Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos (Oct 2024)
Dos nuevos paradigmas para renovar la historia de la Unidad Popular (1970-1973): la “revolución desde abajo” y la dimensión “inter-americana”
Abstract
The commemoration of the 50 years since the coup d’état in Chile was accompanied by a debate over the necessity of better understanding the distinct facets of the government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973). For decades, inevitable political considerations blocked a multidimensional comprehension of the Unidad Popular (UP), feeding binary narratives and mythological accounts. Traditional historiography has adopted an institutional perspective, focused on the system of political parties and the role of the most visible protagonists. In the international sphere, a key dimension of UP foreign policy, closer to third worldism than to adherence to the Socialist block, has been overshadowed. Fortunately, over the past decade access to new sources (including oral history) has opened up new interpretations that have complicated the portrayal of the "Chilean route". This essay centers on two new tendencies: the “revolution from below”, that has allowed us to recover the roll of actors and structures neglected by institutional histories. Through relatively autonomous actions, such as industrial cordons, indigenous communities and peasant organizations, among others, were able to deploy a mobilization parallel to official actions, radicalizing the program of the “Chilean revolution”. The second paradigm is the “inter-American” dimension of the international insertion of the UP, an approach that invites us to rethink the model of the Cold War and demystify functional narratives accounts that seek to ascribe each political experience to one of the two powers in dispute.
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