Salvador Allende

Salvador Allende: The Physician Who Diagnosed a Country

Barred from hospital work by his radical reputation, the young doctor became a pathologist. Cutting open the Chilean poor for a living taught him something no medical school had: that the cause of death written on the certificate was almost never the real one. Tuberculosis, infant mortality, malnutrition — these were symptoms. The disease was the distribution of income. Nearly forty years later he would be Chile's first socialist president, and he would still be arguing the same case.

Valparaíso, and a Thesis About Poverty

Salvador Allende Gossens was born in 1908 in Valparaíso into an upper-middle-class family with a political tradition behind it. He entered the medical faculty of the University of Chile in 1926 and took his degree in 1932. He was not a quiet student: he held office in student organisations and was arrested twice and expelled once. He later opened a practice among the poor of Valparaíso.

In 1933, a year after qualifying, he was among the founders of the Socialist Party of Chile, built on Marxist principles. He entered Congress in 1937 and became Minister of Health in 1939. Chile's national library records the book that came of it: *La realidad médico-social chilena*, 216 pages, published in 1939 by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Social Assistance. It is a founding document of Latin American social medicine, treating disease as a product of social and economic conditions rather than individual misfortune and proposing, alongside tuberculosis control and maternal and child health measures, the redistribution of income as a public health intervention.

Twenty-Five Years in the Senate

He sat in the Senate from 1945 to 1970 and spent much of it drafting legislation for a national health service guaranteeing universal care, which Chile's private physicians fought bitterly. He ran for the presidency and lost in 1952, 1958 and 1964. He was, by the late sixties, the most familiar loser in Chilean politics.

Thirty-Six Per Cent

On 4 September 1970 he came first with 36.2 per cent, against just under 34.9 for the conservative Jorge Alessandri and 27.8 for the Christian Democrat Radomiro Tomic. No candidate had a majority, so Congress chose — and the Christian Democrats would only ratify him if he signed a Statute of Constitutional Guarantees committing him to the democratic order. He signed. He took office on 4 November 1970.

Six weeks earlier, on 15 September, Richard Nixon had told CIA director Richard Helms that Allende's election was unacceptable and instructed the agency, in Helms's note of the conversation, to make the Chilean economy scream. On 22 October General René Schneider, the constitutionalist army commander, was killed in a botched kidnapping; the Church Committee later found the CIA had supplied weapons to the plotters and afterwards paid the group $35,000.

The First Year Worked

Under the economist Pedro Vuskovic, the government nationalised copper, accelerated land reform and built a state-owned Social Property Area of some two hundred major firms. The copper law, No. 17,450, passed Congress unanimously in July 1971; compensation to Anaconda and Kennecott was calculated net of "excessive profits" and came out at nothing.

The numbers for 1971 were remarkable. Industrial production up 14 per cent, wages up 55, GDP up 8.3, unemployment down to 3.8, inflation down from 35 per cent to 20. In the April municipal elections Popular Unity took 49.7 per cent. It looked, briefly, as though the "Chilean road to socialism" — revolution through the ballot box and the statute book — might actually be a road.

Then It Did Not

By the end of 1971 the budget deficit had gone from 3.5 per cent of GDP to 9.8; public-sector credit expanded 124 per cent; reserves fell from $394 million to $163 million. The escudo depreciated 140 per cent in 1972. Real GDP contracted at 5.6 per cent a year from 1971 to 1973. Inflation eventually reached an estimated 606 per cent, the highest in Chilean history. Copper, which paid for everything, fell from $66 a ton to around $48. Food imports rose an estimated 149 per cent.

The external squeeze was real and deliberate. Credit lines were cut and accounts blocked; of $270 million earmarked for Chile in 1972, one academic account puts the amount actually received at $32 million. In October 1972 a truckers' strike financed with $2 million of CIA money paralysed the country for twenty-four days; Allende answered by bringing General Carlos Prats into the cabinet as interior minister. His government ran the Cybersyn cybernetic management system to keep production coordinated while the roads were empty.

In March 1973 Popular Unity's vote rose to 43 per cent — enough to survive, not enough to govern. On 22 August the Chamber of Deputies voted 81 to 47 that his government was in breach of the constitution and seeking absolute power. Allende replied point by point two days later, telling Congress it was facilitating sedition and insisting that never before had Chile had a more democratic government than the one over which he had the honour to preside.

Eleven September

On the morning of 11 September 1973 he had intended, according to his adviser Joan Garcés, to announce a plebiscite on his own continuation in office. Instead the armed forces moved. From La Moneda, over Radio Magallanes and against a soundtrack of gunfire, he made his last broadcast: he had faith in Chile and its destiny, and the great avenues would open again through which free men would pass to build a better society. He refused safe passage rather than serve as a propaganda trophy for men he called traitors.

He died that afternoon by his own hand, using an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro and engraved to his friend and comrade-in-arms. His physician Patricio Guijón was in the room. For decades the left disputed it; in 2011 a Chilean court ordered exhumation, and the forensic panel concluded unanimously that the wounds were self-inflicted. His family, including his daughter Isabel, never contested the finding.

Why Salvador Is Called a Genius

The word does not appear in these sources, and the claim needs care. Allende was not an original theorist; he wrote no work of political philosophy. His intellectual achievement was a translation — taking a clinician's causal model of disease and turning it into a governing programme, then spending a parliamentary career making it law.

*La realidad médico-social chilena* is the evidence. It reads the mortality tables of a country and argues that the effective treatment for tuberculosis is wages and housing. That move, from bedside to budget, is genuinely rare, and it made him a founding figure of social medicine well before he was a president. The political skill was separate and considerable: he built and held a fractious left coalition, was ratified by a hostile Congress by signing a document constraining his own power, and kept constitutional forms after his enemies and his own left flank had abandoned them.

The counter-case is severe. On the numbers, his economic management failed catastrophically — 606 per cent inflation is not solely attributable to Washington, and the tripled deficit and 124 per cent credit expansion were his government's own decisions. He never solved the arithmetic of 36 per cent, and his refusal to choose between insurrection and compromise left him with neither. Sympathisers call this integrity; critics call it a failure of political judgement.

Legacy

He remains the test case for a question democracies have not settled: whether a socialist programme can be enacted by constitutional means against determined domestic and foreign opposition. Pinochet's seventeen years supplied one answer; Allende's final broadcast supplied the counter-argument, and it has outlived him. The great avenues line is now among the most quoted sentences in Latin American politics — which is what happens when a man is right about how he will be remembered.

Achievements

• President of Chile (1970–1973)
• president of the Senate of Chile (1966–1969)
• deputy of Chile (1937–1939)
• senator of Chile (1945–1970)
• Order of José Martí
• Order of Augusto César Sandino
• Lenin Peace Prize
• Grand Cross of the Order Bernardo O'Higgins
• Educated at University of Chile and Instituto Nacional General José Miguel Carrera