Cosmonaut interviews Chilean-French economist and veteran of the Chilean Radical Left Claudio Jedlicki. The interview has been translated from Spanish and mildly edited for clarity.
Claudio Jedlicki was born in Santiago de Chile in 1946 and began his activism in the early 60s in the Socialist Youth. During his university studies at the School of Economic Sciences of the University of Chile he participated in the creation of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). At the same time, he worked at the Institute of International Studies in Santiago de Chile, and during the period of the Popular Unity government exercised his professional activities at the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research, where he worked until the coup d’état. He was briefly imprisoned at the Military School in October 1973, and shortly after went into exile in France with his wife. There, he worked with Greek-French economist Arghiri Emmanuel until Emmanuel retired, and he has continued to work on economic problems since.
Here, we interview Claudio on his experiences as a young militant in Chile.
Q: To start us off, you were born in Chile, yet you have not lived there for most of your life. This is because of the coup, correct?
A: Yes, I grew up there and I left after the coup, for several reasons. First, my partner was French. She had come to Chile during the Popular Unity government and she did not have the proper paperwork, because there was generally no need for hassles. And second, during the period of Popular Unity in practice I did not have a very militant position within the MIR, for the simple reason that my role in the party was… my relationship to the party was limited to helping within my means to procure infrastructure for illegal actions, so to speak, and these were suspended during the period of Popular Unity when Allende won.
The MIR had even decided to join the Presidential Guard for more or less a year, until it was replaced by people from the PS. Bank robberies were suspended. Of course, there are other types of illegal actions such as running fences to recover Mapuche lands, occupying factories, etc. Let’s say that they are not totally legal things, but it is not the same. As I said, I was in the area of how the party was financed until the moment when Popular Unity won. Even then, the actions were suspended about four months before the victory because it was seen that Allende had the possibility of winning and they did not want to hinder the possible victory with our behavior and Allende’s reaction to the MIR.
Because look, until 73 the MIR did not even call to vote for Allende. Myself, if they had asked me at the beginning of 73, for whom are you going to vote, I would answer that I am not going to vote or I am going to vote blank. But, in the end, the party never officially decided to support Allende, but decided to give freedom of action to its members. But the great majority decided to vote for him.
Q: And how exactly was the MIR formed? What was your experience in the formation of the MIR? I remember reading something that said you were one of the founding members.
A: Yes, I am a founding member. But only because I participated in the first congress where the MIR resulted from a merger between the Marxist Revolutionary Vanguard and the Popular Socialist Party. And they called for a unification congress, and I participated in that congress. In that sense I am a founding member, but no, I was not a founding leader.
Q: I see, and how did you get there? What did you do before the MIR?
A: Let me make an effort to remember. Let’s say I came to the left and to leftist ideas with the Cuban revolution in the 1960s. I was 14 years old. From the revolution onwards I became interested in politics and, well, I was quite influenced by the Cuban line. And by a certain family inheritance. My father had been a Trotskyist militant, so I had a bit of that affiliation.
I was in a private school and then I spent the last two years in a Liceo fiscal [Public High School]. And there I joined Allende’s Socialist Party. Soon after, part of the Youth left the party and joined the Marxist Revolutionary Vanguard, which is the party that merged with the PSPC to create the MIR in 1965.
And shortly after joining the PS, 63-64, I don’t know exactly, I went to the Vanguard. There was already a presidential election in 1960, which Allende lost, against the Christian Democracy.
Q: And at that time, that is, in the MIR, you told me that you were in the underground apparatus.
A: Yes, but not yet at that time. I was 14 or 15 years old. At that time I was just another militant. And at that time the Vanguard was controlled by some old Trotskyists. Then it was a study party, in which the meetings were with the general secretary, it was a small group.
We had about fifty members in all of Santiago, and there were the comrades from Concepción, where there was also a section. And they began to grow quite strongly. There was Miguel Enrique, Luciano Cruz, Miguel Enrique’s brother, Eduardo Enrique… In any case, there were the cadres that were going to control the MIR from 1968 onwards.
Even during the Merger Congress of 1965, when the MIR was created, the people of Concepción did not take power. They left power to the old Trotskyists. But 2 or 3 years later Miguel Enrique took leadership and the Trotskyists left shortly after.
Q: So the MIR at that time took another political attitude.
A: Of course, that is when we stopped being a party that talks and talks in meetings, and actions began, even clandestine ones, since then, there was already a part of the party that went underground.
Q: But the clandestine period didn’t last that long, if you say they stopped in the 70s or just before the elections….
A: That period effectively lasted two years. It must be mid 68, 69 and part of 70. Because Allende was elected on September 4, 1970 and as I said, more or less in the month of May the party must have calmed down a little to facilitate Allende’s election.
Q: Did they at that time have contact with other international groups? At that time there were many exiles in Chile.
A: Yes, indeed, there was contact because in Chile there were quite a number of exiles, mainly from the Brazilian dictatorship. There were Argentine exiles, and there were those from other countries, such as Guatemala, but the most representative and numerous were the Brazilians, followed by the Argentines.
Q: And did the MIR have international contacts?
A; Well with the Cubans, mainly. Fundamentally since Miguel took power. And well, with the Cubans there was quite a good understanding. There were some differences at some point, but that was not very public. When Che started the guerrilla in Bolivia, he began to recruit militants in Chile. And we did not like that very much. Because well, because they don’t take away the people who are willing to continue fighting. We are willing to do the same thing here.
Then there were small differences, but the understanding was quite great at that time as well. Fidel publicly disagreed with the Chilean CP which was for the peaceful way [to socialism].
Q: If I remember correctly, the Chilean CP was even more pacifist than Allende.
A: More peaceful than Allende, and of course more Stalinist than Allende. These people were terrible. Well, now I’m talking like the Trotskyists totally. As we used to joke, and it is an almost true irony, that when they said it was raining in Moscow they went out with umbrellas in Santiago. No, they took orders, they were totally subordinated to them. They said one thing, and if by chance the Soviet CP or Brezhnev said the opposite, they changed their position.
And I don’t know, the militants were terrible. I mean, before opening their mouths, they read in the newspaper to see what was the line of the day. And, for example, many things were forbidden for them. I had a friend who was a Communist militant, but he used to meet with me in a semi-clandestine way because in the party he was forbidden to come and have a coffee on the way to the university school where we studied. He was terribly sectarian, to the point that at one point they killed a comrade. And there Allende intervened, because he said that here a civil war was being waged between the Communists and the MIR and that was unacceptable. And well, there was a process of at least a little mutual respect, so as not to reach a phase of inadmissible confrontation.
Q: And what kind of people were members of the Communist Party? How did they end up there? What were the members’ backgrounds (workers, trade unionists, university students…)?
A: The CP was fundamentally a workers’ party. Well, there were some intellectuals, of course. People from liberal professions, there were some lawyers, architects, etc., but the base of the party was fundamentally workers. And there were quite a few students, university and high school students. But fundamentally the working class, employees, and a category that existed in Chile in those years, and that well still exists, but in those years it was significant, are people we called the pobladores.
They were not really workers because they did not work in industry. They were people who had recently been expelled or had expelled themselves from the countryside because they could not even earn enough to eat. In the city they lived in towns that we called callampas [mushrooms] because they grew like mushrooms grow. They would appear here from one day to the next, with a few boards and some tarpaulins to put on top of the roof so they wouldn’t get wet. And there they lived, but in a miserable way and worked from time to time in marginal jobs.
So those were the pobladores, of course, and later in the MIR we also had pobladores as members.
Q: So, the MIR, what kind of social base did it have more or less?
A: Likewise to the Communist social base it was the worker, working in industry, unionized, specialized, professional, and whatever else you want. But there was also a part that was somewhat marginal, perhaps they were not militants, but they followed communist leaders or leaders who did work with the pobladores.
In Chile at the time, to be a militant was not necessarily to carry a party card. One identified oneself with a party, went to the meetings that were held there in the cell that was in the neighborhood one lived in and, well, one could consider oneself a militant. It was not necessarily people who were up to date with their contributions and taxes. Whether in the Communist Party or in the MIR.
Q: How did things change when Allende arrived? In other words, how did the people in the MIR feel about Allende’s victory?
A: Of course, that totally changed the line. And then the MIR had no great illusions about the program of Popular Unity, but it tried to promote and deepen it. To give an example, Allende proposed agrarian reform, which had already begun with Frei. Well, then he went and took agricultural land. And then the MIR, by its presence, encouraged the peasants, forcing the government to intervene in that point and to start agrarian reform. In other words, it accelerated the process far beyond what was intended.
And in the factories the same thing. The workers occupy a factory, they throw out the owner and the manager and the government has to intervene and immediately appoints an interventor, because the industry is then taken over. And well, they begin to operate in companies with interventors and without the capitalist owner. Then the process of nationalization also deepens and many of these companies are even nationalized or remain in this, let’s say, in this situation of being intervened without knowing very well, in which, well, the controller decides everything and the workers, of course, organize themselves without the owner. So, although they belong to the state, let us say, it is the workers who run them.
And so, on all fronts, on the front of the pobladores, for example, who do not have a house, there are occupations of land more suitable for building. The MIR promoted the seizure of those lands and leads occupations in which many pobladores come and so the party was growing a lot. And of course among the students, a front of rebellious student officials was created both at secondary and university level, although the latter already existed.
It began to develop on all those fronts which are the front of, let us say, a new front of organized workers, of semi-marginalized pobladores, of students fundamentally, and of peasants. Within the peasants there was the problem, which persists to this day in Chile and is a bit particular, of the Mapuches. Because, let us say, in a certain region of the country, they have claims that are very much their own, because their lands were stolen from them. They even have testimonies of some living Mapuches, they have testimonies of their parents or grandparents who were robbed of their land. So there is a desire to recover the land and a desire for retaliation.
Q: And what was the feeling at that time? Optimism? I remember watching the famous documentary The Battle of Chile, and it was like feeling that everything was going to explode.
A: Yes, there was, yes, there was a lot of optimism. It was not my case. It is not because I want to take credit, but it seemed evident that it was very… I, who was a little bit involved in that way, I knew that there was nothing here, there were no weapons, what were we going to do to face the army? I knew perfectly well… the Chilean Army parades at goose step. It was created by the Germans, all the officers went to train in Panama or to West Point in the United States.
I had no illusions, even though there were some generals there who appeared to be loyal to institutionalism. There was General Schneider… The right had even tried to generate a coup before Allende assumed the presidency. He won the elections on September 4, and it was only on November 4 that he assumed the presidency. There are two months in which the previous government continued and the president had the condition of being president-elect only. And during that period they tried to kidnap General Schneider and make it appear as an action of the extreme left to generate an insurrection of the military, but they failed and Schneider was killed.
Well, and that was a general who was in favor of respect for institutionality, as later there was General Prats and as Pinochet apparently presented himself for a certain time. When Prats resigns and Pinochet himself is named, Prats himself tells Allende to put Pinochet in that place, he seems to me to be trustworthy.
Q: Yes, I remember reading about that, that they trusted Pinochet. And well this is a common strategy. A lot of coups have been like that, put this general there, we trust him and then…
A: No, but institutionally, it isn’t even worth arguing. In the case of the Navy there was not the slightest doubt, the Chilean Navy always appeared openly right-wing or extreme right-wing. On the contrary, in the Army there were more middle-class people. So one could say that maybe they could escape because of class issues, but institutionally, as I said, they have a very clear ideology.
Q: Yes, you see that a lot in Latin America in the armies. Even if people from the lower classes enter, after four years, they are no longer on the side of the people.
A: And finally, they did have an interest, they were corporatists. So, if they had a coup, they would manage [to split the spoils]. But they made an alliance with the, let’s say, the extreme right. Because the existing liberalism at that time would not necessarily shock anybody. Especially after the left has itself converted to that liberalism. People like Felipe González I am talking about, for example. The Spanish PS and the PS in Latin America, the socialists of the world converted to that liberalism.
At that time there were, for example, even in Chile, after the coup d’état there were military men who, in spite of wanting to get rid of communists, Marxists, etc., were perhaps in favor of a more developmentalist position. There were some who were fascistic, that is to say, they were for a nationalist and fascistic line. Somewhat inspired by Franco, perhaps, in part, and so on. But there was another line of the military that made a pact with the extreme liberal right that had emerged at that time. There was a group of intellectuals in the Catholic University that we call the Chicago Boys, because most of them had gone to study in the United States with Milton Friedman. And they had extremely liberal conceptions. It is even said, and I think it is almost correct, that Chile was the first experience, followed by Thatcher and Reagan in the United States, of neo-liberalism, which really appeared in Chile in its maximum expression.
Q: Yes, although now it has calmed down a little. When the new Chilean Constitution was coming out of the Assembly, it was said that neo-liberalism was born in Chile, and now they were about to finally defeat it.
A: Of course, because Reagan came to power, practically at the end of the 70s, succeeding Carter. And Thatcher had arrived before that. But in Chile, the liberal line was defined in mid-1974, almost a year after the coup. It was taken there, without breaking completely with the ultra-nationalist sector of the Army. Pinochet took sides majorly, he began to appoint Chicagoans and left all the reform to them.
Q: And what do you remember about Allende? Was he as charismatic as he was portrayed? Did he have the people hypnotized?
A: He was a guy who of course had a lot of charisma. He was a guy who when he won the election it was his fourth presidential election. He had run in ’52 from ’58 to ’64 and ’70 and in ’70 he was elected. Allende had an extraordinary memory and above all to recognize people, he traveled all over Chile and he remembered and saw people and remembered their names, which had a lot of effect.
And he was really quite an honest guy, he was a doctor but he didn’t make his living as a private practice doctor, he was an autopsy doctor. So as a doctor he was a state employee. He was a relatively modest guy, he lived in modest conditions. He had a house there, in a bourgeois neighborhood, but he had a rather cute house, as I would say. It was no more than 100 m2 Allende’s house, and he had another house on the beach where my family also lived. I knew him a little bit. And well, sometimes they made him pass for a bourgeois just to deceive the working class, but it was the same bourgeois who did that. Allende’s yacht, they said he had a boat there of 3 or 4 metres in which he went out alone, but the yacht he had was a dead dog’s [poor man] yacht.
He was a guy who was always a leftist and never changed his line. He always presented himself on the left, he said that he respected revolutions in other parts of the world, but that in Chile it was different. And he always said that and maintained it until practically the end. And when there were extreme situations, Allende always played it very honestly.
For example, when the remains of Che’s guerrillas reached the Chilean border, Allende was president of the Senate. And he himself was in charge of protecting those Cuban comrades and perhaps from other Latin American countries. They entered Chile, and he took them out and accompanied them to, I think it was as far as Easter Island, so that the Yankees would not kidnap them. Then he accompanied them on the plane, and they made them pass through Asia and not through the American countries. Since Chile has Easter Island and in the Pacific, he sent them there. So they went out that way, they went around the world until they reached Cuba. Allende took a gamble.
And when Allende was in government another action was that of Santucho’s Argentines, who broke out of prison, there was a massacre, they also hijacked a flight and arrived in Chile. Allende had managed to have quite good relations with the Argentine dictator Lanús, the military man, but who was less fascist and less murderous than the other military who had preceded him. Allende had come to have good relations with Lanús, and this complicated this a lot. But when this massacre took place in a prison, Allende said no, they were going to Cuba. And running the risk that Lanús would get angry and well, besides having the Yankees he would have a country like Argentina against him, which is as long as Chile and much stronger than Chile at that time.
As I tell you, he was a man that when one thinks of the leftist types of these times. No, no, no, no, Allende has nothing to do with them. They are capable of waking up at dawn talking to the right. No, Allende was not like that. He was indeed a Marxist social democrat. He was not a Leninist, he was a Marxist. He was a Mason, secular. But he was straight in his line. He was of the social democracy of the Nordic countries of the time. Perhaps that would have been the model to which he aspired. Perhaps a little more adapted to the situation of a country like Chile, which was poor and the poor were a much higher fraction of the population than they would be in the Nordic countries, yes. So necessarily with a situation of redistribution more important than the one that existed in those Nordic countries. But no, Allende was really an honest guy, and for that reason very respected. One had difficulties, really in opposing him in terms of character.
Q: I guess what you guys could tell him was look, grab some guns, there’s something coming, but you couldn’t tell him much more…
A: Maybe yes, maybe yes, in terms of the difference in the level of discussions. Like asking him, comrade, do you have any illusions that we are going to reach socialism through this path? But there were respectful relations with him. And well, when the MIR began to accelerate the process, Allende was not very happy. But each time he tries to maintain a little harmony in some way or another.
He had a daughter, I say had because she died, she committed suicide in Cuba. The daughter was a rather extreme leftist. I don’t know if she was really a MIR militant, but she served as a bridge with the MIR. And he had a nephew who is Andrés Pascal Allende, who was even the one who succeeded Miguel Enrique [in the MIR] when Miguel was killed. He was the son of a sister of Salvador Allende, Laura Allende. So let’s say, there were family channels with the presidency.
For example, if I speak just one example, my case in particular. There were people who knew that I was a MIRist, and I started working in an organization that depended on the Presidency of the Republic, it was called the National Council of Science and Technology, CONICYT, which was directed by Benigno, who was a socialist deputy, from the left wing of the Socialist Party. But he had no problem knowing that I was MIR, they didn’t know exactly what I did but I knew that they knew that I was more or less MIR. Because I didn’t say it publicly, but they knew it because it was known there in the Student Federation.
And even when there were elections and everybody knew each other that way. And they defended us from the CP. I, for example, tried at one point to enter to work in a ministry where the minister was a communist and they didn’t take me. From the economics school, and he said this one can’t, he’s counterrevolutionary. We were Hitler-fascists. All this the CP said or transmitted in this sectarianism of the 70s.
Q: And what particular memories do you have of the militancy of that time?
A: I can give you some examples, I was in contact with those who were really the ones who entered the banks and left with the money they had been able to rescue. But let’s say, they had enough confidence in me, because they would tell me, Claudio, we need an apartment, I don’t know, in two or three days. Because before leaving an operation, those who participated directly in the operation would concentrate in a department from which no one would leave, because if there was a snitch, no one would know anything else.
So, they asked me to make the contact to get the keys to the apartment, and to get cars. And I knew perfectly well that something was going to happen. I didn’t know where it was, I didn’t know when. I didn’t know exactly if it was a bank, but one presumed that it was going to be a bank. So I knew perfectly well what day there was going to be an operation, because it usually was the day that I had passed the keys, that I had already passed the car or that I had been summoned.
Because, for example, when a bank was robbed, although it was not necessarily done with cars that had been stolen, the car that had participated directly in the robbery was abandoned. After a quarter of an hour or 10 minutes they were abandoned and then they got into legal cars, took off their masks and appeared as ordinary people. And they would avoid being recognized because the police were already everywhere looking for them. So that’s how I participated in relay actions at that time.
There were also well, the episodes which are a bit hotter, the hottest ones, which one was not called to participate because in some other way the people who wanted to lend a car, an apartment, were not many. Personally, I was only halfway through my first year at the University, or second year. I didn’t have the means. So I did the things that they got me in one way or another, but it wasn’t lending an apartment.
The other good thing, but that was more during the Allende period, yes, it was something quite passive, but I had a lot of weapons in my apartment. That was where they came to hide the weapons. And I lived in the centre of Santiago, and everything seemed a bit reckless to me. I am in a neighborhood that after the coup was repressed and raided because there were many foreigners who had rented apartments because there had been a lot of rentals in that place. And so there were Brazilians living there.
The police had these Brazilians as trainers of the Chilean revolutionary. And, in addition, [after the coup] the Brazilian police also came to participate and to teach the Chileans how the tortures were carried out in the national stadium. So, well, they had the weapons, they came, they came in, they came out, and they came to do the maintenance.
I have other memories like that. But notice that in my memories I got shit more from the CP than from the right wing. When we ran in the first elections, in the student association of the University of Chile, the Communists, with the Christian Democrats, who were the ones who controlled the Federation of Students of Chile, the FECH. When the votes were being counted, [a CP member] grabbed the votes of MIR and tore them up like that. And one jumped on top of them and they beat us up like that. They were much more numerous than us, but after the following elections we began to come with some pobladores who came with knives and everything, so the balance of power began to change.
We had problems with the Communists, I mean, for us they were really enemies. I mean, they were the main obstacle we ran into. Even the Christian Democrats treated us better. They didn’t necessarily beat us. For the Christian Democrats we were, as I would say, the enemy, but with the others we were not only enemies, we were in love with the same person because, well, we disputed the same militancy. For us they were traitors to the left, and for them, we were provocateurs who played into the hands of the police.
Of course, of course, I remember getting the shit kicked out of me a couple of times by the communists. Two, three times. I even remember, during the Allende government, there was a demonstration in support of the government. And I was participating in the demonstration and some guys caught me and pulled me out. They said that the right wing, the extreme right-wing, was infiltrating, and they made me pass as one of them. They pulled me out right in one place, and I ran because it was very close to my office, and very close to my office is the French embassy, and I went into the embassy, so that this son of a bitch wouldn’t beat me up, yes. The policeman was there at the door, and I don’t really know if I stood next to the policeman there at the door, or if I went in, but the guys left.
Well, I also have a very early memory before the MIR, when I was in La Vanguardia we used to go out to sell the newspaper. It was in 1964, during the presidential campaign of 1964 we went out to sell the newspaper in which these old Trotskyist militants wrote, and we went to sell it at an Allende rally. I was caught once, they took all my newspapers and beat me up there, I had to leave. I should have been 15 or 16 years old, I wasn’t even very aware of everything I think. Let’s say, of the almost most critical situations I lived through were confrontations with the CP.
Q: What are your memories of the coup?
A: The day of the coup, I lived in downtown Santiago. And well, you turn on the radio, and I heard that the Navy had risen up, and soon after we began to see the planes bombing the city. In the tower where I lived there was about 1 km to La Moneda, and as I was on a high floor we could see perfectly what was happening, the airplanes… and well, the first thing the military did was to intervene in the radios. There were one or two left that were still controlled by people in favor of the government or even a radio controlled by the MIR, and that is how we kept ourselves informed.
But there, well, that’s one of the reasons. I wanted to explain that my party activity was such that I wasn’t, for example, I didn’t have a place to see what they were assigning me as a task, but it was more like somebody they were coming to, hey, we have this, we need this. And I had just gotten married recently. Well, married, she lived with me and had just recently arrived.
And we lived 50 metres from what was the central posta [urgent care] in Santiago. The posta was not in a hospital, they only treated emergencies. It was there, next to the tower. And that’s where the wounded from the coup began to arrive, so there was a lot of activity there in the department where we were. There were even two bullets in the glass. There was a bullet hole, it had broken the glass. They had entered the apartment because there were confrontations there. In my set of towers it was said that there were foreign terrorists. Well, I myself had Brazilian friends who lived there, etc.
Q: And from there you were detained? Or did you leave for exile on your own?
What happened to me was that about 10 days after the coup, I don’t remember the exact date, but it must have been around September 21 or 22, I was told to report for work. And I was under pressure. My wife said to me, hey, we haven’t done anything, so what’s going to happen to us? I told her, look, you don’t know who these sons of bitches are. But we showed up at my job, and she was working in the same office. And there we were arrested and I was taken away. Someone called the French embassy, as I said, the embassy was two or three blocks from where my office is. And a diplomat from the embassy came to pick her up, and they took her off the truck and took me.
They took me to the military school and there they detained us, they kept us there. Well, we got there and a rather funny thing happened there. There was a guy, he must have been, after captain, a major or something. This guy was not a savage. He wasn’t a brute. We were there, about 8 of us, those taken from the office. So the guy asks what are you? I said I am an economist. And he answered, why are they all so involved in this? The people from the Social Sciences, why do they all end up here? So there I started to give him a course, that when you study sociology or economics, you might have a little more progressive ideas than when you were a landowner or business owner. And I explained to him a little of what social science was, in which one understood the contradictions.
The captain was calm and satisfied. The guy was very surprised that there were more detainees with professions like that, already with higher studies coming from the field of Social Sciences than from other harder disciplines. And well, what happened there is that the same people who in our office had called the military, giving problems when we returned to work, etc., called to find out what was happening with us. So they told them, we are going to move them to the national stadium because here we don’t really have interrogation equipment, that is, interrogation and torture. And then they, the same people, told them that we were not dangerous enough for that. By that time everyone knew that the National Stadium had been transformed into a concentration camp, so they themselves began to reel in, as we say. They, who at the beginning had called the military saying that there could be danger if they did not come, now said that they were not so dangerous and could be released. So, the same thing they accused us of, they came at the end of the day with that at 6 or 7 o’clock in the evening to the military school. And what they told us is that they were going to summon us for an interrogation and that we were going to stay under house arrest.
And then, I immediately thought of making arrangements to leave. So I bought a ticket. I had a friend at a travel agency. I made it appear as a call ticket, that is, that it had been bought abroad. He also received a ticket that his father had bought for him, and we left already in mid-October. We left because I was totally out of the loop and I had no contact with the party during the month following the coup.
Q: And once you left, did you manage to regain contact with people?
Here, of course, yes. In the years not immediately after the coup, but in the middle of the years 67-68 we were already participating in… well, it is more difficult to talk there because there are things that have not passed through the amnesty like the cases in Chile. But, well, there were even activities in Mexico that were a bit illicit in order to finance themselves, and there were several things in Panama, where there were comrades.
And the other thing was the contacts that returned to Chile and people who left because, well, with international pressure there are people, there are detainees in Chile who manage to leave. Pinochet, because of the international pressure, accepted to expel them. He expelled them from Chile and expelled them with a passport that did not allow them to return to Chile, which had the letter L. And those people returned to Chile, after training in Cuba and some of them began to return to Chile. Well, and all that needed a whole apparatus. I had some contacts that participated then in all that matter, a little bit in the location of what had been my role… let’s say what they call the helpers.
Q: And now what is your relationship with Chile? I mean, I know that right now you are dedicated to the study of equal exchange and the theories of Arghiri Emmanuel.
Yes, I worked with Emmanuel from ’74 onwards, until he retired, it must be around ’82 or something like that. And shortly after that I moved from the laboratory where I was working with him, which was a Third World Institute called the Institute of Economic and Social Development, and I went to work in another institute. And there I started to work on European problems in the middle of the 80s. And I began to work on the problems of European integration and the monetary problem, of the single currency, etc., etc.
And then, in the mid 90’s, I left that institute, and there I went directly to work at the Institute of Latin American Studies. And there I started to work on the problems of integration in Latin America. These things of Mercosur and other processes, the FTAA. And I worked with researchers on this whole issue of integration processes in America. Now, this is working from a professional point of view. I am not going to say that I believed much in what I was studying. But well, you have to make a living somehow. That’s when I started to travel quite a lot to Latin America and in general I went around Chile. Although Chile does not participate in the integration process. Chile they were, as I wrote an article once called Chile, the Englishmen of Latin America. That is, they looked at the integration process from the outside, so they wanted to integrate, but up to the free trade phase, but the more integrative phase as a Common Market, or a project even with a common currency and all that, that was, it was totally out of the Chilean neoclassical monetarist schemes. So, I started working and from then on, I went to Chile. I made contact with universities. The return was no longer a problem.
I go back a bit, for anecdotal reasons. In 1978, I was in France and my father had passed away. December ’78. My mother asked me please not to go to Chile. I didn’t really want to go either. And then in ’79, I decided to go to Chile, a year after that. Because there had been one or two comrades who were in more or less compromised situations, more or less like mine, who had gone to Chile and had not had very complicated problems.
And I went there to see my mother. And one day I realized that I was being followed by the police. And I was with my wife and my daughter who was born in France and was one year old. And then, there were four guys in a car and I stopped to buy something in a place. We had gone for a walk towards the mountains next to Santiago. I parked to buy something and they also parked further ahead. I turned around and went back to my mom’s house. I was with my daughter and my wife.
Well, the thing was that in the same building that I lived in, a cousin lived there. And my mother is of French origin, so she alerted France, and they didn’t go into the apartment, they stayed down there. And there instead of one policeman there were three. That is, police, it was the DINA, Pinochet’s police. They drove around in camouflaged cars and guys with a rough face. They were the DINA, the ones they had designated [for dirty work].
And this happened on a Saturday afternoon. So I stayed there in the apartment, a lot of people were alerted, and at one o’clock in the morning a car from the French Embassy came. It went into the basement of the apartment building where my mother lived and where I was staying. And we went down the elevator, with my wife and my daughter, and they took us to the French embassy. And from there I didn’t go out anymore, I entered the embassy and I stayed there.
Well, and then some things happened. The ambassador was not there, but the first attaché was there. So I started talking to some people, telling them what was going on. And at the end the first attaché says, hey, what the hell are you here for? I had French nationality, I had recovered my French nationality. And he says to me, well, and what did you come here to do, why are the police arresting you now that nothing is happening in this country? And yes, nothing good happened in the year 79. It was all over, and indeed it was not good. I had seen one or two friends who had been militants, but I did not have the slightest political activity.
And they were following me because they were following me, maybe to intimidate me, who knows. The thing is, then the guy says, well, in any case I reiterate one thing you should know, when they gave you your French passport. They must have told you. You are French on the whole earth except in the country where you have the other nationality. In Chile, I am Chilean. And, let’s say institutionally, they do not recognize my French nationality in Chile. Politically yes, because there is a relationship of forces. They do not want to get into a mess with the French, because even if they take me prisoner and catch me in Chile, the French government will intervene. Even though I am Chilean there.
And notice that in the embassy, my wife’s father had a brother who was the French ambassador at that time in Ireland. And the ambassador’s wife was the sister of my mother-in-law’s wife. They were two brothers married to two sisters. So my wife pretended to be the ambassador’s daughter. Which raised the temperature a little bit at the embassy. And they said, the best thing here is for you to leave. We arranged the tickets we had to leave Chile. And they found me a plane in a couple of days and I stayed those days at the embassy. What I can tell you is that those sons of bitches didn’t even feed me. I was passing money to one of the policemen. There were French plainclothes policemen in charge of security at the embassy, who would buy me sandwiches. I was in the embassy but in the office area. Not in the ambassador’s house, not in the house of any diplomat.
The day we left Chile arrived. There I left the embassy in the car, the embassy with my wife and daughter, and there it was really funny because there were the same policemen who had followed me waiting for us. But there were not three or four cars, I more or less felt like Allende in the car that Allende was in, because he was in a car here and one on each side because it was a way to avoid an attempt on his life. And I would tell the embassy guy that I was leaving and the other policeman that accompanied us, there they go, because they thought I was making this up. And, once at the airport, the French police, yes, they were very nice. The ones who behaved the best with me there at the embassy were the policemen. He escorted me to the plane, put me inside the plane and we took off.
And then I did not return to Chile until 1992, two years after the return of democracy, in quotation marks. Pinochet continued as commander in chief of the Army until the middle of the 90’s, although he was no longer president of the republic.
Q: Yes, the transition in Chile was similar to the Spanish transition, everything changes so that everything stays the same.
A: Yes, it was in Spain where the transition was prepared. I had a friend, a classmate of mine at the University, who was Chilean ambassador in Spain in the 90s. And there were meetings organized by my same ambassador friend, who well, I have nothing to do with him politically, [but I learned that] Spain and Felipe Gonzalez lent their support to the process of return to democracy. And the Chilean military came and began to talk about how things were going to be put in order. Well, at the end of the 80’s there were conversations.
Of course, before the agreement is reached there will be the plebiscite and the return [to democracy] in case we win the plebiscite. And there the Chilean military itself is divided because Pinochet at some point wanted to disregard the result of the plebiscite, but the commanders-in-chief of the Navy and the Air Force said no. They were even more lackeys of the Americans than he was. They were even more lackeys of the Americans than he was. Pinochet was more a slave to his own power. He did not want to lose, but there was part of the Army that wanted to follow. It was the directors of the empire who decided.
