Partido Socialista de Chile

(PS)

   / Socialist Party of Chile

   Founded in 1933, the PS provided an option for leftists opposed to the strong Soviet influence over the Partido Comunista de Chile (PC, Communist Party of Chile). The PS was divided from the beginning. Some members were committed to taking power through peaceful means; others called for armed struggle. After the Cuban Revolution, the party drifted to the left, and in 1967 it proclaimed itself Marxist-Leninist. Yet divisions persisted into the years of the Unidad Popular (UP, Popular Unity) government of President Salvador Allende Gossens (1970–1973). Carlos Altamirano, the party secretary-general, advocated mass rebellion; Clodomiro Almeyda Medina, a socialist and high official in the UP government, urged moderation. After the 1973 military coup, the party, owing to its reputation for militancy, became a target of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA, Directorate of National Intelligence), the secret police.

   As PS leaders disappeared or were exiled, the party broke into more than a dozen factions. Altamirano and Almeyda Medina, both in exile in East Germany, competed for control of the party, and, by the late 1970s, had pulled it in opposite directions. Altamirano, rejecting his earlier militancy, now renounced violence and favored social democracy. Almeyda Medina, in contrast, moved from reformism to militancy. The Altamirano camp—later under the leadership of Carlos Briones, interior minister in the UP government—aligned itself with the mainstream coalition Alianza Democrática (AD, Democratic Alliance); the Almeyda Medina camp, under the Marxist-Leninist banner, aligned itself with the leftist coalition Movimiento Democrático Popular (MDP, Popular Democratic Movement). By 1988 the Almeydistas moved to the center, joining in the “no” vote against eight more years of rule by Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.