LMT #146:Cordón Industrial Cerrillos-Maipú, Santiago, Chile – Marco Lagos Catalán

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Marco Lagos Catalán
Researcher at the Nucleus of Popular Social History, University of Chile

Click here for the Spanish version

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The government of Popular Unity (1970–1973) represented a moment of immense political and social intensity. The arrival of Salvador Allende to the presidency allowed broad popular sectors to consider the possibility of transforming the existing order. Processes such as agrarian reform and land occupations accelerated, while new forms of popular organization emerged. Among them, the Supply and Price Control Committees (Juntas de Abastecimiento y Control de Precios, JAP) and the Industrial Cordones stood out, which, in the midst of the business offensive, coordinated the defense of production and promoted forms of workers’ control. In these experiences were expressed what historian Peter Winn called a “revolution from below.”

One of the most significant expressions of this revolutionary process “from below” took place in the southwest of Greater Santiago. The Cerrillos-Maipú Cordon encompassed industrial growth, trade union organization and severe urban deprivation. In the early 1970s, it was estimated that around 46,000 workers were distributed across approximately 250 industries, among them Perlak, FENSA, CIC, Fantuzzi and Polycron. Trade union organization was also growing rapidly: around one fifth of the trade unions in the area had been formed between 1971 and 1972. The Cordón extended, moreover, across a territory where city and countryside still intermingled, and from the nearby rural areas came workers and products that supplied Santiago.

In 1972, these mobilizations began to articulate more broadly across the territory. In the first half of the year, protests grew over improvements in transportation, healthcare, housing and other urban issues. Marches and blockades converged in a Cabildo Abierto (an open assembly) that brought together between 300 and 400 people from trade unions, encampments, peasant organizations and neighborhood councils. There, the idea emerged of creating a Communal Command to coordinate the territory’s organizations, bringing the world of the factories closer to pobladores (residents of working-class neighborhoods) and peasants. Mobilization was also growing in the workplace. During 1972, 63 strikes were recorded in the region: 55 industrial and 8 rural.

In June, the mobilizations at Perlak, Polycron and Aluminios El Mono, among other industries, marked a new moment. Several strikes and occupations began to coincide, while meetings between workers from different companies increased. From this process emerged the Workers’ Struggle Coordinating Command (Comando Coordenador das Lutas dos Trabalhadores) of Cerrillos-Maipú, which within a few weeks brought together more than twenty industries. Part of the conflicts was linked to the demand to incorporate factories into the Social Property Area (Área de Propiedad Social, APS), a sector of the economy that the government sought to place under state control. At the end of June, some workers blocked access to the municipality, which led the Minister of Economy to decree the intervention of some industries in conflict. The pressure exerted was thus able to influence government decisions, and the conflicts began to find responses at a national scale.

These dynamics anticipated several characteristics of the Industrial Cordones: coordination between factories, assemblies of delegates and actions that went beyond labor disputes. Each factory retained a certain autonomy, although there were common spaces for coordination, circulation of bulletins and political discussion. This articulation made it possible to link the defense of production to everyday problems such as supply and transportation.

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However, there was no single vision on how to act: Communist and Socialist militants and members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR) coexisted in these spaces and debated the methods, timing and objectives of the mobilization.

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One of the main problems encountered in this process was distribution. Although several factories managed to maintain production amid the boycott and stoppages, workers continued to have little control over a large part of the commercial circuit. At Perlak, for example, workers denounced that every month more than one million units of tomato sauce and tens of thousands of soups left the factory, while these same products were absent from the poblaciones or reappeared only on the black market. The problem also lay in the distribution structure: even with a greater state presence, the public sector controlled only a portion of this system, around 25 to 30%, leaving ample room for speculation. In response to this issue, popular fairs, direct sales and forms of coordination with the JAP, neighborhood organizations and nearby peasants began to be organized.

The business and truckers’ stoppage in October 1972 escalated this situation to a new level. The shutdown of transportation and commerce worsened the shortage of supplies and put the forms of organization that had been built to the test. In Cerrillos-Maipú, numerous factories were occupied and organized shifts to maintain production. The “Battle for Production” thus became part of the daily life of the factories. Responses to the scarcity also emerged, such as food distribution, the production of broths and direct sales. But the stoppage also revealed the limits of these initiatives: without controlling transportation, or indeed a large part of the commercial networks, keeping the factories running was not enough to guarantee that products reached the population.

After the event, one of the most persistent conflicts was the fate of the companies that had been subject to intervention or occupation. Many workers expected these companies to be transferred to the APS, while the government sought to limit the process and return some to their owners or bring them within the framework of the Popular Unity program. This tension divided the workers’ organizations themselves. One of the main points of friction arose with the Central Union of Workers (Central Única de Trabajadores), whose leadership defended a strategy closer to the government program and watched with caution organizations that could escape its control. Within the Cordon, distinct positions coexisted over how far to advance and how to relate to the government. In this sense, Cerrillos-Maipú expressed the disputes over the direction of the Chilean path to socialism and the tension between a revolution “from above” and one “from below.”

Throughout 1973, the territorial coordination sought to strengthen ties with other industrial zones. However, the coup of September 11 violently put an end to this experience. From the early hours of the day, military forces occupied the industrial sector of Cerrillos-Maipú and took control of access routes and thoroughfares. According to the testimony of Guillermo Rodríguez, there were attempts at resistance at Perlak and Fensa. At the latter, armored vehicles took part in the operation and, the following day, military troops blasted their way into the factory with explosives before removing 109 workers from the premises with their hands behind their heads. Searches, detentions and military occupations were replicated across other industries. The Santiago International Fair (Feria Internacional de Santiago, FISA), in Cerrillos, served as a detention center during September and October 1973. Other facilities were also used, such as the Medialuna (the rodeo arena) and the Municipal Gymnasium of Maipú. Thus, the repression occupied the same territory that had given life to the Cordón Industrial, transforming everyday meeting spaces into places of detention and interrogation.

The destruction of these networks did not mean the end of all territorial organization among workers. During the dictatorship, attempts to rebuild trade union ties emerged in Maipú, among them the Maipú Trade Union Federation (Federación Sindical de Maipú, FESIMA). In that same location, in 1979, the Goodyear Industrial Union No. 1 led one of the first strikes to confront the new Labor Plan of the Pinochet dictatorship.

In the following decades, the experience of the Cordones was reclaimed through research, commemorations and cultural expressions. The play Cordones Industrials, by the company Tarea Urgente, is one of the initiatives that brought this history back to the public sphere through theater. Their name also reappeared in recent cycles of mobilization. During the Penguin Revolution, organized by high school students in 2006, “student Cordones” emerged to coordinate educational establishments across municipalities and zones of Santiago. In October 2019, various territorial assemblies formed “assembly Cordones” or “cabildo Cordones.” This did not represent a direct continuity with the industrial Cordones of the 1970s. Nevertheless, these experiences once again put into circulation a form of organization built from the territories. More than half a century later, this experience continues to raise questions about the forms of popular organization, their relationship with the territory and, above all, how far that revolution built “from below” could have gone.

_{Robert Moss, The Chilean Marxist Experiment, 1974. Santiago, Chile: Gabriela Mistral.}

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Tradução: Larissa Farias

Salgado, Xaviera (2019). “Organización política y sociabilidad popular: Cordón Industrial Cerrillos‑Maipú y el paro de octubre de 1972”. En Se levanta el clamor popular. Experiencias del pueblo organizado durante el gobierno de los mil días 1970‑1973. Concepción: Talleres Sartaña, pp. 125‑157.

Henríquez, Renzo (2014). “Industria Perlak ‘Dirigida y controlada por los Trabajadores’. Desalienación obrera en los tiempos de la Unidad Popular, 1970–1973”. Revista Izquierdas, n.º 20, pp. 52–77.

Castillo, Sandra (2010). “Sociabilidad y organización política popular: Cordón Industrial Cerrillos-Maipú”. Cuadernos de Historia, n.º 32.

Gaudichaud, Franck (2016). Chile 1970–1973: mil días que estremecieron al mundo. Poder popular, cordones industriales y socialismo durante el gobierno de Salvador Allende. LOM Ediciones.

Cordero, M. C.; Sader, E.; Threlfall, M. (1973). Consejo comunal de trabajadores y cordón Cerrillos-Maipú: Balance y perspectivas de un embrión de poder popular. Documento CIDU.

Silva, Miguel (1990). Los cordones industriales y el socialismo desde abajo. Ediciones Documento ILIDE.

Documentário: La Batalla de Chile (Parte II). Dir. Patricio Guzmán, 1976.

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Cover image credit: Copper workers of Cerrillos march carrying banners of the Cerrillos Cordón and of “Cobre Cerrillos Intervenida Presente”. Santiago, 1973. Source: Armindo Cardoso, Cordão Cerrillos, 1973. Monochrome negative, gelatin on cellulose acetate, 6 × 6 cm.

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