Last June, Communist Party candidate Jeannette Jara’s stunning victory in Chile’s left-wing presidential primary led political observers to declare Chile the “great anomaly,” and possibly “the only country in the world where a Communist candidate wins in such a significant election.” A member of the Communist Party since age fourteen, Jeannette Jara grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Santiago. She came up in politics as a student and union leader, and studied law before entering government, serving in Socialist President Michelle Bachelet’s second administration in 2016. She has most recently served as Labor Minister under the current, center-left coalitional government of Gabriel Boric, where Jara introduced a forty-hour work week, historic increases in the minimum wage, and pension reforms, all measures that have made her a household name throughout Chile.

Jara achieved an overwhelming majority with 60.16% of the primary vote in last year' s presidential primary. Democratic Socialist candidate Carolina Tohá, considered an “establishment candidate” of the center-left Concertación and who had been favored to win, received 28.07%, while the candidate from President Boric’s left-populist Frente Amplio Party received a paltry 9.02%. The Far-right Republican Party candidate José Antonio Kast is currently expected to win in the November 16 general election despite his outspoken apologia for the fascist Pinochet military dictatorship, in which his brother was a key figure. Kast’s inflammatory anti-immigration and hard-on-crime rhetoric mirrors the hardening of right-populism across Latin America and globally.

While the Right is currently poised to win the election, the outcome of the Left’s presidential primary is significant nonetheless. The Communist Party’s surprising victory presents a pivotal development that could shape the political trajectory of the Chilean Left into the future. After coming in and out of political power since Chile’s return to democracy in the 1990s, Chilean social democracy has floundered. Its weaknesses have been particularly evident in the wake of the Boric administration’s failure to successfully carry through the constitutional process that began after mass protests broke out in 2019 against widespread economic inequality and austerity, legacies of the eighteen-year-long military dictatorship.

By all accounts, Chile’s center-left appears to be in disarray, while the Communist Party has emerged with strong and sustained momentum. If this victory for the Communist Party really makes Chile a “great anomaly,” what can explain that anomaly? I believe the answer is to be found in the Communist’s Party’s long history. A historical view of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) demonstrates that its current strength derives not from recent tactical shifts, but from well-established organizational foundations and a long-term commitment to core political principles. Many on the Left internationally remember the Communist Party of Chile for remaining stubbornly committed to the "peaceful road to socialism” and thus holding back Chile’s socialist revolution under the Unidad Popular government from 1970-1973. I do not wish to suggest that such critiques are not worth engaging. Rather, in addition to contextualizing the Communist Party’s political strength today, I hope to share a fuller view of the PCCh’s history. I seek to highlight how the Communist Party nurtured a Marxist political culture that was capable of supporting the diverse and dynamic Chilean Left of the twentieth century. In my view, the PCCh is the party that is most capable of rearticulating an independent, organized, and bold working-class Left in Chile today.

Antecedents

“In a way, in Chile there was communism and anti-communism before the Russian Revolution,” writes Chilean historian Joaquín Fermandois.^[1] From its very inception at the end of the nineteenth century, and arguably to a greater extent than any other Latin American country, the Chilean labor movement developed closely alongside revolutionary ideologies that threatened foreign and domestic capital and Chile’s landed oligarchy alike. Chile’s four-thousand-mile littoral, dotted with seaports, allowed a native Chilean workers’ movement to tap into the international circulation of revolutionary ideas spreading across the world’s oceans at the turn of the twentieth century.^[2] In Chile’s isolated Northern nitrate exclaves, workers formed labor brotherhoods, or mancomunales, which organized workers to strike for better wages and working conditions. Employers and the state met these efforts with incredible violence. When the typographer Luis Emilio Recabarren traveled North he was struck by the slave-like conditions in which the miners lived, and began to help organize them by establishing worker organizations and newspapers. Increasingly disillusioned with the mainstream political parties with which he had been affiliated, Recabarren founded the Partido Obrera Socialista (POS) in 1912. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he traveled to Russia and returned “more convinced than ever” of the urgency of social revolution, “putting power into the hands of the people for the construction of a communist society.”^[3] On January 2, 1922, the POS became the Communist Party, and soon after joined the Third International.

The Communist Party (PCCh) was a fixture of Chilean politics for the next century and remains so to this day, distinguished by its steadfast adherence to Marxist-Leninist principles, organic roots in Chilean civil society, and keen ability to act upon Chilean reality on account of its disciplined party apparatus. From its beginnings, the Communist Party pursued a political program that encompassed both participation in Chilean political institutions (whenever the national political context allowed) and the construction of powerful movements from below.

The Communists built strong ties to blue-collar unions in industries such as nitrate, coal, and copper mining by championing struggles to improve workers’ material conditions. These ties translated into electoral success in government and the unions: the Communist Party regularly received 15% of the vote among the Chilean electorate leading up to 1973, and remained the majority party within the labor movement.^[4] The PCCh’s mass base in the unions, which had forged high levels of solidarity and discipline among the workers and their communities over decades of struggle, constituted a highly disciplined party membership.^[5] In turn, cultivating deep roots in organized labor allowed the Communists to broaden and deepen their political program by organizing in new sectors. Beginning in the 1940s, for example, Communist miners in Southern coal districts ventured into rural latifundios, large agricultural estates born of Spanish colonialism, to organize tenant farmers and agricultural wage laborers where the traditional ruling class parties had long held unassailable influence.^[6]

Though the Communist Party’s relative moderation and penchant for compromise with the political Center often came under scrutiny from its left flank, the PCCh has also been recognized as having been instrumental in promoting Left unity, “emphasizing the importance of respecting democratic principles and the right of dissent” within broad working-class coalitions.^[7] The Communists were often harsh when dealing with sectarians to their left whom they saw as ultra-left “extremists” and “adventurists.” Yet the PCCh was sincerely committed to building broad alliances, and played a key role in the formation of left-wing electoral coalitions and national labor organizations—most notably the Central Única de Trabajadores, the anti-capitalist labor confederation founded in 1953 that united a heterogenous working-class Left including socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, Trotskyists, Radicals, Christian Democrats, and later Guevarists inspired by the Cuban Revolution. The PCCh was the primary force behind the idea of the Unidad Popular coalition, which governed from 1970-1973.^[8] Through a dynamic process combining government-led programs with popular mobilization from below, the Unidad Popular coalition nationalized key industries long dominated by foreign and domestic monopoly capital, carried out radical land reform, and raised workers’ living standards.^[9]

Communist Party activities were not confined purely to electoral and workplace politics. The Communists helped organize working-class people politically in all areas of life through organizations like the Communist Youth, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Chilean Woman (MEMCh), and neighborhood organizations.^[10] From 1947 until the late 1960s, the Communists were the principal sponsor of land seizures by pobladores (shantytown dwellers), who were largely recent migrants to urban areas from the countryside. Through these land seizures, called tomas, pobladores occupied large agricultural estates on the outskirts of major cities to build homes and establish working-class communities. The beautiful 1972 album by Victor Jara, La Población, tells the story of one such toma that took place in 1967 on the outskirts of Santiago. Communists provided poblador communities with “critical logistical support, legal counsel, access to prominent legislators, and publicity.”^[11]

The Communists fostered a vibrant cultural life both inside and outside the Party, linked to what historians have called “a wider Marxist political subculture” that became an integral part of the day-to-day for many Chilean workers. Communists provided support for working-class sporting leagues, popular theater troupes, musical ensembles, and visual arts groups. The Brigada Ramona Parra, formed in 1968 among the Communist Youth and still around today, painted colorful political murals in urban areas. They developed a distinctive style depicting political iconography like workers, fists, and stars, alongside Chilean motifs like fields of wheat and the Andes mountains. The beloved singer-songwriter Víctor Jara was an active member of the Communist Party, as were other musicians of the Nueva Canción Chilena left-wing musical movement like members of Inti Illimani and Quilapayún.^[12] Within the Party, Communist militants moved through a common program for political and ideological formation, reading Marxist classics that initiated members into “a world charged with ideology and simultaneously connected with important cultural currents.” The Communist Party’s process of cadre formation was rigorous, but members have described the experience of joining the Party as one replacing “an atomized life with a life in a community that gave sense to their being.”^[13]

The violent US-backed military coup on September 11, 1973 fundamentally changed Chilean working-class life and politics forever. Thousands of workers were tortured, killed, and disappeared, with hundreds of thousands forced to flee into exile. The Pinochet dictatorship dismantled labor and left-wing political organizations through a combination of draconian political repression and neoliberal political-economic restructuring. The Communists had experienced previous periods of right-wing political repression, such as under the anti-Communist, McCarthy-esque “Law for the Defense of Democracy” which banned the PCCh from 1948-1958. These prior eras of repression had given the Communist Party experience in clandestine organization. Under severe and sustained repression by the military dictatorship, the Communists maintained a covert cell structure and played a vital role in building popular resistance among workers and pobladores “from the shadows.”^[14] Inspired by the 1979 Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, the PCCh adopted the “Política de Rebelión Popular de Masas” (Politics of Popular Mass Rebellion) strategy in the 1980s, embracing all modes of resistance against the dictatorship. This led to the creation of its armed wing, the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR), which engaged in urban guerrilla tactics against Pinochet’s ruthless military apparatus. Simultaneously, the PCCh organized massive national protests and strikes alongside a broad coalition of pro-democracy forces that ultimately crippled the dictatorship and led to its demise.

Left-wing groups outside of the PCCh, like the Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), also played critical roles in opposing the dictatorship in addition to the Communists. But other groups were often plagued by the pressures of the late Cold War. The Socialist Party, long afflicted with bitter intra-party divisions and splits, suffered from various fractures under domestic and international political duress and was thus weakened, with the right wing of the party consolidating power after the fall of the dictatorship.^[15] Meanwhile, the Communist Party’s sustained commitment to international Communism led by the USSR provided the PCCh with a common point of reference and inspiration that allowed the Party to remain unified and focused under persecution. Remaining devoted to the Moscow line throughout the Cold War thus had its difficulties, which the Communists stoically endured, but also its merits. In the end, the Communist Party of Chile showed that it was not willing to accept just any position from the Soviet Union uncritically: the Party could not accept Gorbachev’s reforms under Perestroika once these began to clearly disavow the Leninist model. The PCCh maintained its core ideological principles unaltered after the USSR’s dissolution.^[16]

The end of the dictatorship in 1990 coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union. Within an international context heralding a unipolar liberal order and the demise of Communism, Chile’s moderate pro-democracy forces concertedly pushed to marginalize the Communist Party in the transition to liberal democracy. The Communist Party remained outside the center-left Concertación coalition that came to govern Chile for the next twenty years.^[17] Though the excesses of military repression ceased with the return of democracy, the Concertación remained committed to the neoliberal economic and political framework Pinochet had introduced under his rule. The Concertación deliberately suppressed worker demands for greater political participation and stronger labor rights in the name of “governability.”^[18] Chile has thus become one of the most unequal countries on Earth.

Return

The PCCh has continued to maintain a significant presence on the local level, organizing in neighborhoods, unions, and among the youth. Through the nineties and aughts it formed a small left opposition to the Concertación, but it remained a marginal force in national Chilean electoral politics until 2009. That year it re-entered the electoral arena with the election of three Communist deputies.^[19] Then in 2014, it signed a pact to join the cabinet of the center-left Socialist President Michelle Bachelet. It was the social uprising of 2019 that opened the way for a renewed broad appeal of the PCCh, and set the stage for the Party’s role in forming the left-wing coalition Apruebo Dignidad, which would win Gabriel Boric the presidency in 2021.

With 45,000 members, the PCCh currently has the third-largest registered party membership in Chile and has ranked first in recent years. As one commentator notes, the PCCh’s strong neighborhood-level organization makes this number “significantly more meaningful” than the party registration numbers of the Center-Left and Right.^[20] A key figure in the Communist Party’s re-emergence in formal Chilean politics has been Daniel Jadue, the Palestinian-Chilean former mayor of Recoleta, who ran in the 2021 Left presidential primary and received 700,000 votes to Boric’s one million. Under Jadue’s leadership, Recoleta’s popular municipal programs, like low-cost pharmacies, public libraries, and free higher education, have showcased a pragmatic, effective, and participatory socialism that has resonated deeply with the Chilean working class, even as Jadue has become a target of political persecution.

The PCCh today draws on its history and long-held principles to guide its political vision for the future. It continues to espouse Marxism-Leninism and its vision of a dictatorship of the proletariat. In this way, it has decided not to moderate its core political principles, unlike many other Communist Parties after the fall of the Soviet Union. Two years ago, at the fifty-year anniversary of the 1973 military coup, the Communist Party issued a manifesto affirming that “popular mass rebellion” led by the PCCh and the Left opened the way for the transition to democracy under the dictatorship. In a country where a battle for memory on the meaning of the military coup and dictatorship continues, this view pushes against a common liberal narrative that political negotiation with Pinochet, rather than strikes and popular resistance, ultimately brought about the end of the dictatorship. The PCCh’s historical interpretation of the dictatorship and its demise seeks to guide the Party’s forward-looking project of building broad left-wing alliances to pursue structural transformations to dismantle Chile’s entrenched neoliberal regime.

The Communist Party’s deep political experience and well-developed institutional foundation have been its greatest strengths in navigating Chile’s shifting political landscape throughout its history. A recognition of the value of such experience among voters (conscious or not) is perhaps one of the greatest reasons the Communist Party has prevailed amidst the recent failures of the center-left, especially with regard to the defeat of the 2022 constitution drafted by a popularly-elected constituent assembly. Left-wing explanations for this defeat have pointed to issues in convention procedure, Boric’s poor leadership, and the identitarian politics promoted by the proposed constitution itself. Few have identified the shortcomings of Chile’s rather diffuse, “autonomous left,” built upon a constellation of progressive social movements that have clearly been capable of channeling popular resentments into mass mobilization, but incapable of consolidating these protests into lasting structural change.^[21] During the 2019 protests that opened the way to the constitutional process, many Chileans voiced a distrust of Chile’s political elite, including the “traditional” left-wing parties. Citizens thus largely supported independent candidates and newer, looser left-wing coalitions like the Frente Amplio when selecting delegates for the constitutional convention.^[22]

Without the leadership of a national political organization that could channel constitutional proposals from local citizens into a cohesive overarching program, the 2022 constitution ended up a long, somewhat incoherent document. While the 2022 constitution included many laudable and creative political goals, its lack of an overarching political program meant that it was difficult to explain to voters; skeptics disparagingly called it a long “wish list” of more than 100 rights. The Right waged a vicious misinformation propaganda campaign which contributed to the failure of the referendum on the proposed constitution. Chile thus remains governed by the right-wing constitution implemented by Pinochet in 1980 that has granted private interests such influence in Chilean society.

The traditional Concertación parties have been largely discredited following thirty years of neoliberal politics-as-usual. Meanwhile, the more decentralized political project of the “autonomous left” embodied by the Frente Amplio coalition, which emerged in opposition to the Concertación and came to rule under President Boric, has failed to carry through the task entrusted to them of shedding Pinochet’s lingering right-wing constitutional framework. In contrast the Communist Party remains a steady, organized, and disciplined presence in Chilean politics.

Of course, the PCCh is not without its internal disputes. These have recently come to the fore between a more moderate wing with Jara as its figurehead, and a more orthodox wing led by Daniel Jadue.^[23]Since her presidential nomination in June, Jara has distanced herself from official PCCh positions, like those surrounding the unconditional defense of Jadue amidst his continuing political persecution, and whether or not Venezuela and Cuba are dictatorships or democracies. Some party members, as a result, worry of Jara’s political opportunism and lack of party discipline. In the coming months and years, the PCCh will need to navigate the challenges that will inevitably surface as it reclaims its role as a leading party of the Chilean Left.^[24]

Internal party struggles aside, in this election cycle, Jara’s working-class roots appeal to Chileans’ widespread distrust of the political elite, while the Party’s success spearheading socialist municipal programs in the past decade indicates its clear commitment and demonstrable ability to build popular programs aimed at bettering the lives of working people. Amidst fierce red-baiting from the Right, the mainstream media, and even the Center-Left, I believe that Jara secured her presidential nomination not in spite of her Communist Party membership, but because of it.

If Jara’s chance of winning in November is perhaps unlikely (though not at all foreclosed), it is also difficult to fathom that a Communist presidency alone could be capable of finally dismantling the neoliberal-capitalist paradigm that has continued to reign in Chile for almost fifty years. It will at least be difficult to achieve lasting left-wing political change as long as the Chilean labor movement remains weak and divided. Historically, the Chilean Left’s strength has derived from its firm connections to a strong and independent, yet highly politicized, labor and working-class movement.

If Jara is to win in November, her administration should focus on reducing economic inequality, thus allowing the Chilean working class space to reconstitute itself as the strong political force it has historically been. Jara’s promises to implement a jobs program, invest in public infrastructure and housing, and carry out a comprehensive overhaul of national healthcare will help lead Chile in this direction. Meanwhile, the Communist Party and the Left should continue the day-to-day work of organizing the working class, broadly conceived to include precarious laborers, the unemployed, service and cultural workers, migrant workers, and students, in addition to their traditional base in the blue-collar unions.^[25] Whether the Left can prevail this November, and whether the Communist Party’s coalition can finally guide Chile beyond Pinochet’s neoliberal order toward an internationalist socialist future, remains to be seen.

1. Joaquín Fermandois, “The Rise of the Union between Theory and Praxis: Chilean Communism in the Cold War (1934-1990),” in Words of Power, the Power of Words. The Twentieth-Century Communist Discourse in International Perspective, ed. Giulia Bassi (Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2019), 340.

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2. By the 1920s, most Chilean labor unions officially declared themselves to be Communist or anarcho-syndicalist. See: Peter DeShazo, “The Valparaíso Maritime Strike of 1903 and the Development of a Revolutionary Labor Movement in Chile,” Journal of Latin American Studies 11, no. 1 (1979): 145–68, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X00022331.

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3. Luis Emilio Recabarren, “La Rusia Obrera y Campesina: Algo de Lo Visto En Una Visita a Moscú,” Santiago de Chile, 1923, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/recabarren/1923/rusia-obrera.htm.

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4. Alan Angell, Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile (Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1972), 88.

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5. Angell recalls: “The social and political cohesion of the mining communities impressed me forcefully in the 1960s when I met the coal miners of Lota and Coronel, where it was obvious that the social fabric of the area rested on a combination of the miners’ union and the PCCh.” Alan Angell, “A Classic on the Never-Ending Debate on the Allende Years,” Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America 12, no. 2 (2015): 422–37.

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6. On this topic, I highly recommend the excellent book by Jody Pavilack, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile’s Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).

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7. Angell, Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile, 218.

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8. The left wing of the Socialist Party was much more skeptical of the electoral road to socialism, especially in the wake of the Cuban Revolution.

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9. For a classic study on Chile’s dialectical process of “revolution from above” and “revolution from below,” see: Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (Oxford Univ. Press, 1986); Certainly, the Communist Party’s strategy of compromise is not above critique. The violent fall of the Unidad Popular in 1973 and the ensuing massacre of thousands of workers unquestioningly represented a major failure of this strategy. For one thorough critique of Chile’s “peaceful road to socialism,” founded on a strategy of building broad cross-class coalitions, see: Gabriel Smirnow, The Revolution Disarmed: Chile, 1970-1973 (Monthly Review Press, 1979). There are many, many others.

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10. See: Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Pavilack, Mining for the Nation; Edward Murphy, For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

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11. It should be noted, though, that after entering the Unidad Popular government in 1970, government officials in the PCCh shifted into a more moderate position in no longer endorsing extra-legal land seizures, wanting to respect the official policy of the UP by remaining within the bounds of existing law. See: Murphy, For a Proper Home, 80, 116.

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12. For a beautiful account of the role of music and the arts in the Chilean Left pre-1973, see: Joan Jara, Victor: An Unfinished Song (Vintage/Ebury, 1983), available to borrow on the Internet Archive.

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13. Fermandois, “The Rise of the Union between Theory and Praxis: Chilean Communism in the Cold War (1934-1990),” 349; For more on the everyday experiences of Chilean Communists during the twentieth century, see: Alfonso Salgado, “Exemplary Comrades: The Public and Private Life of Communists in Twentieth-Century Chile” (Columbia University, 2016).

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14. Rolando Álvarez Vallejos, Desde las sombras. Una historia de la clandestinidad comunista (1973-1980) (LOM Ediciones, 2003).

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15. For a discussion of foreign left anti-communist influence on the internal affairs of the Chilean Left during the dictatorship, which helped exacerbate sectarian tensions, see: Kim Christiaens, “The Difficult Quest for Chilean Allies: International Labor Solidarity Campaigns for Chile in the 1970s and 1980s,” in European Solidarity with Chile- 1970s – 1980s, ed. Kim Christiaens, et al. (Peter Lang, 2014), https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-04659-5/12.

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16. Fermandois, “The Rise of the Union between Theory and Praxis: Chilean Communism in the Cold War (1934-1990),” 356.

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17. Paul W. Drake, Labor Movements and Dictatorships: The Southern Cone in Comparative Perspective (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 141.

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18. Rodrigo Araya Gómez, Organizaciones Sindicales En Chile: De La Resistencia a La Política de Los Consensos (1983-1994) (Ediciones Universidad Finis Terrae, 2015).

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19. The Communist Party’s recent integration into formal politics, following about twenty-five years on the left-wing margins, is reminiscent of the PCCh’s experience with the Popular Front strategy during the Second World War. In this period, the PCCh entered into a pact with the centrist Radical Party following a time of ultra-left isolation during the Third Period. Though the era of Popular Front coalitional governance came to a crushing end with the onset of the Cold War and the banning of the PCCh under the “Law for the Defense of Democracy,” the Popular Front period was a formative time for the PCCh. It increased its geographic reach, organizational power, and influence among various social classes, and cemented its dominance in the labor movement. This influence did not wane significantly even with the banning of the PCCh in 1948. Furthermore, concrete experience in government was critical for Communist political leaders who would go on to develop and lead the FRAP and Unidad Popular projects in the 1960s and 70s. It is too early to say whether the PCCh’s recent integration into formal politics will have a similar effect on the PCCh’s ability to effectively organize and lead a new socialist movement in Chile. For more on the Popular Front see: Andrew Barnard, “Chilean Communists, Radical Presidents and Chilean Relations with the United States, 1940–1947,” Journal of Latin American Studies 13, no. 2 (1981): 347–74; also see: Jody Pavilack, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile’s Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).

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20. Joaquín Jorquera, “Will a Communist Be Chile’s next President?,” RedFlag.Org, August 31, 2025, https://redflag.org.au/article/will-a-communist-be-chiles-next-president.

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21. Though a February 2021 piece by Claudio Aguayo did presage this problem for the constitutional process. See that essay also for an insightful discussion of the PCCh’s role before and during the 2019 uprising.

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22. The constitutional convention delegate elections were set up so that candidates could run on an “Independent list” or a “Party list.” Out of 155 convention delegates, 48 electeds ran on the Independent list, while another 40 ran as Independents through lists associated with a political party without being formally affiliated with that party. See: Tom Ginsburg and Isabel Álvarez, “It’s the Procedures, Stupid: The Success and Failures of Chile’s Constitutional Convention,” Global Constitutionalism 13, no. 1 (2024): 189, https://doi.org/10.1017/S2045381723000242.

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23. The decision to put Jara up as the PCCh’s nominee for the Left presidential primary, as opposed to Jadue, was itself extremely contentious within the party. Though Jara secured the party’s nomination, Jadue retains strong support among rank-and-file party members. His wing won a majority on the PCCh’s Central Committee in 2024. Recent claims that Jara’s selection as the presidential nominee signals the PCCh’s “eurocommunist” political transformation are dubious at best.

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24. My own view is that the PCCh as a whole should be wary of Jara’s moderating tendency: my argument in this piece is that the Party has weathered the rise and fall of Latin America’s pink tide into this much more politically-polarized moment precisely because it has resisted the urge to abandon core principles for the sake of political expediency.

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25. The Communist Party has indeed adopted a broad definition of the working class since the return to democracy in this way. See: José Ignacio Ponce and Rolando Álvarez Vallejos, “¿Comunismo después del fin del comunismo? La política sindical del Partido Comunista de Chile en la postdictadura chilena (1990–2010),” Nuestra Historia, 2016.

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