Volume 20, Number 8 · May 17, 1973
Letter from Chile
By Richard Fagen
The Chilean election in March for all 150 members of the lower house and twenty-five of the fifty members of the Senate was preceded by even more threats, insults, and prophecies of triumph and doom than are usual here, and that is saying a lot. The highly partisan and uninhibited press, whether supporting the government or the opposition, was filled with political news and propaganda; campaign songs pushed ballads and soap operas off the radio, walls glistened with newly painted slogans. The end of Marxism and Allende, the victory of the masses, the reconstruction of the nation were all claimed as possible—and necessary. The rhetoric came close to reality, for if the electoral coalition of Eduardo Frei's Christian Democrats and the right-wing Nationalists (in addition to three much smaller parties) had been able to win a two-thirds majority in the Congress, they might have rolled back the program of the Popular Unity government and perhaps even impeached President Allende. Even the Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR) broke its longstanding rule against participating in the bourgeois electoral game and backed some candidates of the Socialist party.
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