata de un trabajo que que complementa El Yugo Zeta. Su objetivo es dar cuenta de la expansión de los grupos criminales que operan en Coahuila. Mismos que se divide en dos partes. En la primera se aborda la historia de los Zetas, desde sus orígenes y funcionamiento hasta la ruptura con el Cártel del Golfo y lo que sabemos de su situación actual. La segunda trata sobre la importancia estratégica de la región norte de Coahuila, las razones del arribo de los Zetas a la zona y algunas características de su funcionamiento en la región.

In 1946, while demonstrating in support of a group of striking nitrate workers, a twenty-year-old female communist named Ramona Parra was shot to death by police in Santiago, Chile,[i]in what has come to be known as the Bulnes Square Massacre.A product of political marginalisation, the details of Parra's life are sketchy. But for fleeting mentions in art history books she is otherwise a mystery.[ii]Her death, however, has had a far-reaching significance, for she became and remains a martyr symbol of the Chilean struggle against oppression. In particular, her name was proudly taken to identify the artistic movements of the muralist brigade of the Chilean Communist Party (CCP), the Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP) in 1968.[iii] On September 11,1973, Chile, and with it the CCP, was thrown into turmoil. The country that homegrown poet Pablo Neruda once described as a 'long petal of sea, wine, and snow' was transformed from Latin America's foremost social democracy under Salvad...

El Movimiento Campesino Revolucionario (MCR) se constituyó en septiembre de 1970, poco después de la elección de Salvador Allende como Presidente de Chile, en las provincias de Malleco y Cautín de la actual región de la Araucanía. El movimiento incorporó tanto a mapuches como a campesinos pobres no mapuches, aunque sus principales dirigentes eran mapuche (Railaf 2006: 61, 102). En su constitución y desarrollo posterior, desempeñaron un papel central estudiantes universitarios del Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), al que se sumaron jóvenes de origen mapuche, pero ningún militante del MIR pudo prever la amplia acogida que tuvo este movimiento social entre los mapuches y los campesinos de la región (Bastías 2009).