And, more than five decades later, they more than deserve to be told in the form of fragments of that broken time of a revolutionary experience that did not come to fruition. They explain the joy of a people standing tall that can be admired on the glossy paper of Armindo Cardoso’s photographs or in the Patricio Guzmán’s documentary films. They mark those historical moments when everything seems possible, when humiliation, state violence and exploitation can be overthrown. These experiments in self-organisation, although sometimes limited, are the essence of Chileanity. The popular river that overflowed everywhere during those thousand days was the smile of the workers of the Yarur textile factory occupying their factory, it was the soundtrack of the songs of a jubilant people cheering the comrade-president in the Plaza de la Constitución, it was the contours of a popular power that confronted big capital and the sabotage of the extreme right and it was the radicalism of the Mapuche people who broke the barbed wire fences to reclaim the land usurped from their people by colonisation.
To retrace the steps of the Popular Unity is to caress with your hand the history of a continuum of multiple social, worker, peasant, student and struggles of ordinary people that suddenly burst into a scenario until then monopolised by an oligarchy accustomed to reigning over Chile.
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Beyond the intense debates of the time and the omnipresent figure of President Salvador Allende, the strength of the Chilean process lies in those from below, those without voice who became essential protagonists of this budding revolution, whose creative energy, certainly full of contradictions, was decapitated on September 11, 1973. Starting in 1969, the parties that formed the coalition that came to be called Popular Unity proposed a strategic path that, although considered reformist by the extra-parliamentary left, claimed to be original: electoral, institutional, non-armed, but also anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and socialist. The legalist and revolutionary commitment of the Chilean left radiated throughout Latin America and once again put ideas such as the distribution of wealth and the necessary nationalisation of natural common goods at the center of the debates, proclaiming the reconquest of national sovereignty for a nation of the Third World against Yankee imperialism, claimed the right to development and democracy from a perspective of rupture with the dominant order and (re)posed the question of the place of the bourgeois State in the transition to socialism. The Chilean road to socialism lasted barely a thousand days (from November 1970 to September 1973), but it profoundly transformed the country, its social relations, its political imaginaries, and its vision of the future. But Chile was not only a country of tragedies: the first years of the 1970s were above all those of an extraordinary popular and (pre)revolutionary process that shook the established order. Today, these memories of repression, exile and struggle for the defense of human rights continue to mark our images of this country in the Southern Cone. The Chilean people, their struggles and their resistance, have been at the heart and in the mobilisations of many solidarity organisations around the world. The images of the presidential palace of La Moneda burning, the terrified looks of the prisoners in the National Stadium of Santiago and the sinister dark glasses of General Pinochet remain recorded in our retinas and in our collective memory. Fifty years have passed since the coup d’état of September 11, 1973. Then, starting in 1990, a slow and partial democratisation took hold that continued to prolong numerous authouritarian legacies and a violently unequal socioeconomic system. After having experienced an attempted democratic transition to socialism (1970-1973), the country experienced the violent establishment of a civil-military dictatorship (1973-1989) that anticipated the advent of a new logic for the world: that of neoliberalism. Chile, that vast strip of land sandwiched between the Pacific and the Andes, a world where the world ends, as described by the writer Luís Sepúlveda, illustrates with its recent history the turbulence of the short 20th century.
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