Erik Visits a (Latin) American Grave, Part 2,198

This is the grave of Miguel Enriquez.

Born in 1944 to a pretty elite family in Talcahuano, a prosperous town on the southern Chilean coast, Enriquez grew up an intellectual environment. His father was a well-known academic and doctor. His father was also a prominent leftist and friend of another well-known leftist doctor by the name of Salvador Allende. Other family members were legislators and lawyers. Even his mother was an important lawyer in a time when there weren’t a lot of women practicing. So Enriquez went to good schools.

Now, just because one has wealth does not mean they are inevitably right-wing assholes. Believe or not, you can come from money and actually not only believe that you live in an unjust society but actually fight for it. To do so, it helps to not have the cancerous individualism that has destroyed the social fabric of the world in the 21st century, so such possibilities seem distant. But this was the era of communism. And whatever you want to say about the realities under communism–and there’s plenty to criticize–what communism did in other nations was provide a path toward imagining a different future than life under rapacious capitalism. Chile definitely had felt the ravages of capitalism. Its copper industry drove much of the country and it’s hard to imagine a more exploitative industry than mining. That had dominated much of the economy since the late 19th century, with many of the same problems (and often the same capitalists) as a place such as Butte, Montana–the death of workers, deep poverty, environmental catastrophe, the pilfering of all the money by the wealthy while providing nothing to the community, political corruption, state violence when workers resist. Socialism meant there was another way. Few if any socialists would, say, turn their back on the need for Chile to have a strong mining industry. After all, socialism was another developmentalist ideology. But who should that industry support? Who benefits? For someone such as Miguel Enriquez, it needed to be the workers.

Enriquez became a doctor and did advanced graduate work and became a professor of anatomy at the University of Concepcion, the biggest city in southern Chile. But he was also engaged in radical politics. This was the urban intellectual communist kind. The left was on the rise through Latin America at this time. Chile was one of the most fertile versions of this. It combined the urban intellectual left based in the cities with very real and very long traditions of organizing in industry due to the nation’s mining history, where the copper companies had created the conditions for strong left-wing organizing. There were textile mills and other industries as well with strong organizing traditions. This all led to the elected government of Salvador Allende, where the people of Chile actually chose a leftist path by the vote.

Now, Enriquez wasn’t just some leftist professor. He was general secretary of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). This was the major communist party of Chile. Its head was Allende’s nephew and Enriquez was not only #2, but really the spokesperson and most important figure in the party. So when Allende was elected in 1970, Enriquez was happy….up to a point. That’s because he was part of the Marxist ideas of this time that did not really believe in bourgeois reforms such as elections and believed that the only way to bring the revolution to the people was through armed struggle, not the vote. The Communist Party of Chile was much more happy to go along with Allende, but for Enriquez and the MIR, the CP was hopelessly hidebound and had lost its revolutionary edge. Enriquez called for Allende to nationalize private property. Allende wanted a more gradual move toward socialism. In retrospect, it’s amazing how far Allende moved, pressed more by the demands of the working class than the intellectuals in the MIR, who wanted immediate change.

But by 1973, Enriquez had moved toward thinking that only renewing armed struggle, even if it was against democratic socialism, was necessary. They were serious about this as well. They were involved in training urban guerillas in paramilitary methods, the kind of thing that you could see across the global revolutionary movements at this time. And unlike, say, the Weather Underground, they were pretty serious about what they were doing. This wasn’t 20 people in New York apartments pretending the “people” would be with them. There was serious support for far left movements in Chile.

But this was all predicated on a false view of Chilean society. That is that the military, traditionally relatively apolitical in Chile, would stay out of politics and not launch its own right-wing coup. That belief proved rather naive, as the military forces showed on September 11, 1973, when the Navy in particular launched the military coup that murdered Allende and installed Augusto Pinochet as the head of the Chilean government, where he would remain for the next 17 years.

After the Pinochet coup, Enriquez probably should have fled the country. He was not immediately found. But the Pinochet dictatorship went crazy over the MIR. They were totally, completely paranoid. MIR members were the top people they wanted tortured and executed. I wonder how many people were “asked” about Enriquez’s whereabouts during torture in late 1973 and 1974–I am sure the answer is a lot. And then they were shot. In any case, Enriquez did not believe in fleeing. This was a man deeply imbued with the ideas of people such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. To stay and fight and start the revolution internally, well, this was a new phase in the struggle. To leave Chile would mean leaving the struggle. Exile was betraying the historical inevitability of the revolution. So Enriquez stayed and led the communists from the underground. Brave man.

Of course, this was only going to last for so long before the dictatorship and their helpers from the United States found him. Enriquez was working out of a safe house in the San Miguel district of Santiago. In October 1974. DINA agents–the secret police–found it, surrounded it, and took it. He fought back. He wasn’t just an intellectual–he could very much handle a gun. He used that gun to provide cover for the escape of his pregnant girlfriend and some other men. It made sense since he was wounded in the first seconds of the attack and probably could not have escaped. So of course the DINA opened fire and he was hit many times, killing him. At least he didn’t let them torture him.

Miguel Enriquez was 30 years old.

Miguel Enriquez is buried in Santiago General Cemetery, Santiago, Chile.

If you would like this series to visit leftists in the United States, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Michael Harrington is in New Rochelle, New York and Sasha Zimmerman is in Paramus, New Jersey. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.