Tanya Harmer. Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 384 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-5429-4.
Reviewed by Aldo Marchesi (Universidad de la República (Montevideo-Uruguay))
Published on H-LatAm (June, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In 1977, Beatriz Allende, daughter of Salvador Allende, took the Uzi submachine gun that Fidel Castro had given her six years earlier and decided to end her life. She wrote a farewell letter to Castro thanking the revolution, expressing her despair at no longer being able to be of use, and asking that her children be placed in the care of Isabel Contrera, sister of Paya Contreras (President Allende’s lover and partner). That image, at the end of the book, epitomizes the intense life lived by the historical figure Tanya Harmer set out to depict in this book. Beatriz’s life is emblematic of the cycle of political awakening, radicalization, and revolutionary commitment that many young Chileans and Latin Americans experienced between the sixties and seventies. But the life described by Harmer also reveals the contradictions, ambiguities, conflicts, uncertainties, passions, and depressions that pierced these individuals, whose paths cannot be reduced merely to an epic or a tragedy. Harmer reconstructs these complexities in a biographical account conceived as a micro-history and a portrait of everyday life in the Cold War that speaks to the wider political processes of Chile and Latin America.
Reconstructing Beatriz Allende’s life was no easy task. Her intense but low-profile political activity, her involvement in clandestine tasks, her relationship with Cuba, and finally, the dictatorship’s repressive destruction have converged to determine the virtual lack of documents pertaining to Beatriz in the more traditional archives. For her study, Harmer gained access to her private correspondence; conducted interviews with people who were part of Beatriz’s network of friends, spanning seven countries; and sifted through the period’s documentation in search of relevant material. The result is a research work in which an individual’s life story engages actively with secondary sources and the period’s historiography.
The book’s ten chapters tell Beatriz’s story chronologically, covering individual, family, and intimate aspects of her life, but with the private viewed always in connection with the political. The chapters follow the different forms of political commitment she assumed throughout her life. While this reflects Harmer’s main interest, which is politics, organizing the book in this way also makes perfect sense for the portrayal of a life that fused the individual with the political.
In the first chapters, Harmer looks at Beatriz’s childhood and youth. Various moments depicted in this section provide a glimpse into the relationship with her family, in particular her closeness to her father, from whom she inherited her vocation for politics and medicine, and her distance from her mother. Friends and relatives recall how in her teenage years she began questioning middle-class society and the prevailing conservative sensitivity of that time. That questioning was fueled by her increasing awareness of the injustices in the Chile of the fifties and sixties, as well as by her rebelliousness. The student protests that erupted spontaneously in 1957, involving for the most part youth sectors; the 1960 earthquake; and the Cuban Revolution, with its attendant anti-imperialist solidarity movements in Chile and throughout the region, emerge as key milestones in the development of Beatriz’s social and political awareness.
Harmer shows in an exceptional way how Beatriz’s commitments increased in an exponential way that led her individual trajectory to be linked to national and regional processes fundamental to global history of the late sixties and early seventies. Likewise, Harmer masterfully narrates how the complexity of the supposed dilemmas of the Left of the sixties (reform and revolution, “old” or “new” Left, national and international, individual options or collective commitment) coexisted in the case of Beatriz Allende. It was historical contingency, not previous ideological beliefs, that led her to make certain determinations at each moment. In this regard this biographical example challenges many of the narratives on the period that have overemphasized dichotomies on communalities within the Left.
Beatriz’s political commitment began to take shape in two somewhat contradictory ways. On the one hand, her political socialization as a medical student at the University of Concepción was linked to the initial steps in the development of a new Chilean Left. The university practices connected with social outreach activities in low-income areas, the anti-imperialist demonstrations held in solidarity with Cuba, and the denunciation of the Alliance for Progress in which Beatriz participated were all among the developments that led to the radicalization of what would later become the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario, or MIR). It was at that university that a group of students, including Beatriz’s friend Miguel Enríquez, would form the new MIR leadership in 1967, which would change the course of that organization, turning it into the leading group advocating armed struggle as the road to the Chilean revolution.
On the other hand, Beatriz always maintained her socialist identity and her loyalty to her socialist father, who since 1954 had been the presidential candidate of the Popular Action Front (Frente de Acción Popular, or FRAP), and to whom she lent her full support in the 1964 and 1970 election campaigns. Although Salvador Allende represented the antithesis of what the new Left proclaimed, as he believed elections were the main path to achieving social change, Beatriz gradually shaped political approaches that could in some way reconcile these two opposing views of politics.
Beatriz played an active role in the development of a military apparatus within the Socialist Party. The main political objective of this apparatus was not, however, armed struggle in Chile; rather, it was meant to support the struggle of the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or ELN) formed by Che Guevara in Bolivia. In these underground activities, Beatriz’s political and personal commitment to the idea of the continental revolution was heightened. It was in the course of these activities that her visit to Cuba in 1967 opened up a new world for her, as described in chapter 5, “Love and Revolution.” There she began a relationship with Luis Oña, a member of the Americas Department. She also started to explicitly declare her intention of becoming a revolutionary, a guerrilla. She was trained to carry out covert operations, but when she asked to expand her military training she was met with reticence from the Cubans, who feared it could be detrimental to their political ally Salvador Allende. Their reluctance was also prompted by their sexist views of the demands of military activity. In any case, neither of these reasons prevented Beatriz from being involved in multiple underground tasks in support of the Bolivian ELN, both on Bolivian and Chilean soil. Her father, who always advocated Latin American solidarity and was not against political violence as a form of political struggle in other countries, even collaborated with her in some of these activities in his capacity as senator, securing asylum in Chile for ELN militants.
The other moment in which Beatriz somehow reconciled her two political commitments was in the 1970 election campaign and the subsequent victory of Salvador Allende. Beatriz occupied a central place in the president’s immediate circle. She was involved in multiple tasks, ranging from political relations with organizations in other countries to aspects connected with Allende’s security. Beatriz’s political approach in all these tasks was to bring the different positions within Chile’s Left closer together. Salvador Allende was fully aware that she was the most capable person for the job and the best-connected to build bridges with radical organizations such as the MIR, which was not part of Unidad Popular (UP), and with the radical sectors of the Socialist Party and other groups within the UP coalition. While the more traditional narratives have focused on the differences and serious conflicts with these organizations, the history that emerges from the political actions of the president’s political advisor and daughter reveals the rapprochements and points of convergence between these diverse approaches to politics. Moreover, Beatriz was a key player in all efforts connected with the attempted resistance to the coup. Even on September 11, the very day of the coup, she was there at La Moneda Palace, five months pregnant and armed with the Uzi submachine gun Castro had given her and a Cobra Colt pistol, ready to resist. But being a woman and Allende’s daughter conditioned her, as her father begged her to leave, arguing that she would be more useful outside.
The last chapters describe her life in Cuba and her attempts to organize the resistance against the dictatorship and solidarity actions with the Chilean people. This period reflects the tension between her international political involvement in solidarity efforts, for which her figure was extremely symbolic as the president’s daughter, and her desire to fight in the Chilean resistance, which did not seem very viable. Moreover, during her stay in Cuba, Beatriz gained a more nuanced view of the revolution. She became aware of the differences between the standard of living of the ruling elite, of which she also formed part, and the rest of the population. She saw firsthand the sexism that persisted in the revolution and which affected many aspects of her everyday life. Finally, her increasing relationship problems, as well as the gradual perception that the resistance in Chile was losing its way due to unpredictability and multiple forms of sectarianism and divisions within the Left, led her to start distancing herself from what had been her life’s main motivation: political struggle. It was in this context that she made the tragic decision to commit suicide in 1977.
The leading challenge faced by historians when writing someone’s biography is balancing the tension between individual and historical context and avoiding two possible excesses: on the one hand, making the individual story so exceptional as to render the historical context irrelevant, and, on the other, focusing so heavily on the historical context that it drowns out the unique experience of the subject of the biography. In her book, Harmer strikes a very good balance between both extremes. It thus serves to illustrate the period, but at the same time to challenge sweeping statements that have been made regarding Chile and Latin America in the sixties and seventies. For example, Beatriz's link with Cuba sheds a lot of light on the complex relationships in terms of political strategies and international relations between the Cuban Revolution and the Chilean experience.
In this sense, the literature on the subject has emphasized the dilemmatic nature of the options of the Left of that time: reform or revolution; old or new Left. Beatriz’s political experience, however, reveals that there were spaces where these positions converged, as well as the interdependence that existed between the two in unstable political processes, in which neither seemed to have a winning strategy or the forces necessary to move the process forward on their own.
Many studies have pointed out the sexism that existed in Latin American left-wing organizations and how these groups limited the political participation of women. Harmer’s book reveals these limits, but it is also evidence that certain women managed to influence political processes despite such limits. Her case also reveals that one of the conditions for the political participation of women was that it be relatively invisible. Although Harmer shows how central Beatriz’s involvement was in the period of the UP government and in the resistance against the dictatorship, her figure has not found a place in historical memory. In this sense, without setting out to do so, the book also impacts the memories of that time.
Finally, the biography clearly illustrates the ways in which the tension between collective political commitment and the individual operated in the context of the sixties. Several works have underscored how this generation was marked by the idea of the need to sacrifice the individual. In Beatriz’s story we can perceive the many ways in which her private life was subordinated to a notion of the political that seemed to overtake everything. Beatriz raised no major objections to her father’s problematic infidelities, or to how Castro described her father’s death as an assassination when she knew it had been a suicide. Her political choices also appear to have led her to neglect, to a certain extent, those nearest to her. These aspects are not explained by strong ideological convictions but rather by her upbringing in a family where politics was central, as well as by the sense of being in a critical historical cycle that demanded subordinating individual subjectivity to collective passion. A historical cycle whose end was so difficult to accept for Beatriz and for so many others of her generation.
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Citation:
Aldo Marchesi. Review of Harmer, Tanya, Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55794
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