All Forms of Struggle: The Left, Armed Resistance, and the Catholic Church in Pinochet's Chile, 1973–86

Armed resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship as it developed in poor and working class neighborhoods (poblaciones) of the nation’s capital in the late 1970s and 1980s is not congruent with the entrenched stereotype of angry young men with “nothing left to lose” taking up arms or blindly following revolutionary leadership and theories from afuera (outside the country and/or outside the población). This paper places the most important armed groups that operated in popular-sector Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship –the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR) and the Movimiento Juvenil Lautaro (MJL)—into historical, politico-cultural, and social context from the perspective of the broad-based popular-sector social movement of which they formed a part.  It examines the relationship between the Left and the Catholic Church as it developed during the 1970s and the shifts in that relationship as sectors of the left, some of which had been closely linked to the Church at the grassroots, became increasingly radicalized even as the official Church promoted non-violent resistance, drawing on internationally well-known figures such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Meanwhile, select members of some armed leftist groups went to Cuba for military training and to the Central American wars for combat experience, but popular-sector militants who remained in Chile drew upon local strategies and networks built earlier in the 1970s under the protection of the Catholic Church to mount resistance to the regime.  This paper will focus on the strategies, lived experiences of participants, and friction on the ground as these two approaches to rebellion –informed by both local and international events and strategies—emerged and developed in dialogue with one another in the poblaciones.