Book Reviews

Comm unists, since the deposition and death of Allende, have been assiduous in their attempt to make a martyr out of him. The myth goes that General Pinochet, the head of the Chilean army, and his junta colleagues from the navy, the air force and the carbineros, or national police, snuffed out a promising experimen t in trying to take a peaceful road to socialism. There was to be a "revolution within the form" of democracy. Allende, so the Communists will tell you, was on his way toward success without interfering with freedom of the press or the right of pluralistic interests to support their own views in the give-and-take of parliamen tary battle. The truth, as a remarkable book called Chile: The Balanced View, edited by Francisco Orrego Vicuna (University of Chile Institute of International Studies, Santiago, PO. Box 14187, Section 21) makes plain, is that Allende dug his own grave. Chile: The Balanced View is not the work of partisans. Published in both Spanish and English, it consists largely of articles by such respected U.S. and British scholars and journalists as Robert Moss of the London Economist, Paul Sig mund of Princeton University, Edward Glab of the University of Texas, William Ratliff of the Stan ford Hoover Institution, James Theberge of Georgetown University and Markos J. Mamalakis of the University of Wisconsin.

A Radical Plan What happened in Chile was the inevitable consequence of Allende's attempt to ruin the middle classes as a prelude to bringing off a radical socialist golpe. When he assumed power Allende had a foreign exchange balance in the Treasury. With this balance as his cushion, Allende decided he had time to bU,ild an absolute majority (he had been elected in a parliamentary run-off after achieving a thirty-five per cent popular vote) by subsidiz ing consumption throughout a wide stratum of the people who would be called "shirtless ones" in the neighboring Argentine. By arbitrarily defining any company that had $500,000 capitalization as a "monopoly;' Allende moved boldly to take over practically the whole of Chilean industry. He wiped out unemployment by loading the payrolls of banks and steel com1976 CHILE: THE BALANCED VIEW 573 panies and the expropriated mining sector. Wages were raised without regard to productivity. Anaconda and Kennecott, which had been mining copper on a partnership basis with the previous Chilean governments, were told to skedad dle. They would get no money for their property.

The Christian Democratic gov ernment of President Eduardo Frei had already started a land "reform" before Allende took power. It hadlnot been a success. But Allende made things much worse by putting peas ants into collectives and failing to provide them with such mundane things as guidance, fertilizer, seed and machinery. Once the plantings that had been done under Frei had been exhausted, Chile had little locally grown food. In 1973, the last Allende year, Chile had to import $600,000,000 in grain, meat and other food from abroad. Wild Inflation With the payrolls loaded with uneconomic employees at high wages, with the copper miners tak ing it easy, and with queues lengthening at th.e markets, Allende found himself in the middle of a rip-roaring inflation. He had told Regis Debray, the French fol lower of the guerrilla Che Guevara, that his commi tmen t to a "peace ful" revolution was merely tactical, and he had said he was not "President of all the Chileans." His obvious duplicity had caused the Christian Democrats, Chile's big center party, to desert the coalition that had put him in power. When the truckers, most of them small businessmen who owned one or two trucks, struck to forestall their incorporation into a state-owned agency, it really paralyzed the coun try.