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Chile
Index
Led by the centrist Radical Party, the administration
of the
Popular Front assimilated the Socialists and Communists
into the
established bargaining system, making potentially
revolutionary
forces into relatively moderate participants in legal
institutions.
Although the official Popular Front ended in 1941, that
bargaining
system, with Marxist parties usually backing reformist
Radical
presidents, lasted until 1952.
Aguirre Cerda, like all Chilean presidents in the 1930s
and
1940s, essentially pursued a model of state capitalism in
which
government collaborated with private enterprise in the
construction
of a mixed economy. The Popular Front promoted
simultaneous importsubstitution industrialization and welfare measures for
the urban
middle and working classes. As in the rest of Latin
America, the
Great Depression and then the onset of World War II
accelerated
domestic production of manufactured consumer items,
widened the
role of the state, and augmented dependence on the United
States.
All these trends dissuaded Marxists from demanding bold
redistributive measures at the expense of domestic and
foreign
capitalists.
Aiming to catch up with the more affluent West, Chile's
Popular
Front mobilized the labor movement behind national
industrial
development more than working-class social advances.
Although
workers received few material benefits from the Popular
Front, the
number of legal unions more than quadrupled from the early
1930s to
the early 1940s. Still, unions represented only about 10
percent of
the work force.
Prior to his illness and death in November 1941,
President
Aguirre Cerda labored to hold his coalition together, to
overcome
the implacable opposition of the right-wing parties, and
to fulfill
his promises of industrialization and urban social reform.
The
Socialists and Communists quarreled incessantly,
especially over
the PCCh's support of the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression
Pact
between Hitler and Stalin. Early in 1941, the Socialist
Party
withdrew from the Popular Front coalition because of its
animosity
toward the PCCh, its rival claimant to worker loyalty and
Marxist
inspiration. Because the Conservatives and Liberals
blocked nearly
all legislation in Congress, little social reform was
accomplished,
except for improvements in housing and education. To
appease rightwingers , the president clamped down on rural unionization.
From the 1920s into the 1960s, this modus vivendi
between urban
reformers and rural conservatives held fast. Progressives
carried
out reforms in the cities for the middle and working
classes, while
denying peasants union rights. Thus were preserved the
availability
of low-cost foodstuffs for urban consumers, control of the
countryside for latifundistas (large landowners),
and
domination of the rural vote by right-wing politicians.
From time
to time, Marxist organizers threatened to mobilize the
rural work
force, and time and again they were restrained by their
centrist
political allies, who needed to reassure the economic and
political
right-wingers. When peasants protested this exploitation,
they were
repressed by landowners or government troops.
The greatest achievement of the Popular Front was the
creation
in 1939 of the state Production Development Corporation
(Corporación de Fomento de la Producción--Corfo) to supply
credit
to new enterprises, especially in manufacturing. Partly
with loans
from the United States Export-Import Bank, Corfo
contributed
greatly to import-substitution industrialization, mainly
for
consumer items. The economically active population working
in
industry grew from 15 percent in 1930 to 20 percent in
1952, where
it hovered for two decades. From the end of the 1930s to
the start
of the 1950s, Corfo supplied almost one-fourth of total
domestic
investments.
Data as of March 1994
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