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Chile: Caught in the Middle

3 minute read
TIME

“This country,” declares Chile’s President Eduardo Frei in an apt simile, “is like the worker who was perfectly happy earning only $50 a month. Then his salary doubles, he moves to a better neighborhood, buys new furniture, better clothes, a TV set. Instead of appreciating what he has gained, he begins grumbling and complaining about what he does not have.” Last week Frei had as many grounds for grumbling as any of his striving fellow Chileans. His trouble is that he may wake up one day soon and discover that he does not even have a political party.

Rebel Report. From his first day in office three years ago, Frei has been hounded in Congress by a coalition of Communists, leftists and Socialists that has blocked almost all of his major reform legislation. Now the far left is making a determined grab for the reins of his own Christian Democratic Party. Six months ago, a rebel faction led by Jacques Chonchol, Frei’s director of agricultural development, managed to ram through a party resolution permitting Castro’s chief subversion agency in the Hemisphere, OLAS, to set up a branch office right in Santiago.

At the same time, Chonchol’s group quietly won control of the party’s executive council, and began joining the opposition in criticizing Frei. When Frei asked the party for a routine analysis of its future course, Chonchol prepared a 57,000-word report that read almost like the Communist Manifesto. It recommended tight government control of economic and industrial activities, nationalization of all banks, insurance companies, electric power corporations, and communications companies as well as a far-reaching agrarian reform law that would do away with all large landowners. Embarrassed by the report, Frei tried to shrug it off casually as a meaningless “scrap of paper.”

Forced Savings. The damage was done. As the Christian Democrats went into a special Senate by-election two weeks ago, more and more of the country’s businessmen and landowners turned on Frei. As an added burden, party leftists once again deserted the President and began attacking a new governmental proposal for a forced-savings program. Designed to stem Chile’s growing inflation, the program would grant workers their usual yearly wage increase, but 25% of the raise would go into a savings account. Frei’s leftist opposition in and out of the party stridently demanded that the worker get everything at once.

In the final by-election vote, a right-wing candidate drained off support from the Christian Democrats and the coalition candidate coasted to victory, leaving Frei with only twelve of the Senate’s 45 seats. This week Frei hopes to reassert his authority at a two-day party meeting, but beforehand he suggested the possibility of forming a coalition government with leftist parties. Unless he can somehow regain control of his party, Chile’s far-left coalition could well sweep into the presidency in the 1970 elections without any need of Frei’s Christian Democrats—if the army does not decide to sweep in first to prevent just such a possibility.

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