Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

CHILE: Communist Party in Decline Risks Losing Youth Leaders

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, May 16 2003 (IPS) - Chile’s Communist Party (PC), one of the country’s strongest political forces until Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’etat, has been unable to reverse a decline that has dragged on for decades, and is now facing the risk of losing its main youth leaders.

Although the Chilean PC, led by former legislator Gladys Marín, has seen a decline at the polls, it remains faithful to orthodox Marxism-Leninism, unlike Communist parties in Europe, Asia and the rest of Latin America, which have reshaped themselves along Social Democratic lines or simply dissolved since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

Some 30 leaders of university student federations are now in open rebellion against the party’s governing body, over which Marín presides. Their likely break with the PC would have a severe impact on the party’s presence among the young, one of the few areas of society where it still has some strength.

Jorge Pavez, the charismatic president of the Colegio de Profesores (Chile’s teachers’ association), was expelled from the party in March by Marín, who accused him of ”divisionism” after he created the Democratic Social Force (FSD), which is backed by the young ”dissidents” in the party.

Pavez was the most important of the Communist trade union leaders, given the fact that the Colegio de Profesores, one of the largest unions in Chile, represents the 120,000 educators in the country’s 9,000 public, or publicly-subsidised private, primary and secondary schools.

The young Communist leaders who joined the FSD are headed by Julio Lira, the president of the Federation of Students of the public University of Chile (FECH), the country’s oldest and most influential university.

Several former presidents of FECH also back the FSD, as do student leaders from various other universities.

The PC governing body warned its members that it saw membership in the party and in the FSD as incompatible. But it called the students to engage in talks, without adopting sanctions against them.

The national university student leader in the Communist Youth league, Marcos Barraza, reported that the rebellious student leaders were not dissuaded at the league’s meeting on May 10, and that they refused to quit the FSD, while defending their right to remain members of the party.

But in the name of the PC governing body, Barraza once again underlined the ”incompatibility” of belonging to both the party and the FSD.

The FSD ”movement lacks a broad will to integrate the social and political worlds. In that context, our Communist youths would be excluded,” he argued.

But that argument was rebutted by Roco, one of Chile’s most popular youth leaders and a former president of FECH, in a letter of support for the movement created by Pavez.

Roco said that in few other countries in the world had ”neo- liberal” free market policies been applied more strictly and widely than in Chile, which meant that all possibilities for developing a social movement with a strong grassroots base should be explored.

”Penalising, sanctioning or stigmatising our members for trying to forge alternative paths in today’s difficult situation in Chile is a supreme stupidity and an enormous incongruity,” said Roco in his protest against Pavez’s expulsion.

Over the past 15 years, the PC has lost ”thousands of compañeros who have preferred to go home or to channel their struggles and abilities” through other forces, said Roco.

Chile’s Communists were the main promoters of the alliance with Socialists, Social Democrats, and left-leaning Christian Democrats that gave rise to the Popular Unity movement, whose Socialist candidate, Salvador Allende, won the presidency in the 1970 elections.

As part of that alliance, the PC won nearly 15 percent of the votes. But the bloody 1973 coup that overthrew Allende unleashed fierce repression against the Communists, the Socialists and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR).

During Pinochet’s regime (1973-1990), the PC’s old Socialist allies moved closer to the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, in order to pave the way for a peaceful transition to democracy.

The first big accomplishment of that new alliance was the dictator’s defeat in a popular plebiscite held in October 1988, which cleared the way for democratic elections.

The Communists, in the meantime, decided in 1980 to invoke the ”right to rebellion.” That led them to back the creation of the insurgent Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, which staged an unsuccessful attempt on Pinochet’s life in 1986.

In 1989, on the eve of the restoration of democracy, the PC sought to overcome its isolation by removing former senator Luis Corvalán as its secretary-general, a post he had held for 31 years.

Corvalán was replaced by another former senator, Volodia Teitelboim, a writer, who said at the time in a clandestine press conference that there would be no more ”secretary-generals for life” in the PC, and that his party would seek to reinsert itself in Chilean politics, even though it was still outlawed at the time.

In the 1989 elections, the Communists and other leftist forces banned by the dictatorship backed Christian Democratic presidential candidate Patricio Aylwin, who represented the centre- left Coalition for Democracy and defeated Pinochet’s candidate, Hernán Büchi, by a wide margin.

In the 1993 elections, the PC headed an alliance of smaller leftist forces whose presidential candidate was Catholic priest Eugenio Pizarro.

Pizarro took around six percent of the votes, while the Christian Democratic candidate of the ruling Coalition for Democracy, Eduardo Frei, scored a landslide victory with 58 percent of the votes.

The alliance of small leftist parties failed to win any seats in parliament because of the way the electoral system put in place by Pinochet operates. Under that system, only two candidates per voting district are elected to each house of Congress.

By then, Teitelboim was the largely symbolic president of the PC, and Marín, who led the ”hard-line” sectors of the party, was secretary-general.

Marín was the party’s presidential candidate in the 1999 elections, in which she won just 3.19 percent of the votes, half of the share gained six years earlier by Pizarro. The runoff vote, in January 2000, was won by current President Ricardo Lagos, the Socialist candidate of the governing centre-left coalition.

”In any other party, the leaders resign when they suffer a thrashing at the polls,” a member of the Communist Youth told IPS. ”But in the Chilean PC, it is the other way around, and the current that Gladys heads has gained strength in the internal party apparatus, and controls the Central Committee and Political Commission.”

The most flexible PC leaders, like Pavez, were sidelined, and Teitelboim himself chose to distance himself from politics and return to his ”old love” of writing. He won the National Literature prize in 2002.

Last year, a PC national congress ratified changes to the party’s statutes that reassigned much of the secretary-general’s authority to the president – a post that Marín had held since the previous year.

Local political analysts point out that the rebellion of the young Communist leaders is not only a clash over the specific issue of the FSD, but is based on a much broader questioning of an inflexible governing body that blocks the ascent of new leaders.

”I have the feeling that the Communists are not looking forward. They are stuck in the past,” Paulette Dougnac, a 20-year- old journalism student at the University of Chile, told IPS.

”It is only natural that their youngest leaders would want to go with Pavez, who is setting forth new proposals and ideas,” added Dougnac, who describes herself as leftist but has never voted for any member of the PC in the university elections.

 
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