Politics: The Rising Force

Echoes of Chile’s presidential election will be sounding around Latin America for years—and not merely because the Communists were thrashed in their attempt to take power by democratic means. Marxism has never succeeded at the ballot box. The bigger news is the man and the party that won: Eduardo Frei and the Christian Democrats, who are rapidly emerging as a vital new force, not only in Chile but in all of Latin America.

Encyclical & Ethic. The Christian Democratic movement now has political parties in 16 of Latin America’s 20 countries—all except Honduras, Paraguay, Haiti and Cuba. Like their powerful European counterparts in Italy and Germany, the Latin American parties base their philosophy on the 73-year-old Rerum Novarum encyclical of Pope Leo XIII—the so-called “Magna Carta of Labor,” which advocates labor unions and worker profit-sharing.

They are reformist, often leftist always ardently antiCommunist. Their ideology is not based so much on the tenets of Roman Catholicism; indeed, the church in Colombia openly opposes the Christian Democrats. Rather, the party rallying cry is the Christian ethic, and it calls for social revolution without the shackles of Communism. “Christian Democracy,” says Chile’s Frei, “believes that the modern world is in crisis, and that only a complete readjustment of society can save man from materialism and collectivism.”

Such talk has a strong appeal for the underprivileged—and also for Latin America’s deeply religious women, rich or poor. In Chile, it was the women who gave Frei his large majority. He broke about even with Marxist Salvador Allende for the men’s vote; the women (who use separate ballot boxes in Chile) gave him almost 63% of their vote. Frei’s own sister Irene, 46, was one of the country’s most popular political figures until her death in an auto accident five weeks ago. In Santiago municipal elections last year, she herself won an alderman’s seat with the biggest majority of any candidate. Some 40,000 women turned out for her funeral, and her tragic death just before the presidential elections almost certainly led to a sympathy vote.

Chile & Beyond. The earliest ancestors of today’s Christian Democrats turned up in Uruguay in 1910, and over the years other parties sprouted—first in Chile, then Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and on throughout Latin America. In 1947 party delegates met in Montevideo to form a hemisphere-wide confederation. Three years ago, in Santiago, the European and Latin American branches formally joined forces in a Christian Democratic World Union.

The stronghold of Latin America’s Christian Democrats is, of course, Chile, where the party has soared from 3.4% of the vote in 1941 to 56% in Frei’s election. How much of this was due to Christian Democracy itself, and how much to Frei’s charismatic personality, will not be clear until congressional elections next March. Right now, the party has only 27 members in Congress, 70 short of a majority.

Second to Chile is Venezuela, where the Christian Democrats call themselves COPEI. In 1958, COPEI won 16% of the presidential vote and played an important role in the coalition government with Rómulo Betancourt’s Accion Democrática party, which had finished with 49% . In last year’s elections, COPEI moved up to 20% while A.D. slipped to 33%—and now COPEI Leader Rafael Caldera has pulled out of the coalition and is building up for his run at the presidency in 1968. In Peru, the party is only eight years old, yet its support was a strong factor in the victory of President Fernando Belaúnde last year; in exchange, the Christian Democrats picked up three Cabinet ministries and the mayoralty of Lima. In Brazil, the party went from two federal Deputies in 1954 to 20 in 1962, now boasts one federal Cabinet post and two state governors. The Bolivian party is still small, but growing. “In the coming years,” says Bolivian President Víctor Paz Estenssoro, “there will be only three forces in our country—my own M.N.R., the Communists and Christian Democrats.”

No one understands the prospects better than the Communists, who regard the Christian Democrats with fear and hatred. In Cuba last week, Havana radio claimed that Eduardo Frei’s victory was brought about by “force, fear and money.” Railed Fidel Castro at Havana University: “The means by which the exploiters maintain the people in ignorance must be grabbed out of their hands.” But even he had to concede Frei’s appeal. “Sometimes,” Fidel admitted, “our opponents surpass us in ability.” What Castro really has to face is that the Christian Democrats are stealing his revolutionary thunder, offering a simple, powerful ideology that promises sweeping changes with freedom and dignity. And they are getting very good at it.