Before The Coup
The Sino-Soviet ideological dispute, the Soviet Union's repressive interventions in Czechoslovakia and other Warsaw Pact countries, the presence of the Cuban Revolution in Latin America, and the emergent global student movement inspired in the humanist socialism of the Frankfurt School and the New Left (by the time of the early opposition to the Vietnam War) were main ideological issues that the traditional Chilean left (the Socialist Party and the Communist Party) had to deal with amid their relative political stagnation in the beginning of the 1960s.
Their "reformist" doctrine of a non-revolutionary road to socialism began to be questioned in a country with political dominance of the right-wing and center-right wing parties strongly supporting US policies. The questioning for changes and the opposition against such changes resulted in several small groups or fractions.
The Maoists left the Communist Party and the Socialist Party group of students. A the same time, since World War II, there were some minor Trotskyist formations and minor left-libertarian groups, which also had a discrete ideological influence in the student movement in Santiago and Concepción. The group led by Miguel Enríquez, temporarely allocated in the cell "Espartaco" at the Socialist Party, called itself the "Revolutionary Socialists" fraction. It was formed by Miguel and Marco A. Enríquez, B. Van Schowen, Marcello Ferrada-Noli (a left libertarian and then the leader of the socialist cell "Espartaco" in Concepción), and Jorge Gutiérrez. When this fraction was finally ousted from the Socialist Party (Senator Ampuero) in February 1964, it continued as independent fraction until they merged in the organization VRM. There the young socialists met with Trotskyites and Stalinists, most of them twice their age.
When MIR was founded on 12 October 1965 at the locals of an anarchist union in Santiago, less than 100 participated, and all the above ideological tendencies were represented. Revolutionary socialists (by Miguel Enríquez and B. Van Schowen), former communists (represented by the Maoist Cares), Trotskyites (by Dr. Enrique Sepúlveda and Marco Antonio Enríquez, Miguel Enríquez's brother), left-libertarians or social anarchists (by Marcello Ferrada-Noli), and anarcho-sindicalists (by Clotario Blest). It took some time before the MIR finally could achieve its ultimate identification as a solely Marxist-Leninist political organization. And this was the work of Miguel Enríquez for the two years to come.
The first document approved at MIR foundation congress was the "Tesi Insurreccional", the political-military theses of MIR. The document was written by Miguel Enríquez (Viriato), Marco Antonio Enríquez (Bravo), and Marcello Ferrada-Noli (Atacama), all three from Concepción. Two reasons explain this document and its co-authorship.
One is that the group of young students from Concepción led by Miguel Enríquez was the most numerous. The second being that the group from Concepción had internally some different ideological profiles, which were represented in the document by the co-authors. Several tendencies were represented on the Central Committee, but later, the only line that prevailed was the Marxist-Leninist. Both Maoists (and Stalinists) and Trotskyites abandoned MIR or were ousted by the new Secretariat led by Miguel Enriquez. The few anarchist and left liberal cadres remaining in the organization were confined to academic tasks and trusted the ideological polemique with the emergent "Christian Humanism" and old stalinists.
MIR then considered itself a revolutionary vanguard party and advocated a Marxist-Leninist model of revolution in which it would lead the working class to a "dictatorship of the proletariat".
In 1969, following the "Osses case", a direct (non-fatal) operative acted by four militants of MIR in Concepción against the right-wing tabloid Noticias de la Tarde, the Christian Democratic Party government used the incident to ban the MIR and persecution of its known leaders. The government publicized a national list of 13 young MIRleaders for their capture. Among them, all between 22 and 26 and with links to the University of Concepción, were Doctors Miguel Enríquez and Bautista Van Schouwen, Professor Marcello Ferrada-Noli, Medical student Luciano Cruz, Sociologist Nelson Gutiérrez, Lawyer Juan Saavedra Gorriategy, Civil Engineer Aníbal Matamala, and Economist José Goñi (Goñi later became a Minister of Defence and ambassador of Chile in the USA). Some of them were captured after spectacular operatives coordinated by the central headquarters of the Chilean Political Police in Santiago, tortured, and imprisoned in the Cárcel of Concepción and in Santiago.
On 1 May 1969, fifteen armed MIR guerrillas stormed the Bío-Bío radio station of Concepción and transmitted a discourse urging the people to take up arms and overthrow the current government. On 21May, a group of local MIR sympathizers took to the streets of Concepción and attacked the branches of 'The City Bank' in the city and the offices of the 'La Patria' newspaper.
The banning of MIR by the Christian Democratic government in 1969 drastically changed the organization of MIR, which entered a clandestine political existence with semi autonomous operative-structures that survived even during the first years of the military resistance of MIR against the 1973 Chilean coup. The threat from the MIR was underlined by the discovery at the end of May of a guerrilla training camp in the southern province of Valdivia.Beginning in March 1968, a series of MIR bomb attacks took place in various parts of the country that targeted among others, the U.S. consulate, the Chilean-American Institute in Rancagua, the main office of the Christian Democratic Party, the office of Chile's largest-selling El Mercurio newspaper and the residence of senator Francisco Bulnes of the National Party.
In June 1971, a small group known as the Vanguardia Organizada del Pueblo (VOP), founded among other by two former MIR militants expulsed from the Organization in 1969 conducted the abduction and cold-blood execution of the former Minister of Interior Affairs during the Christian Democratic government, Edmundo Pérez Zujovic. The Minister had been signalled by sectors of the oppositional left and worker-unions as the top government politician supposedly ordering the repression actions ended in the Masacre de Puerto Montt on March 9, 1969. Then, 9 working-class men and woman fell under the fire of the police in Southern Chile. Following the assassination of Perez Zijovic, the MIR Political Bureau condemned this action in "categorical" terms in a special issued communiqué.
MIR explicitly condemned terrorism perpetrated against individuals ("atentado personal"). Ideological issues that would help to explain this anti-terrorist posture of MIR have been referred in historical notes by MIR-leaders survivors of the epoch.
Although MIR built up an arsenals of light arms, assault automatic weapons, and also mobile mortar-launchers from its own handcrafted manufacturing (the Talleres), MIR supported rather than opposed the presidency of Salvador Allende and his People's Unity coalition. Nationwide unrest and political polarization escalated, as did left-wing and right-wing violence. Before 1973, the organization may have staged few attacks compared to its urban guerrilla peers, but it tried to infiltrate the Chilean Armed Forces in anticipation of a coup d'état against Allende and discussed plans to replace the existing police and military with a militia recruited from the Popular Front's supporters. The MIR commanders, Oscar Garretón and Miguel Enríquez were tasked with infiltrating Chilean Navy personnel. In August 1973, it finally formed the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (JCR) with other South American revolutionary parties (the Argentine ERP, the Uruguayan Tupamaros and the Bolivian National Liberation Army. However, the JCR never achieved real effectiveness.
Read more about this topic: Revolutionary Left Movement (Chile)