Partido Comunista de Chile

(PC)

   / Communist Party of Chile

   Founded in 1922, the PC established a strong electoral base among the working classes. Though the party was subject to repression—it was banned from 1948 to 1952—it had by the 1970s grown to 250,000 members, becoming the largest communist party in Latin America. The PC exerted a moderating influence on the Unidad Popular (UP, Popular Unity) coalition of President Salvador Allende Gossens and was committed to achieving revolution through peaceful means. After Allende Gossens was deposed in the 1973 coup led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the party debated the reasons for the fall of the UP government. At first it blamed the militant stance of the Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR, Movement of the Revolutionary Left) and the Partido Socialista de Chile (PS, Socialist Party of Chile) for the UP’s loss of mainstream support. In 1977, however, it blamed the Allende government itself for not defending itself militarily—a charge leveled by radical leftists and the Soviet Union. Yet the party continued its policy of nonviolence in the belief that the government of Pinochet Ugarte would fall on its own. That policy would soon change. As senior party leaders were arrested, they were replaced by a younger generation committed to removing Pinochet Ugarte by force. In 1980 the party announced a strategy of popular protest that did not exclude violence. Some members resisted the shift and resigned in protest, but others fell in line, emboldened by the fall of the Shah of Iran and the success of the leftist revolution in Nicaragua, both in 1979. The hard-liners were now in command, and in 1983 the party gave rise to the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR, Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front), an urban guerrilla organization. Still, the party recognized the need for a broad alliance and reached out to other opponents of the regime. But its refusal to rule out violence alienated many in the Alianza Democrática (AD, Democratic Alliance), a multiparty coalition formed in 1983 to seek a negotiated return to democracy. Excluded from the AD, the PC formed the Movimiento Democrático Popular (MDP, Popular Democratic Movement), a militant left-wing coalition.