12 - The Chilean road to socialism, 1970–73

Summary

As in the classic Greek tragedies, everybody knows what will happen, everybody says they do not wish it to happen, and everybody does exactly what is necessary to bring about the disaster….

– Radomiro Tomic to General Carlos Prats (August 1973)

Born into a comfortable, if not affluent, Valparaiso family, Salvador Allende (he was 62 in 1970) had originally wanted to become a physician, like his respected paternal grandfather, Ramón Allende Padín, the Radical politician and Serene Grand Master of Chilean freemasonry. (Allende himself was a loyal and lifelong freemason.) While studying medicine, he discovered firsthand the appalling conditions of the poor, and in particular their medical situation – malnutrition, infant mortality, congenital disease. Though he qualified as a doctor, politics gradually superseded medicine as his real vocation. He was active in the FECH, and was briefly jailed during the Ibáñez dictatorship. He quickly rose to prominence in the fledgling Socialist party of the 1930s, was elected a deputy for Valparaiso in 1937, and served as minister of Health between 1939 and 1942. In 1945 he became a senator, and remained in the upper house (rising to be its president in 1966) until he moved to the Moneda. He was a politician to the marrow of his bones.

There can be no denying the enthusiasm with which allendistas greeted the new government and which remained alive for many (if not most) of them while it ran its course. The Left had come into its own at long last.