Ottawa, February 2016.

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Visiting Allende’s Chile

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I was a researcher working at the United Church in the Division of Mission in Canada, which was formed around 1970. I was very interested in trade issues and development, and so I proposed – I knew that the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was coming up in ’72 in Santiago – I campaigned to go. I wanted to go to investigate issues and see how the world was working in ’72, and ultimately I was sponsored to go. The churches decided that they would send a team, and so they sent an Anglican, Jerry Hames, who was editor of their newspaper the Canadian Churchman, and the Catholics sent a young man from Windsor, named Greg Arbour. And we went off to Santiago, and I was there for six weeks, and there I met others as well, such as a student from Dalhousie named Michael O’Sullivan, who was already in Chile. And one of my United Church associates and co-conspirators, Norm Laverty, who had decided that this was the time for him to go to Latin America, and the Chilean-Canadian couple, Arturo and Florrie Chacon, who were to be very influential with this little group of Latin American interest people – the Latin American Working Group – around 1970.

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Allende was in power, the progressives were in power in Peru, the progressives were in power in Argentina, and they were talking about a “new international economic order” and we got all very excited about that, and here we were, rubbing shoulders, and sitting at the feet, of Andre Gunder Frank who was an intellectual around the Left and Barbara Ward who was a heroine to Catholic development people and more broadly, and so on. And we came back from there just, you know … wound up!

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One other aspect which was very important to us at the time, was the cultural aspect. This was the time of Inti-Illimani, Quilapayun, the Peña de las Parras. Chilean music was running through our veins. It was really incredible. I remember going to the Peña de las Parras and there would be somebody playing and you’d sit on these little tiny chairs like in Sunday school, and then there’d be a break and they’d serve kind of Chilean BBQ and then more. We saw Isabelle, Nicanor, and Angel, and yes, Violeta – they were all there. (We kept in touch with Angel Parra after the coup, when we visited him in Mexico, and were in touch with him in Paris. LAWG sponsored him in a visit to Toronto and we independently produce a solo LP with help from one or two Toronto-based Chileans.)

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The other part of that experience that turned out to be more important than we might have thought, was that we were involved – because I was there for six weeks; I was not just at the UNCTAD – in other experiences which were arranged for us. So, for instance, we went out to land reform being announced in Temuco, south of Santiago, and that was a big thing, the equivalent of a skating rink, led by Jacques Chonchol who was the Minister of Agriculture with Allende. At another point we would run into Pedro Vuskovic, and so on. And then we were also in demonstrations. I marched down the Alameda, this major boulevard, holding one corner of a big poster of Ho Chi Minh! You know, in an anti-war demonstration organized by the MIR. So, we were part of all that and I do remember conversations with other students, and Michael and different people, not so much at the UNCTAD but at different little house parties and things like that. We went to visit poblaciones where new housing was under construction. I remember Norm and I went to a textile factory, a huge textile factory, ex-YARUR, which had been nationalized and we visited the day care centre, and the workers and so, it was quite an experience. It was an immersion experience. And of course, at that stage I spoke hardly any Spanish. I mean, on the plane down somebody shook my shoulder in the morning and said, “desayuno?” Well, “what’s that?”

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Another experience I had there was meeting people associated with Christians for Socialism. People like Gonzalo Arroyo and other Chileans, and the person at the registration desk who turned out to be someone who ended up being very influential with some of us, and that was Pepe Alvarez  Icaza from Mexico, the founder of CENCOS, which was the model ultimately for the News Synthesis. So those were key experiences.

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Then we went to Ottawa and we saw people like Mitchell Sharp and we’d known Paul Martin Sr. because he was the head of the Canadian delegation in Santiago. We got to Ottawa in, May or June, and it was sort of like we were distracting them from the golf course! The difference in intensity about what was happening in Latin America and in the world – was incredible. It was just a yawn in Ottawa. Just a, you know, a yawn. Everything was nailed-down here.

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So what was the effect of going to the UNCTAD? Well, we came back to Toronto to an event at St. Michael’s College which was a report-back with Jerry Hames, and Greg, and I, about what had happened in Santiago. Paul Martin came and spoke to that event. So that put trade issues, what we were paying for primary products, the new international economic order, and all that on the table. And people said, “We’ve got to carry these issues forward.” And, “We need a new coalition to do that.” And “the next event or focus is going to be a meeting of the GATT – the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, so we will monitor that. And we will be a fly on the wall.” And that became “Gatt fly”. I became one of the church representatives on an ecumenical board that would have, for example, a Presbyterian and a Catholic and United and Anglican and so on, and we hired a young Catholic from London, Ontario, named John Dillon who is, I think, the oldest coalition staff still extant. So that’s from 1972 til now, how many years is that? 44?

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In 1973 we had the coup in Chile, and the formation of the Committee on Chile. To some extent the involvement – and of course I was involved in LAWG through this whole period –  there was a kind of back-and-forth in my mind, and in terms of my learning and so on, between going having the chance to go to Chile and then encountering the Allende government and people like Andre Gunder Frank and many others, and then LAWG – and then, with the coup in Chile, LAWG was front and centre in responding to that, taking leadership at the inter-church level and also at the civic level. So when the need to welcome refugees became apparent very quickly, we formed the Toronto Welcome Committee and I was the first chair of that.

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The Inter-Church Committee on Chile began and it involved some of the churches who were involved in Gatt-fly. We were sending investigative teams, Ian Adams and George Cram and other people to Chile to see what was going on in Chile. We were lobbying and so on. And of course, this was a place where Scarboro Foreign Mission people who were absolutely key. That was important from a Latin American point of view because they were people with experience in Latin America.

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Meanwhile, Ten Days for World Development had grown in its reach and was involved with events in church basements and school halls across the country and all three coalitions were sitting there at the Canadian Council of Churches, with staff intermingling, and the issues intermingling. I think the churches had a tremendous reputation for expertise in terms of information from the field. And LAWG was feeding that, sometimes through documents and sometimes through those of us, like George, myself and so forth, who were part of LAWG and who were part of those coalitions.