Remembering to Reimagine: A Symposium on Salvador Allende, Unfulfilled Promise, and the Future of International Law
by Wanshu Cong and Francisco-José Quintana
Published on 19 December 2023
Fifty years ago, a military coup d’état put a brutal end to the democratic socialist experiment led by President Salvador Allende in Chile. The coup ignited a reign of terror that led an iron-fisted socio-economic restructuring of the country. In commemorating this half-century anniversary, this symposium aims not merely to mourn the violence and its enduring scars. We also aim to reclaim the (international) legal ideas and imagination that underpinned some of the Unidad Popular government’s initiatives and ambitions, elucidate how these projects were thwarted, and unearth enduring lessons that could illuminate our path forward today.
When preparing this symposium, a colleague remarked, almost offhand: ‘Good idea. Everybody knows Pinochet, but not everyone knows Allende.’ Indeed, much of what started fifty years ago in Chile has become standard fare in international law textbooks and courses: Augusto Pinochet, human rights abuses, immunity/impunity, justice and reconciliation – they all belong in this account. But this narrative is not the full Chilean story; neglected tales of tragedy, heroism, and perhaps even utopia also exist. International law is no less entwined in these other stories. So, if as students we were invited to discuss Pinochet in our international law classes, as scholars we now choose to discuss Allende.
In international legal scholarship, mainstream antipathy towards the predicament of the Global South has receded, due in no small part to the scholarship of Third World Approaches to International Law over the last few decades. Yet, the marginalisation of Global South experiences and perspectives in international law remains, and therefore so does the need to critique and reconfigure the production of international legal knowledge. In the case of Chile, the half casual remark that Pinochet is more célèbre than Allende is reflective of this enduring marginalisation of the Global South. The textbook narrative casts Chile as just another spectacle of human rights atrocities for which international law is needed but missing. In response, we make a deliberate choice to study Chile as an agent highly capable of bringing about changes to international law.
Allende’s Chile stands as one of the most determined and complicated attempts at bringing about both radical domestic and international change. It represented a pinnacle of third-worldist ambitions, its fall marking the end of an era. From empowering factory workers and giving free milk to children, to nationalising key economic sectors and resisting giant transnational corporations, to strengthening regional integration through the Andean Pact and hosting United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) III to help build a new international economic order, Allende’s socialist experiment was perhaps one revolution too many. And precisely because of this, numerous ‘what-if’ questions appear. These what-if questions are not mere speculation; they are exercises in imagining alternatives – an inherently political praxis and an urgent one in the age of the planetary polycrisis and ‘the strange non-death of neoliberalism’. The urgency is also—and perhaps particularly—felt now in Chile fifty years after the coup, as the country is divided again by different paths forward, each built not only by opposing projections of the future but also by different accounts of the past. Never has the political import of how we (i.e., politically engaged international lawyers) turn to history, what we choose to commemorate, and how we derive meanings from and give new meanings to the past been more evident.
So what? For international lawyers, these are ultimately questions about how international law is related to social change and what world projects international law has and could help to create or sustain. As this symposium will show, the Chilean experience is marked by two seemingly independent approaches to law. At the domestic level, Allende’s government was intent on enacting socialist reforms while adhering to—and visibly demonstrating respect for—existing legal procedures. Internationally, in turn, Allende sought explicitly to rewrite international law to enable the redistribution of wealth and power between North and South. Ultimately, however, the international law of Allende’s Chile, like many other anti-colonial legal agendas of the 1970s, was also highly deferent to existing international law and institutions. It therefore expressed a certain optimism in the possibility of change through existing mechanisms and the possibility of appropriating key idioms such as sovereignty and property, as well as the distinction between the public and the private. In this way, the Unidad Popular experiment arguably reinforced international law’s power in constituting the terrain of action. These experiences make the internationalism of 1970-1973 Chile a crucial case study for arguably the most important question in critical legal thinking; namely, how to actualise the progressive potential of law. This symposium does not offer any definitive answers but maps out some new directions and areas to look for them.
Following this introduction, the symposium dives more deeply into the interplay between Allende’s domestic politics and his international (legal) agenda. Claerwen O’Hara and Valeria Vázquez Guevara’s contribution unpack how Allende’s ‘peoples’-centred politics at home naturally paved the way for his ‘international law of solidarity’, foregrounding the ‘peoples’ of Latin America, the South, and the world. Following this, Anna Saunders’ piece turns to a central yet neglected concern of the United Popular government: technological cooperation. Saunders illuminates Chile’s aspiration to alter the foundations governing technological research, development, and commercialisation as part of its larger objective to reshape international economic relations. Like O’Hara and Vázquez Guevara, Saunders reveals the interlinked yet distinct dimensions—national, regional, and international—of Chile’s ‘technological diplomacy’.
We continue by zeroing in on the underexplored international legal struggles of Allende’s Chile. Fabia Fernandes Carvalho and João Roriz turn to a central issue, i.e., Allende’s nationalisation of copper, through the lens of Eduardo Novoa Monreal, the architect behind Chile’s planned legal defence. This experience, they show, profoundly shaped Novoa Monreal’s legal thought, leading him to develop a pioneering critical jurisprudence that deserves our attention. Subsequently, Wanshu Cong demonstrates that Chile was not merely a central promoter of a fairer and more equitable international economic system but also a trailblazer in striving for a democratic and people-empowering paradigm of international information flow. Despite its short life, Cong shows Allende’s efforts were foundational to the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) movement, which, like the teachings of Novoa Monreal, extended far beyond Allende’s time.
The symposium expands its scope with two contributions that take 1970s Chile as a starting point for broader discussion. André Dao revisits Salvador Allende’s impassioned plea before the United Nations General Assembly, where he indicted International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) for endeavouring ‘to provoke a civil war in my country’. Dao not only highlights the prescient cautionary notes in Allende’s speech about the unchecked influence of large transnational corporations but also probes its limitations. He contends that our present difficulties as international lawyers and legal scholars in determining what counts as a ‘bad’ corporation or how to regulate them under international law are symptomatic of a broader dearth in theorisation on what exactly is a corporation under international law. Francisco-José Quintana, in turn, explores the response of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to the coup and the extraordinary violence of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Against conventional accounts, he argues that the IACHR’s actions in Chile did not merely inaugurate a new era of human rights protection in the Americas. While the IACHR played a central role in denouncing the worst abuses of the dictatorship, Quintana contends that there was a politics behind the veneer of anti-politics, and one that exposes inter-American regionalism as a highly limited framework for political reform.
Finally, Jorge Contesse’s contribution navigates us through fifty years of constitutionalism and human rights in Chile. Starting from the ruins of the 2022 Chilean constitutional referendum that had captivated the hopes of progressives before its ultimate collapse, Contesse delivers a grim verdict: ‘we’re going wrong’. Capturing the essence of this collective project, Contesse combines this sobering diagnosis with a reasonable call for action: in Allende’s commitment to ensure equal dignity in and through international law, we may find the rudiments for realising the elusive promises of constitutional democracy to peoples around the globe.
Revisiting Allende’s Chile on the forum of CIL Dialogues, we also believe that diversifying international law scholarship means more than provincialising Europe or de-centering the West. What is equally crucial is to share non-western perspectives and build mutual understandings between various regions which are positioned in the epistemic periphery of international law. For this, we truly thank the blog team for accepting and hosting this symposium. Given the regional focus, this symposium will also be available in Spanish on the Agenda Estado de Derecho blog. We therefore hope this symposium could generate more interests for future cross-region, Asian-LatAm dialogue in international law.