Neruda, p.33
Neruda, page 33
The Atacama Desert, which covers northern Chile, is the driest desert in the world. The sand was filled with numerous valuable minerals, most importantly an abundance of copper and crucial nitrate fields. These held the ingredients that yielded sodium nitrate, or Chilean saltpeter, a superior form of gunpowder and a lucrative export to countries fighting wars around the world. Sodium nitrate was also mined as a profitable soil fertilizer (until cheaper synthetics did it in). The importance of the region’s minerals was so great that in 1879, Chile started the War of the Pacific against Bolivia and Peru to take the top of the desert all for itself. (Chile emerged victorious in 1884; Bolivia lost its coastal access, and Peru, its southern territory.) Chile captured Peru’s most valuable nitrate province, suddenly bringing the mines there under Chilean control. The Peruvian government had nationalized its mines by going into foreign debt, a burden the Chilean government did not want to assume. Instead, it enabled private entrepreneurs to control the resources that became the main source of revenue for the Chilean state, initiating a wave of economic expansion, while providing a bonanza to the new private mine owners.
Within the next few years, one enterprising Englishman, John Thomas North, had amassed so many holdings that he was deemed the “Nitrate King.” Before the end of the 1880s, the value and expanse of the resources he controlled seemed to constitute a state within a state. And it wasn’t just the nitrate fields that British capital had bought; Britons controlled the majority of Chile’s means of production: the mines, the railroads, and the banks that funded the economy and reaped its rewards. The British, and then later the United States, took Spain’s place in the economic exploitation of the country and its people.
Many would later criticize the government for not having kept the mines in Chilean hands, but others argued the country simply couldn’t afford it and pointed toward the windfall the treasury gained from the export taxes. As then-president Domingo Santa María put it: “Let the gringos work the nitrate freely. I shall be waiting at the door.”
The Chilean poor migrated in great numbers to work the mines in the north, where they were paid pitiful wages and often lived in grim company housing or shantytowns set up around the mines. As had happened throughout Latin America—in the banana industry, for example—workers were forced to rely on the company store for their provisions. The already miserable plight of the Chilean proletariat then became desperate with the virtual collapse of the economy in 1919. Not only was there a slowdown in the demand for minerals after the end of World War I, but Germany had invented a synthetic substitute for sodium nitrate, which sold at prices lower than Chile’s saltpeter. Thousands of workers lost their jobs and made their way to Santiago looking for any form of employment. They lived in sprawling, filthy tenements. Many became politically active and radicalized.
The government’s continual repression of the workers’ movement during this time shaped the country’s politics, creating tremendous tensions and divisions that lingered throughout the twentieth century. Even before the economy’s collapse, the Chilean armed forces began breaking up strikes and protecting the (mostly foreign) companies. There was a massacre of fifty-eight workers (with more than three hundred injured) in Antofagasta in 1906 and another bloodbath in Iquique the following year. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Chile’s tireless socialist labor leader, Luis Emilio Recabarren, was elected to the National Congress with the votes of the workers. Recabarren formed the Socialist Workers Party in 1912. Ten years later he completed his conversion to Marxism and formed the Chilean Communist Party. Neruda renders his interpretation of this history in the Canto General poem “Recabarren (1921)”:
It is the Chilean interrupted
by unemployment and death.
It is the enduring, rugged Chilean,
survivor of the labor
or shrouded by the salt.
It was there that this captain of the people
arrived with his pamphlets.
He took the solitary offended man,
who, wrapping his broken blankets
over his hungry children,
accepted the fierce
injustices, and he told him:
“Join your voice to another voice,”
“Join your hand to another hand.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He organized the loneliness,
he took books and songs
to the walls of terror,
he united a complaint with another complaint
and the slave without voice or mouth,
the extended suffering,
was named, it was called Pueblo,*
Proletariat, Union,
it took on a persona and elegance.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and it was called Party.
Communist
Party
Workers’ strikes were so rampant in 1920 that President Sanfuentes declared a state of siege in Santiago and Valparaíso. In 1925, soldiers gunned down more than twelve hundred nitrate workers at La Coruña, and some two hundred people were arrested at the Industrial Workers of the World’s headquarters in Valparaíso. Workers’ newspapers were banished, union headquarters ransacked, labor leaders arrested. Recabarren called for a nonviolent revolution. Over the following decades, led by the Communist Party, and granted some breathing room by less repressive administrations in Santiago, the workers in the north developed one of Latin America’s most organized and influential movements.
Neruda wasn’t alone as he launched his Senate campaign in this tumultuous and economically important region. He found a lieutenant in a former nitrate worker, Elías Lafertte Gaviño, a cofounder of the Socialist Workers Party and leader of its newer incarnation, the Chilean Communist Party. Lafertte was running for the other Senate seat in the north. They took their campaign to the workers in the mines, involving themselves in their daily lives, endorsing their calls for better wages, education, and working conditions.
Lafertte wrote about visiting a worker’s living quarters in company housing at a nitrate mine:
I enter her home and she shows me makeshift beds, some of them on the ground, a table made of boxes and only one chair for the entire house. They didn’t build a kitchen for the houses . . . there’s no toilet or bathroom in the camp, and since water is scarce, they sometimes have to buy it. The eczema and ulcers caused by the acids of the nitrate process are just one more problem in their fearful lives.
On February 24, 1945, Neruda and Lafertte held a huge rally at the stadium of the province’s largest city, Antofagasta, presided over by the city’s mayor and congressman, both Communists. Neruda read a new poem, “Salute to the North,” with economical phrasing and rhymed consonants throughout, which effectively worked as a campaign speech (the rhymes are lost in translation):
North, I finally arrive at your wild
mineral silence of yesterday and today,
seeking your voice and to find my own,
and I don’t bring you an empty heart:
I bring you everything that I am.*
Neruda would be true to his verse; he and Lafertte were elected senators on March 4. Up and down the length of Chile, the Communist Party felt victorious, with two other senators and twenty deputies elected.
That same month Neruda was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature, despite a strong political opposition within the current conservative government’s self-selected jury. “This triumph over prejudice and anti-communist action,” Neruda said, “with which they want to poison the world to take advantage of the leftover remnants of Nazism, is more than a personal triumph for me; it represents the hope that my homeland will achieve a more prestigious status in the world as a democratic nation.” But divisive tension between communists and capitalists was brimming. The McCarthy era had begun, and anti-communist fever was being fanned in the United States and down throughout Latin America.
During his years in the Senate, Neruda demonstrated a duality in his character that many have remarked upon. Not only did he write great poetry, including political poetry, but he also proved to be an agile politician. He was much more than just a renowned figure whom the party could deploy as a candidate to capture a seat. Instead he galvanized the chamber on a variety of issues, from demanding women’s suffrage—which was realized in 1949—to labor rights. His political shrewdness was such that, over the following decades, many politicians and party members would go to Isla Negra to discuss their concerns.
Neruda loved part of this new life and loathed the rest. He may have been a very effective politician, but that didn’t mean he always enjoyed serving the public, as he commented in an interview in the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional: “In politics, not everything can be productive, brilliant action: the strongest, most absorbing part is the everyday, routine work, the bureaucratic function of the politician that does not have an apparent objective or point, but is inevitable nonetheless.”
He found the social and personal aspects—writing and answering letters, receiving and greeting people, the constant meetings, talks, bland dinner parties—to be “extremely boring and tiresome, and worse yet, it takes time that could be used to write poetry.” Politics and literature were both such “overwhelming, all-consuming occupations that they are incompatible.” He wrote much less during this time, but what he wrote hit its mark.
On July 8, at a ceremony in the Teatro Caupolicán, Neruda officially joined the Chilean Communist Party. Six days later, he traveled to São Paulo, Brazil, for a public celebration of Luís Carlos Prestes, the leftist leader who’d been forbidden release from prison for his mother’s funeral in Mexico, setting off a firestorm. Prestes had now been let free after a decade of incarceration. Jorge Amado, one of Brazil’s greatest writers and a member of the Brazilian Communist Party, received Neruda for the Prestes freedom celebration; the two would be friends for life.
Amado, Neruda, and Prestes spoke before a crowd of more than one hundred thousand enthusiastic people at the Estádio do Pacaembu. Neruda read a poem, written for the occasion, which started by him telling the crowd
How many things I’d like to tell you today, Brazilians,
how many stories, struggles, disappointments, victories
harbored in my heart for many years, unexpressed thoughts
and greetings.
The greetings he carried included words spoken to him from Chilean workers, miners, stonemasons, sailors; even the snow, cloud, and fog; and “the little girl who gave me some ears of grain”:
Their message was one. It was: Greetings to Prestes.
Go look for him, they told me, in the jungles and rivers.
Remove his shackles, look for his cell, call him.
And if they don’t let you talk to him, look at him until
your eyes are tired, and tell us tomorrow what you’ve seen.
—“Spoken in Pacaembú (Brazil, 1945)”
* * *
While Neruda was in Brazil, nitrate workers held a strike in northern Chile. Companies had broken the union’s negotiated freeze on company store prices. Violence erupted between the workers and the authorities. Then the government intervened and outlawed unions in Tarapacá. Senators Lafertte and Neruda, now back in the country, tried to visit the mines but were denied entry. On January 28 the Chilean Workers Federation organized a solidarity march in Santiago. Afterward, many of the thousands of participants gathered in Plaza Bulnes, in front of the presidential palace. There was intense friction between the protesters and the police, and eventually the police fired into the crowd, killing six and wounding many more.
The poetry Neruda wrote at the time, which would fill Canto General, was blunt and politically charged, progressive and reactionary. He wrote not just about the history of the Americas but of current events, in such poems as “The Corpses in the Plaza (January 28, 1946, Santiago de Chile)”:
In the middle of the Plaza this crime was committed.
The brushwood didn’t hide the people’s
pure blood, nor was it swallowed by the pampa’s sand.
Nobody hid this crime.
This crime was committed in the middle of the motherland.
In the midst of all this, Neruda once again received a cable from Carlos Morla Lynch, saying that Maruca was now in Belgium and that she still wanted to be reunited with her husband. She insisted that she hadn’t received money from him in nearly six months. Neruda responded through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that even though he was now divorced, he was still willing to send her money, and asked for her address in Belgium. That same day, August 22, Morla Lynch sent another message, saying that Señora Neruda denied that they were divorced and wanted her passage paid to Peru or Chile. Neruda stalled.
In January, Chile’s president, Juan Antonio Ríos, had resigned; he was dying of cancer. As new elections were called for, the growing conservative middle class created a split in the Radical Party. One faction of the Radicals created an alliance with the Left, including the Communists. They nominated Gabriel González Videla as their presidential candidate. His exaggerated, flamboyant left-wing stance irritated the more conservative elements of the Radical Party. This was a major reason for the split.
Neruda, with his charisma and ability to bond with the people, was named the campaign’s top communications official. He was to spread González Videla’s image everywhere, “even into soup,” according to the Chilean Communist politician and writer Volodia Teitelboim. At the kickoff to the campaign, Neruda read one of many ballads he would recite across the country, this one specifically for the candidate. The lines, the second and fourth rhyming, were sometimes stirring:*
In the north the copper worker,
in the south the railroad worker,
from one end of the country to the other,
the people call him “Gabriel.”
Neruda campaigned all over the country, on the radio, and in the newspapers (television in Chile was still nearly a decade away). On September 4, 1946, Neruda’s candidate won with 40 percent of the vote, as the Right’s vote was split between two other candidates. According to the Chilean constitution at the time, however, since he didn’t win a majority, González Videla had to be voted in by the National Congress. Violent altercations signaled the political polarization in the country, but González Videla was ultimately named president, after he composed a diverse cabinet and struck a secret deal with center-left Christian Democrats and some on the Right.
As soon as González Videla took office, he fulfilled his campaign promise to the Left by rescinding rural unionization restrictions. Almost immediately afterward, he made good on his secret deal with the Right, and its large constituent of landowners, and backed legislation that prohibited the new campesino unions from striking and limited their collective bargaining powers, among other restrictions.
This betrayal didn’t stop the Communists from promoting unionization efforts, now more than ever. The people were responding to them, and they did have party members in the cabinet and high up in various government ministries. They took their fight to both the mines and the cities, advocating for the workers’ quality of life and the right to organize. Their focus was on class struggle. The unions became the most effective tool to advance the Far Left and Communists’ front, and strikes were the most practical mechanism.
Meanwhile, the economy was lagging, and González Videla switched his legislative priorities away from the social reforms he had pledged to the Left and concentrated on promoting growth through industrialization, with no provisions that would allow workers to benefit from any increase in profits. He began to blame the Communists for exacerbating the country’s economic troubles.
By now, the United States had a significant influence on the Chilean economy through U.S. mining companies and the country’s importation of Chilean copper. It exerted great pressure on González Videla to crack down on the unionization of the mine workers in an effort to protect its economic interests. In addition, the Cold War was gearing up; Latin America would be a major battleground of that power struggle for the rest of the century, with U.S. foreign policy strategies focused on containing the threat of communism and Soviet influence in the hemisphere. González Videla seemed to be stuck with the choice of either pleasing Washington or aligning with the Soviets. He tried to please everyone, scrambling to hold on to some semblance of support and power, juggling different parties and factions to the left and to the right, abandoning whatever ideals he may have held in the process.
The divided government had an immediate impact on Neruda in late 1946. In December, President González Videla sent the Senate his nomination of Neruda to be ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary before the Italian government. González Videla assumed he was still enjoying his honeymoon with the Communists and wanted to reward his campaign’s chief of PR, but the marriage was about to fall apart. Members of the Liberal Party sided with the Right and voted against the poet’s nomination. The result was a tie. González Videla met with leaders of the Liberal Party, asking for their support, but they refused to vote for a member of the Communist Party. The president withdrew the nomination.
As 1947 began, political tensions in the Chilean government continued to rise, inflamed by the Chilean workers’ movement. On February 26, Neruda had just come back from a trip to the north, where he had visited a nitrate miners’ strike. He announced in the Senate why the strikes were necessary:
I had the opportunity to compile the necessary data: I have spent time with workers, sleeping in their dormitories, and over the past few days I have seen their work on the pampa, with the machines. Some of the jobs they do could be classified as among the hardest work done on this planet. Yet their salaries are barely enough to cover their living expenses, and naturally, they are not enough to meet any needs for cultural enrichment . . .
