Four Discuss Future of Chile At Teach-In on Recent Coup

"I am known for my optimistic bias," Attilio Boron, one of four speakers at a teach-in on Chile, told about 50 people in Boylston Auditorium yesterday. "The coup will last until the end of this year. Three more months."

There is little solid mass support for the coup, Boron said. He described the coup as a fascist attempt to crush Chilean workers' strength by eliminating the democratic institutions they were using to achieve social change.

Along with Carlos H. Waisman, teaching fellow in Social Studies, Boron stressed the contradictions between the interests of the Chilean middle class, which he said constituted the coup's main strength.

The interests of the Chileans from the fascist Patria y Libertad group were also significant, he said. The group owned large amounts of capital and gave the coup its direction, he said.

But Andrew Zimbalist, a graduate student in economics, implied that the military junta would endure considerably longer than three months.

"The junta has already reversed all the gains that the Allende government made," Zimbalist said. "And what may be even more important is that all through the Allende government's term, sectors of the working class--especially professional workers and older people--were left behind at a very low level of consciousness."

Boron disputed this, claiming that increases in the political awareness of Chilean workers over the last three years have been "irreversible."

"At the burial of Pablo Neruda 2000 people followed the coffin giving the communist salute in front of the media and the cameras," Boron said. "This sort of resistance was never seen in Italy, was never seen in Argentina."

Waisman said one of the people at the funeral was Radomiro Tomic, the 1970 presidential candidate of the Christian Democratic party, whose official leadership supported the coup.

Alan H. Coes '67, teaching fellow in History and Literature, took little part in the discussion of Chile's future. But he said that tension had mounted sharply in Chile in the months before the coup.

"It is very difficult to predict what course Chilean history will take," Waisman said, in a statement apparently agreeable to all four speakers. "But one thing is certain: Chilean history does not end with the military coup."