Popular Unity and Allende: Inspirations for the Future

Abstract

The article proposes a synthetic reading of aspects in order to derive ideas about democratic socialism that serve as an inspiring basis for future social processes that have the emancipation of peoples at their center. At first, it discusses the historical trajectories that led to Popular Unity and the strategic debates carried out since the late 1950s, because they opened the door for the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism. In a second moment, it is necessary to understand the actions promoted to realize rights, as achievements that arise from the popular base, outside and inside the frameworks of bourgeois institutionality. 51 years after the civil-military coup and a devastating and destructive neoliberalism, the figure of Salvador Allende and the legacy of Popular Unity have not faded, on the contrary, they are regaining new energy to settle within the real, concrete experiences that serve to illuminate and imagine futures.