Posted on 12/26/2003 8:15:05 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Chile's extreme militant left is reorganizing around the Patriotic Front Manuel Rodriguez -- or FPMR -- but only the Communist Party seems to be noticing.
Most politicians, concerned with their own pre-election internal squabbles, have ignored the process. But the communists, the only remaining legal institution of the Marxist left, paid considerable attention.
The government, kept informed by the Defense Ministry, apparently preferred to turn a blind eye to the rebuilding of the FPMR. Rocking the boat would have overshadowed the tributes that it lavished on former president Salvador Allende in September as part of its of national and international image campaign, which it tried to counterbalance by underwriting the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.
The FPMR was formed in 1983 from the CP's illegal armed forces in Chile. Created, trained and financed by Cuba two years before, the FPMR's "commanders" had their baptism of fire among the insurgent groups of Central America and soon they were deployed in Chile to challenge by force the military regime headed by general Augusto Pinochet. An effort that ended in defeat and flight.
The return to democracy in 1990 threw the "commanders" into the ranks of the unemployed. The murder in April 1991 of the right-wing senator of the Independent Democtratic Union, or UDI, Jaime Guzman and the kidnapping of the son of newspaper tycoon Agustin Edwards, rescued after the payment of more than $2 million, were the last two acts in which "frentistas" were involved.
The capture, trial, detention and conviction of the movement's leaders together with the internal control exerted by government intelligence services and the communist leadership greatly inhibited any further activities.
The FPMR is now nothing more than an illegal movement prone to sudden bursts of banner-waving street demonstrations. It began in September to organize its Congress, which in Marxist jargon must be understood as a series of meetings and exchanges of opinions that can go on for months or even a whole year.
The Congress has two key stages: the first, just started, corresponding to the work by groups at national and international level; and the decisive one, from which will emanate the main policies and the new direction of the organization. In the Congress three elementary issues will be analyzed to give life to the project:
Organic: the type of conceptual and material foundation on which the support structures will be built.
Social: dealing with the task of mass manipulation, the demands and the building of popular forces.
Military: principles and the organization of armed and unarmed confrontation.
With its emblematic leader, Gladys Marin, hospitalized in Havana after an operation for a malignant brain tumor; without slogans to attract the working "masses" and with few economic resources for survival, the Communist Party is currently faces a critical moment.
The Communist Party, representing less than 5 percent of the national electorate of 8 million people is the only -- and perhaps final -- bastion where the ideas of the legally recognized extreme Marxist-Leninist left are maintained.
An elections law grants representation only to those who get more than 33 percent of the electoral votes. The success of the neoliberal national economic model, or social market economy, are without doubt, the two main factors which marginalized the two trends historically associated with extremism: the CP and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left - MIR. Many of their followers are subsequently reorganizing around the FPMR.
The sudden onset of Gladys Marin's illness iinfluenced Chilean politics. In two months she was disabled, with little hope of living to the end of the year. A hardened fighter in her 60s, Marin is a unique case in Latin America.
She assumed control of the newly legally registered CP as soon as democracy was restored in 1990. Her party did not join in with the elected government of Christian Democrat President Patricio Aylwin. One reason was that they were not invited to join, but another more important reason was that the party's Central Committee thought that it would improve its chances by remaining independent and bettering its position at the expense of the neocapitalist government's mistakes. It was a fatal error of tactical strategy.
However, the CP's former partner in Allende's government, the Socialist Party fared very differently. Also openly Marxist-Leninist and an overt supporter of armed struggle prior to the takeover of the military regime, it succeded in staying in power without renouncing its doctrine.
The Socialist Party understood the historical moment and adopted democracy and the globalization of the economy as concrete facts, the binomial electoral system as a challenge to its competence and the government as the best instrument to effect changes on behalf of the poor.
Today that party is respected, has significant parliamentary representation and has shared power with two previous Christian Democratic Party presidents.
The current President, Ricardo Lagos is a Socialist Party member.
We should be so lucky. In the U.S. it is called the Democratic Party, has a lot more strength and is more solidly committed to Marxist ideals.
The Bolivians were, needless to say, sore losers and recently appointed an ADMIRAL to head their armed forces (Bolivia is now land-locked -- but has some "coastline" on Lake Titicaca.)
Anyway, Chavez' comments were not very well received by the majority of Chileans, but the Communists are nominally in favor of supporting the Bolivian claims...
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