[104-10225-10027.pdf — page 64]
# 14-00000accentuation of the class struggle. At the same time that appeals were made to the pocketbooks of the lower-class Chileans, there was also to be an effort to increase their class consciousness (concientización) through government publications and the use of the media to remove the elements of "false consciousness" instilled by "bourgeois" propaganda. Expressing the diametric opposite of a claim often voiced by his predecessor, Eduardo Frei, Allende caid in a press conference just after his installation, "I am not president of all Chileans." And in his first "State of the Nation" message to the Congress he asserted:..... the People's Government (Gobierno Popular) is Inspired in its policy by a premise that is artificially denied by some--the existence of classes and social sectors with antagonistic and opposing interests.Allende's economic advisers anticipated an additional source of revenue for the government from the "exploitative" profits of the industries that were to be nationalized by the new government. The partially American-owned copper mines were to be taken over by a constitutional amendment--both to lay to rest any legal doubts about the reversal of the Frei Chileanization agreements of 1967 and 1969, and because a general consensus in Chile favored nationalization. Other companies were to be nationalized after a controlling interest was gained through the purchase of shares on the open market by the government development agency. The latter course seemed facilitated by the fact that the price of shares had been depressed since the elections, and further economic pressures could be created by allowing wage increases but forbidding any rise in prices. The legal adviser to the government, Eduardo Novoa, also outlined other "legal loopholes" in existing Chilean law which could be used for "temporary" takeovers of companies, including "intervention" because of labor disputes and "requisition" because of a "breakdown in supply of an article of prime necessity."Salvador Allende, "The Chilean Way to Socialism," in Paul E. Sigmund, Ed., The ideologies of the Developing Nations, 2nd rev. ed., New York, Praeger, 1972, p. 450.Frel's Chileanization program had involved the purchase by the Chilean state of a controlling Interest in the large copper mines owned by the Fennecott and Anaconda companies. The agreements had also provided that Chue's payments to the American companies were to te invested in the expansion of copper production and retining in Chile, earning the country additional revenue in the 1970's to pay back the loans contracted to finance the purchases.Industry and trade, as promised in the Popular Unity The takeover of large sectors of Chile's basic program, was thus seen as an essential part of an economic and political strategy aimed at achieving and maintaining power. Combined with a rapid acceleration of agrarian reform (again using existing legislation-the 1967 agrarian reform law-but exploiting, provisions such as one authorizing the expropriation of "abandoned or badly-farmed land," with one percent payment in cash and the rest in bands), the planned takeover meant that even if the effort to create a unicameral left-dominated legislature falled, the Allende government could cition through a series of "Irreversible" taits accom. destroy the economic base of the "capitalist" opposition through a series of "Irreversible" taits accomplis (hechos consumados) which would give the> [Figure: A hand-painted sign on a fence reads "SE TOMA LA RECERVA FORESTAR VALEXPLOTA" ]A Chilean peasant guards the gate of a farm south of Santiago which was seized from its owners on the pretext that it was "operated unproductively" (mal explotada).![photo of Maggi Castello]47