“The MIR Gave Me More Than It Took Away”: Narratives of Militancy and Transformation in Chile’s Revolutionary Left Movement, 1965–73

Founded in August 1965, the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) consciously differentiated itself from Chile’s Communist Party by declaring itself a Marxist-Leninist Vanguard Party. Yet even within Chile, the MIR was not the first, nor the only self-proclaimed revolutionary group to draw inspiration from the Cuban Revolution and to legitimate the use of violence to usher in Chile’s own revolution. Yet of these factions, the MIR alone succeeded in transforming itself into a grassroots movement in favor of revolution. In the context of 1960s Chile, the MIR’s appearance and their fiery discourse gave material and symbolic expression to a latent desire in society for change. The MIR’s ability to channel this desire underwrote their rapid expansion as a mass movement during the Popular Unity period (1970-1973). Indeed, as I will argue, the originality of Chile’s New Left was not their call to arms, but rather the newness of organizing in a historical moment marked by unprecedented possibilities for popular mobilization, particularly after Salvador Allende’s election in 1970.

This paper seeks to explain how and why the MIR succeeded in garnering grassroots support for its revolutionary project (1965-1973) by foregrounding individual subjectivities and motivations for joining the MIR. Drawing from more than fifty oral histories, I analyze the narratives participants use to explain their militancy as a window onto understanding the complexity of people’s lives on their own terms. This approach enables us to ask: What led individuals to identify with the MIR?  What was happening in their lives that made the proposal of a revolution in Chile appear not only attractive, but feasible?  The answers shed light on the transformations happening in Chilean society in the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so, it humanizes a story of political activism and collective transformation long silenced by decades of imprisonment and persecution.