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REPORTS: CHILE |
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CHILE:
Communist
Party in Decline Risks Losing Youth
Leaders
Gustavo
González
SANTIAGO, May 16 (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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