Pasos para la creación de una interfaz

an authoritarian, repressive, and violent regime. For the following seven-teen years, the military suspended civil and political rights, massively and systematically violated human rights, and imposed a neoliberal economic agenda. The dictatorship was especially harsh on working people and the labor movement, who suffered the consequences of repression and the impact of economic reforms. While the dictatorship’s economic reforms have been celebrated as the basis of the Chilean economic miracle, they had enormous costs for the great majority of Chileans. By the late 1980s, the economy was growing, but a third of the population was living below the poverty line and the gap between rich and poor was increasing.¹

In the aftermath of the coup, the military repressed and attempted to co-opt the union movement and labor activists throughout the country.² In the copper mines, repression was very selective, targeting the pro-up union leadership and the company management. In the days following the coup, the camps’ police officers arrested union leaders, management, and political activists. In the specific case of Potrerillos and El Salvador, prisoners were sent to Copiapó, the provincial capital, to be tried by a military court.

In Copiapó and other provincial cities, repression was initially less severe and arbitrary executions were less common than in Santiago. In October 1973, the military junta decided to extend its brutality from Santiago to the rest of Chile, giving this mission to General Sergio Arellano Stark.

General Arellano organized the “Caravan of Death,” a special military

1. For a history of the military dictatorship, see Ascanio Cavallo et al., La historia oculta del régimen militar. Memoria de una época, 1973–1988 (Santiago: Grupo Grijalbo Mondadori, 1997); Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet (New York: Norton, 1991).

2. For a discussion of the labor movement under dictatorship, see Alan Angell, “Union and Workers in Chile During the 1980s,” in The Struggle for Democracy in Chile, 1982–1990, ed.

Paul W. Drake and Iván Jaksic; (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Manuel Barrera and Gonzalo Falabella, Sindicatos bajo regímenes militares: Argentina, Brasil, Chile (Santiago:

Centro de Estudios Sociales (ces) Ediciones, 1990); Manuel Barrera and J. Samuel Valenzuela,

“The Development of the Labor Movement Opposition to the Military Regime,” in Military Rule in Chile: Dictatorship and Oppositions, ed. J. Samuel Valenzuela and Arturo Valenzuela (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Guillermo Campero and José Valenzuela, El movimiento sindical chileno en el capitalismo autoritario (Santiago: Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales [ilet], 1981); Paul W. Drake, Labor Movements and Dictatorships:

The Southern Cone in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Jaime Ruiz-Tagle, El sindicalismo chileno después del Plan Laboral (Santiago: Programa de Estudios del Trabajo [pet], 1985); Peter Winn, ed., Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004);

Francisco Zapata, “Las relaciones entre la Junta Militar y los trabajadores chilenos: 1973–1978,”

Foro Internacional 20, no. 2 (1979).

squad that traveled throughout the country to accelerate military trials and execute prisoners.³Arellano arrived in Copiapó on October 16 and executed thirteen people, including two copper labor leaders, Benito Tapia and Maguindo Castillo, and the general manager of Cobresal, Ricardo García. Tapia was a young blue-collar worker at El Salvador, a leader of the Copper Workers Confederation (ctc), and a Communist Party militant.

Maguindo Castillo, a militant from the Socialist Party, was an office worker and a leader of the white-collar union. Ricardo García was also a Socialist Party militant and had been general manager in 1971–73.

In the following months, a series of governmental decrees dismantled the national labor movement. In November 1973, the military government dissolved the national labor confederation, Central Única de Trabajadores (cut), and in December, it suppressed all union elections.⁴In 1973–76, a period defined by Paul Drake as one of “devastation and hibernation” for the Chilean union movement, workers refrained from overt action and union membership dropped. While leftist union leaders were persecuted, arrested, or assassinated or went into exile, nonleftist union leaders such as Tucapel Jiménez from the National Association of Government Employees, Gilberto García from the Teachers Federation, and Hernán Morales from the National Petroleum Workers Union tried to adapt to the military rules and negotiated some space for participation.⁵Although some of these leaders were pessimistic about the impact of the military’s repression on the union movement, they expressed “relief” that the coup had taken place and were sympathetic to the military. For example, Jiménez believed that the “junta will permit legitimate unions to pursue normal activities in the near future” and thanked the “Labor Attaché’s government [the United States]

for helping to bring about the change.”⁶

In the copper mines, as in the rest of the country, the process of collective bargaining was interrupted, and workers sympathetic to the military govern-ment filled the vacancies of what remained of their labor organizations.

Aware of copper workers’ controversial attitudes during the years of the up;

the economic importance of the copper industry; and especially, the role of the El Teniente strike in the downfall of Allende, the military government

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3. For an account of the actions of the Caravan of Death, see Patricia Verdugo, Caso Arellano:

Los zarpazos del puma (Santiago: cesoc, 1989).

4. The two decrees were Decreto Ley 133 and Decreto Ley 198.

5. Drake, Labor Movements, 123.

6. Davis, October 1973, 12. nara, gr, Chile 1970–73, box 2194.

treated the copper workers’ labor movement with some deference, hoping to gain its support. The attempt by some copper union leaders to accom-modate the military regime was the result of visible divisions within the copper unions and between white- and blue-collar workers on the eve of the coup and the influence of Christian Democracy, especially in El Teniente, since the late 1960s.

The military did not dissolve the ctc, as it did the cut. Yet the new ctc bore little resemblance to its predecessor, as seven of its thirteen leaders were replaced and its new president, Guillermo Santana, worked closely with the government. Santana, a militant Christian Democrat and a leader of the white-collar union of Potrerillos, had been especially vocal against Allende and the up, playing a key role during the legal strike of August 1971. Another central actor in the copper workers’ labor movement was Guillermo Medina, a leader from El Teniente who had participated in the strike of April–June 1973.⁷Medina remained a close collaborator of the military government, joining the Council of State (Consejo de Estado), a national body created by the military in 1976 that represented the different groups of society.

In the aftermath of the coup, in an effort to adapt to the repressive envi-ronment, copper workers’ leaders reinforced their relationship with the U.S.

labor movement, specifically with the American Institute for Free Labor Development (aifld). Organized in 1962 by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (afl-cio), the aifld included representatives of the U.S. business sector and received funding from the U.S. government through the U.S. Agency for International Devel-opment (usaid). By 1970, the aifld had representatives in nineteen cities in Latin America and the Caribbean and sponsored programs of union education and socioeconomic development. Strongly anti-Communist and close to the U.S. Department of State, the aifld had little success in Chile before 1973, only attracting some Christian Democrat and anti-Communist union leaders such as the president of the Confederation of Maritime Workers, Wenceslao Moreno. Despite its controversial past, after the coup

7. Thomas M. Klubock, “Class, Community, and Neoliberalism in Chile: Copper Workers and the Labor Movement During the Military Dictatorship and Restoration of Democracy,” in Peter Winn, ed. Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 217–18.

the aifld provided, as Art Nixon from the aifld put it in 1975, “a safe excuse for the leadership to get together.”⁸

Beginning in 1975, the harsh social impact of government economic policies, the consolidation and institutionalization of Pinochet’s dictator-ship, and the government’s opposition to reestablishing the most basic of workers’ rights such as union elections and collective bargaining severed the fragile “alliance” between nonleftist labor leaders and the military. In 1975, the junta incorporated into the government the so-called Chicago Boys, a new generation of economists trained in the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman, who sought to consolidate a free-market, neoliberal, export-oriented economy in Chile. To do so, they implemented a series of drastic economic stabilization measures. In 1976, the appointment of Sergio Fernández as minister of labor (1976–78), to coordinate labor policies according to the new economic directions, ended any possibility of an understanding between labor and the government.

In this context, nonleftist labor leaders, increasingly dissatisfied with political and economic conditions, started articulating a more critical dis-course against the government. Maintaining their distance from the Left, especially the Communist Party, they formed the Group of Ten in December 1975. The Group of Ten included important and influential labor leaders such as Manuel Bustos (textile workers), Tucapel Jiménez (public employees), and Guillermo Santana (copper workers).⁹In May 1976, they addressed a public letter to the military junta protesting the current situation. The government launched a public campaign against the group. Guillermo Medina especially attacked Santana, accusing him of putting the ctc out-side the law and siding with Communist labor leaders.¹⁰As a result, the government forced Santana out of the ctc and appointed Bernardino

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8. From Art Nixon to McLellan, April 11, 1975, gmma, cf (1969–81), box 5, folder 19.

9. The Group of Ten was integrated by Manuel Bustos (textile workers union), Pedro Cifuentes (sugar workers union), Andrés del Campo (bank workers union), E. Díaz (maritime workers union), Tucapel Jiménez (public employees union), Enrique Mellado (peasant federa-tion), Antonio Minimiza (oil workers union), Francisco Mujica (private employees union), Eduardo Ríos (maritime workers union), Guillermo Santana (Copper Workers Confederation), and Ernesto Vogel (railway workers). There were all members of the Christian Democracy but Jiménez, who was a member of the Radical Party. The Group of Ten evolved over time, in 1981 it became the Democratic Union of Workers (udt) and in 1984 the Confederation of Democratic Workers (1984). Campero and Valenzuela, El movimiento sindical chileno, 389.

10. Campero and Valenzuela, El movimiento sindical, 389.

Castillo as its new president. The Group of Ten and its criticism of the government’s labor policies illustrate the divisions between nonleftist labor leaders and the government and are representative of the final rupture between Christian Democracy and the military regime.

Critical voices also started coming from international organizations. In April 1975, for example, the ctc invited George Meany, the president of the afl-cio, to visit Chile and attend the forty-ninth anniversary of the confederation. A couple of months before, Meany had also received an invitation from General Pinochet to visit the country. Turning down both invitations, Meany declared that leaders from the afl-cio would not visit Chile until there was “a complete restauration [sic] of trade union rights and a return to the old system, as it existed in Chile before the regime of Allende.”¹¹Although copper workers feared the government’s reaction, they sympathized with Meany’s decision, joking that “el viejo tiene huevos.”¹²In the following years, the afl-cio and the orit continually threatened the Chilean government that they would organize an international boycott against the country and maintained a close relationship with Christian Democrat union leaders and the Group of Ten.¹³

In 1977, Chilean workers became more active and organized in response to deteriorating economic conditions and the new labor policies of the gov-ernment, which threatened workers’ few remaining rights. In the copper mines, a series of protests took place in 1977 and 1978. Copper workers addressed public letters to the government, criticized the ctc and its lack of independence, and organized absenteeism strikes and movimientos de viandas (lunch actions) or loncheras vacías (empty lunchboxes) that consisted of workers’ refusal to eat at company cafeterias. In El Teniente, workers organized a movimiento de viandas in September 1977 and an absentee strike in November. In the following months, similar move-ments took place in El Salvador and Chuquicamata, where workers led absentee strikes, openly criticized the lack of independence of the ctc, and protested against the economic conditions. New movimientos de viandas took place in Chuquicamata and in El Salvador in August–September 1978.¹⁴The Corporación del Cobre (codelco) and the government severely repressed these mobilizations, firing, arresting, and deporting workers. In

11. From Meany to Valencia, April 8, 1975, gmma, cf (1969–81), box 5, folder 19.

12. From Art Nixon to McLellan, April 11, 1975, gmma, cf (1969–81), box 5, folder 19.

13. Barrera and Valenzuela, “Development of the Labor Movement Opposition,” 249.

14. Klubock, “Class, Community, and Neoliberalism”; Zapata, “Las relaciones.”

1978 in the mine of El Salvador, Bernardino Castillo, president of the ctc, declared that management was “systematically persecuting copper workers, humiliating them, doing arbitrary dismissals, violating legal dispositions and refusing to accept fair labor demands.”¹⁵

These protests laid the foundations for the reconstruction of the labor movement in the copper mines. Given the political and legal context, workers developed new forms of activism to confront management and the government. Moving away from traditional union actions such as col-lective bargaining, labor courts, and strikes when, as noted in a 1986 newsletter for Potrerillos workers, they explained that “the old methods of solving problems with employers were not useful anymore,” they organized innovative protests such as cuchareos (bumping of spoons) in company cafeterias, movimientos de viandas, and hunger strikes.¹⁶

By 1978, the military’s labor and economic policies had driven the majority of union leaders toward the opposition and in doing so made pos-sible an understanding between Christian Democrat and Leftists union leaders. A broad coalition of union leaders from the opposition organized the National Union Coordinator (Coordinadora Nacional Sindical, or cns) in 1978. Led by Manuel Bustos, who abandoned the Group of Ten, the cns played a critical role in the reactivation of the workers’ movement from 1978 to 1983.¹⁷