Erik Visits a Latin American Grave, Part 2,225

This is the grave of Aniceto Rodriguez.

Born in 1917, Rodriguez grew up pretty well off, went to the University of Chile, studied law, and went into politics as a socialist. He was involved in student leftist movements and in 1940 was elected secretary general of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile. So this was a young man with a future. Now, he was basically a mainstream socialist politician and was the kind of guy who could get elected, rose in importance, but really was the kind of insider who doesn’t get a ton of attention. He won races to represent Santiago districts in the national legislature and had important committee posts within that. He was elected as a senator in 1953 for some outlying areas.

Then in 1961, Rodriguez joined the Socialist Party of Chile. This was the party of Salvador Allende. Now, in the early 1960s, that this would become something close to a revolutionary party was not necessarily preordained. It had a lot in common with socialist parties in western Europe. It included some far-left elements, but a lot of those people were either in communist-based parties (very much not the same thing) or independent political operators. Meanwhile, it also had quite a lot of people who one would describe as “center-left,” at least in the European model. But Allende was becoming the leader of the Socialist Party and he was quite far to the left. That opened space for the liberal Eduardo Frei to siphon off some of those center-left folks in 1964. When Rodriguez joined the party, it was at a moment when all the leftists were trying to unite and so that splintered pretty quickly. But Rodriguez stayed in the party. He remained in the Chilean Senate, working in major committees.

Then in 1965, Rodriguez became the party’s secretary general, which was an internally elected position. He was a considered a conservative socialist, which might seem a contradiction in terms in the U.S. context, but really wasn’t, especially in the context of the era of third world rebellion and in a place such as Chile. This made him the top rival of Allende in the party. He never seriously threatened the latter’s dominance, though he tried and had ambitions to be president. Interestingly, part of this was seeing Tito’s Yugoslavia as the center of what socialism could be, not the Soviet Union or China. In the global socialist world of the time, that mattered and he was one of a trio of leading Chilean socialists who worked closely with the Yugoslav government in these years and built those ties for a hopeful future of that style of socialism.

Rodriguez had become a big enough deal that he was a serious challenge to Allende’s domination of the Socialist Party. In 1969, the party considered nominating him as their presidential candidate instead. But Allende defeated that relatively moderate challenge. Rodriguez accepted this and generally supported Allende’s rule after his successful 1970 victory. In fact, he was campaign manager for Allende. But Allende refused Rodriguez the Interior ministry, which was a powerful position. He didn’t trust Rodriguez’s political judgement over past issues. I don’t have the real knowledge to evaluate who was more correct here in their rivalry, but Allende worked to sideline Rodriguez and get him replaced as the SP’s secretary-general as well.

Then in 1973, the CIA, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger worked with the Chilean military to launch a fascist coup against Allende and eliminate socialism from Chile.

Rodriguez fled Chile, as you’d expect. It was that or death. He got to Venezuela, where he based himself for many years. He became a leader in exile, organizing the various opponents in exile to the Pinochet regime during the 1975 Colonia Tovar meeting, which attempted to coordinate opposition. Of course, there was only so much they could do, which is true of any opposition in exile. But he continued to be one of the main exile leaders and was big into coalition building to try and exert pressure inside and outside of Chile to get rid of Pinochet. Rodriguez became something of a voice of the exiles, in part because he was so moderate and thus not really that much of a threat to the fascists supporting the coup. If even he couldn’t return to Chile, how messed up was that country? He took advantage of this position. He wrote, “This illegal and inhumane sanction of exile continues crushing me worse than a sentence of perpetual imprisonment–yet I have committed no crime.”

The old divides over economics and revolution were sublimated if they didn’t disappear entirely and by the time of the 1988 election that denied Pinochet of what effectively would have been lifetime rule, they had largely disappeared. Rodriguez was still in the Socialist Party, but this was now mostly just a party of liberal democracy, relatively unthreatening to capital, but in a way that was probably necessary to clear the space to get rid of the fascists. You do what you have to do.

Rodriguez returned to Chile after Pinochet in 1988, after the plebiscite. In fact, U.S. foreign policy documents (the one I read for this post was a discussion of Chile by the later known scumbag Eliot Abrams, then Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs in the Reagan administration, yuck) noted that Rodriguez’s return to Chile was a good sign for the return of democracy to the country. Rodriguez ran for the Senate again in 1989. But he didn’t win his seat. However, the Aylwin government, knowing what they owed him, paid him off by giving the position of ambassador to Venezuela in 1990. He served in Caracas until his death in 1995. Rodriguez was 78 years old when he died

Aniceto Rodriguez is buried in Santiago General Cemetery, Santiago, Chile.

If you would like this series to visit American ambassadors to Chile, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Heman Allen is in Burlington, Vermont and Samuel Larned is in Providence. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.