Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

Abstract

Tanya Harmer has written a creative and deeply researched political biography of Beatriz (“Tati”) Allende, the daughter of Salvador Allende Gossens, the first democratically elected self-proclaimed Marxist president in Latin America, who took office in 1970. Harmer provides an easy to read (but not easy to “hear”) narrative of Beatriz’s political life as well as her death by suicide in 1977 when she was in exile in Cuba. Much of the biography is based on more than a decade of Harmer’s research on Chile’s place in the inter-American Cold War, on Cuban support for insurrection throughout the Western Hemisphere, on Cuban and Chilean Socialist Party support for the Che Guevara–led guerrilla movement in Bolivia (ELN), and on counterinsurgency operations by U.S. and allied regional governments (mostly, but not always, military dictatorships). An essential starting point is Harmer’s pathbreaking book Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (2011), which was based on her 2008 doctoral dissertation, “The Rules of the Game: Allende’s Chile, the United States and Cuba, 1970–1973.” Harmer’s latest book also draws on her “‘Serémos como el Che’: Chilean elenos, Bolivia and the cause of Latinoamericanismo, 1967–1970,” Contemporánea, Vol. 7, No. 7 (2016), pp. 45–66; her “The View from Havana: Chilean Exiles in Cuba and Early Resistance to Chile’s Dictatorship, 1973–1977,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 1 (2016), pp. 109–146; and “Two, Three, Many Revolutions? Cuba and the Prospects for Revolutionary Change in Latin America, 1967–1975,” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 45, No. 1 (February 2013), pp. 61–89. Combining this earlier work with new research, Harmer takes the interAmerican Cold War that she knows so well to the “micro” level: the life of Beatriz Allende. Harmer tells the story of Beatriz Allende’s life as part of the “long 1960s,” the “internationalization of national political life,” and also of the idiosyncrasies of Chilean politics and political culture from the late 1930s to 1973. Part of this political culture was traditional gender roles and expectations, even within the Socialist and Communist parties, the Marxist-controlled labor unions, and other leftist political entities. Beatriz fought against these traditional gender roles, including limits on female leadership and “outside the family” activities, and also against Chile’s capitalist institutions until her death. But she could not overcome Chilean (and Cuban) political and cultural limitations on female revolutionaries or even on everyday female spouses,